Gradually. and later with greater acceleration, I began to leave the citadel of my intellect for longer and longer periods of time, with less and less anxiety.  This process is painful, because it requires the ability to be devastatingly honest with oneself.  I say that one must be able to draw the honesty cards - to accept what is before one's awareness, without rationalization or defense, in order to see clearly what is. To do so one must remember three injunctions: make no comparisons, make no judgments and delete your need to understand.
     The story of the injunctions demonstrates both their possible usefulness and the possible consequences of not following them.  In November 1975. a woman who lived near Redlands, California, came to the ranch for a personal consultation with me. In going into the reasons for her visit, she said that she had for some time been reading Tarot cards psychically.  She was so gifted in accurately bringing through the future aspects of any question a client asked that she soon found herself inundated by phone calls from all over the world.  Her talent in this particular psi area had become available to her eighteen months before her visit with me.
     Now she very much wanted to be free of her psychic gift.  She was emotionally unprepared to handle seeing negative events occurring in the future.  Even when she was not reading the Tarot cards, she often became aware of traumatic events that were about to take place from minutes to hours after she perceived them.  She had been so shaken by these experiences that a few months before coming to the ranch, she had stopped doing readings and had embarked on a course of study in conventional psychology at a nearby university.  Respectable credentials and conventional work were more important to her than a strange ability that was to her outer mind, upsetting and abnormal.
     After we were well into her session, she suddenly remembered an event that had taken place three years before.  She had mentioned it to no one else because she considered it an insane experience.  A voice had spoken to her.  She remembered the words perfectly; but even after three years, at the time of our conversation, they held no meaning for her.
     This event happened some eighteen months before the onset of her psi ability.  It occurred dramatically, and she had had no preparation for it.  She emphasized to me that until then she had been a perfectly normal human being, without any knowledge of paranormal experiences or even of meditation. She was "just a housewife."
     That the event took place in this context is important.  To another person, it might have been the fulfillment of long years of spiritual preparation. but that woman at that time had no idea that such spiritual development was desirable - or even possible.
     The episode occurred one day at sunset while she was walking along the beach in Santa Monica, California.  Glancing down, she noticed that, as each foot sank into the sand, an iridescent light would appear, coming from the sand.  Within a few minutes her feet also took on the eerie iridescence.  She tried in vain to make the light co away, and at the same time she was deeply fascinated by it.  As its many colors intensified, she lifted her gaze to watch the waves breaking on the shoreline, and she saw that the strange light emanated from the waves, too, as they crested and broke.  Suddenly everything radiated this light in a fantastic display of color.
     The woman lost all sense of time and normal spatial relationships, and she realized a feeling of overwhelming well­beingness, as if she were in a state of bliss where she was one with everything and all was God.  As the experience came to its climax, she heard a booming voice, It was unlike anything she had ever heard.  She was frightened by it, and she was afraid that she was going insane.  The voice slowly and repetitively said to her: "There are three injunctions for you.  Pay attention to them.  Make no comparisons; make no comparisons.  Make no judgments, make no judgments.  Delete your need to understand, delete your need to understand.  "
     The experience then faded gradually as she returned to ordinary consciousness.  She was filled with wonder and with fear.  Instead of realizing, that she had touched cosmic awareness, she believed that she had experienced insanity.
    All of you who are working so diligently on achieving, cosmic consciousness through long, and sometimes painful, disciplined practices, take note!  The event was spontaneous, totally unexpected, fully developed and occurred in a woman to whom, at least in this lifetime, its significance and nature were completely veiled.  It came before the development of her ability to transcend the barriers of space and time.  I stress these points, because I strongly suspect that experiences of this nature occur in ordinary people much more frequently than they are reported and that what keeps these people silent is the fear of being thought abnormal or psychotic.

     "Make no comparisons."  Time and time again we are conditioned to evaluate ourselves in relationship to other people through competitive examinations, sports, promotions, social standing, and so on.  Each society has its own selection of criteria to which its people must measure up, by which they are compared.  If our particular psychological or physical makeup does not meet the standard, we experience trauma.  Yet we, ourselves, are the ones who create this trauma, because it is not the rejection or nonacceptance by other people but nonacceptance or rejection by ourselves that causes the pain.
     The tendency to live in ideas about reality isolates the mind from the true reality of the physical level.  But the idea level has an impossible time when it is directly confronted by the manifest level.  Self is - the self is true, without question - but ideas about self may be true or false, and in this ambiguity lies the problem.  If the individual insists on holding on to ideas rather than harmonizing with what is, pain must follow.  The individual then is driven to take stronger defensive measures, and repression, depression and abreaction (to name a few) compound the difficulty.  The ability to experience and to flow with what is signals the beginning of the unification of mind, body and spirit.  It is the first initiation into a natural state of Beingness.
     Are we too fat, too short, too tail, too uneducated, too intellectual, too emotional, too feminine, too masculine, too strange, too undisciplined, too weak, too immature, too compulsive, too unspiritual, too ungifted?  Do we criticize ourselves because we smoke or don't smoke? Because we drink or don't drink?  Because we are religious or not religious? The list of abilities is endless.  Rooted in the injunction "Make no comparisons" is the corollary idea: be whatever you are.  Experience of the self, not any preconceived ideas about the various aspects of the self, is what should dictate whether something should be changed.
     In Conference work at the ranch, this injunction comes up repeatedly.  As the first participants begin to experience expanded states of consciousness, the others, observing them, start the self-whipping process: they report that they feel left out, inadequate, insecure and relatively worthless.  When I point out to them that they could be resonating with the experience the expanded member is enjoying, opening to the experience, and rejoicing in another's accomplishment, they begin to understand how their own minds obstruct expanded awareness. how they and their comparisons are holding back their own growth.  Actually, the heightened individual helps to heighten others through the principle of induction.  That is, the heightened person's level of consciousness is reflected in his or her body­energy field so that a similar response is induced in the second person's energy field, and that response moves on to the second person's awareness.
     Induction works better if the second person's induction field isn't blocked by defenses.  Unfortunately, the process of comparison is not the only cause of defenses.  It often happens that, even though the aspirant's outer mind envisions the heightening experience as desirable, the individual feels threatened on some inner level by the fear of loss of control.  To defend against that imagined loss, a reactive block is established.
     Again I offer experience from my own life as an example.  Through most of my life, I saw my body as less masculine in form than the ideal I held and the standard I was convinced others held.  My right testicle was undescended until I was fourteen, I didn't need to shave until I was nineteen and my beard growth is patchy.  Mild breast enlargement was noted in adolescence, my skin was too smooth and my relative lack of body hair, especially on the chest, was unacceptable to me.  I believed that there was something wrong with me.  It was not until I reached my early thirties that I realized the fallaciousness of this self-made trauma.  I now have no need to compare myself to any other human form and certainly not to an image of a different self, one that doesn't even exist.  When my self­rejection be-an to crumble, the energy that had gone into my psychological defenses was released into a deep sense of appreciation and wonderment at the infinite variations that form nature displays.
    The comparison process literally locks us into a prison filled with psychological pain.  Until I could reach a state of awareness that each individual is a distinct and unique representation of form and psyche, I was trapped.  Then awareness let me out of the prison and led into the astonishing truth: we are far more than we possibly could wish, but we are herded into a narrow spectrum of beliefs about who and what we are.  To begin to awaken into this potential experience of our own individual wholeness demands that no comparisons be made.  There is only one entity in the entire plane who can make the comparison that generates the vicious cycle, and that entity is you.
     My greatest test of self-value came during the night of the full moon in February 1975 when I spent thirteen hours alone in the Great Pyramid of Cheops.  One of many profound experiences that night was the presentation of every flaw of my Beingness, each one rapidly flashed before my awareness like a series of photographic slides in supervivid color and detail. Seeing them, I knew that I could choose between reacting and observing and I chose the latter.  The totality of my Beingness then flashed before me, and with insight into each flaw.  I no longer saw them as flaws, but rather as challenges, necessary experiences for my unfolding and awakening.
     There is a quotation from Goethe: "If you treat man as he appears to be. you make him worse than he is.  But if you treat man as if he already were what he potentially could be, you make him what he should be." The key word is appears. Rarely, if ever, do we see the totality - including the potential not yet manifest  - of ourselves or of another human beinggg; the filtering system of the outer mind is too strong.  In Conferences at the ranch, after I deliver the Goethe Quotation to participants, I ask that each spend an entire afternoon paraphrasing, this quotation into a contemplation of: "If I treat myself as I think I appear to be, I make myself less than I am.  But if I treat myself as if I already were what I potentially could be.  I make myself what I should be. "Only linear, time-trapped thoughts prevent us from seeing the staggering beauty of our entirety.
     Ideas about what is right and what is wrong are, in the vast majority of cases, not intrinsically valid.  They can be valid only relative to the perspective of the consciousness that holds them; and, as we have seen, they can be mistaken even then.  There are many, many value systems. as one can easily discern in traveling through the world: and each has its own ideas of right and wrong.  The awakening process brings one to the deeper wisdoms wherein one finds a preference for that which feels harmonious, natural. uplifting, expanding and inspiring.  Instead of striving for ideas of what ought to be, one chooses what f its into what is.
It is especially important that one not interpret the injunction against making comparisons as an exhortation to live in a state of complacency, where everything that the outer mind sees is rationalized as being perfect or right, without need for change.  Complacency is the way of the ignorant.  The critical key here is to unhook the emotional or psychological defense mechanisms so that one may begin to see and accept what is coming from more expanded states of awareness.  What appears undesirable from a less inspired state may be in perfect harmony from a higher point of view.
     We are all in different stages of development in awareness.  The ever-expanding realizations that eventually bring one into illumination or mastery of one's current level of existence are a natural process in the experience of Life.  Each of us chooses whether to honor that deeper yearning, for spiritual fulfillment when it begins to emerge into awareness.  The most common choice is to ignore it. to sink- back into comfortable, established life patterns already conveniently rationalized as real and important.
     If one is fundamentally content with one's life, if there is no strong suspicion that there is more to Beingness than what the usual human being calls life, if one does not feel a pull toward any other level of awareness, then there is no need to be reading a book discussing the Transformational Process.  As I warned in the introduction, the moment one begins to seek the path for change and expansion of awareness, one's life changes, often dramatically.  Once the nectar is tasted, there is no turning back.  Like the outgrown clothing of youth, the old patterns and beliefs no longer fit.  A sense of constriction and pain will be experienced if one tries to continue embracing one's old gods.

     "Make no judgments." All judgments of the kind meant in this second injunction issue out of conditioned value systems, which in turn have roots in the emotional-reflex arc.  A judgment of this kind can be only a reaction to what is experienced.  Note the word reaction because it is the criterion to determine whether the response is a conditioned one and not an intrinsic value.  Our reactions to good or bad, beautiful or ugly, talented or untalented are trained responses related to the culture and subculture of our upbringing and education.  Before one commits oneself to a judgment, one must at least attempt to see whence the reaction came.  If it is an idea also held by mother or father, a teacher, an authority figure in a religious institution, you must ask yourself whether it is a valid, natural response in its own right or whether it has been conditioned in you by those authorities.  Do you have an alternative to the perspective from which you are viewing and experiencing the situation. The task is to discern an event, to see it clearly, at first without response.  Then one's later response is a clue to one's level of development or awakening.  Human consciousness becomes rigid through training.  Once it has been conditioned, it cannot appreciate natural states of experience without being retrained.
     In Rudolf Steiner's book Theosophy, the last chapter, entitled "The Path of Knowledge. contains some profound words on the consequences of judgment:

One of the first qualities that everyone wishing to acquire a vision of higher facts has to develop ... is the unreserved, unprejudiced laying of oneself open to what is revealed by human life or by the world external to man.... Knowledge is received only in those moments in which every judgment, every criticism coming from ourselves, is silent.... Anyone who wishes to tread the path of higher knowledge must train himself to be able at any given moment to obliterate himself with all his prejudices.  As long as he obliterates himself the revelations of the new world flow to him.... This open-minded and uncritical laying of ourselves open has nothing to do with blind faith.  The important thing is not that we should believe blindly in anything but that we should not put a blind judgment in the place of the living impression.

     As for the woman who heard the voice on the beach, what she related was obviously an experience in cosmic-awareness.  If she had understood and followed the three injunctions she received, she might never have had to experience pain from what came into her life by way of her breakthrough into higher dimensions of consciousness.  All three injunctions have to do with giving up ideas of what ought to be and accepting what is, and it is from hanging on to what ought to be and rejecting what is that pain comes.
     And, let me add, even as great a psychic gift as hers, is only one of many initial experiences in spiritual-psychological development.