Promises and Pitfalls of the Spiritual Path - Ram Dass Full Lecture 1988

after that invitation I just want to sit and gloat and glow and just have you all stroke me I'm really great I didn't realize how good I was when you get old enough it's interesting you just sort of become an elder and you you just get points just for living somebody came up to me and said to me today they were telling me what they do and they say you know doctor Fadiman is one of my professors and remembering back when he was one of my students it took me through I was starting to go like this tonight I'm speaking on promises and pitfalls of the spiritual path and then after I speak Rama and Gangadhar who were two of my dear friends and I are going to lead some chanting and for those of you that would like to play that spiritual practice out the reason I'm speaking on promises and pitfalls of the spiritual path is because Stan Grof couldn't get in touch with me and so he created the title but since I respect stand so much because he's one of my teachers I felt that if he set the title I should rise to the occasion so I'm going to speak on promises and pitfalls of the spiritual path it's probably the same lecture you just keep working it around into a it was interesting to reflect about it today when I was putting this together I'm talking primarily about the spiritual work in the United States tonight because that is the one that has whoops as feedback that's the one that has most been visible to me over these past years even though I'm now teaching more in Europe and Australia and abroad certainly there is a history of mysticism in America as Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman and so on but it was in the 60s that there was a dramatic awakening of spiritual consciousness in America and that is in no small part due to a speaker who has been here on this program dr. Albert Hofmann who I certainly want to honor I don't know this is a confidence but the first time I met dr. Hoffman was in Basel and we had lunch together outdoor restaurant and I was meeting the head of research for Sandoz which from our point of view was quite a coup and it took a while before he described to me how he would once a year go out in the field where the flowers were with his wife to explore with psychedelics and then I knew I was with a Landsman but he spoke this morning about realities and the shift in reality and that was a major shift that occurred in the 60s was the shift from what you'd call absolute reality thinking that what you saw and what your thinking mind thought it understood was only one kind of reality and there were other kinds of reality William James of course had been saying had said that many years before remember his quote our normal waking consciousness is but one type of consciousness whilst all aparted all about it parted from it from that by the film was the parted parted from it by the slightest vales lie other types of consciousness we might spend our entire life without knowing of their existence but apply the requisite stimulus and there they are in their completeness and of course it's interesting that William James said that when he was a professor at Harvard and I was thrown out of William James Hall for doing what he said up until the 60s the the primary spiritual containers were the organized religions of this culture and they were primarily the holders of the ethical constraints of the culture and they motivated people to ethical behavior through fear and through internalized super-ego and they were primarily mediated the mediator between you and God was the priest so there was a priest class and what the 60s did through psychedelics initially was blow that whole system apart because it made the relationship to God a direct experience once again of the individual of course the Quakers have had that and had a long history of it as did other traditions but in terms of mainstream it started to be this was a new concept coming into the culture which was spiritual and not formally religious most of the time up until then mystical experience had been pretty much denied and treated as irrelevant in our culture I was a social scientist and it all eyes just spurned it I mean I was just cynically spurned I wouldn't even read that stuff Rilke said about that period the only courage this demanded of us to have courage for the most strange the most singular the most inexplicable that we may encounter that mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm the experiences that are called visions the whole so-called spirit world death all these things that are so closely akin to us have by daily parrying been so crowded out of our life that the sense with which we could have grasped them are atrophied to say nothing of God but then in the 60s that changed and most of us recognized a part of our being that we had never known before we experienced a part of our being that was not separate from the universe and we saw how much of our behavior was based on the desire to alleviate the pain that came from our own separateness it was the first time that many of us broke out of the alienation that we had known all of our adult lives and we began to recognize our the health of our intuitive compassionate hearts a health that had been just lost under the veil of our our minds and the constructs our minds had created about who we were and who everybody else was in other words we transcended dualism and experienced our unitive nature with all things and there was bliss and there was all kinds of wonderful feelings for it and that glow lasted into the middle 60s and there was the Summer of Love in 67 and then of course it had started to turn by then and it did turn but it's interesting how mainstream those ideas have gotten in the 25 years since that time when I lecture now - when I was lecturing in those days I was speaking to audiences between the ages of 15 and 25 those were the explorers in those days and these meetings were like members of the Explorers Club and we were just comparing maps of you know the terrain of the travels and 25 years later when I speak in say Des Moines Iowa there are 1,500 people and I'm saying roughly the same thing she's probably not to my credit but I'm saying the same thing I was saying 25 years ago and I'd say most of those people at least 70 to 80% have never smoked dope they've never taken psychedelics they've never read Eastern mysticism and they're all going like this now how do they know see how do they know and of course the reason they know is because these values these the shift from that narrow view of reality into a relative reality which made all institutions up for grabs if you globe deep enough all of that has permeated into the mainstream of culture so that in a way a person nowadays has much more option about reality than they had at the time that I was coming through graduate school for example as is reflected in all of the peripheral of the proliferation of new kinds of social institutions for education to understand what was happening to us we started to look for maps and the best maps that were available to us at that time that seemed to be readily available where Eastern maps maps from Buddhism Hinduism those traditions most of the Middle Eastern religions the maps about the direct mystical experience were part of the esoteric rather than the exoteric religion and thus they were sort of guarded in a way the Kabbalah and HUD citizen wasn't as popular as it is now Sufism wasn't as popular as it is now so in those early days we were going to the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita things like that now and what we found was since this experience was happening to many of us including the Beatles and The Rolling Stones there were different strokes for different folks different people interpreted the experience differently and people turn to different forms of practice in order to to further experience or to integrate what had happened to them often through psychedelics only the only partly through psychedelics of course but much through that at that time in the 60s in the early 60s it had happened to us so dramatically that we remember Tim Leary and I had a chart on our wall at Millbrook deterrent which which was a curve showing it was a geometrically rising curve showing how fast everybody would get enlightened and it did involve putting LSD in the water supply but other than that it was not terribly dramatic okay and it seemed so inevitable and irrevocably because the experience was so powerful that and so irreversible once it had happened that we couldn't as we started to surround ourselves with other people who had experienced it and pretty soon at Harvard we were considered a cult because the people that hadn't experienced that no longer could talk to us because we couldn't talk to them because they didn't know and it would add that unbridgeable Gulf had started to occur right in our own department of social relations now that kind of naive expectation that it was all going to be over immediately denied all of the information that we read but didn't really we said well we've got a new way because psychedelics are going to do what Buddhism couldn't do when Hinduism couldn't do because when the Buddha described how long we've been on the journey since he was talking reincarnation talk you know the image he said imagine a mountain six miles long six miles wide six miles high and every hundred years a bird flies over the mountain with a silk scarf in its beak and it runs the silk scarf over the mountain once every hundred years in the length of time it would take the silk scarf to wear away the mountain that's how long you've been doing this so you take then you look at this life and it's less than a blink of an eye it's just up and then I had a birth like that and then I like that it's like still-frame photography and those are all births and with that kind of time perspective you take your chart off the wall you start to relax a little bit now but they're at the same moment they're a lot of the spiritual literature suggested urgency Buddha said do it as hard as you can this is a precious birth it's a rare rare experience to have a human birth work as hard as you can which is just what Western achievers love to hear of course Kabir said friend hope for the guests while you're alive jump into experience while you're alive what you call salvation belongs to the time before death if you don't break the ropes while you're alive do you think you ghosts will do it after the idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic just because the body is rotten that is all fantasy what is found now is found then if you find nothing now you will simply end up with an apartment in the city of death but if you make love with the divine now in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire so plunge into the truth find out who the teacher is believe in the great sound so there was this desire to get on with it and which we interpreted of taking the entire spiritual journey and make it into an achievement course and there is a lovely story about a Zen boy who goes to a Zen master and he says master I know you have many students he said but if I study harder than all the rest of them how long will it take me to get enlightened the master said ten years he said well if I work day and night and just double my efforts how long will it take master said twenty years and he asked with a more further achievement and the message at thirty years and he said why do you keep adding year as the master said will because you will only since you will have one eye on the goal that will only be one eye left to have on the work and it will slow you down and measurably and in a way that was the predicament that we got so attached to where we were going that we really had little time to deepen our practice to get there and that is something that has has we've grown we've grown to the point where we've developed patience and we've stopped counting and that is great growth for a Western consciousness to do that in I do my spiritual practices because I do my spiritual practices and what will happen will happen and whether I'm going to be enlightened or free now or ten thousand births is of no concern to me because what difference I make what else am I going to do I can't stop anyways so it doesn't make any difference to me but you watch to make sure you don't get too trapped in your expectations about any practice it's a lovely story about Nasiruddin the Sufi mystic slob it's kind of a bum he's great I mean the stories of nuts rooting the delicious and aside one the one I love this isn't the one telling but is the one about nuts rude and going to the bank with a check to cash and he hands the check to the cashier and the cash rich studies the check and the check looks wonderful but Nasir Uddin looks like a complete derelict and he said sir this cheque looks fine but can you identify yourself now it's rude and reached into his pocket pulled out a mirror and he said yep that's me but the the one I wanted to tell you of nice routing was nice Rudin was talk he went to his neighbor to borrow a large cooking pot and his neighbors said nuts Rudin you know you're very undependable and I really treasure this big pot and I don't think I can give it to you and nice rude and said my family is all coming I really needed I will bring it back tomorrow finally begrudgingly the neighbor gave the pot - no Scruton this Rutten took it home very thankful appreciative next day he was at the door with the pot and the neighborhood's delight he says nice rude and how wonderful he took the pot and inside the big pot was a little pot he said what's that Nasiruddin said the big pot had a baby so the neighbor of course was delighted so the next week nice rudin came and he said I'd like to borrow your pot I'm having another party the neighbors said of course nice rootin take my pot so Nazaruddin took the pot next day no nuts Rudin the day after Nona's Rutten finally the neighbor went to nuts rude and he said no strudel where's my pot Nasiruddin said it died see how you get sucked in by your own mind starting from the 60s the there was an influx of Eastern spiritual teachers I remember going to the Avalon Ballroom in the company of Sufi Sam to hear Allen Ginsberg introduce AC Bhaktivedanta who was going to chant this weird chant called Hari Krishna and that was just in the early 60s and the Beatles of course were jetting with Maharishi Mahesh at one point I went with a group of hippies from the Haight Ashbury I was the elder of that group to meet with the elders of the Hopi in hotel Villa to arrange a Hopi hippie bein in Grand Canyon because we were honoring them as our elders but they really didn't want to be honored by us I don't think because when we went there we made terrible mistakes we gave feathers to the children and we some of us made love by the well because we really didn't know how to honor lineages properly and that is something that we learned over these years through our connection with Eastern traditions something about lineages and the problem of course with lineages were the problem was how much we would incorporate of the lineages as they were from the East and how much we would modify them and the predicament about all of that was that to modify them you have to modify them from inside them you can't modify from outside and what many Westerners started to do was take a tradition say from Mahayana Buddhism and say well that's all fine for Tibetan Buddhists but really what we should be doing is this and they did that prior to fully understanding the practice from the deepest place inside Carl Jung talks about richard wilhelm in his preface to the e ching and he talks calls him a gnostic intermediary and he said what he did was he incorporated into him the Chinese being into his blood and his cells so that he was dreaming that way and then he brought it back to the culture and the interesting thing about Gnostic intermediaries is we were so eager to get ahead that we were really doing violence to a number of the lineages because we went to the west to the east rather and bought them but we kept modifying them in order for our own convenience and comfort and because we in the West are much more of a personality cult than the East that we are much more focused on what I want what I desire what I need and that isn't true of Eastern cultures as much I mean it may be more repressed there but whatever it is it is not a dominant theme and so a lot of the spiritual practices are not focused around personality and thus they are not quite immediately transferable to the West I didn't really understand lineage I remember doing a television show with chögyam trungpa rinpoche and we were talking about non-attachment as the quality of mind that was so desirable and I said to him well if he is so not attached why don't you give up your lineage and he said I am NOT attached to everything but my lineage and I said well you have a problem and it was out of my gross 'no some not understanding the way of the intimate love affair one has with a method where one goes into a method first as a kind of a dilettante and then one gets into the method in a in a more or less fanatic way then one comes out the other end and then one where's the method or uses it or honors it without being attached to it just because it you become the unique carrier of that lineage it's a whole different place that you carry a lineage from once you don't need it any longer and that was something that I didn't understand at that time well what we did was we gathered together around our newfound spiritual awakenings on all the ways we knew how to get high so there were people that gathered together around sexual freedom there were people are gathered together around drugs there were people who gather together around chanting others around meditation and we had wonderful Eastern names for them the satsang and the Sangha and the predicament is that after a while most of those went from being very fresh and pure and joyful coming together they started to turn into having boundaries around them having a leat ism having who was in them and who wasn't in them and professing that their way was the only way and a lot of us have seen much violence done from just that simple concept that my way is the only way it reminded me in those days of that story of God and Satan walking down the street and they see this brilliantly shiny object on the ground and God reaches down and picks it up and he says I it's truth and Satan says oh yes here give it to me I'll organize it and that roughly was what it felt like that it started to become institutional and structured in the 70s and faddish it became the in thing to be part of these large spiritual movements and they were beautiful and they got people incredibly high the predicament was that many of the Eastern teachers who came over had come out of primarily celibate renunciate paths they weren't ready for Western women who were at the middle of their sexual freedom and feminism and they could do anything and they were just absolutely vulnerable they just fell like flies because these people were teachers they were not gurus a guru is a cooked goose a guru is is done that guru the the difference between a cave and a city makes no difference to a guru to a teacher it makes a hell of a lot of difference because the teacher is pointing the way while a guru is the way and it's a very different quality what a guru does is mirror for you we you aren't that's all they do but we we can we took the whole concept of guru when we turned it into our need for a good father in a psychodynamic sense and we wanted the Guru to do it to us when in fact what happens is that the Guru just is like a tree or a river and depending on your karmic predispositions or readiness you do it to yourself in the presence and the Guru is a presence that allows you to do it it's a presence that doesn't catch you anywhere only you catch yourself and so what what happened was that we after while started to bring our judging mind to bear in the whole scene and I was surrounded by people coming up with gossip about this spiritual teacher of that spiritual teacher and it seemed like everybody was becoming a Khanna sir of clay feet and they were busy deciding whether they could afford to take a teaching from somebody who was impure and they were looking for the impurities in order to protect themselves because they misunderstood the concept of surrender and they thought what you do was you surrender to somebody else as a person when what you really surrendered to is the truth Ramana Maharshi says God guru and self are one in the same thing and so what you're surrendering to is your higher truth or your higher wisdom in the Guru and it's an interesting issue that has gone on for many years and I'll talk about it on the next page the issue about surrender and about because surrender is a very unpleasant word to us in the West it always has images of MacArthur and you know it's terrible images you know I accept your surrender and it's it's the showing of the neck and vulnerability and the fact that surrender is such a deep part of the spiritual path is something that we have had to stretch a great deal to understand I'll come back to that as we learn more about the traditions we realize that if we were going to incorporate what had happened to us in the through psychedelics but we were going to use these other methods to stabilize and integrate them into our lives we were going to have to do a lot of purification at first we poopoo that it was like the ten commandments you who cares you know that's all old stuff that's all all those uptight people and we can have all of our things and then we began to see that you had to stop creating karma to get your head into place where you could get high and not come down that was the interesting question how do you get high and stay there that was the way we used to say it we don't say it that way now and so there was a big push for renunciate practices because the idea was that this earth plane is the illusion it's causing trouble the best thing to do is get up there get out there in sort of lala land get really high get into the place where it's all divine and this is sort of an era that we all ended up here anyway that was a kind of renunciant model and so people felt that by giving up a lot of things they would get very much purer to be able to have deeper experiences and many did but others just ended up sort of like horny celibates was like a because they collected the stuff as an achievement again and meister eckhart said we are to practice virtue not to possess it and that was the issue we tried to possess it and wear it like marks on our sleeve about what how pure we were but even a little bit of Sheila or Yama or whatever your purification rituals are of just not creating suffering not stealing not killing not not Kriya prove you're not having adultery not you know not not causing a lot of trouble even that affected us and we started to have money many more spiritual experiences and that led to a time of such spiritual materialism I mean it might bother my mind because everybody was in rapture or bliss everybody was having experiences seeing radiant balls coming to talk to them it was an incredible time now this is all true but the way we reacted to it was what was interesting because we got absolutely enamored of all of the phenomena that occurred as a result of our practices our meditation or our spiritual purification and we really were very vulnerable to spiritual materialism and we had a if we had a Ford in the garage we had an astral being in the bedroom and the the traditions warned us about this they said don't get stuck like Buddhism said don't get stuck in the jhanas in the trance states because you'll go into trances and you'll experience omniscience omnipotence omnipresence don't get caught at just notice it nod to it and go on don't get stuck in it but we it was too tasty for us to let it go and it continues to be quite tasty it's very hard to understand that the spiritual freedom is very ordinary it's nothing special and that's what's so precious about it and we keep trying to make it into something with all these powers came a tremendous amount of energy because if you meditate you quiet your mind just a little bit the amount of energy that is dissipated through your monkey mind of thinking but going from here to here the minute you concentrated even the tiniest bit through chanting or meditation or anything you start to tune to other planes of reality where there is an incredible energy it's like if you're a toaster sticking your plug into 220 instead of 110 and everything fries and many many people have these incredible and continue to have these incredible experiences of energy was Shakti or what's often called Kundalini which is the energy rising up the spine and I recall the first time it happened to me I really thought I had damaged myself I mean it was so violent as it started up my spine it felt like a just a thousand snakes climbing my spine and it got to my second chakra and I remember I ejaculated automatically and then it kept going up and I was really frightened extremely frightened because I hadn't expected anything this horrendous and I get calls all the time as I'm sure the spiritual emergence Network and Stan and Kristina who've done a wonderful job with that organization by the way I get calls often from people who are having Kundalini experience who says I'm a therapist in Berkeley and this things happen to me and I ride my bicycle for six hours a day and I don't get tired and I can't sleep and I cry at the strangest moments and I think I'm going insane and I said well let me read you a list of all the symptoms which I have in a Xerox and she said I thought I was the only one having that I said no it's xeroxed Swami Muktananda published it a long time ago and it's just mother Kundalini at work and don't worry it'll pass and just breathe in and out of your heart and keep it soft and so on but a lot of these phenomena started to happen to us and they scared us are they excited us or they entrapped and enamored us and we stopped to smell the pretty flowers many people when they went into the plane where they experienced this power brought their egos up with them and interpreted it as my power and they went into a messianic journey where they tried to convince everybody that they were the one and that was very painful for everybody extremely painful I remember a moment with my brother who was in a mental hospital because he he was Christ and he was doing terrible things as Christ turned out and there was a moment where the doctor and my brother and I met in this hospital ward together and the doctor wouldn't let him see anybody without the doctor being present and the I came in a beard and a dress and beads my brother was in a blue suit and a tie sing and he was locked up and I was free which the humor of which didn't escape any of the three of us you know and he said to me we were talking about whether the psychiatrist would ever know he was God the psychiatrist was writing on his clipboard very uncomfortable I mean because my brother and I were really out there floating and then my brother said I don't understand why am I in a hospital and you're free you look like a nut and I said well I said you think you're Christ he said yeah I said well I'm Christ too he says no you don't understand I said that's why they're locking you up the minute you tell somebody they're not Christ watch out and so that was the Messianic phenomena that happened along the way this is too heavy are you still with me okay because I'm trying to cover an awful lot of material a little fast and I'm sorry about that now in a lot of people when the energy got so intense from their spiritual practices they really lost their ground they lost it on this plane and that's what the spiritual emergence Network has done because it done to help these people because in India or other cultures when that happens those are called like mahabhava served those people they were called musts or God intoxicants and everybody knew if somebody flipped alike like Ananda my MA one of the greatest Saints of all time she was a Bengali woman a very dignified woman and she spent about two years doing cartwheels in her front yard and throwing off her sari and stuff now in our culture that is Belleview material and in that culture it is ah there is a God in toxicant we must take care of them at a temple so that there was a very we have not had a support system for that kind of transform transformative loss of ground which you need to go through at times and you go through the ground and then you regain it a lot of people just went out you know I remember in the early days the whole game was to get everybody out to get them to let go of their minds and the heaviness then you looked out and everybody was floating and I look at half the audience now I want to say hey come on up for air it's okay it's not so heavy and like the other heart I want to say come on get your act together learn your zip code get a job for Christ's sake you know when spiritual practices work a little bit but you're not stable in your transformative experience your faith is flickery and that is when fanaticism breeds strongly the mosquitoes of fanaticism breed in flickery faith environments and that is really what happens to most disciples in spiritual things they become much worse when you meet when you meet a spiritual master in any tradition you meet a Zen master or a Hindu Buddhist Sufi doesn't American Indian whatever time you meet a master you know you meet and you recognize another a mensch you know and like we're really here and they don't sit around saying what you're not following my way so you're lesser but all of the disciples right under them usually do keep enough in their faith yet to where they can they haven't come out the other end because you see the thing about a method is the for a method to work it has to trap you if you try to dilettante your way through it doesn't work you've got to become a meditator but if you end up a meditator you lost you want to end up free not a meditator then a lot of people just end up meditators I've meditated for 42 years and I you know and they look at you with intense you know with earnestness you know it's the golden chain of righteousness that caught them again but a method must trap you and then finally if it works it self-destructs and you come through the other end and you're free of method that's the story that's what Ramakrishna's gospel of ram accretion is so wonderful about because he just went through kali worship and then came out and then started to explore all the other methods because once you come through your method all methods lead you to the same thing people say well how do you do buddhist meditation and you've got a Hindu guru when you're a Jew you know I say I don't have any problem what's your problem it seems fine for me I in all Sh'ma Israel is all there's only one God and the one has no name so there's no form so that's Nirvana I don't have any problem with that what are you the the righteousness that we were the way we were approaching the spiritual path had an element of righteousness in it and teachers came along who really helped us a lot with it the teacher that helped me most about my righteousness probably was trungpa rinpoche because in what you look for in a really good teacher is that quality of rascal 'no scoundrel nespresso all nisonger oppa the first summer that Naropa started I was having a hard time with Trungpa Rinpoche and one of the problems was that he had all of his students drunk most the time he had them busy gambling heavy meat diets and I thought what kind of a spiritual teacher is this all right I mean you can understand my dilemma I came out of a Hindu renunciate path you know you mm-hmm Hindus are always afraid of fallin over the edge so the best thing is to just keep that all separate but here he was just taking them down the hell the path to hell as far as I was concerned and I was sitting judging who was i judging ooh was I might think back when I looked at those same students a few years later I saw students deep in the hundred thousand prostrations deep in the heaviest spiritual practices because he had taken them through their obsessions and then on to deeper practices he wasn't afraid to do that while most of the other traditions were afraid to do that for ferry but he would get lost along the way and that's what a tantric teacher is not afraid to do and tantrics are very exciting and very scary and you never know whether the tantric is just hung up her or himself or whether they're an exquisite teacher see and there's no way you can know was Rajesh's 92 Rolls Royces a ploy or was it really a hung up Indian you know I mean you don't never know all you know is that if you want to be free you use them as hard as you can to be free and their karmic problems are their karmic problems see and that's the secret you finally find out about teacher so our period was a period of the we were called the me generation and that was because there was a narcissism there was an inner work we had to do when we still have to do it and inner work that made us somewhat oblivious to the our social roles in society we were less interested in political things and there was some metaphysical confusion around that which is reflected in the difference say between tera vaada Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism Theravada Buddhism in the simplest this is simplistic and we all agree in Jack corn-fields here he knows I'm not speaking seriously but the the terrified ins in effect say look my job is for me to get enlightened then if I get enlightened nothing exists anyway that solves the problem the Mahayana Buddhism say nobody makes it till everybody makes it so I might as well take the Bodhisattva vow and hang back and help everybody because there's no I can't go any you get done too you can see these are too that's oversimplified okay but it did catch us a little bit because many of us said I've got to work on myself to become free and others said I've got to work with everybody else to help them become free we've all got to be from free together and part of the Vietnam anti Vietnam action was part of the we've all got to work together and the turning inward of many of us to just pull back from political action was I've got to get free myself even though I could rationalize and say I've got to get free so that when I do something for somebody else I'm not creating suffering through the attachments of my own mind a lot of people in the spiritual journey once they realize that enlightenment wasn't going to happen the day after tomorrow and once they started to get some powers because their mind got quiet I mean if you do TM 20 minutes a day you will definitely get quiet and you will start to have powers there's no doubt about it then the question is what do you do those are called cities and cities or powers are a terrible trap on the spiritual path they are a real pitfall because one is inclined to want to use them to do good that's the one and once you realize that because the minute you see cities you realize the game is not at all how you thought it was example I was with uhm what's twitch story shall I tell I was with such a Sai Baba the miracle man of southern India beautiful man and he said ROM does let me give you something I said no Baba I don't need anything I have a guru and he says no let me give you something he held out his hand and I went up really close and I knew what he does see so I wasn't going to blink see cuz I figured he might be a magician I'm going to really watch so I was about this far and I my eyes are fixed on his hand and he went like this and this bluish light appeared and it turned into a medallion which he then gave me it was cold it looked like it had been made in Tijuana it was very badly made it had a picture of him on a star on a circle and I thought my God if he's going to bring something from somewhere else the least he could do is bring me a you know a crystal or something like that so I said to one of the Swami's they're nearby I said well that's wonderful I said that he produces these he said oh he doesn't produce them I said no he says no he keeps them in a warehouse he just moves them with his mind I said oh well if that's all he does who the hell wants it you know I'll just give you one more because they're hard to stop I'm not going to tell you my guru miracle stories because I wrote a book miracle of love and you can read them all your heart's content this one was with Swami Muktananda who was a great guy really he was a real rascal and he and I were traveling in southern India on a pilgrimage together and one morning he got me up at 4:00 in the morning and he took me to a little temple and he sat me down and he whispered a mantra into my ear and then he started to do a puja and I passed out I don't remember anything about five hours later somebody came and said baba wants you and I had been I don't know where I was but I felt good and I came back and the mantra was in my head I said what's that mantra he says that will give you vast wealth and vast power now being a Jewish boy from Boston that's what my father told me I wanted you see however I'm now a righteous spiritual seeker you see so I said I only want those if you give me an equal amount of compassion and love and he says just do the mantra well I couldn't stop doing it I mean I was doing a day and night and waiting for the wealth and power and and I got back to his temple in Ganesh glory and he put me to meditate in the inner room of the meditation hall inside and I went down there round two in the morning and they unlock it with a big key and it's hot it was like 110 degrees I took off all my clothes and I was lying there naked and I started to the mantra and I was ripped out of my body this is like 2:00 in the morning and I come to another plane and I'm at a doorway and I look in and there is Muktananda sitting on a table tuck it so I go in and I kneel down in front of him and I start to fly up over his head now this is all in the astral and I think wow I'm flying I always wanted to fly and so then I was sort of flying and I started a tilt and I went to write myself and I was back in the meditation hall this all took about six minutes I was so manic from that experience I mean so high that I put on all my clothes rattled my gates and they came with a key and I opened the gate walked outside into the dark night of the courtyard and there was Muktananda with one of his disciples walking around in the middle of the night and he walked over to me and the man spoke English and Muktananda said to me how did you like flying okay I mean those are my direct experiences so I have to live with that stuff so the question is when you get powers like the power to just stay quiet enough to hear what's really going on in a situation gets quiet see you're not reactive so much but you're more responsive there is a tendency to want to take your winnings and get on with it I had a fun experience I was in Oahu and Hawaii oh I don't know maybe eight to ten years ago and fellow said that I was with Rick Bernstein said there's a somebody that wants to see you in a shopping mall said okay so we went to the shopping mall after hours it was closed except there was a place in the shopping mall where there was a new Honda where there was a competition to see who could keep their hand on the Honda the longest and whoever did would win it and there were three people left and they had been there for something like five days a day and night they had the hand on the Honda so I said to one of them how do you do it he said I'm a Buddhist another one I said how do you do it she says I'm a Christian fundamentalist third one said I'm your just devotee I'm a Hindu and I realized that each of them was going to win the Honda through their spiritual powers right I'm not going to tell you who won but you take your your you take your gain and you put it to work and it's an interesting question of whether I'm one of those people because instead of my being in a monastery now getting on with my that kind of inner work I'm out here teaching and is that a cop out is that my Dharma I can say it that my my my Karma my Dharma whatever but I don't know I really don't know I don't know how we in the West are ready for the kinds of discipline that are necessary for the kinds of practices that we have been offered I was in Burma three years ago meditating in a monastery for several months very very severe meditation practice with saya pandita who's my meditation master and you got up at 3:00 in the morning you meditate it till 11:00 at night in your cell you did sitting and walking that was all you saw the teacher for five minutes a day otherwise you were alone you didn't read you didn't write you didn't do it you just did that and it gets very subtle okay I mean after you finish with your seven hours sexual fantasies and all that stuff I mean after you run through that you run through in the first three days and then you that was two months of that and so I got a telegram that my stepmother had cancer is going to be operated on and my father was very old and they would probably need me she didn't say that she just said she was going to be operated on for cancer which I didn't know she was ill so I went to the teacher side out and I said here and I showed him the telegram and he said I don't think you should leave I said well my stepmother my father my father's old they need me in frightening time he said you're making such spiritual progress don't leave he said if you were a Burmese I wouldn't let you leave but I don't feel I have that that power to do that because you're from another culture and I looked and I saw that my karma as a boy from Boston with the responsibility to my family I wasn't Assad to who had renunciate idli and I said to him I've got to go and we both saw the poignancy of the situation if you can hear that I mean I had to go because it was my part as a who I was to do it at the same moment he was saying if you continue your path you may relieve many people from suffering as it is you're going back you'll relieve suffering of a couple of people I said I'm sorry I got to do it and it's like you get to the point where you see that you can only proceed on the spiritual path so fast because of your own karmic limitations not because of what anybody's doing to you but because of the stuff in you and that wreck you begin to recognize the timing of spiritual work that you can't get ahead of yourself you can't be phony holy because it comes back and hits you in the head you can get so high but you'll fall and a lot of people fall off the path they say they fell off the path you see somebody who was busy in white doing Dancing with big smiles on their faces and I see them about a year later and they're in a bar having a scotch and soda and and I thought that was all and no and then later they say really I fell off the path and I say no you didn't fall off the path the impurities that in with which you were doing it in the first place had their karmic effect this is all the path once you have begun to awake and you can't fall off the path there's no way where you going to fall to you know make-believe it never happened you can forget for a moment but it's in there it's going to keep coming back and getting you and getting you so don't get upset it's okay go be worldly and very often I really push people into worldliness you know go out have more sex and more you know really more dope come on make more money come on do it do it do it until you're done with it don't get done too soon because you got to be just uh you know you're going to be greedy if you do so a lot of our expectations were that the spiritual path I just got a few more minutes can you handle just a human that the spiritual path would get us healthy psychologically that was an expectation I've said this in many lectures that some of you heard but it's interesting to me that I was trained as a psychologist I was in analysis for many years I taught Freudian theory I was a therapist I took drugs for six years intensively I have a guru I have meditated for since 1970 regularly I have taught yoga I have studied Sufism and many kinds of Buddhism in all that time I have not gotten rid of one neurosis not one the only thing that's changed is where previously they were these huge monsters of no don't take me over again yeah that kind of stuff sitting in the bathtub cowering now they're like these little schmooze you know Oh sexual perversity there you are I haven't seen you in days come on and have some tea and to me that is the product of the spiritual path that what's happened is I have I have now rested comfortably in another context Yule framework which makes me much less identified with mine own neuroses and with my own desires if I don't get what I want that's as interesting as if I get it it turns out did you ever noticed that all this I need you well you're not getting me oh ha you know and then isn't that interesting and then you grow from that it's far out when you begin to realize suffering is grace you are so you can't believe it you think you're cheating along the way on the spiritual path you begin to get bored with the usual things of life and kerchief said that's just the beginning he said he said our friends found us becoming dull Oh Spence kee said rajeev said that there is worse to come kerchief said he's an interesting man whose lies well you have already begun to die it's a long way yet to complete death but still a certain amount of silliness is going out of you you can no longer deceive yourself as sincerely as you did before you have now gotten the taste for truth and that happens and you'll lose a lot of friends and your friends change and you don't grow at the same rate and it's very painful people you have loved even in marriages where other people aren't going along with you and that's a pitfall it's very painful to go from until death do us part to we are together as long as the the quality of loving growth is present in the relationship and that's a complex topic that I really can't get into because it's very interesting there's a lot of permutations of that one but it's one that did catch many of us about feeling guilty about letting go of friends and realizing you needed new kinds of relationships and new kinds of friendships along the way when that gets deep enough when the meaning the stuff that you justified your existence in order to achieve starts to become meaningless when even when you win you didn't win anything you start to experience the dark night of the soul the despair that comes when the worldliness starts to fall away never are we nearest the light then when darkness is deepest the dark night of the soul and a away what's happening is the ego has been based on the whole structure of it has been based on our separateness and our needs and desires to make us feel comfortable and happy and at home and as trungpa rinpoche said in his rascally way he said enlightenment is the egos ultimate disappointment and that's the predicament you see the fact that your spiritual journey is an entirely different ballgame than the one you thought you were on it's a different path than you thought you were on and it's very hard to make that transition a lot of people don't want to they want to take the power from their spiritual work and make their life nice that is wonderful and I honor it and it's great and it's exactly your karma pence but that is not freedom and that is not what the spiritual path offers as the potential it offers freedom but freedom demands complete surrender meaning surrender of who you think you are and what you think you're doing into what is and it's mind-boggling when you understand how powerful it's the game of dying into yourself but there is a death in it and people grieve there is a grief when you start who you thought you were starts to disappear Koller rinpoche says he's a beautiful beautiful beautiful man he said we live in illusion the appearance of things but there is a reality we are that reality when you understand this you see that you are nothing and being nothing you are everything that's all that so far can you hear that we live in illusion the appearance of things but there is a reality we are that reality when you understand this you see that you are nothing you're nothing special anymore you're just part of it all and being nothing but you are part of it all your everything the minute you gave up your specialness you're part of all things then you're in harmony you're in the dough you're in the way of things you're in the moment but you're not anybody anymore you're just part of it this is just phenomena happening at this moment the illusion that I'm doing this and that you're busy listening that's all our minds behind it here we are there's just this nothing else nothing special this stuff is very very far out and we don't want to hear how far out it is I just take people through the first line of the third Chinese patriarch of Zen's writing just the first line it's a little booklet it's only about 10 pages long first line says the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences when love and the third of the great ways not difficult for those who have no preferences when love and hate when love and hate are absent everything becomes clear and undisguised yes the the slightest distinction however and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences when love and hate are of both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised to make the slightest distinction however in heaven and earth are infinitely hard so I don't remember it exactly you can see why I don't want to remember and it's interesting because that doesn't mean have no preferences and now this isn't a cop-out this is this is as deep as I can get it doesn't mean having no preference it means not being attached to your preferences of course you have preferences and opinions but you don't have preferences and opinions that's the one if you don't get what you want you don't get what you want how interesting because the interesting process is the transformation not getting what you want all the time surrender surrender surrender surrender surrender Mahatma Gandhi one of my great teachers says God demands nothing less than complete self surrender as the price for the only freedom that is worth having when a person must loses herself or himself she or he immediately finds himself in the service of all that lives it becomes their delight and recreation there are new people never weary of spending their themselves in the service of God's creation reminds me of the story of the pig and chicken that are walking down the street and they are hungry and they want breakfast and they come to a restaurant and they start to go in and it's the pig says I'm not going in there why not because there's a sign that says ham and eggs chicken says oh come on we'll have something else Pig says look it's fine for you all they want is a contribution from you for me they want total surrender they want everything okay I got to finish quick I'm sorry I'm running so far it's just such interesting stuff if I do say it's not mine one of the things we develop along the way is the witness the ability to quietly observe the phenomena including our own behavior our own emotions our own reactions and it's fascinating and as you cultivate the witness more deeply it's like you're living simultaneously on two levels there's a level of witness and then there's the level of desire fear emotions action reaction etc that is a stage in the process and it gives you again a great deal of power there is another stage beyond that which is again the surrender issue here's a quote when the mind gazes into the mind itself the Train of discursive and conceptual thought ends and supreme enlightenment is gained see when the witness turns in on itself when the witness witnesses the witness it's like a Zen koans egg Niek then you go in behind that and then you come into awareness where everything just is and you no longer busy with one part of your mind watching another you're not busy watching you're just being it comes very simple again I'm having the most extraordinary experience these days that most that I have gotten an increasing number of letters here I have spent 25 years trying to become divine and most of the letters I get now say thank you for being so human is that far out the one of the big traps we have in the West is our intelligence is our thinking because we want to know we know and the thing about freedom is you can be wise or you can know knowledge you can't know wisdom you can be wise wisdom has simplicity to it when my guru wanted to put me down he called me clever when he wanted a reward me he'd say he's simple and I can understand the way in which we want to that the intellect is a beautiful servant as I think Vivekananda Yogananda said it's a beautiful servant but it's a terrible master the thing is that the intellect is the power to love our separateness and the intuitive compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity and the dialogue between the mind and the heart has gotten out of balance in this culture so that we are enamored of our intellectual powers just like we must have been at one time of our prehensile capacity we are enamored of our intellectual power which is in the service of protecting us as separate entities so to the intellect the heart which would give away the shop is seen as a threat an ins word threat because when you see somebody on the street here take my coat here take my money here and the mind saying now wait a minute forget that lily's in the field crap just think about tomorrow yeah and in a way what the spiritual path at its best offers is a chance for us to come back into the innate compassionate quality of our heart and our intuitive wisdom and get back into the balance where when we need our intellect it's available as a servant but we are not ruled by it and trapped in our thinking mind and to me that is well worth working for because as albert hofmann pointed out this morning now most of the social ecological and political problems we have are the creation of the human intellect as along with all the benefits and the answer to that is the rear eken of the unitive nature of all things and realizing you are nothing and therefore you are everything what I have done tonight is try to show you that the spiritual path is a is unning is a graceful opportunity for us the fact that you and I even here there is such a path is such grace for a human life from a karmic point of view and each of us must be true to ourselves to here what is our unique way through because if you get phony holy it ends up kicking you in the butt you've got to stay true to yourself and for people to say things like if I didn't have my children I could meditate your children are your path for many people services their path for many people in marriages that path relationship yoga is exquisite yoga I don't mean sloppy I mean really discipline techniques meditation is a beautiful baseline for the whole game devotional practices are extra ordinary these are all incredibly useful study of metaphysics of the words of holy people are just incredible we have the chance to become the truth which were yearning for one of Gandhi's strongest lines that guides me all the time is that he's sitting on a train and a reporter rushes up and says Mahatma ji give me a message to take back to the people in my village and Gandhi just has time to scribble on a paper bag and he hands it out and it says my life is my message and it's like the rabbi who said I went to see that Sadiq the mystic rabbi in the other village he said I didn't go to study the Torah with a mic went to see how he ties his shoes and Saint Francis says it doesn't pay to walk to preach unless our preaching is our walking finally we must integrate the spirituality into our daily lives bring into it the equanimity and the joy and the awe and the ability to look suffering in the eye and embrace it into yourself without averting your glance when I work with AIDS patients and I'm holding somebody and my heart is breaking because I love this person and they are suffering so much with fissures in their rectum and social ostracism and all of that I can't handle it I mean I'm crying with them and at the same moment inside of me is this equanimity and joy and I don't know it's almost the paradox is almost too much for me to be able to handle but that is what real helping is about because if all you do is get caught in the suffering all you're doing is digging everybody's hole deeper finally you work on yourself spiritually as an offering to your fellow being because until you have cultivated that quality of peace and equanimity and love and joy and presence and honesty and truth and simplicity all of your acts are colored by your attachments you can't wait to be enlightened to act so you use your acts as ways of working on yourself so while we started out tonight talking about paths and practices and lineages for me my entire life is my path every experience I have as Emanuel my ghostly friend said to me Ramdas why don't you take the curriculum try being human because it's all the curriculum it's an exquisite curriculum I invite you to join me in matriculating thank you you

Channel: Baba Ram Dass

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Keywords: Dass, awareness, Hanuman108108108108, grace, Ram, witness, methods, purification, self, spirituality, surrender, ram dass, ram dass pitfalls, ram dass promises and pitfalls, ram dass methods, ram dass grace, ram dass awareness, ram dass surrender, ram dass purification, ram dass the witness, ram dass videos, ram dass full lecture

Id: nyn0dH5k-Ls

Length: 77min 8sec (4628 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 02 2015