Ram Dass – Here and Now – Ep. 174 – Being Ram Dass

[Music] hi everybody ram das here and now i am back raghu and i'm with we won't say how old a buddy but someone very very close to me and we have done so much work over the years together rameshwar das ramesh welcome i am an old buddy we are about the same age probably okay forget about that um but uh i do want to say to everybody this uh tell everybody this podcast is going to be centered around the release of ramdas's new memoir being ramdas and ramesh and i i don't think you've been on on ramdas here and now have you maybe maybe with ramdas i think some time back yeah could have been a while ago yeah um so we thought it would be appropriate to i'm gonna you know just talk about how this book came together with ramesh and uh we're gonna play some excerpts that are you know are a very very small sampling of what ramdas hit the teachings that he represents the life that he represents the incarnation but i think there'll be enough to give give enough of a picture and certainly a little bit of a picture of the book because it's all going to be related to that and yeah so happy to have you here to do that but maybe talk a little bit ramesh about [Music] what happened were we sitting around with ramdas and going hey it's maybe time for you to put together a memoir i mean how did that happen and and how long ago was it uh it actually started 10 years ago or a little more now uh we had uh just come to uh the end of working on uh be loved now which came out in 2010 and um uh so we had actually finished the work i guess in 2009 um and um i approached him with an idea because i we really had a good time working together then i think was sort of the basis for the uh um whole project uh and others along the way uh which you've worked on also starting back with uh love serve remember which is what our foundation is called yeah which uh raghu is the executive director of as well as the chief podcaster and pottery cleanser chief pot cleaning yeah yes and chief cook and bottle washer is what my mother used to call me yeah and when i first approached ramdas about doing the memoir though he really uh he was like um you know first of all he didn't want to look at the past particularly i mean his thing is be here now be in the moment then not living in the past um but um and the other aspect of it actually that he was very reluctant about was he really wanted to be very careful about not hurting anyone's feelings he was quite emphatic about that um so we talked around it a little bit and after that first uh refusal we uh came around to the idea that um we would look back at his life through maharaji's eyes and try and uh not try but just feel what that would be like seeing from that other consciousness that uh we all have experienced and you know so many um dimensions of our lives uh even though you know we probably have uh uh barely an inkling of the vastness of that state but um that is the common thread for so many of us and um ramdas finally got used to that idea and he started to like it so um we started going through things we it wasn't particularly uh a linear uh exercise you know start at the beginning of his life and uh as it turned out we got to the end of his life and talk about being in the moment right yeah um but i think in the process it was really um you know fascinating and i i was going back and forth to uh maui maybe three times a year and we were working on skype together also on uh and sometimes just on the phone um and there were a lot of uh ups and downs for him i think uh including one uh episode when we were talking and um it was maybe in about uh 2010 or maybe 2011 and he was alone in the house and it was at a point where he still had the uh strength to transfer himself from his chair to his wheelchair and was pretty mobile still and um we were talking about a passage in a book that we both had and he um uh transferred to go get his uh chair and um get into his chair and to go get the book so we could discuss it whoops i have to turn something off here rago i had the news going there it's okay it's all part of podcasting no problem i'm hoping my dog who's right next to me doesn't start snoring okay yeah well if our dog comes back which she may she's going to want dinner time on the east coast for dogs yes all right so continue so ramdas was transferring to his chair he was transferring and i didn't hear anything back from it and finally i hear a voice that says uh i fell i'm on the floor and there was nobody in the house and i'm in new york and he's in maui what am i going to do um and um i tried to reach uh dossier on the phone and uh as it turned out i mean this is a whole other story but there was a uh a young woman who's a devotee is a musician um and um she's a cellist you probably remember her i said her name is something like i aisha no that's not quite it anyway um she was nearby and she gets this thought in her mind that she's got to go see ramdas [Music] and she drives over she doesn't hear anything and then she calls out and he responds and she goes up and helps him to get onto the bed and it turns out he broke his hip and when he fell getting transferring and uh he ended up in the hospital had a hip replacement and that was a whole other saga yeah and at another point i was out there working with him and uh i was out walking early in the morning before we had breakfast and uh i get a call from my son in new york and there's sirens in the background and that was my daughter had been run over on her bike 14 year old and she died because she didn't make it out of the surgery at the trauma hospital and ramdas helped me i don't want to say cope with it because there's no way to do that but um it was an intense moment and it's still ongoing and that was seven years ago why don't you mention though what he said to you regarding a young person dying um when we heard that she hadn't made it out of surgery i looked at him and said she didn't get to finish her life and he looked me straight in the eye and he said yes she did and it that view which we had been looking at his life through that lens of seeing an incarnation and uh that took me out of my own uh pain and self-pity for a moment enough to see that um that uh was the case with her too and as you know as much as i didn't want to accept that there was no choice yeah that's what uh trump i used to call choiceless awareness yeah good karma's to be in a journey yeah good karmas though to be with ramdas in that moment who had done a tremendous amount of work in this area over his lifetime that was a big part of his offering certainly around death and dying and so to have that right with you in that moment um yeah and then i was uh with him when he died yeah right right that's right so ramadas did pass just after the book was completed not fully but mostly um and ramesh happened to be there at that moment with a couple other people yeah it stayed to uh read the uh updated manuscript to him and uh we didn't get much done because he was he had another infection which i guess is what took him out really finally and and uh it um he was kind of groggy from antibiotics and we just hung out and kd krishnadas was there for uh the first week or so and then he had to go and there were just a few people well what we have today i mean i'm getting a little lost in the moment but yeah yeah but we have here several uh excerpts that we've gotten that represent different parts of ramdas's teachings life and his these are from his talks not from the book that's right these are from his talks but certainly they refer absolutely to what goes on in this book the book is extremely comprehensive it is what 550 pages or something like that yeah plus a about plus six five pages of photos yeah so uh it is very very comprehensive uh so the first um and we're gonna play this and then we'll just talk about it for a minute the first one is we are calling relative reality and uh i'm gonna just play this and then we'll chat what happened to me in brief from inside myself was that after i took these uh psilocybin mushrooms in 1961 um my entire understanding of reality changed and it changed my entire life and you're paying to hear about it [Applause] isn't that fun i love it i love it basically what happened was that i went from seeing a reality that i had been trained to interpret as reality as absolutely real i went from that to in a moment or in the few hours to moving through planes of consciousness to understand that the reality that i thought was real like richard come down to reality my father would say was indeed just one reality it was relatively real instead of absolutely real what happened to me was exactly what einstein did to newton because newton said these laws are absolutely real mechanistic theory i remember learning it in high school as absolutely that's the way the world is and then basically einstein said it depends on where you're standing in time and space and so on now i can't overestimate the significance of the shift of consciousness that goes from seeing reality as absolute to seeing it as relative it opens up a vast terrain of possibilities that's what william james said when he said our normal waking consciousness is but one type of consciousness while all about it parted from it by the filmiest of screens there lie other types of consciousness we may spend our entire lives without knowing of their existence but apply the requisite stimulus and there they are in their completeness whatever they're meaning they prohibit our premature closing of our accounts with reality that was uttered by william james and i was basically thrown out of william james hall at harvard for arguing that the intellectual analytic mind was only one plane of reality because that was heresy within that temple so opening the doors of that you see what it did it cast me out from the dominant theme of our culture which is basically a form of scientific materialism humanism scientific materialism right in there it's rooted in the feeling that technology and science have paid off so much in changing the quality of our lives and those models a way of defining reality and how to interpret what's real have worked so well we can't really question them the predicament is they are relatively real but there are other realities they have nothing to say about but science really has a hard time accepting there are other realities it can't say anything about it's like the issue of consciousness versus the brain science really has very little to say about consciousness it's got a lot to say about the brain so since it's got a lot to say about the brain what it says then is the brain and consciousness are really one thing isomorphic but our technology doesn't allow us to measure it from the point of view of consciousness so we'll work on the brain but we know when your brain is dead you aren't somebody that has seen relative reality says like they do in india when you die in india they called call it dropping the body not an interesting image well i'm going to drop my body today who's the eye that's going to drop what in the west that's a very peculiar expression because when your body isn't you aren't so it seems to me that what happened to me in 1961 and that certainly got reconfirmed a thousand times over when i met neem karoli baba in 1967 was that there was a a larger context in which i existed than the one that i thought i did and that everybody around me was telling me i did relative reality so i uh i mean i remember just the first talk that i heard from ram das which is probably a year and a half after you heard the first one or or even more i can't remember but rameshwara said rondos first chat it was more of a chat it was an eight-hour kind of video um but relative reality so obviously the one huge thing in first hearing ramdas and his take on on reality basically through his own experience and everything that happened to him at uh as a psychology professor as a psychonaut with leary at harvard as a uh a yogi in india so and he talks here a lot about the relative levels right so and so that perspective once it's a huge thing seeing reality as absolute which is how we all come into this everything we think is as real as it gets and then seeing uh seeing it all as relative it opens up a whole new uh territory and um this until that happens nothing happens and and that may happen of course it happened through psychedelics with ram das it happened that way for many of us that went over to india and uh but it can happen in many different ways reading a book now just uh being at a christian dos kirtan something happens that's ineffable and leads you to believe wait a minute there is another territory here it's uh yeah so it's it's the perfect uh opener for ram das in terms of i feel what he offers on an immediate basis is a radical shift of perspective yeah and i think that uh occurred to you know that's that's what shifted for me when i first met him but uh the uh in a sense these three lives that he had you know combined in his incarnation being a psychologist a psychedelic work and becoming a yogi those three uh viewpoints all came to bear in the way that he saw that uh you know he talked a lot about planes of consciousness so that he saw the different uh ways that uh the mind uh is a projector of reality and uh that started with psychology and then uh when he started uh um working with psychedelics especially that first time that he took psilocybin and he saw his various selves as external to his inner being his role yes as opposed to his soul but she is often how he referred to it yeah and um you know in talks he used to do that thing where he would uh kind of take you through changing channels in your mind you know visualize your your uh head as a tv uh screen and uh what's uh just uh chains the channel to the astral plane the causal plane the soul the physical plane yeah and i think that uh was one of the really fundamental parts of his uh identity also so much of his teaching and uh as you know you'll find in the memoir his his uh journey is about identity yeah and uh and then this next little uh excerpt that we're going to play it is a recounting brief one of his first psychedelic experience and and which you just uh referred to and how that radically radically changed him changed every one of us and uh it's wonderful to think actually ramesh of how they're getting so you know they legalized psilocybin in uh oregon i believe for therapy therapeutic purposes uh and maybe more than that i'm not sure but i know that at least is is what's happening and i think it'll happen more and more because of the work especially the work of maps and rick doblin yeah who is very connected to ramdas came later and he uh you know he's been doing this work you know since he was a young man and it's come to the point where their government is starting to give permission for this to be used in uh therapy and so on and it's so uh powerful a thing and there's one uh part of the book actually where uh ramdas uh mentions rick doing this uh study when he was uh still an undergraduate uh he wrote he did a review of the uh what was called the good friday experiment at harvard yeah that's right it was really uh fascinating and the good friday experiment was uh where they gave uh psilocybin to divinity students on a good friday and they all uh were down in the crypt under the uh chapel where this sermon was being given and it was uh you know the classic uh double-blind experiment where uh nobody knew who was getting the psilocybin and the other students uh half of them got uh i think it was niacin or niacinamide um which gives you a rush kind of you know of that niacin flush yeah yeah yeah and then it very soon became very obvious who had actually gotten the psilocybin but the follow-up study that rick did demonstrated that 25 years later the people who had gotten the psilocybin uh the divinity students many of whom had become um you know priests or works has stayed in religion in one way or another that that had been a formative mystical experience in their lives amazing and i think that his work in maps has really you know continued from that inspiration in many ways yeah absolutely so let's play this uh excerpt and uh you can it's we're calling it first trip which it is for ramdas here you go when i first um experimented with these uh mushrooms the tian and octo these flesh of the gods which were used in mexico by coronderos and oracles in order to override their habitual way of looking at the universe in order to see things freshly or innocently okay so what the mushrooms did was they overrode my way of conceiving of the world so i saw things afresh and what i saw was that i had built this incredible structure of mine called ego about who i thought i was and little by little it fell away and my initial experience was so powerful in that sense because what i met was a part of me inside that had nothing to do with who i thought i was and it had nothing to do with that which is born or that which dies it was behind that it was the first time i had gone behind that let me just the emotional part of it was that i had taken these mushrooms and i sat in a darkened room on a couch and i suddenly saw a person in the dark over there and i looked across and there was a being that was me but it was me in one of my social roles it was almost a caricature of me it was me with my pilot helmet on i never wore a pilot helmet but i was a pilot and there was my pilotness and now it was separate from me it was about eight feet away from me and i thought all right i'll let that go because i was a psychologist remember a professor and i was saying to myself interesting hallucination you're having okay seemed reasonable i was analyzing it as a scientist so i let go of that and then all one by one all my social roles appeared across the room of lover a professor with mortar and you know all of that stuff each of my roles appeared and one by one i let it go until something appeared which was like my childhood identity of myself and i thought if i let that go i will be i'll have amnesia i won't know who i am and that's what this mushroom is going to do to me i thought oh well i'll let that go too and so i did and i thought at least i have my body and then i looked down and there was the couch and i looked from one end of the couch to the other and there was no body on it now my mind can say as long as i want hallucination but what i experienced was fear because being a materialist all my life a philosophical materialist there was nothing that prepared me with my eyes open to not see my own body all right that's like the your worst dream you don't exist anymore and i was about to scream for help when i thought who's about to scream for help i mean if i'm not my personality and i'm not my body who's frightened and at one moment i touched a part of me that had nothing to do with all that and it was so joyous so unexpected because what it felt like was i had come home something very familiar to me and it was a way in which i experienced a connection to the universe that i had never understood before i'd never had it i was always doing good in order to be appreciated or prove that i was adequate or control this vast uh situation that was out of control and i ran out in the snow and i somersaulted and then i went home it was a big snowstorm and my parents i came back to my parents home and i went to shovel the walk it was about four in the morning and my parents appeared at the upper window looking scoldingly like nobody shovels snow at four in the morning and i looked up and i saw these were the people i'd always listen to who always told me what was right and wrong and i looked inside my heart and it seemed all right to be shoveling snow at four in the morning and i waved at them and i threw them a kiss and i went back to shoveling snow and that of course was the beginning of the end of my life in that sense because i had stood up to an authority that ended up my being thrown out of harvard so yeah sitting on the ceiling looking down and going whoa who's that what's that thing lying on the couch you know i love that that's it's so archetypical of uh the power of uh psychedelics and being able to see you are not that thing you are not well i think the the uh the central experience of that uh first trip for him was this feeling of being home and uh that was um also what he kept trying to come back to all through the time that they were working with psilocybin and i think often felt uh at least aspects of that no matter what they were working with um but when he came to maharaji that was the dominant feeling that he had and um i i know for myself when i came to maharaji the first time which was in 1970 [Music] and first of all i i realized when i i got there that maharaji had come through ramdas when i first met him because the feeling being with maharaji was the same as being with maharaji with ramdas that first time and it was this feeling of being home and it was just a deep heart space i don't hard to describe i used to have this experience when i was in high school and i would uh drive out to see my grandparents and um i had a very close relationship with them and it was this just uh you know real feeling of uh coming back to uh the kind of uh um experiences of childhood um in a really uh deep a sense of enjoyment and it was similar to that and then of course it got deeper and deeper how about deep okay-ness yeah very deep okay-ness and how is it that every person you'll ever talk to who happened to meet neem giroli baba maharaji they say the same thing yeah home uh my thing was uh my first thought was oh that's what romdas was all about holy you know and home you know and that home and it's taken us quite some time to understand that it's not outside ourselves he reflected it in to so we could see ourselves and we've done a lot of flopping around trying to look elsewhere uh but uh half a century later it's still working on us yeah exactly so but the idea of home that that ramadas got uh with this psychedelic trip is uh very profound and very much i don't think there's anybody that i know who's taken a psychedelic you know from those days up until like now where i meet many many people next gen 20s and 30s and so on and and their description is exactly the same and they are that home is is as profound as any home that we got into at any stage so that's in that is to me living proof of the reality um of that place it's just uh of course trying to hold on to it doesn't really do it and uh as christian us our buddy likes to say practice makes perfect [Laughter] well it's not called practice for nothing yeah right exactly so um there is more psychedelic research happening again now and i know one of the researchers at uh nyu in new york yeah where they've done uh psilocybin research with terminal cancer patients and they're now undertaking a study with um religious leaders not so different from the good friday experiment yeah um and those same kinds of things are happening and it's deeply experientially it's it's it's helping people with their fear of death yeah very profoundly yeah yeah exactly and roshi uh joan halifax and uh her former husband stan groff did a lot of work with that which ramdas was very aware of yeah at spring grove hospital in maryland yeah yeah people came more than once but once there was a rather substantial group of uh researchers that came just to reflect on it all with randos after all those years but they wouldn't let us record it still fear out there so this next excerpt is basically of course this we just talked about it a little bit but guru found his uh little name that let's give credit to nathan nathan thank you it's curated these wonderful pieces nathan wilburn um so yeah we've been talking about it and uh and i also know and i guess this also refers to psychedelics and that experience ramdas would say more than once that he's not sure he said i am not sure what it might have been had i meeting a being like meen karoli without having that psychedelic experience without having the experience of the relative reality and home base is kind of what we're we're talking about and without that it it would have been difficult and i see the same thing uh uh you know for all of us i mean we were obviously really young not there that way yeah exactly that was when yeah it absolutely helps so all right well this is let's listen to this guru found so we got out of the car at the temple and bhagwan das asked where's the guru and they said the guru is up in the hills up in that hill over there around the hill and bhagwan dusk goes off at a low but all the way up into the hills tears are streaming down his cheeks and i know that we're getting close to something very powerful but i don't know what it is and i'm very bugged about the car and i'm sulking in the corner and you know i've been smoking too much hashish so i had stopped a few days before but i was having the the down effect one has after having smoked for a long time we rush up the hill i'm rushing behind him trying to keep up with him and i'm being ignored by everybody and and i'm just in terrible shape really stumbling up this path and we come out into this field beautiful sunny day overlooking a valley and there's an old man sitting there with a blanket wrapped around him around him or about oh eight or probably eight or ten hindu people sitting there and we rush over and bhagwan das does dunda pranam the full pranam out flat on the stomach before this man and he's crying and the man's patting him on the head and it's some kind of joyous reunion and i'm standing by you know what am i supposed to do am i supposed to touch this guy's feet or you know i don't know what to do i've never seen a guru before and i assumed if he was crying this much it must be somebody but i was too angry to even care to tell you the truth and after a few minutes this man looked up and he looked at me he smiled and he said in hindi to bug one does have you a picture of me by one's essays yes he says give it to him if i win i said all right i will then he looked at me says you came in a big automobile yeah you'll give it to me that really blew my mind i mean you know i wish i could have but you know so i said well it's not minding my mind to give and you know you get me one like it so i thought my god i just got here and he's hustling me i mean what kind of a thing is this you know what have i done to deserve this am i that bad a person that i got to be subjected you know and i was boy was i self-pitying and paranoid all the time he's laughing he's like he's laughing he's putting me on but i don't know that costs a lot of money he says you make a lot of money in the united states that's how i used to you'll get me a car like that it rides nice huh yeah it's just coming on to me something fierce right okay and i'm really angry but i'm suppressing it and answering pleasantly and everybody's smiling at me and i'm smiling everybody then he says uh take them for food and he they take us to a room and they give us a big feast these beautiful sadhus bring us food the food that the women bring to the guru each day as an offer and we eat and then a few minutes later bhagwan das and i are together all the time and he's the only one i've come with and this is way up in the remote mountains no electricity up here nothing going you know it's very remote call back to the goro and go back to him and he says to me he looks directly at me right in my eyes he said you got under the stars last night acha you were thinking about your mother not you leaning back and then he said she died last year got very big in the stomach before she died she said she died of spleen he didn't ask he said she died of spleen well the only way i can describe what experience i had at that moment and he looked at me with a twinkle at that point now the only way i can describe what happened to me at that moment is to compare my rational mind to a computer that has been fed an insoluble problem that the computer runs through all of the alternative resolutions of this problem that are in the storage units and it runs off each of them in sequence you know and i thought well does he have a telephone did bug was bhagwan das away from me for a moment bhagwan das doesn't even know my mother's dead how is he gonna because he wasn't interested in my past he doesn't know that i've never said to you know does was he reading my mind was i thinking about it at this moment what would that mean you know and i went through but i wasn't even thinking about it i had even forgotten what she died of i mean the spleen i hadn't even remembered the term of the organ so the computer went and went and went and then as computers do when it finishes its uh analysis through the storage unit a little red light goes on and a bell rings and it stops and that is literally what happened to my rational mind at that point i realized i just been overwhelmed i mean i ego richard alfred had just been beaten you know there was nowhere to hide this was i wasn't high so i couldn't say this was a drug hallucination there was a guy doing this thing right to me right then right through my gross senses and at that moment when that computer stopped it was like a very severe pain in my heart it was like a really wrenching feeling and i started to cry i wasn't crying because i was sad and i wasn't crying because i was happy the closest way i could describe it maybe is i was crying because i was home i mean because yeah right wow that kind of feels like i didn't have to do it anymore it all was all okay so the amazing thing though ramesh with ram das is especially well not especially throughout his whole life i mean the premise of this book is seeing his entire life through the lens of of nimkorolibaba through his guru through our guru and being able to see exactly how the the family that he was born into the relationship he had with his mother with his father with his siblings how uh the school that he went to the the relative level of ease financially the family had and all of it how it all played like just a little thing i don't know if you ever even talk to him about this but you know the whole thing maharaji said don't take an inheritance from your father yeah he does talk about that yeah and uh and how that changed his relationship with his father yeah but how he grew up but seeing through that maharaji's lens he grew up where that was what you did okay you the affluent family and you're part of that family and and all of the affluence turns to you and and gets you know it's propagated generationally so he had that in his dna so it's not nothing to just oh yeah no problem and and of course maharaji made him the whole thing don't carry money same kind of a deal don't the saint doesn't carry money so he gets my brother lakshman to carry his money around and drive him absolutely insane and then he had to get a succession of people to do that i'm not carrying money so he gave all his money and these people were spending it inordinately where he never would have spent it and he you know so just those are so well there are two aspects that came up in the uh process of the book that i i want to flag for that one going back to what we were talking about and how psychedelics kind of opened things up to and allowed maharaji's darshan to penetrate and and then allowed ramadas to adapt to being a yogi so completely and the the uh he said that psychedelics in he said this in the book that psychedelics allowed him to change planes more easily because he had done so much of that when he was tripping and that that facility allowed him to be open to where maharaji was coming from in ways that he might not have otherwise and that it was like a kind of a ability to be flexible in his uh in that view of reality those relative realities and then when he met maharaja he encountered uh a different reality which was uh you know so much more uh powerful being with maharanji and the other thing that we did in the book which was really interesting we did sort of a and it's in the latter part of the book uh we've kind of uh talked about what it may have been like before he took incarnation as richard alpert and what that place is of uh you know what um [Music] sometimes is described as a bardo but um the in-between incarnations and you know we talk a lot in in for instance in the tibetan book of the dead they're talking about what the after death planes are like and what the opportunities for uh letting go and getting into the clear light at that point but the the part about before you take birth that was an interesting one and he talks about what it might have been like um getting guidance from a being like maharaji to look at the incarnation and know that he was going to be you know part of the alpert family and how this was going to help him work out his power and love karma and then this kind of knowing that maharaji would come into the picture at a certain point and take over which is what happened and then you know that thing about taking birth and the veil covers you and you forget all about that and you only know that you're embodied in you know as in his case as richard albert uh in uh newton massachusetts yeah remembering wouldn't be good uh maybe not no some people do and i suppose tibetan tulkus i think have a certain amount of that or yeah even then yeah yeah that's um that's a profound it's an interesting shift though it's part of that shift to seeing it his life as an incarnation as an incarnation rather than this life which is what uh you know certainly personally i'm stuck in seeing i don't see anything beyond it and maharaji did i think there's that story of maharaji with walking with one of the devotees and he i think it's in that uh excerpt actually um or one of the other ones we're going to talk about that uh near the end so i won't tell the story okay yeah i do that though when i introduce ramdas they i tell what i like and it's okay you can hear it it's repeated it's you know these things we've been listening to ramdas forever and and me even more these days because of the work of the foundation and it uh there's always something fresh that i didn't really hear before or that i he he he just made a little bit of a complete uh fresh perspective on something that he might have been talking about ad infinitum that's that just does the click because he had that power you know um yeah for sure for sure well let's listen to the next one which is called the purpose of life all right let's listen to that what's the purpose of our life on earth it's a curriculum that the soul has created in order to explore its own attachments in order to awaken out of its illusion of separateness which each created as part of its play it's not an era you didn't fall from grace it's not original sin it's choice i had an interesting discussion with a tibetan rascal named chogyam trungpa rinpoche he once called me into his room i just met him once and he called me and he said ramdas we have to accept responsibility it's a great opening line isn't it i said to him what responsibility rinpoche i don't have any responsibility god has all the responsibility not my but thy will o lord giving him a bhakti duelist you know he said you're copping out and it bugged me because i didn't understand it what do you mean i was copying out then emanuel said to me you have the choice he said you can be the victim or you can be the creator and the victim is when you identify with any part of the form of the manifestation your body your personality your thinking mind that's all part of lawful unfolding that's all the victim there's a part of you that has no form that part's the creator it's not the part that makes affirmations that's your personality that's all part of what's being had personality body that's all in law that's all form it's all happening it's all karma unfolding that part isn't even the experience you think you're free isn't free and yet there is a part of you that is free that is creating that could change anything you want in the universe the only funny part about it is that were you identified with that part of your being so that you were outside of it and seeing all you'd see why you would create it that way in the first place it's like in the bible it said hedgie but faith you could move mountains but if you had the faith you'd see why you put the mountain there in the first place so that from the soul's point of view it's on a journey a creative journey and it has created a set of experiences which are selected by your body and your personality that's the way the selecting mechanism that's the programming that's gone into it to the experiences you're gonna have and you keep going through them until you are so clear that even at the moment of death instead of i'm dying or even here i go it's just another moment nothing special nothing special to go into the white light of death means that you're already about three quarters of the way turned around while you're still alive there's no way to stand the third chinese patriarch the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences when love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised but make the slightest distinction and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart the purpose of life so to me this is the other not the other another very very important part of what ramdas his legacy is and that's around to it really is it gives us the ability to lay back and relax and he talks about it's a curriculum right and the soul has created this curriculum in order to awaken out of the illusion and of separateness and that's the key key and at the same time what ramdas has added into this over and this is so well reflected throughout the book that is so very very thank god he did it humor okay not taking oneself so self seriously and creating the kind of space around our day-to-day uh entrapment in our minds and our stories and our thoughts and so on and having having the perspective of this being a curriculum and i think that came from um emmanuel who his spook friend he calls it yeah from us you're in a it's a curriculum take it well i think that was also what he brought back from um his yoga training in india and uh you know hari das uh used to tell them things like um desire is the creator desire is the sustainer desire is the destroyer the desire is brahma vishnu and shiva's the creation and that um that's part of that same thing of seeing uh reality as a projection of our desires and the piece that he quotes from the third chinese patriarch at the end of this uh excerpt um from the um um about the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences and uh there was that great i mean back when we did love serve remember that record said and that was the first reading he had done recorded that peace the third chinese patriarch and uh uh worth getting everybody it's fantastic uh yeah we should in fact we should make them up and give them away i know you've done it in the past you've made them little booklets up or somehow i don't know if you have any more no they're about gone oh well we're gonna do something okay whoever is listening out there um download now right it's a download but it's nice that ramdas created these beautiful little booklets of uh with the entire um poem that's so great yes but uh that is what uh maharaji i think you know partly through hari dos and partly through the yoga training um that and and all of our uh buddhist training when we studied with galenka also yeah that was the um using the that witnessing to see how your mind uh creates your reality yeah and that i think his uh ability to bring his psychology training uh the work that he'd done with psychedelics and his yoga training all to bear in uh teaching about that was really great and with that uh incredible humor yeah yeah of not taking it all too seriously and we you know we're certainly all guilty of climbing into our uh righteousness about who we think we are yeah amen how it should all be yeah but just the idea that you you can just shift that perspective you know his later years and in maui was all around shifting to loving awareness out of your head the idea that it can happen and the idea that you're going to get lost over and over and over again but there is always a coming back we love sharon salzberg our close friend who in every meditation it's okay you get lost you can come back and here and ramdas offers this the idea of it's a curriculum see that means like stuff that happens sometimes not so fun but it is part of the burning off of whatever needs to be burned off so that more spaciousness and freedom can occur so yeah i think that's really uh i mean it goes along with the perspective of knowing okay i'm stuck in that thing that i think i am yeah and it goes along you know so it's uh quite a really quite an evolvement yeah i love what he represents you know that literal translation of nirvana or nibana as burned out yeah that stuff gets burned finally and uh you know it's it is again practice that uh carries you slowly as kd says slowly but inevitably and i i love his analogy of uh you know you you get on the train of uh in his case chanting getting into the kirtan and uh the mantra the names and uh that uh analogy of uh you get on the train and even though you're running in the opposite direction that the train is going the train is still going to the station yeah and you're on it yeah so be happy the there is a curriculum you we are taking it and it um it's just a matter of allowing it to be which is not easy because the vicissitudes look where we are now in the in a pandemic and a whole switch of government and um all the kind of race talking about real justice realities yeah i mean it's easy and and that doesn't mean that you get into home base and go i'm home screw it all because there's only home for everybody if everybody's not home there's no home you know so and that ramdas represents in spades his work and social action his work with many different foundations uh including seva curing blindness in the world and working with death and dying and that's where the final piece that we're going to play which i think is uh excerpt is appropriate it's called uh hold on tightly let go lightly and it's around that but there's some other anecdotes that are really cool in this and yeah let's go ahead and play this track now perhaps the biggest fear of aging is the fear of death and um as long as you are identified with your separateness and you think that's what you are you will have fear and if you cultivate the part of you that is not identified with your separateness you will have a place in you that is not afraid as well as the place in you that is afraid you'll have a balancing of those things and you might even get light enough a zen monk is dying and his he hasn't written his death poems and monks is supposed to write death poems and his students say to him master you haven't written your death poem yet and he says oh i haven't written my death poem and he grabs the brush and he calligraphies madly and he dies and it says birth is thus death is thus verse or no verse what's the fuss now my guru helped change uh my feelings about i mean i had had many experiences of what it called out of body experiences so i had a sense that i wasn't this body anyway but my guru was walking with one of his old devotees and he started my guru started a laugh and the old devotee said what are you laughing about he says well so and so this old woman devotee just died and the friend said what are you laughing about what are you some kind of a butcher and maharaji said to him what would you like me to do make believe i'm one of the puppets would you like me to make believe it's all that real the question is where does somebody go what happens it's a mystery when i sit with that mystery all the experiences i've had i don't even have a flicker of anything other than an appreciation that when we drop our body we just drop our body ramana maharshi's dying and the people say don't leave don't leave and he says don't be silly where could i go it's like i'm just selling the ford i'm not going anywhere you know no don't leave us don't leave us it's just a shift of form and if you have loved somebody in the love that transcends form even for a moment you and they aren't going anywhere your mind may say they've gone but that's your mind the minute you quiet down go back into your heart they're right there again and love really does transcend death there's not even a doubt in my mind about it and you remember when i said to emmanuel my spook friend manuel what shall i tell people about dying he said tell him it's absolutely safe he said it's like taking off a tight shoe that's the world i live in so when i have a sense of who we are that is so much more vast buddhist said do you know how many times you have taken birth like this he said imagine a mountain six miles long six miles wide and six miles high and every hundred years a bird flies over the mountain with a silk scarf in its beak and it runs the scarf across the mountain once every hundred years in the length of time it would take the scarf to wear away the mountain that's how long you've been doing this it sure gives you a different perspective doesn't it about time meaning of a life can you see a life as so precious and beautiful and still learn how to hold on tightly let go lightly how to not cling to it how to be open to the mystery and open to the next part of it by saying okay and now this and now this in the tibetan tradition when you're dying you are trained to stay in the moment instead of the model i am dying you are just in the moment the earth element leaves you notice heaviness the water element leaves you notice dryness the fire element leaves you notice coldness the air element leaves you notice the out breath is longer than the in-breath just moment moment now this now this now this i have been sitting now with dying people for 10 15 years i guess and i can tell you that it is the richest experience of my life it is such incredible grace the two things that awaken the same feelings in me are being present at a birth and being present at a death and at that moment of death when you feel the awareness leave the body and when that person's connection to that which is beyond their body is deep enough because they have relaxed the mind that keeps grabbing at their separateness so that they can just let go very gently there's not even a ripping there's not a pushing there's not a grabbing the whole secret is to live this moment fully now this moment now this moment so if you're in this one how do you know the next one may be the one you die in the best preparation for your dying is that you live this moment now fully moment by moment and then one of them will be the one in which you drop your body and it'll just be another moment nothing special it's not really that dramatic we milk it so much such a big drama will he die won't he die should you die sure we're all going to die i want to tell you a secret you're all going to die but though you perish you will not die the whole secret is of extricating yourself from identification with form because all form corrupts it all dies you take care of it you honor it you clean it up you keep it healthy as it is slowly corrupting hold on tightly let go lightly so in the movie ramesh becoming nobody the the end of that film that we did with ram das that came out at the end of last year many many people experience that part which is all around death and dying um as a profound part of this this film and it is a profound part of ramadas's legacy for sure i mean it's stuff he's been working on since the early 70s it's it was a through line you know through his whole life he was an example of uh of dealing with really on you know through the stroke of really really tough stuff i mean if you tell that story oh there he is on the floor with a broken hip and nobody in the house and you know he went through tons of stuff like that by the way it's the stroke in particular you know that was that one where he he was being brought into the hospital he's looking up at the pipes on the ceiling and um he's realizing he's not thinking about god and he's flunked the test and where was maharaja you're out to lunch what the hell is going on good but he in terms of the power of that message in in that film and how it was you know very much a through line for him uh how do you how do you feel about how you represented that in in the book which is certainly substantial his relationship with well he talks about his work with people starting with when his mother died which was i think the point where he really realized that the the culture and the cultural systems around death were broken and there was so much denial that his mother was actually dying until he had this one breakthrough conversation with her when he had stopped in at the hospital where she was kind of going downhill and all of her doctors and even the rabbi were telling her oh you know you're getting better you're going to be out of here in a week and then they'd go outside the room and say you know she'll be dead in a week and so rondas was very hurt by that level of denial and he felt like he really wanted to change things after that um and he started working with stephen levine and then elizabeth kubler-ross who was the founder of the hospice movement and ram dev borglum the alborglum who's still running a the living dying project in marin yeah which is home care home hospice care for people and but within a spiritual context much more than uh the physical you know taking care um and rhonda sat bedside with many many aids patients in the 80s when that was such a a prevalent scourge and um i'm kind of glad he missed this one the pandemic yeah yeah but i think it for one thing it loosened his fear of death i have never known anyone who had less fear of death than what he says in that excerpt of is what his spook friend emanuel says about uh death is absolutely safe yeah oh he loved it he felt that way yeah um and yet being with him when he died you know there was it was it was the first time i'd been with somebody when they at that moment when they left their body but you know i'm not even sure it was a moment it was more like a process and um you know the profound thing for me was that um i kept feeling him you know i mean he was clearly not in his body and i think he had left his body before his body even stopped completely you know there was sort of uh his body was sort of had this reflex gasping for breath still at the end a couple of times and i think he was gone before that wow um and then we kept the body at the house which was his wish for uh three days after he had died and people were meditating in his room and his body was covered with flowers on dry ice and it was very powerful and that statement about you know that um consciousness doesn't cease and love doesn't cease when the body goes that's a that is a very powerful statement for all of us to consider and you know it's the mystery for us in the body in on this plane we don't know when my daughter died that was the dominant feeling for me is i don't know why this happened i don't know what it means i don't know where she is i don't understand and i still feel that way but there is that sense that it goes on and that this profound feeling that we are more part of a cycle a continuum and yeah i think that was that was a great contribution to people and and you know all of us to work on our own fear of death yeah absolutely you know i think it's in the movie becoming nobody but some he's asked about jamie are you looking forward to your death he goes i'm not looking forward to my death i'm looking forward to what happens after so he was real with this it wasn't there was no i mean you and i sat with him one of the times that i sat with you uh while you were doing working on the book just hanging out you know yeah just hanging out it was around death that was that particular conversation was around death he was so transparent and honest and there just was no he was human relative you know i'm not looking towards fun dying are you crazy you know there was no intellectual up level he was going to although it's it is interesting i wonder what happens after you know those bardos they talk about and all of that so uh yeah that's uh one of the first things when he first went to maui i don't know if you remember this when he started living in maui i did a thing with uh or david may david silva a good friend did an interview with ramdas around i do remember that honesty being honest with yourself it was so we've never done anything with it by the way i've looked at it the other day i'm gonna go run by it but we are uh so challenged in that way because we are so stuck in what we think you know who we think we are and so it's rhonda all the identity stuff and the stories we tell ourselves yeah and it's so difficult and of course psychedelics help with all that but i i really believe ramdas is accessibility in that way he was really honest with himself so we that was when we first met him it became easier okay it's okay we're human we can we don't have to act like this curriculum isn't real and uh so that to me that's one of the most profound parts helping people to you know deal with their own impending death which we are all doing in some way or other i mean i in that uh excerpt i think he is talking to people and he said it says you know flat out well uh we're all gonna die right and um you know there's not too much doubt about that well and uh dealing with the fears and feelings and the cultural uh um you know kind of conditions around that um that's been really a pretty big contribution to helping people out and big time you know the psychedelic work with uh death has been a a great um part of that uh too and um i think that um you know if nothing else came out of his uh teaching helping people face death was a pretty great contribution and it's on so many levels because of the different kinds of work he did i remember they when they set up the dying house in santa fe and people with terminal illnesses were coming there to try and to have conscious death and it didn't work because the staff and the people like ramdev who were running the house that were taking such beautiful care and were so inspiring and loving to people that they didn't want to leave [Laughter] it's funny not funny but poignant poignant attachment grasping yeah it's all right down to the bottom does it in people's houses yeah right they're not running they're right that's great oh boy oh boy well we're at the end of our time here uh everybody of course uh being ram das is maybe at the end of our own time well okay well you never know um being ramdas is available everywhere okay so it's a fantastic book and uh for those of you who have known ramdas and have followed him over the years it's of course essential and for those of you who maybe don't know that much about him it's this is a great way to to learn about a great soul and um it's going to be kind of a parable for you know people in these times you know yeah his life is really kind of an example of uh how you can work on yourself it's an example of somebody who gives a about other people and not just themselves okay i hate to put it as crudely as that but it is so real i mean look at all those years we spent with him in maui when he was in i mean just broken hip strokes i mean you i mean in and out of hospitals just a lot of pain and he never succumbed to it ever never complained either which was pretty remarkable yeah no he used to say to me on the phone i mean because i talked to him all the time i'd say how you doing oh no just wonderful he'd go i i went you are you're lying to me because i happen to know that you've got a blah blah yeah well you know a little pain and suffering you know uh but someone who just really cared for for i really love everyone rom does i think he stayed around quite a lot longer yeah just doing he said yeah yeah yeah no absolutely so uh ramesh who without you this book would not have been written because ramdas was not writing anymore he had not not that ability so they sat and ramesh recorded over 10 years it seems like a long time but i guess it's real huh yeah 10 years and put that together yeoman's effort really everybody owes you joy a debt of thanks really so thank you for this and uh everybody um please for this conversation you're welcome i'm enjoying i'm enjoying uh this is ramdas here and now and that's the beauty is as ramesh indicated there is only love and it is available every second every moment and that includes ramdas's soul which is with us but we will be back with ram das here now next time meanwhile go to behrnownetwork.com so many great people and teachers and friends of ramesh and mine who are doing wonderful podcasts and we add people all the time and turning into 2021 we're going to have some pretty fun surprises and new people that we're going to hang out with so we shall see you next time ramram this podcast is brought to you by the love serve remember foundation and ramadasa.org appreciate you listening and we appreciate all the support that you've given us please continue that support and donate at ramadas.org we can then continue to share what ramdas has been sharing for all of these years thank you

Channel: Be Here Now Network

Views: 3,696

Rating: 4.9285712 out of 5

Keywords: francesca maxime, podcast, buddhist wisdom, wise girl, buddhism, buddhist, rerooted, rerooted podcast

Id: QNUis149C4Q

Length: 85min 19sec (5119 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021