A Gathering of Souls - Ram Dass Full Lecture 1995

poem by Rumi the minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you not knowing how blind that was lovers don't finally meet somewhere they are in each other all along that last line interesting the minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you not knowing how blind that one lovers don't finally meet somewhere they are in each other all along this year last year it was two planes any two this year I'm pushing three planes out of the infinite variety of planes I'm just pushing three one is what we would call the ego plane that will include the physical mental and emotional body then we'll call the second one the soul plane and that will include the way in which you are a somebody awareness you're still somebody you are an entity with unique karma and the third plane is the plane of pure awareness which is really not a plane but we'll use the word planes now we could use spheres but we'll just use planes for fun don't think that planes mean higher is better they're just different from one another so if I were to review our story line thus far from let's say the souls point of view the middle well I would say I had some business to do which we will call karma psychic DNA some some uh nil digested attachments aversions and attractions and that karma led to the manifestation of me in a physical form in other words I took birth in an incarnation and when I was born I was still fully out there with my karma to run through of course but that karma involved a certain experience of socialization and in that process I knew ultimately of my separateness I experienced my separateness from God or from all or from something in other words I began to get attached to the form in which I have manifested I'm now speaking as a soul now as I get sort of encrusted into a form there is a kind of a moment of incredible fear when the form starts to solidify enough so there's a boundary so there is a form and other there is a and other you pinch your toe and you pinch the bedpost and they're different then you keep pinching and pinching and pinching and pinching and you're learning that's me and that's not me what's something like that now it can be as early as when you leave when you get born when you leave the womb it could be that separation or it could be the separation when you first experienced sucking and there's no milk coming that is when you experience the separateness so that the universe isn't all one thing anymore this is an awareness that there's something separate you have separated and you have gotten caught in a part of the universe rather than the awareness you are the whole universe so you have what guru ji f-- talks about been imprisoned by your own mind in some way I mean this is the mind that's done this because the hunger was so strong and it wasn't being fulfilled and there was pain and this is these learnings of very deep when there is an emotional component to them and most of us got very deeply socialized into being somebody into our incarnation it's as if there is a when you take an incarnation and I'm just going out this is Advanced Course when you take an incarnation there is it's like getting into a spacesuit and the whole program for running that spacesuit on this plane of existence physical mental emotional social psychological that whole mechanism is something that is like software in the system and it has to be developed you develop the software and that happens through your DNA code through your socialization process through all the people you meet and talk to but notice an interesting thing that your whole sense of separateness is really rooted from some discomfortable discomfortable experience of being separate in other words you didn't jump into separateness as a celebration for the most part you were kind of pushed into separateness maybe you would have jumped a moment later and maybe you did jump and that's just the experience you had was one of pushing against it as you obviously did and I did the other day when I was thinking back over all of this in my life I can experience that the power of my mother to deliver milk to me and keep me fulfill dry and warm and loved I traced how the separation from my ability to be that so that I got into separateness so then I tried to control it as soon as you become separate somebody you get a new power thing because as as somebody as a baby you're awfully little and the forces around you a very big and so I revised somehow experience in myself having experienced the pain of separateness and having not the power to control that that I couldn't get what I wanted when I wanted it once I became as somebody who wanted some and I only became that somebody who wanted something cuz I couldn't because I didn't have what I wanted all the time I hadn't even had a want up until then I had a learn once by the way I want to and it really most of my life from all my education because these were all surrogates for that power person that held the control of my being and I developed as you did incredible skills of looking into other people's eyes to know who you were am I good am i enough am i achieving am i successful am i beautiful am i fulfilling am i attractive am i smart enough whatever judgmental thing you imposed it on yourself and I am myself and I kept trying to be satisfied all the time through various things but notice how all of it all of my separateness was built on relationship my relationship with my mother with my father with my surrogates with all of the things that then became so on and how much the whole web of what I call my ego is basically relational so for example I'm working in the field of aging now unconscious aging and what I notice is the karmic effect of that in old people when they end up feeling lonely isolated lack of self-respect duh that's the whole chronicle of things that are primarily relational things and they are suffering because of them because of their identification with it as you know my story I guess I would have continued to be that somebody having then been trained as you know in somebody specialness just like you were so we aren't just somebody with somebody special and then we all go around being somebody special and we form relationships based on our specialness and their specialness and we look for symbiosis around our specialness and it's all very dramatic it's all is the world turns and it's all so poignant Lee beautifully horrible and so thick and everybody's in it right up to their eyeballs and does she does he will they won't they can I can't I what will he think if I do oh yah yah hello goodbye I miss you I love you go away it's all relational stuff I mean you just look at your language your concepts all of it it's so thick you keep saying I want to be alone don't kid yourself you don't want to be alone you wouldn't exist by the way you only exist relationally at that level it's a funny thing about the ego how deeply it is in relationships and that's why I got interested in what happened in the 60s when was a certain thing culminated that was kind of bubbling around in the in the history of the culture which was the undivided loyalty to individualism after communism and after fascism and communism we got into individualism the new ISM in it what's in it for me am i growing Who am I what do I need what do I want what do I desire almost a worship of our somebody nosov a light to be somebody and that came out of years of feeling you didn't of carrying around the feeling I'm powerless and something I'm wrong because I don't I'm not the whole universe like I used to be which you experienced baby must be incredibly painful the moment not just a physical birth but of psychological birth of the experience of separateness as an entity when you have been the whole thing I've described in many lectures and on tape and I can't do the whole story but the experience in Hawaii with that community of meditators in Hawaii where finally they had pushed me to my limits and they all were had their hands on my body and I was screaming and screaming and screaming as to their orders and it suddenly I was back in a crib in my room in at home and I was screaming the same way and my mother was holding me down just had her hand on my chest I was having a temper tantrum obviously of some sort and she was just being a good mother she wasn't giving way to it she wasn't reinforcing temper tenders which she didn't do in those days later you did and look what happened but she didn't then she wasn't out of a like I'm a mean mother she was just calming me down but it was firm and the firmness had a resistance to my power I couldn't control the situation anymore and the experience was one of loss of power and when I see when I look at business and I look at government and I look into the personalities of all of the politicians and don't you see all that fear and don't you see all that sense of not being powerful enough and if I had the power it would all be alright its we are caught in a drama so thick of ego ego structures ego constructs that have come out of our intellectual extrapolations from a basic root jewelle models of who am i and how the world works which has to do with fear it has to do with feelings of pain of separateness it has to do with with power it has to do with a yearning a yearning to come back to a certain feeling at home in the universe at home at one mmm and I think most of what we live with in politics in business in most of our professions most of our lifestyles deeply deeply deeply emerged in these particular conceptual plane of reality that everybody conspires to see is real like in the book I'm doing with aging it's absolutely amazing how this society conspires to define what aging is and then sucks everybody into believing it's true and then they live it out and it's the hype it is a complete hype it's a creation of mine so that if you look at aging in almost all the literature it is seen as a problem that's the first one it's that bizarre you know it's like the leaves turn red in the fall and you say we got a problem let's get out there with the green can and paint them all green what the hell we can't have these leaves turning red what's that about I think it's so absolutely bizarre bizarre the first thing you have to realize is you're in prison you've been had you bought into a conceptual model that you got trained into from birth to deal with your separateness and it's a whole structure that you've invested with reality and from your point of view it's the only reality most the time when my father would say Richard come back to reality that's the one II meant now where are all the other planes of reality when we're so busy investing in this one rather uninteresting plane it's not uninteresting it's actually passionately beautiful but it's also on interest if it's your only one it's a very sparse it's like having not having cable but the minute you realize you are in prison that's the relative reality perception you realize you got a problem you realize there's more than one channel you realize there's another place from which to look however you want to say you understand the theory of relativity you understand that everything is real depending on what you're looking at it from just like you dreamt last night and in that dream that stuff was real and you woke up and then you said I woke up into water I mean you ultimately must realize you just woke up into another one of them didn't the one you were in last night seemed real didn't seem like you were in a hall with all those people and then you woke up they're all gone still here long dream and once I had realized that I was in prison which is what my first mushroom trip absolutely ascertained for me with certainty or a certain is relative reality can yet I look back at all the years in which I had taken it all so quote seriously and I thought didn't I have any clues any of those years I mean did I go 30 years without a clue that I was caught in some weird psychosis group psychosis at that time I didn't I didn't quite see it over the years I began to see that as my vision of where I was looking from changed then a number of things that had been in the background in my life started to come out as figure and things that were figure started to recede into background and suddenly I could see that there was a web of that information and that wisdom available but I was busy not seeing it because of the intense nature of the plane I was seeing the interesting example of that that predicament was the one in which my guru said to me on the second time I saw him after he the first day he told me how my mother had died the second day he said your mother is a great saint and I said didn't maharaja say was a great saint and the translator asked Margie Margie said no is a great saint and she was dead so she was a dead great Saint so what was that and what I experienced at the moment he said that was the realization that my mother wasn't who I had thought she was that I had trapped her in being that Jewish middle class nurturing very responsible mother and that was just who she had incarnated it and he was saying she's a great being and suddenly at that moment there was a figure-ground reversal and the very few maybe four or five times in our life that I could remember when there had been that reversal and where we had recognized one another as fellow beings what an example that I always use is she and I were coming back from the dentists I was maybe nine so and we came to a stoplight and we were playing a game to see who could hold a note the longest and we opposed screaming at the top of our lungs and we looked over and there was a man in the next car looking at us as if we were both completely insane and there was a moment when our whole game of mother and child dissolved into the the hay of the moment and at that moment we were outside of our roles for a moment and then back in and those were so few and yet they had existed and it's interesting after he said that ever after that's who she and I have been with one another and all that other stuff has disappeared or dissolved into the ground and it's why I say to people when they're grieving you're grieving for all the forms of the Incarnation but why you're grieving is because you connected with love to the deeper nature of the other person and when you stop filling your mind with your self-pity anger hope fear wishing uh and quiet you experience nothing happened nobody went anywhere it is bitterly because I've measured you in terms of your forms I've reduced you into form and now you're dead and you up leveled me you said find me now go ahead you really love me find me and you keep wanting the form back because that's that's the one that turns you on but ultimately you have to turn on from somewhere else otherwise you're always desperate for external rushes so the awakening is the is an awakening could be said to be I mean the word awakening is used in the spiritual it could be said to be the moment when you realize you're in prison the moment when you experience another reality the moment when you see there are other ways of looking at it all I mean really other really other I'm not talking about other places in your thought process but other now what you call that place from which you look at your life when before you were just busy busy thinking you were it your incarnation life when you look at it from and that's where we're using the word soul which could at the deepest levels of the use of the word witness could be that but usually it isn't now let's look at the soul's predicament the soul had some karma to work out took an incarnation got lost in the incarnation and then it starts to awaken and realize that it has just taken an incarnation and it had to get lost and go through the whole process of awakening for the incarnation to work out the Karma this is not an error in the system the predicament of the word soul is that it's got all kinds of Christian overlay I guess it's got Jewish overlay and probably everything other religious overlay to I don't mean to lay it on the Christians just that they are so soulful and and and actually that's because that plane is a wonderful leverage plane to get able to see the plane you've been stuck on it's a very useful plane it's like a step in a ladder and it allows you to take your pressure off your foot on the lower rung because you're on the middle rung so that you could say that a one of the ways of awakening is you awaken to realize you are a soul that has been lost for quite a while in an incarnation which you created or which is the manifest of what your karma needs it's all fine there's no errors it's just interesting oh my god have I been had I'm not that being at all and the experience of the awakening of the soul which one is not just the awakening because with my mother and all we were awakening into that place of just being two beings sharing the peculiarity of the predicament we found ourselves in as an incarnate as incarnate like as Gollum said what are we doing here where this is real what are we doing stuck in this place where it's real that's the lazy man's guide to enlightenment so from the Souls point of view as you start to awaken you see the way in which the incarnation sticks to you as you're sort of shaking it off like shaking off water or stuff like that now there's a tendency because you've been trapped in the incarnation for so long when you awaken to see it in negative terms it trapped me it's thick it's heavy it's something and you push against it and that's called it's like the renunciate path I just won't think of rhinoceros you know I just will push away life and then I will I'll push away incarnation and then I will spew soar as a soul in other words I want to get high and I want to push away the low and low and high are still seen as value things that higher is better than lower higher I feel connected to the universe I feel I'm in my soul lower I come down back into my psychodynamic social physical somebody specialness trapped back here again from the soul's point of view the the a curriculum of the soul has two components to it they're really interesting it's the middle level remember now first of all it's working with its incarnation and it sees ultimately that Buddha was absolutely right on that the clinging of mind the attraction and the aversions of mind our what juice the whole system and the suffering in the whole shtick so the soul is using the experiences of incarnation to get lost in than to awaken out of to see one's predicament and to get to the point where one can be as Christ said in the world but not of the world you are not pushing away your incarnation because that's an aversion and you can't afford any aversions anymore if the versions are from the ego level soul doesn't have a versions their soul just sees a versions and attractions within the ego every time you're identified with an attraction or an aversion you're identified with your ego so the job of extra cating oneself into one soul is slowly cultivating those qualities which allow you to see the whole process and to calm yourself into realizing that your incarnation is about extricate yourself from attractions and aversions so that you are not lost in incarnation anymore but it doesn't mean pushing against it as you'll soon find out in the horny celibate period is if you push against that it still gotcha the game is to go beyond that into the point where you are fully in the world and fully not in the world there are stages where you get into your soul where you say oh I miss the passions of life meaning the passions the excitements that would cause by being lost in it and you think I'll never have those again I'll never have my first romance I'll never have this and I'll never have that because those were so adrenaline rush II heady stuff you must remember and that's a lot like what is often called the dark night of the soul where you have sort of realized that you're not going to have the intensity of the excitement that came from being totally lost into the linear drama and not knowing how it comes out it all comes out the same it all turns back into whatever it is that's the nature of the transitory nature of phenomena do you like it or not the soul is unique it has its unique Karma it's working it out through incarnation as it awakens to its own existence it starts to shed the attractions and the aversions that had it stuck and closed down into the prison of incarnation it awakens so now the soul is present and the incarnation is unfolding its storyline is continuing Ramdas is continuing its story goes on hello Hawaii yes I'll do that hello good evening this is Rhonda's that's all the storyline and slowly more and more behind it is just aa Wow look at that one mild curiosity at first that's a subtle attachment fascination my you wouldn't have believed that would you the synchronicity was appalling and then you get to the point of it Oh and then the point of it's all precious see you can't experience the all precious beautiful yum-yum-yum of the beloved as long as you're afraid of being trapped by it you've got to get through your original reaction to the trauma of what you've been through of being trapped when the soul wakes up it's it's like oh I mean it's very shaky very shaky it isn't of course but it thinks that shaking so now when somebody says I have a special relationship with you the question is two souls have special relationships ego certainly do souls are working out their stuff through ego special relationships but the question is do you want to identify with a special relationship what do you want to identify with a soul and if it's the soul we just you here I'm here hi well what have we got to do well this time we'll just wave now this time let's you be my father and I'll be your child now this time let's be competitors okay it's like when the Dalai Lama was asked what he thought of the Big Bang Theory he said which one and the mature relationships that we develop that you when you when you work on yourself deeply enough and you meet another person who is working on themselves deeply enough is we meet just as you here I'm here and then if we have a dance to do we dance and if we don't have a dance to do we don't dance but the dance of the not dance doesn't matter to either us and yet we love each other deeply deeply and I don't Ryan really playing with different ones of you in these different ways as if it really matters but it's much more fun if you also realize it doesn't matter much more fun the game is much higher and I keep saying everybody hey play it a different way come on out it's like having a ball bouncing outside at sunset and everybody's got their nose pressed against the windows then we can't come out mother said it's too late we can't come out and I'm just waiting for somebody come out and play and most of you we play for moments and then people go back into stuff and I go back into stuff and that's our work is to extricate ourselves from having to look at how we are with each other as egos rather than as souls and I think it's a confusion the term soulmates I mean I can understand it I can see souls traveling together through series of incarnations because they have work to do most the people use the word soulmate do it from an ego level and there's a whole way of describing spiritual planes from ego that is really basically ego stuff a lot of the New Age movement is that it is basically an ego both of spiritual concepts by people who still want power because they are rooted in fear soul isn't rooted in fear the soul is doing fine and when mahadji said to me run as don't you see it's all perfect he was saying hey couldn't you come up for air for a second you know couldn't you come up and play a little bit and I'm saying no it's real dammit it's wrong it's bad there's good and there's evil and this is evil and he's saying we'll wait you know he's flipping through the deck of incarnations and seeing that about a hundred thousand incarnations down the line I will say oh god you were high but he's a no rush where's he gonna go huh I mean when souls look at people who are busy being egos just realize how poignant it all looks how poignant it all looks and you love the person and you put you love the soul and the the storyline is so poignant but my story lines poignant I mean my story lines no more interesting to me than yours is to me it's all vitally interesting it is and it's all empty I'll give you a vital if you'll allow empty if you don't buy empty you can't have vital see if you don't understand what I'm saying you've got two choices either I'm insane or you are and I haven't the faintest idea I wish I could help you because it seems real to me what I'm saying to you so good luck the fun is that when the hubbub and clamor of ego entrapment gets lightened and I mean lightens so that you're not pushing against it but so you're really in it but you're not caught in it like taking care of my father through the years of his last year's was going from being caught in doing it from one level which was ego level slowly to extricated until we were Souls just completing the business of ego and incarnation together so as it gets lighter not through avoidance but lighter through harmoniously fulfilling one's Dharma fulfilling one stuff on earth doing what your thing is hearing your uniqueness and manifesting just not getting caught in it as you get lighter into all of that then the soul's initial business comes to light which is its relationship to the one or to the to the to the non book no words the what the fingers pointing it the finger of religion points at something it's the mystery its the relation of the soul to the mystery and that ultimately is the only game in town that's the language of the mystic poetry it's the language of the soul yearning to be with God to be in God be one with what is to be beyond boundary to ultimately Ren the strings that keep a boundary between something and something else in other words is to become in love which is boundary less it is to die in to love and what's happened if you notice the sequence is you went from one into Sol Sol took birth in two separate Kotnis separateness awakes to soul and then when soul is and in harmony got its act together then souls yearning for the coming back out of its own ultimate separateness that is created by its the karmic structure of it all then it starts to come back into the one and that yearning is the call toe as the beloved and many of you know because I've read this that almost every retreat these words from Ananda my MA she said this body has lived with father mother husband and all this body has served the husband so you may call it a wife it has prepared dishes for also you may call it a cook it has done all sorts of scrubbing and menial work so you may call it a servant but if you look at the thing from another standpoint you will realize that this body has served none but God for when I served my father mother husband and others I simply considered them as different manifestations of the Almighty and serve them as such when I sat down to prepare food I did so as if for god whatever I did I did in a spirit of divine service hence I was not quite worldly though always engaged in household Affairs I had but one ideal to serve all is God to do everything for the sake of God now can you hear there's the whole ego storyline going bengali woman house wife dot does it all but she's on the level of soul doing her life as an offering to bring her to the beloved when Hanuman is with ROM and ROM says to Hanuman who are you Hanuman and Hanuman says when I don't know who I am I serve you when I know who I am I am you okay now we're talking about the second and the third planes that I'm asking you to consider because the second plane is the soul and you and I are fellow souls that have taken incarnation and we're meeting in this room in Marin with our story lines coming from distances all of our life stuff and we're souls coming to meet as it's a convention it's a party of souls it's a party of souls and we're meeting each other through our our psyches and personalities and stuff but behind it we're laughing Farah what happened to you this trip well I really had you should have seen them my god what happened in my childhood you wouldn't believe I been milking it for 30 years I'm a fierce player by the way don't make friends with an elephant trainer unless you have room for an elephant in your living room it's a great Hindu line isn't are you looking for me I am in the next seat my shoulder is against yours you'll not find me in stupas nor in Indian shrine rooms nor in synagogues nor in cathedrals not in masses nor keratins nor in legs winding around your neck nor in eating nothing but vegetables when you really look for me you will see me instantly you will find me in the tiniest hour of time Kabir says student tell me what is God God is the breath inside the breath and so the predicament between the second and third planes that I'm asking you to consider is that the second has this intense yearning to merge back into the beloved and as that merging occurs the next surrender the next death if you will it's not a ripping it's just a movement into there is the realization that God has been all of it all along that that final plane is something that includes everything it excludes nothing you could call that third plane and we will for this weekend awareness awareness seeker back inside yourself annulment a few moments we're going to meditate together so you have to do it heavy now just hear the method you go back inside yourself and you sit down so that the trauma of your ego story quiets down just a little bit and then you begin to feel the awareness the presence of soul which is still you and unique and you're seeing your life unfold you're seeing your clinging x' your shadows your loves your passions you're seeing it all your mindfully bringing mindfulness to what is in incarnation and if you keep going in and saying but who's that who's that who am i what is then even in in buddhists anata then even the sense of a separate entity turns out to just be more phenomena you're even thinking of yourself as separate finally dissolves and you are indeed back where you started it be one way of saying it that although that hadn't flies start and back and beginning and in you've been there all along that's the bizarre thing the realization you've been here all the way along it was like I had a dream and I awoke oh the dream was that I was separate even as a soul and then that soul and its separateness all comes into awareness but as phenomena as phenomena and at that moment you start to appreciate if you go inward you begin to appreciate how awareness is awareness it's not your awareness it's not my awareness it's nothing personal and when you and I rest in awareness that is the culmination of love because you're not even a breath apart you are the breath within the breath when people say may peace be with you peace cannot be with the ego except like for the briefest second because the egos made up of stuff that doesn't allow for it the soul is still moving towards something awareness is peace and phenomena arise I am a phenomenon in your consciousness at this moment just another moment just another moment I guarantee you that within 10 hours this will be gone and there'll be even the memory of a gun it'll come back but it'll be gone you'll be so busy getting supper they're just in cutting the beans this moment will be gone where was it I'll never forget this I hope you will because awareness is in the moment it's not in moldering butterflies of memories of awareness it's in the moment it's so bizarre as we will see this weekend as we keep playing with this how you can go through time into timelessness you can go through be coming into being you can go into through meditation of planes of consciousness of the witness and the deeper witness and the witness of the witness and back in until is just and all of that keeps going in and out and in and out and in and out and that's an interesting one does it ever be all in at the same moment I don't really know that because the way we see manifestations is always from one plane or another like the other quote of a nun to my mom that I use are the words on one plane speaking about another plate as the finger pointing at the moon and once Paramahansa Yogananda asked ananda my MA to tell him something of her life father she said there is little to tell my consciousness has never associated itself with this temporary body before I came on earth father I was the same I grew into womanhood but still I was the same when the family in which I had been born made arrangements to have this body married I was the same and father in front of you now I am the same even afterwards though the dance of creation changes around me in the Hall of eternity I shall be the same can you hear who that is it's you that's peace you hear that that's equanimity that's peace oh just the same loss gain fame shame pleasure pain life death look look look look same boy did you see that world and heavy wasn't it now see this is the Advanced Course I'm challenging you now to get all three planes going so that you are honoring the ego and you're playing your part and you're in your role and you're doing it all perfectly the soul that is running off its karmic tab well there goes abuse there's you know there's financial dismal failure that's good I needed one of those to fill in that square let's see mmm comes a Republican administration I need one of those ah comes a good golf score I certainly needed one of tho Saul's running off it's Karma interesting fascinating ah and then at the same moment it's got the yearning that yearning for the beloved we're going to talk later on sometime this weekend about relationships and about the difference between loving somebody and loving the beloved and where the somebody nough sends and what it is and how it reflects and mirrors but the other part of the soul's business is its relationship to the one and for the one there is the play of all this stuff going on within itself it's all an internal matter just souls egos stories planes of consciousness all within awareness when you start to work with that ultimate plane the kinds of lines you use are this five line stands it from a Tibetan woman don't prolong the past that's your personal history by the way don't invite the future how do you know how it's going to come out don't alter your innate wakefulness you don't have to do anything just be don't fear appearances for now I'm going to come up including your actions it's all phenomena nothing more than that so now ladies and gentlemen fellow Souls awareness in drag you now have the blueprint for the weekend we're going to work within this blueprint question it bring examples in learn how to work with it and use it that's what our business is together this weekend learning how to meet as Souls meet in awareness and meet as egos without being entrapped in any of it in other words how to be free in form

Channel: Baba Ram Dass

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Keywords: Soul, perspective, Hanuman108108108108, awareness, Ram, Dass, Ram Dass, incarnation, ram dass lectures, ram dass youtube, ram dass full lecture, ram dass soul, ram dass perspective, ram dass awareness

Id: Xu_jell1qpg

Length: 53min 35sec (3215 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 16 2014