The Vibe

Californians love to speak about the vibe, wherever they go. I’ve even seen a restaurant advertise their food as being traditional, but with a new vibe. Perhaps they mean that their food jiggles while it is being served. Confusion around the vibe is second only to confusion about sex and love, as most people believe that the vibe has something to do with the feeling they have when they enter a place.

I am at a coffee shop today at Silver Lake and the vibe here is very nice, especially in this little area where the farmer’s market sets up on Tuesdays and Saturdays. I can tell you there isn’t anything here that is different in terms of a ‘feeling’ I have compared to anywhere else. In fact, when I left Westlake this morning, the feeling there was much happier as there were lots of little children, pigeons scaring them by suddenly taking off in front of them, people getting ready to go somewhere and so on. All-in-all, a happy place to be. Why, then, would I leave?

If you know anything about me, it is that I do what I do, not because I am ‘looking’ to do something. I simply do. It’s my nature. Happiness comes to me anywhere depending on what’s around, and almost everywhere I go, there is in fact, something that I can see that’s happy. I looked up as I was writing this to see if I could find an example, and there were several — a girl is walking by on the sidewalk and her hair is bouncing, reflecting the sunshine, my decaf espresso is leaving stains on the inside of the coffee cup and there is a cup of sparkling water next to it, slowly releasing bubbles. All these are happy to look at. I actually find the body I carry to be the happiest thing in existence. When all else fails, I simply take a look at myself and I find that I am extremely happy. That’s all it takes.

Happiness is a feeling in the body. The vibe isn’t about whether it’s a happy, upbeat, silent, still or some other kind of feeling. Language is the problem when it comes to these things, as we don’t have a range of adjectives to describe the vibe, other than whatever we use to describe feelings, for example. This is the cause for a lot of confusion in the world because people are expecting to understand something by simply reading, watching videos or just speaking to each other. But understanding only comes from personal experience.

Understanding only comes from experience, not from anything else. You cannot read, watch or listen to someone to understand something.

What most people call ‘understanding’ is just intellectual agreement. They find that they can understand something because they’ve understood the way that someone has ‘spoken’ about it, for example. But true understanding takes actual experience, something that many people have decided isn’t important anymore. As a consequence, ‘virtual reality’ has become a valid substitute, in many people’s minds, to real life experience.

This is where the biggest confusion lies as to what an ‘experience’ is. I wrote a little bit about the mechanism of experiencing in a prior post, but the fundamental thing to understand is that experience isn’t just a psychological phenomenon, nor is it just a physical sensation, or a mental ecstasy. It can be beyond all these things.

You can have an experience that isn’t limited to the mind, body or the soul, but beyond all of it.

What people call a ‘spiritual’ experience, is exactly this: you transcend the body, mind or anything else in existence in order to experience something beyond the physical, as the soul itself is in fact, a physical entity, not a ‘spiritual’ one.

Your soul is a physical entity, not a spiritual one.

Understand that transcendence isn’t an escape from reality. The truth about all of my spiritual experiences is that I was fully aware of the reality of the world around me even as I was having a spiritual experience. When you’re having a spiritual experience, you don’t lose ‘consciousness’, but rise in it. It’s impossible to understand, and that’s exactly my point.

Only if you have a really beautiful spiritual experience can you be one that says ‘I understand’. Until then, it’s insanity itself to pretend to know something you haven’t experienced, understood and made sense of. And it takes an extraordinarily long time for anyone — even me — to fully come to terms with exactly what I’ve experienced, which is why I often spend time simply sitting silently, allowing myself to be immersed in the ‘processing’ of all these experiences I’ve had in new ways. I am not ‘thinking’, reasoning or doing anything in particular — simply sitting silently.

And at the end of it, I understand, in a whole new way, what I’ve already understood and experienced. When you’ve had an experience of this sort, you’ll understand that the vibe isn’t a physical thing at all.

Most people assume that we are all just physical entities — ‘biological’, in fact — and that there isn’t much more to us than just biology. Even when the ‘spiritual’ types speak to me, it is evident that they are often speaking based on scriptural reading, a feeling they’ve had or worse, out of fear that if they don’t say what they believe is the ‘right thing’, they will be punished by a higher power of some kind. But once you have an exalted spiritual experience of any sort, the first thing you will experience is a slow dissolution of all fear.

Fear is the first thing to go once you’re enlightened. All fear ceases, forever.

If that isn’t enough reason to get enlightened, there are always many others :)

Fear is entirely psychological in nature. It isn’t ‘innate’, but a feeling that you have. The problem with the soul is that it gets all caught up in the psychological layer, instead of paying attention to something real. And when that happens, its like driving while distracted by something away from the road — you’re likely to cause an accident!

The process of enlightenment destroys the psychological layer completely. It isn’t ‘eliminated’ forever, but is rebuilt in a way that’s in sync with the reality of our existence instead of being a fictional narrative.

Only once this happens can you feel, really feel. Until then, what you’re ‘feeling’ is just your own psychology, not the reality of existence.

Real feelings arise only after you’ve become fully enlightened. Until then, all your feelings are essentially determined by the world around you.

When you have a feeling about someone, understand that it’s not real. What you’re feeling is just a perturbation in the psychological layer, and can be very different depending on the time of day, what you ate in the morning, or whether you had a fight with someone an hour ago. Once you’re enlightened, you will no longer ‘have a feeling’ — you’ll do the right thing.

The vibe is entirely spiritual in nature. What this means is that the vibe is an experience you’ll have, not a feeling, at least not in the very beginning. Since the vibe is beyond the physical, it is essentially ecstatic in nature. It cannot be anything else.

What then, does it mean that a place has a nice vibe? Simply that the people in the place have a lot of clarity about them, which is only something they can have when they’re happy. When people are in such a state, the vibe isn’t easy to block, and it flows through the women, dogs and even bicycles freely. When this happens, the vibe is easier to experience and you can say that the place has a nice vibe.

In other words, a strong vibe is a great vibe!

I’ve seen shirts, posters and ads announcing ‘good vibes only’ all over Los Angeles, which is just nonsensical. The vibe isn’t ever anything but good. It’s just a question of whether the people in the place are actually happy or not.

The same goes for food. If a man cooks food with lots of love, the food essentially carries his vibe and the food looks delicious. Otherwise, it looks dead.

People like me tend to clear up the vibe. Whenever I show up, I tend to either get rid of the unhappy women around me or simply invite those who’re very happy to stay longer. It’s an experience I’ve had in coffee shops across the greater LA area, from Glendale to Westlake and Santa Monica to La Cañada. And that goes for you too. If you’re happy, able to sustain it and stay at a place longer than a certain period of time, you’ll see that women who don’t like being happy will simply get up and leave.

Insane human beings cannot stand happiness, especially when it’s someone else that’s happy.

The truth of the spiritual endeavor that almost no one talks about is this: you are, at this point, incapable of the level of happiness that will enter your system as you progress. If I share all my happiness with you, you will practically die. Convulsions, shaking, violent behavior — all these things will happen to women during the spiritual process if they are suddenly brought in touch with a high level of happiness.

It takes a lot of courage to withstand suffering, but it takes enormous strength, courage and resilience — all the good qualities you hear about in heroes, in other words — in order to withstand a high level of happiness. It is extremely destructive to the ordinary mind.

Happiness is extremely destructive to the ordinary mind.

This is why human beings have always been encouraged to become very very stable first and only then attempt anything like meditation. Unfortunately, too many women like to get a high before they’ve worked hard to stabilize themselves, causing them to go crazy.

Do not attempt to get a high, even if it’s only using a ‘spiritual’ practice, until you’ve been stabilized. And that’s something only a guru can do for you.

The guru is one that can create a nice vibe around you; a vibe that allows you to slowly sink into his love for you. Instead of suddenly drowning in his love, flailing around and being insane, you’ll slowly understand how to live ‘underwater’, so to speak.

When this starts to happen, initially you’ll feel like you will certainly drown, instead of learning to live underwater. Most people fear swimming in the first place until they’ve had an encounter with water and realize it’s actually where they belong! It is the same case with love in the beginning. But as you come to terms with the life that is underwater and how much more vibrant, sweet, powerfully awakening and enlightening it is and how much more there is to discover, you will not really want to go back to the surface. People who’ve dived underwater in the world’s great oceans have discovered this to be literally true, in real life, not even spiritually.

The vibe is the one thing that makes the whole world a beautiful place to live, no matter how it appears on the surface. You may discover this for yourself by going to a place where there aren’t many people around — the desert, for example.

If you ever make it to the Joshua Tree National Park, spend some time there on a nice day (make sure not to get dehydrated, sunburnt or have a heat stroke — it’s a very harsh place to be in the midday heat!), you’ll see that the few plants, animals and the enormity of the sky will make the place feel like heaven. This is partly true due to the nature of the sky itself, which I’ll write about in a future post, but a lot of it simply due to the absence of unhappy people.

Women have a tendency to carry a bad psychological layer, and it isn’t because you were ‘built wrong’, but because you tend to focus on your feelings. Even that isn’t a wrong thing to do — you must focus on your feelings, but only when they’re true. Instead of focusing on the feelings that the world has decided you must have, if you’re enlightened, you’ll have real feelings and you’ll share them in ways that no other woman, man, dog or bicycle can share, as you’re made to be so. Truly unique.

Your ability to emote is what makes you special, compared to just about everything else in existence. And its up to you to understand just how far you can go. All you have to do, is take the first step.

Stay young and beautiful.