Willie (46 page)

A little common sense must be used when making statements like this. I wouldn't walk up to you at a cocktail party and say, “Hey, I talk to God, you know.” I wouldn't sit down beside you at dinner at Elaine's and say, “So what do you think of the Holy Ghost?” If you go around telling people you talk to God, they might burn you at the stake like they did Joan of Arc, or destroy your reputation one way or another, because people who talk to God are a threat to the authorities of both the state and the church.

Of course there are plenty of evangelists on television who say they talk to God and don't get burned at the stake, because they claim God tells them to take your money and buy real estate with it. This is recognized in high places as just business as usual, nothing dangerous.

A Louis Harris poll a few months ago revealed that ninety-five percent of U.S. citizens say they believe in God. There is a great need for people to emerge into a state of peace. We realize there is something else beyond this reality, something we are supposed to do on this earth. A sort of religious fever is sweeping the country. But attendance figures at churches and synagogues are steadily falling.

This means the churches and synagogues are not giving us what we need—which is to know the truth about the laws that rule the universe, and to be free to think in a new way that is really as old as creation.

Dr. John Wheeler, who won the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the big bang theory of creation, is a neighbor in West Lake Hills in Austin. I was moved by something he said on a TV show about creation: “At the bottom of everything is an ultimately beautiful idea, so simple and beautiful that when we finally discover it we will say, oh, why did we never see that before?”

I know Dr. Wheeler was a protégé of Einstein's. Einstein believed
that the sensation of the mystical is the closest we can come to knowing the truth and that the source of everything is what he called the Old Man. This is the divine force behind the universe. The big bang started with a thought in the mind of God. Everything that has happened since is a continuation of that thought. The greatest star and the smallest cell exist because of the energy of this thought.

Scientists have identified the fundamental forces that govern all matter in the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear energy, and so on. What they are looking for is an explanation that will bind all of these forces together into one force that controls all the laws of the universe.

This one force is God.

The scientists, not the preachers these days, are investigating the nature of God. Instead of being so busy thinking up ways to convince ten-year-old kids they're going to burn in hell for smoking cedarbark, or ways of sucking up money for business investments, the leaders of the major churches and synagogues should be paying attention to raising the consciousness of humans to know the truth of the divine law. Pretty soon the scientists will prove it as reality.

The law I mean is that all is one, that every atom in your body was once in a star, that life is continuous and nothing dies, and that the law of Karma—what the scientist would call cause and effect—is as real as electromagnetism is real.

The law is love. What puts the law of love into proper operation is the Golden Rule:
do unto others as you would have them do unto you
.

Most people don't really believe in this law, to the whole world's regret. The leaders of world governments, concerned only with holding on to their power, ignore the law of love, and are overthrown as a direct result, and cause wars of terrible destruction. We are only one bad decision away from destroying our planet. We live with famine and disease and violence, and terrible corruption in our big financial institutions—and we claim not to know why these things are happening.

I know why they are happening, and so do you if you're not too cynical to admit it. We are not obeying the divine law. It is as simple as that.

We must realize that there are entities called adepts or Masters or angels or archangels—the heavenly hosts—who surround us. They are attempting to help us by pouring out their energies and their knowledge and their wisdom. An angel is literally a messenger from God, trying to give messages to the human race through energies
that we are able to receive into our consciousness by turning a dial on our interior radio set. We can turn the dial merely by thinking correctly.

When human beings can come to this point, the secrets of the universe are open to them. This is what is taught in Masonry—though the Masons are so secretive that my dad, Ira, a high-degree Mason, never mentioned any of this. This is taught in all the mystical orders that have come down from ancient times and given the great knowledge to mankind. Since the organization of the state and the churches, all religions have tried to squelch certain aspects of this knowledge. The knowledge has been lost century after century and comes back over and over again in different forms.

Today this knowledge is being given back to mankind in the form of science and psychology. It is impossible for us to get this knowledge except from the heart, from the Christ, from God, from the Masters. And when the human race can understand this and begin to really live by it, then we will begin to get someplace.

The whole purpose of religious holidays and observances is to convince the human race that the Masters exist and that the great Master of the Masters is the person called the Christ. The Christ, in the person of Jesus, manifested this great truth: that the lame shall be healed, the halt shall be made to walk, the persons who have leprosy can be cured, the persons who are deaf can hear, the persons who do not understand can be given understanding. And everything that needs to be done in order to correct anything whatsoever can be done because of the presence of the Christ in the world today. But the people who want this to happen through them must change their energies and their vibrations and their thought processes, and become one with Him. He cannot force us. We must choose to become one with Him. It has to be on our own initiative. This is the great secret. It is really the key to the kingdom of heaven.

It is a matter of transformation of energy, like the energy that makes leaves green. What we call photosynthesis is really the transformed energy that gives life to the tree that bears fruit of a wonderful color. The human being is kept going by this energy. We call it grace. We inhale this energy with every breath. It flows through the lungs, though the vascular system, though the 100,000 miles of nerve fibers in your brain, through every part of the body. But there is another way the energy must work in human beings: we must become not just living bodies but living souls. Our consciousness needs to let the energy flow into the mind by means of the soul so that it will do for us what it is doing for that tree. It will give the consciousness
illumination. It will give the consciousness knowledge and wisdom when it is needed. It will give the consciousness an open door into the kingdom of heaven. Where there is hate there can be love. Where there is ignorance there can be knowledge. Where there is tremendous ill health and weakness there can be great strength and perfect power on a mental and emotional and physical level.

I know why I am here on this earth. I used to tell Ray Price that I owed him hundreds of dollars in education because I could just stand around and watch what he'd do, and then I would know to do the opposite. If people would just do the same with me, they would pick up a lot of shit, save a lot of steps. In
Yesterday's Wine
I wrote that some people were put here to show how perfect a guy could be, but I was put here to show how imperfect a guy could be.

We are all here to progress and learn and have a good time and be happy. I think the higher intelligence, God, intends us to love and be loved and work and sustain ourselves. As I've gotten older, I play music for my own happiness. I do it to keep busy, keep moving.

A song I wrote last year sort of sums up my position on many things I've been talking about, like vibrations and the Holy Ghost.

Still is still moving to me

And I swim like a fish in the sea

All the time
.

But if that's what it takes to be free
,

I don't mind
.

Still is still moving to me
.

It's hard to explain how I feel
.

It won't go in words, but I know

that it's real
.

I can be moving
,

Or I can be still
.

But still is still moving to me
.

My own guardian angels are always talking inside my head, chattering, arguing, carrying on a narration of what's going on around me. Could be I'm just imagining voices talking to me. But it doesn't make them any less real. Creative imagination is the way buildings get built.

Another name for this is intuition. I listen to my intuition every time. The more you trust your intuition, the more you learn to believe the vibes you pick up are true, the sharper your machine becomes.

How many times did your old man or old lady come in from someplace, and your intuition instantly told you they had been at the
Lucky Motel with a lover? But then you would say, naw, they wouldn't have done that, they only went to the dentist, everything is okay, you are paranoid. Months or years later you discover your intuition had been right that day. It happens to everybody.

Intuition is just an attunement of your inner self with the universal mind. The average person ignores these higher vibes if they seem to oppose the distinct and familiar impressions transmitted by the physical sense organs—such as your eyes or ears.

To develop intuition, the moment you ask yourself a question you must give credit to the answer. You must not permit reasoning or argument to take place and change the answer your intuition gives. As soon as you can abandon your willpower and anxiousness and tune your mind to the inner self, you will gain a wonderful bullshit detector. Batteries included.

All right, you are thinking, if everything is so simple, how come the world is in so much trouble?

The answer is we will never stop paying for our sins of the past until we change our thinking about the present and the future.

Now you may be thinking, okay, but what can I do about it?

Be idealistic. That's how to start. Never mind if people call you an idiot. Just because your idealism can't instantly cure all the ills in the world, don't be cynical about it. Be idealistic and take a step forward.

Obviously the three Farm Aids we have done have not cured the problems of the American farmer. Only our government and our major business and social institutions can really do that, and their leaders don't want to cure the farm problems because they might lose their power or their wealth if they do.

But with Farm Aid we at least took a step to say that a lot of people care what is going on. Farm Aid got started when all the musicians got together to do the We Are the World benefit for the starving people in Ethiopia. These people were starving because leaders of the state and big business wanted them to starve, and a bunch of musicians couldn't stop the situation. But we did call the world's attention to it, and what we did was good if we turned even one powerful head around to the right way of thinking.

Ray Charles and I were talking at We Are the World, and I said this was great but wouldn't it be nice if we did something for the people in our own country. Then at the Live Aid benefit, I heard Bob Dylan say part of the money ought to go to farmers. I put two and two together and figured out if we could do Farm Aid as well as we did those others, we would have something.

James Thompson, the governor of Illinois, heard what I was thinking. He phoned me and said, “What can I do to help?” The governor gave us the University of Illinois football stadium for our concert. I talked to John Cougar Mellencamp, Neil Young, Waylon Jennings. We had a nucleus already. Neil's agent, Eliot Roberts, called Bob Dylan. I talked to Kris and Alabama and Kenny Rogers. The next thing you know, we had a show going.

The first Farm Aid mushroomed so quick—quicker than anyone thought it could. We did it in six weeks. So you know it had to be a popular idea. All this time people have been going out of business, getting a raw deal and getting screwed, but the American people were just now finding out about it. When people made $15 and $20 a week, beef was 37¢ a pound. Now it's still 37¢ a pound and people are making $500 a week. It's not right. A bushel of corn was $3.50 when a brand-new Chevrolet was $600. Now a bushel of corn is down to about $2 and it costs $3 to grow it.

The people who determine the price of the grain are the ones who furnish grain to the rest of the world. To compete with the rest of the world, the prices have to stay so low that our farmers can't make it. With all of the embargoes we have, we've got a lot of grain stacked up and people hungry all over the world and hungry here. The Reagan administration hasn't done anything to help it, but the trouble began back in the seventies. With all the excesses, surpluses, and embargoes, the farmer's land value dropped so much that he couldn't pay his bank loans. The banks are now owned by big corporations and not by the small family bankers and so they just said, sorry, pal, get out. The young aggressive farmer went for the loans because he wanted to enlarge and to build and he was encouraged to do it. Then the ones who encouraged him pulled the rug out from under him. There are a lot of good farmers, proud people used to paying their bills, who can't make it. These are family farms owned for generations and now these farmers are losing them and feeling terrible about it. A lot of banks are going under too. Anybody who wants to come in and buy cheap land can get it. There used to be six or eight million family farms early in this century. Now there are only 600,000 left and in the next six months, 200,000 will be going out of business.

I met with a lot of the senators about the farm bill and I tried to focus a lot of attention on it because no matter how much money we raise, it's not going to make a dent in the farmers' debt. It's over $220 billion. If we raised $100 million, it still wouldn't help for long.