Electronic Tribe

(Zazen music plays in the background.)

This is Rama. I'm talking to you from the twentieth century.

I'm on the island of Nantucket. It's around 3:30 in the afternoon on the 29th of May, 1985. Nantucket is an island off the coast of Massachusetts, along the Eastern Seaboard of what they call North America.

I'm pulled off by the side of the road at a place of power. Cars are pulling back and forth, driving, stopping - a lot of tourists sight-seeing. I'm sitting here in the Porsche, thinking about the future, which occurred a long, long time ago, long before any of us can remember. It's windy out - the winds of time are blowing, the winds of change. Chaos is everywhere, and chaos is wonderful. That's all there really is. There is no today. There is no tomorrow. There is only eternity, perfection, consciousness, power - and light.

Love unites the worlds; it's all that stands between us. Order is the creation of man. Chaos is the natural condition. Chaos is perfection. There is only awareness. Don't be afraid of it. Learn to live on the edge and enjoy it because that's all there is. There's only eternity, and you're it - part of everything that's ever been or will ever be, beyond abstraction, beyond conception.

It's ridiculous, if you ask me. I don't know what any of us are doing here. But we're a tribe, a network, cruising the galaxy. We have offices in every loka, in every part of existence. I suppose you make that out to be a unique situation. We're unique! No, I don't think so. We're enlightenment. We are enlightenment. And we're bound together by perfection, realization and awareness.

Who are these human beings anyway, who walk around, strut, fret, as if they owned the planet, or the goddamned universe? I mean, who do they really think they are? Transitory beings, alive for a while, dead, then alive again, not even remembering their eternal glory - the passage through time and space that's so remarkable, that each of us makes. I'm talking networks, awareness, infinite being - beyond conception. The house next door to yours, and maybe the way the plumbing works, the way the galaxy works, spinning each through each other, the dimensions, endless and perfect. And we're a tribe, bound together by secrets, secrets that exist in other worlds. That's what makes us a tribe, our secrets.

We are the electronic tribe. Back again for another show before we hit the road and head out again to strange and perfect universes. We're standing together here, even though I'm alone, and all beings that ever existed that are part of this network are in me. I comprise multitudes, even though some days I can hardly add or subtract, and you think it's all so great! You're right, it's all great. Perfect attention, there's nothing else. The electronic tribe.

I'd like to talk to you about where we've been, how we got into this mess. What's a network? A network is a group of beings who travel through time and space and dimensions together. It's really one being. There is no separativity. There's only one being, but it divides itself into forms, countless forms. And it spreads and winds its way throughout the universes - different beings existing in different planes simultaneously that are psychically connected by something so deep inside them that no one understands them. At least not anyone who can be in time and space and in a body.

There are different networks that work the galaxies, the universes. I am part of a particular net: enlightenment. The network of enlightenment. There are other nets; they're not connected. In this great chaos that is existence, this redolent, wonderful disorder that is life, each network cruises, endlessly moving, with no apparent motion, through all of the worlds.

A network is a tribe. And a tribe, as I mentioned before, is connected by its secrets. A tribe is not a loose collaboration of beings who just get together in a powwow, who live together or work together. A nation is not a tribe. A family is not a tribe. A racial or ethnic group is not a tribe. Ancestry does not create a tribe, at least not bloodline. What creates a tribe is a bond, a sharing of secrets. Not a secret that could ever be told in any words, but a secret that's much too wonderful for that - a secret that can only be told by the unfolding of one's life, specifically, your life.