Tuning In – Sri Harold Klemp

Tuning In – Sri Harold Klemp

This talk is about "Tuning In," as in tuning in the TV or radio. It's about tuning in to the Holy Spirit, learning how to do this in everyday life, to make your life better, more enjoyable.

I say "more enjoyable" with quotes around it, because sometimes it's not really more enjoyable. We meet life on its own terms, and the life we meet is the life we have earned.

Perfect justice, perfect truth, but also perfect love. Always perfect love.

God's love is always working to help Soul find Its way back home.

Big Changes

In the past week, the pope made an earthshaking announcement. He said that the theory of evolution was not in conflict with Christian doctrine. One of those real ecclesiastical problems for a lot of people in the Catholic Church. It may polarize the church more than anyone realizes today, but the pope is doing the right thing. He's recognizing the evidence. Anyone who is at all aware must recognize that there is something to it.

For the pope to make an announcement that there is validity to the theory of evolution is quite astounding. Evolution and Christianity have always been at odds with each other. Science hasn't been at odds with religion over this, because science just reports what it finds. But religion has always been at odds with science.

Within the last month, Reverend Billy Graham mentioned his belief that there is life on other planets. Any person who is at all aware would have to recognize that this universe has so many different worlds which are capable of sustaining life. It would be the height of vanity for the human race to say that the only life that can exist is here on earth.

Borders Of Consciousness

Very slowly, the borders of consciousness are moving back. Some leaders, especially in religion, are now recognizing that there is a greater universe and that there is more potential here than religion used to accept.

These monumental changes in doctrine are going to cause all kinds of problems in the Catholic Church. Some people are going to feel that the pope went too far. Others will support his statement entirely. It's a belief that's quite different from absolute creation, that God created everything as we see it today.

So we're seeing changes.

I was talking to a doctor from a remote area of China. He said that in the back-country areas, villagers have often seen a half-man, half-ape creature, a cross between a gorilla and a human being, like our Bigfoot.

Villagers had seen these creatures fairly often, he said. In this one case, a female came into a village and took big handfuls of corn underneath its armpits on each side, then walked out of the village. Like a shoplifter in a store. So you can't say that these beings have not been in contact with civilization.

These are some of the wonders that are happening in our society today. They're earthshaking.

And they're happening because some leaders and other people are beginning to tune in. They're tuning in to the greater truth that has been denied for centuries. Many people lost their lives because they spoke up about their beliefs; when those beliefs went against the church, they faced the Inquisition and suffered terribly for it, sometimes with their lives.

Uplifting All Religions

It's not just a coincidence that the teachings of ECK have come out during these times. Few people make a connection.

They ask, "Could there be a connection with the teachings of ECK being brought to the public in 1965 by Paul Twitchell? Have these teachings of the Light and Sound of God reached into private and public places to affect the consciousness of key people throughout the world?"

There are people from other religions who come to the Temple of ECK and watch how we do our worship services. They're taking those methods back to their churches and having a more informal worship service. Some churches in the local area are finding a great deal of success in using methods like this. They come to the Temple of ECK to see what's new, to see if there's anything they can adapt.

When some of the people at the Temple first became aware that the ministers in the local area were adapting our methods to fit their congregations, they wondered, Why don't they stick with their own way of doing worship services instead of taking ours?

But when the ECK teachings come into the world, they enliven and uplift all religions.

When I pointed this out to the people in ECK, they could see that this was natural. This is how the Holy Spirit will bring upliftment to the people around us.

People who give truth don't need or expect credit. This is one of the signposts of a person who's come far along on the path to god. You can see other people growing spiritually around such a person, but the person will never take credit for it. He'll never say, "Because of me, you are so much more intelligent and aware of the world around you. If it weren't for me, you would have the consciousness of a corncob." Some people who take credit for other people's unfoldment, progress, and gains will do it subtly. They'll say, "There was a time so and so wasn't getting along very well spiritually, and then…" They raise their eyebrows a little. Then they'll add, "I happened to have given him this brochure." You can tell that these people are not that far along spiritually.

But don't worry about it. Everyone is at a different level. Some are higher than you, some are lower. Who cares? All you want to do is be a clear vehicle for God.

The Sound Of HU

Sometimes a letter comes to me from someone telling me how someone else found Eckankar. What's truly interesting to me is when it's a child who is the seeker.

An ECKIst from Colorado told me a story about an ECK regional seminar she had helped with. The group had rented two-thirds of a hotel ballroom. The hotel used partitions to size the room for each organization that rented it. For their regional, the ECKists had two-thirds of this ballroom; one-third was being used by some other organization.

The ECK seminar began. The first thing on the agenda was a HU chant. For this, the ECKists shut the doors to the hallway so they wouldn't disturb the other group. They began to sing HU, this love song to God. Suddenly the heavy door to the corridor started being pulled open. One of the ECKists went to the door. There was a little girl, about six years old. She had been out in the hallway. She had heard the sound of HU, and it drew her, it attracted her. She was trying to pull the door open so that she could hear a little better. The ECKist asked if they could help her, and she said, "What is that word?" The ECKist said, "It's HU, a love song to God."

Just about that time the HU Chant finished and a video of one of my talks began to play. The little girl's father came up to see what was going on. "Daddy, this man's talking about God," she said to him. The little girl asked him if she could stay and listen to the talk.

A six-year-old child wants to listen to the teachings of ECK. To me this is a wonderful thing.

So with the father's permission, the ECKist led the girl to the front row. She sat there and watched the whole video. After it was over, the father came back and began asking questions about Eckankar. For thirty minutes he asked questions about Eckankar, because his daughter had heard the sound of HU and had recognized it.

Self-Discipline And God Consciousness

How do you tune in in ECK?

With the Spiritual Exercises of ECK. That's our form of prayer. It's a form of contemplation where we don't try to tell God what to do. We listen to hear what God's Voice is saying to us.

Another ECKist was grappling with the problem of self-discipline. She forgot to do her spiritual exercises, the thing that tunes you in to the Voice of God. One of the simple spiritual exercises she'd been working on was to give simple thanks before a meal. This was to be a spiritual exercise for one month.

She'd come into this life with a problem. She eats too much, too fast. She'd be halfway through her meal and realize she had forgotten to do the spiritual exercise again; she'd forgotten to give thanks for the blessings of her life in the form of food. She wondered what she could do to overcome this. And she realized that a person needs self-discipline if they ever expect to reach the heights of consciousness.

We call this God Consciousness. This doesn't mean we become God, as some religions teach. We become godlike, aware of our relationship with God and what our purpose in this life is.

God Consciousness means perfect attunement with the Holy Spirit. That's all it means. God Consciousness.

There are steps that lead to God Consciousness, like Self-Realization. This is a midway step. Other groups feel it's the highest step of consciousness. But we in ECK say that there's a stage even higher than God Consciousness. There are states like the Akshar state, and higher. But for the immediate present, the goal in Eckankar is to become God-Realized, or God Conscious.

Even earlier than Self-Realization comes cosmic consciousness, which happens on the Mental Plane. This is where people feel life becomes superenlivened. Walt Whitman is an example of a person with cosmic consciousness. A person's awareness goes to the level where they can see through many of the illusions that hold most people.

Most people feel that the rat race is the race of life. This is what you've got to do; this is how it is. But there are a lot of people in the rat race today who have higher states of consciousness. These people aren't caught up by it. They just know that this is the pace of life today in their particular society. Somehow they can be at peace with themselves even with such a fast schedule.

There's a way to do it. And the way for ECKists is to tune in through the Spiritual Exercises of ECK.

So this woman was grappling with the problem of self-discipline, eating too much too fast, and forgetting the simple spiritual exercise to give thanks before a meal. She often wondered why she didn't have self-discipline.

Then it came to her: basically, she was spiritually lazy.

Law Of Silence

An ECKist from Accra, Ghana, learned a lesson about the Law of Silence through some cockroaches. Cockroaches are not a lot of fun. When they get in the home, they're a nuisance. They can also carry diseases.

The Law of Silence is one of the laws we're familiar with in ECK. It's simply this: if there's a certain truth that is very, very important for you spiritually, keep it to yourself.

This doesn't mean that you don't help people, that you don't talk to them about one thing or another. But if there is something that has come to you specially, a spiritual lesson that has come your way to teach you something about truth, as soon as you realize this, say nothing about it. Let the Holy Spirit play the scene out for you. Because then you'll get the benefit of the lesson. Otherwise, you waste it. It goes into the air just like empty words.

This young woman was living in a hostel with a number of other young women. There were seven other women sharing the room with her. She had two friends, but they were in another room on the same floor.

One day the ECKist and her roommates got into an argument about who should have a certain bed. There were hard feelings; tempers flared. It went on for a time. The youngest woman in the room would listen to what the others said, and she would carry it back to the one who had started the argument, the one who was the troublemaker. This made matters worse.

The ECKist said, "It'll be OK," and left it at that. She knew it'd work itself out.

One day, the ECKist forgot, and she talked about this argument to her two friends who lived down the hall. Her friends were upset. They felt the ECKist ad taken most of the insults that the troublemaker was hurling at everybody in the room. The two friends wanted to protect her. They would show up in her room, sit down, and make indirect insulting remarks about the troublemaker, and especially the young woman who had carried the tales.

Cockroaches

At first, the ECKist didn't see what was happening. Then she realized that her friends were getting into a game of anger. One side was trading angry, sharp barbs with the other side. Things were getting out of hand.

This ECKist was deathly afraid of cockroaches. She doesn't realize it's from a past life where she met her death by insects. This has stayed with her as an unconscious memory. She lumps all insects together. Whenever she sees a cockroach, she screams and jumps up, and that's the end of her peace and quiet.

The bed argument had been carrying on for a couple of days when the woman began waking up in the middle of the night. She'd feel a cockroach on her bed. She'd jump up and turn on the light, waking up everybody in the room. This didn't help the tension among the women to have the ECKist screaming, jumping out of bed, then standing there with the bright lights turned on, not wanting to go back until all the cockroaches had run for the dark corners.

The two friends came to visit again. They were seated on the bed, rehashing the whole thing. The ECKist had some food on the bed. As they were talking,a very bold cockroach was watching the conversation from the edge of the room. And at one point, the ECKist forgot herself. She forgot the ECK principles: to let this be, not to get into it anymore, let the fire of this anger go out a little. And she got into the argument. As soon as she did, the cockroach came running up onto te bed and jumped on her food.

She saw it, screamed, and made a big scene. She told her friends, "I don't want to talk about this argument anymore." But her friends kept trying to talk about it. When they saw she ignored them whenever they brought it up, they finally left. The woman went to bed.

Lying in bed, she asked the Inner Master, "What was this about? Why did the cockroach come up on my bed while we were sitting here?" The cockroach shouldn't have done that, according to the code of the cockroaches that lived in her hostel. Cockroaches have rules too.

She suddenly saw that the argument over the bed was spiritual food for her.

There was something in the argument for her spiritually. She had something to learn but didn't realize it until she asked and the Inner Master pointed out, "There's a lesson for you in this argument." Then she could see that her friends learned of the argument through what she herself had told them. Without knowing it, she had broken the Law of Silence. Until then she wasn't sure that the Mahanta was trying to give her a spiritual lesson.

Still Small Voice

This is an example of tuning in to the Holy Spirit. When something goes wrong in your life, there is usually a spiritual reason for it. Divine Spirit is trying to teach you something about truth.

Most of us have the reaction of, "I'm going to straighten this out right now." In fact, the woman had tried to straighten out the cockroach problem when it began in the hostel. They had a powerful insecticide. She sprayed it around the edges of the room, and it had always controlled the cockroaches before. But this time, it did nothing. In fact, when she began joining the argument, there wasn't just the one cockroach. A whole bunch of cockroaches came running out onto the floor. She quickly realized that something exceptional was going on.

So tune in. Tune in to the still small voice within you. If you're a Christian, it's the still small voice of the Holy Spirit speaking to you through Jesus. If you're from another religion, it speaks through the leader of that religion. In ECK, the Holy Spirit speaks through the Mahanta, the Living ECK Master.

Light And Sound

Sometimes the Holy Spirit speaks very directly, and when It speaks in this very direct manner, it's through the Light and Sound of God Itself. The Light and Sound of God is divine love, the Voice of God. A number of different names have been given to these two pillars of the Holy Spirit, the Light and Sound. The Light and Sound of God are the pillars of the ECK teachings.

Everything we're talking about — Bigfoot, the pope recognizing that evolution and Christian doctrine are not in conflict — shows that the fabric of life is this Voice of God which we know as Holy Spirit. And Its manifestations are the Light and Sound of God. This is one of the truths that most people have no awareness of. Many people know about the Light of God, but fewer know about the Sound. And there are many different ways that the Sound is heard.

I will briefly mention some of the forms of the Light and Sound of God that you may be aware of.

The Light of God can come as a violet, blue, pink, orange, yellow, white or green light. The Light can look like a soft glow; It can look like a lantern; It can look like a pinpoint of light; It can look like a star off in the distance; It can look like the moon.

The Sound can be just about anything you've heard here on earth. It can be the sound of a waterfall, a jet plane flying over, a bee, birds singing in the morning. It can be like an orchestra playing. We're all surrounded by sounds, and we sometimes don't pay as much attention to sound as we should.

Some in our audience have a hard time hearing sound. Some are not able to hear sound at all. So we have people who use sign language to communicate with them. The words I am speaking to you through sound, they receive via sight. Any form of sight is a form of light, a variation of the Light of God. Any ability to see is a form of the Light.

The Sound can also come as the sound of the ocean, the wind, the rain beating down on the pavement or grass. Sometimes it comes as the sigh of a loved one. A baby's cry. Just about an sound you can imagine. Some of these will come to you on the inner planes or during prayer, contemplation, or meditation. Sometimes you will hear a sound which is soothing and quiet, other times it may be as sharp as the crack of thunder. Sometimes it'll be rumbling like a tornado.

God's Love

People have the idea that God's love is sweet, gentle, and kind. But sometimes God's love needs to shake the sleeping Soul and awaken It because this is the lifetime that Soul has chosen to awaken to truth. And Soul is often in a very deep sleep. It needs one spiritual jolt after another to finally become aware that there is more to life than what meets the eye.
Some people will have an Astral experience; others will have a very vivid dream experience. Others will have a vision. Some will have the higher state of Soul Travel. Others will get a prophecy, perhaps through the dream state.

These things are generally wake-up calls from the Mahanta. As an instrument of the Holy Spirit he is empowered to give these experiences to those Souls who are ready.

Wake Up Calls

Gradually, over a number of years, people slowly wake from their spiritual sleep. As they do, they get a yearning for something they can't quite put their finger on. They have a desire for knowledge first. Behind that they find there is a yearning for understanding, then a yearning for truth.

If they take it far enough, they'll realize that behind all their yearning for is the yearning for God's love. The have been yearning for love all this time, and these other things were just bringing them closer and closer to God's love.

This is what we try to help people discover on their own through the teachings of ECK. I won't give someone a spiritual experience that he or she is not ready for. I can, but why? It's like giving a driver's license to a four-year-old child. You wouldn't tell a small child, "You're going to learn how to drive sometime, so here you go. Save you a couple of years. Have a good time." Of course, you wouldn't' do that.

A true Master will never give someone a passport to a higher state of consciousness until that person is ready for it. A Master won't do this, anymore than a parent or state government would give a driver's license to a four-year-old child. Because the child would do a lot of damage.

Are You Ready For Mastership?

As you unfold spiritually, you also unfold power — spiritual power — along with spiritual love. As this spiritual power comes to you, along with it comes the understanding of spiritual law that you cannot misuse this power at any time. Some people think, I like Eckankar: Now maybe I can develop my healing powers and go out and heal people. I've always wanted to be a healer. I'll just go heal people. But sometimes healing when they haven't learned the spiritual lesson of their illness is interfering with their state of consciousness.

This is why my role in this mission, this time, is not to do things for people that they should learn how to do for themselves.

I try to help people find their own way to a health practitioner to overcome an illness. I try to help people go into contemplation and find out their future themselves, by studying the ECK-Vidya, which is the ancient science of prophecy. Do this for yourself.

My role is to help people who are ready for Mastership,not children who want to have things done for them. I help people who are striving to become self-sufficient and develop te very high spiritual state of being able to survive under any and all conditions. This includes such things as health and even wealth.

One of the most deadening lies of any society is that a government should take care of the people. The more the government takes care of the people,the more childish — not childlike — they become. They become slaves. They're putting their destiny into the hands of people who don't have a real interest in their lives.

With investments, you can hire someone to manage your funds for you. And the longer you stay with a broker, the broker you get. He's managing your money away, away, and away, until he has most of it and you have very little of it.There's a saying: The person who is best qualified to manage your funds is you. Because who's got the most to gain by it? On the other hand, if they're managed poorly, who has the most to lose? Who would care the most? Obviously you. Nobody else cares. The broker doesn't care, our neighbor doesn't care.

Care about your spiritual state as much as you care about your money. And care about your money as much as you care about the food that goes on your table. In other words, take responsibility for what's on your table, for what's happening with your wealth, and for what's going on in your spiritual affairs. It's up to you.

My job is to find those people who want to become masters of the laws of life and help them reach this awareness, to one day become conscious of their Godhood. To know they are Souls made in the image of God — what this means and how it plays out in everyday life.

Love Each Other As Soul

Sometimes I feel so inadequate. I try to speak about different truths, the biggest of which is: You are Soul, you exist because God loves you. And an interesting corollary of that is that everyone is Soul. God loves those of you over there because you are Soul, and God loves those of you over here because you are Soul. Souls exist because God loves them. God loves them; but do they love each other?

Very often the problems we have, come because the Souls God loves don't love each other.

They are not aware of the divinity of the other person. We can all recognize that God loves us, but we think, surely God cannot love that scoundrel over there, that crook, that criminal; therefore, I'm justified in my anger and my judgments.

As the spiritual leader of Eckankar, I sometimes point out the behavior of people who are acting in an unspiritual way. This is not a reflection upon their state spiritually. When you see some people who seem to be the farthest down the spiritual ladder, it's hard to imagine that someday they, too, will become God-aware individuals. "When pigs can fly." you say. But someday, pigs will fly. Someday all Souls who become aware of God's love for them will also realize that God's love is for other people too.

So for the first step in ECK, learn to love yourself as a creation of God. Then love those who are close to you. Because they are a special creation of God too. And once you've learned to love yourself and those who are close to you, then maybe you can love God.

1996 ECK Worldwide Seminar, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Friday, October 25, 1996