Ram Dass – Here and Now – Ep. 180 – The Way of Harmony

[Music] this is ram das here and now i'm raghu marcus and happy to be back with another wonderful talk that we exerted out of ramdas's catalog very very deep into the past actually in 1969 and yeah october 18 1969 at yale university isn't that interesting i mean so this is just after he came back because he came back in 68 at some point and uh in fact this is a kind of an unusual talk in which rondas really gives a little bit of the historical perspective from him about how all this happened in terms of him getting out there and teaching and giving lectures and so on and what happened around the farm that his father had in new hampshire that many of us went to in those couple of summers 69 70 and how uh he one thing it was interesting to note although we experienced it uh when we were there that he was really he made a point of of really representing all the traditions the spiritual religious traditions from around the world so they'd be doing buddhist meditation and hindu chanting and sufi dancing and so on and that was really important to him that's fun to hear about so this this podcast rather this talk that's in this podcast is called the way of harmony and the interesting thing about it is the so there's it's a it's a bit of a hang uh it's uh recorded questions and answers um from that time so the way of harmony in the first question is about hitler i mean really and it was about should hitler have done what he did so uh notice the the uh response from ram das was uh of the the um reality of what made hitler and the reality of how everybody in that country and and so on responded to him in that particular time is the creation of tremendous karma collective karma and he goes into that and uh gee if we think about where we are right now or have been since the pandemic there's been a lot of forces that we have contributed and created by our karma by the actions that we've taken over a vast amount of time all the way back hundreds and hundreds of years with slavery to more recent time since the industrial revolution and what we have done to the planet and it is very collective so uh and interestingly ramadan's response to the guy that asked guy or gal that asked that question and um he says you may you made the choice to ask the question but in fact the whole thing was built into you so that you would ask that question at that moment it didn't just come out of nowhere it comes at a whole out of a whole set of problem probabilistic things in you and so that's what led him off to talk about the power of natural forces there is one well for me it was very poignant when he talked about the in talking about the collective karma of us creating and interacting with nature than the power of natural forces to push back shall we say which we've experienced and he talked about yeah and one of them is a pandemic and here we are yeah it's uh now we can't say it's prescient because there have been pandemics forever but the power of this particular one not since 1918 huh um yeah difficult stuff to understand collective karma and how the individual is completely connected to the greater whole and and the ricocheting of vibrations and actions that happens is extraordinary and the power of uh of the mind just thoughts themselves create karma so there's this great podcast there's there's somebody i really love he's got a podcast on the network actually robert's faboda and he did he had a teacher in india that had the greatest take on karma and ways of explaining it it was really quite unbelievable and it's the agora books and it's the third one the law of karma and it really helps to understand a little bit so that's a suggestion somebody will put that up in the show notes the other interesting thing that jumped back at me out at me listening you know how we walk around day to day we absolutely 100 believe everything that's going on we everything in our lives we are doing we are really doing it and if we didn't do it it wouldn't happen whatever that might be or if we did we think okay we did do it and what's coming back is really unpleasant whatever it is we're completely involved and of course karma again actions reactions pleasant or otherwise unpleasant so he talks here about so the well i have a great example actually someone i quote all the time he was a major mentor of ours casey tawari we're actually getting close to finishing a film about him we have wonderful footage of him and really far out stuff from india footage and he just constantly he was mr mindfulness okay and he just constantly would remind us no matter how caught we were getting or not how caught because we were pretty caught most of the time but he would never cease to say things like this to me after i'd be getting all frustr frustrated and flustered about what it is i thought i needed to do in that moment i was just verbalizing it around him and he'd go my boy if you think you are doing it you are lost and then i'd come back to zero so ramdas talks about this if you think if even though you realize he says you are not a decider of the whole business the doer you are still part of a process you realize you're part of the process but not the doer decider and of course when you get to a point of fairly high accomplishment spiritual accomplishment you end up living more in way in the dao the harmony with everything and here's the most important point of all that when you hear this you'll i think just it's an emphasis obviously i'm making because i think it's so important but the more it's and it's it's not something that oh you got to wait 40 years and then boom it'll happen it's the day-to-day work on ourselves and the more conscious we become and move more towards the harmony that ramadas is talking about the less you are capable of creating this is his words conditions which increase the illusion for you and for everyone else around you for your fellow man he said so anybody ask what's the point of this whole deal here's a major point right it because it affects both your personal karma and collective karma the more conscious you become the less you're capable of creating conditions which increase the illusion and the suffering and everything else so very very important very so very so as they say in india so uh so here we go it is called the way of harmony and it starts off with hitler i think that's crazy but uh thanks to nathan for finding this little gem from october 18 1969 at yale university so this is ramdas here and now this is also by the way the 50th anniversary of be here now the publication of be here now and we have ongoing celebratory stuff we have this wonderful eight-week course it's uh moving along wonderfully with a few thousand people and we if you missed it by the way make sure you're on the mailing list of ramdas.org so that you do see the announcements aside from seeing stuff on social media and we got some more stuff coming up towards the end of the summer into the fall and yeah do get your email in there so that we you can get word of what we're doing this is ramdas here and now on be here now network go to be here now network dot com and catch the incredible plethora of teachers and thought leaders from ramadas to krishnadas to jack cornfield to what i do on mind rolling and sharon salzburg and nikki walton and conda mason i mean it's just uh we're pretty proud of it and so thank you for being here and thank you for being a part of it and we shall see you next time hitler have done what he did so easy to say no isn't it um hitler did what he did and you do what you do and i do what i do now at any point you and i and hitler have a subjective experience that we are making choices in fact we are merely living out karma and you can see that for example the fact that you asked the question about hitler is the result of the fact that you have lived through a certain time you have read certain books you have brought certain thoughts you've had certain experiences you've known certain people the result of that is you ask this question that question is determined in other words it's a highly probable question out of your head at that moment it's a highly improbable question say out of your head that moment okay in other words you experienced it like you made the choice to ask that question but in fact the whole thing was built into you to ask that question at that moment now that's at the level of determinism in the sense that it just didn't come out of nowhere that question didn't just suddenly oh it comes out of a whole set of probabilistic things in you probabilistic things in you now hitler um the hitler phenomenon is awesome because it's just like earthquakes and things like that it shows it shows the power of natural forces which are always scary uh blight and uh epidemic and things like that show the force of nature hurricanes and stuff like that whole villages are uninvaded under rocks and in a way you see the power of nature of which man's desires ego desires are part of it in the same way as rocks tumbling our part of it they are all part of nature and that is that's the divine part of doing the destructive thing and it's horrible in the same way that there's creation of new villages and new things and hope and love and beauty and that's all beautiful and there are all the people that are the the non-hitlers who do the other end of it now it may be that you've got to understand further that there is no human being that in their inner place or that no that isn't true but i would say that most people think they are doing the right thing from where they're sitting their subjective experiences as you can see from the nuremberg trial they didn't say i am doing evil but i'll keep doing it they said either they said well i was just following orders which is what the doctor is saying i got to preserve life i'm just following order or they were giving some other justification but it wasn't like it was they were saying about a master race which was a philosophy of idealism for mankind distorted though it may have been at one level now when you start to go into eternal space and time you begin to do different takes of these these natural disasters and phenomena like wars and pestilence and so on you see them as horrendous things and if you are at in the situation at any moment you may take actions to protect to stop it because you your actions always you see i'll tell you about that in a minute about how you decide what your actions must see but when you get into eternal time and space you begin to see it in a slightly different way there was a book by rene de mal called mount analog and in mount analog it's a group of europeans who compute mathematically the presence of a mountain higher than any known mountain in the world and it's an island and the reason nobody's ever found it is because there's a magnetic field around it such that when you direct the ship towards the ship goes around it's thinking it's going in a straight line because it's got this weird magnetic field around but they figure out that if they get on the west side of it looking east at sunset or sunrise under certain certain kinds of astronomical configurations they'll see the channel and get their way through and they steam and they plan and they get through they get to the base camp and there's a village there at the bottom of the mountain and then they climb them out and then they have many experiences and this is all a metaphor for the journey of the consciousness as you can see now rene demaro wrote this book he was a nitrous oxide sniffer in paris in the 30s okay and he died somewhere along the way for some way or other i don't know not no do with nitrous oxide and his wife published the book posthumously and included a quote which was the last quote that was to be in the book which was the captain sogol which is logos felt backward captain sogo's last quote was this in the place called mount analog he said by our calculations thinking of nothing else by our desires abandoning all other hopes by our efforts renouncing all bodily comforts we managed to gain entry into this new world so it seemed to us so it seems what but if we were able to approach mount analog it was because the invisible doors of that invisible country were opened to us by those who guide them the crowing in the milky dawn thinks that its call raises the sun the child howling in a closed room thinks that its cry opens the door but son and mother follow courses set by their own being those who see us though we cannot see them open the door in response to our pure aisle calculations our unsteady desires and our awkward effort with a generous welcome to understand that quotation from where i'm sitting that is true that is i think it is it is the height of absurdity that man thinks he's doing what he's doing and at the same moment that is not licensed for doing nothing because doing nothing is just doing something else there is no way to not do anything to do nothing no way to do nothing as long as you're a human bird so even though you can accept the fact that you are not the decider of the whole business you can still be a part of a process you are a part of a process you can recognize your participation in a process do exactly what it is that needs to be done which may indeed be exactly the same thing you would have done had you thought you were doing it because you end up living by the dao that is you end up being in harmony with the universe and the way of harmony is that you no longer the more conscious you become the less you are capable the less you are capable of creating conditions which increase the illusion for you or your fellow man and killing stealing lying all those things increase the distance between human beings and therefore you become less and less capable of doing those things you don't become capable of them because you have bought an external moral prescription that they're wrong however you just see that you can't do them because you can't do them because water can't flow upstream because you just can't do them because doing them just feels like you're swimming hard against it it's not like surfing to surf means to go with it and to go with it means to be in harmony with all the forces then if this kid is standing here hungry and i got wheat in my pocket i gotta put the wheat in that kid's mouth because those are the way the forces are if i'm open to the forces if i want to close myself off so i don't see that kid then i can do that but that's the thing that's the cause that's where possessions become too costly that's where lying costs too much that's where protecting your own life sometimes comes costing more than it's worth which is what christ said when he said you must lose your life to save him and when he says to the young wealthy man give up all your possessions and follow me and the kid can't do it as long as he's got those possessions there's got to be somebody that's them that'd be somebody somebody's now well i see energy as just green energy and it's moving from person to person and you move it along and you you know resources and food and shelter and it just keeps spreading around and it's like fluid it's like liquid it's called green energy and some people call it money or the power of you know i don't think holding it worshiping it's protecting it counting it it's like counting your breath counting air intake how much air is there is enough for all of us not i want my tissue now there is a fear in the culture that if we didn't all sit around thinking about how to make it good it would be bad because that's based on the freudian model that man basically is an id driven being of completely socially unacceptable animal impulses that is still the identification of man with his natural being his being in nature that is still a complete refutation of the spirit that is that is still a totally profane take of who man is and in the profane take of man everybody better think full time to keep us from wiping ourselves out and the sacred take of man that isn't the way it works at all is the way it works at all and the funny thing is the sacred and the profane may lead to the same behaviors but the behaviors may have entirely different effects because the vibrations with which you do them i can feed a kid in biafra because i feel guilty because i have so much and the kid in biafra ends up hating me as is the case with america in most the world or i can see there's a thing in my yoga that says this my yoga is really beautiful because it says everything and it says it says in it there is no giving or receiving of gift now does that mean that i can't ever accept take anything from anybody no that doesn't look like me it means that as long as that person is attached to thinking he is the giver and i am the receiver and this is something he has to give forget it because by accepting that i am entering into a subject object contract with him which is ending up keeping us both apart on the other hand if he has this stuff and says here i have this energy you need it you use it like here we are and there's this energy then groovy i mean like last summer some guy came up and he was very obnoxious he was very fierce very heavy neurotic guy and i finally threw him out of the darshan which is the only guy i ever had to throw out of darshan and he got into his maserati and he was about to drive away and he left a number of things for me he left the bag a very special hashish so i the guy that brought it to me i said keep it he left a bottle of white wine the guy that bribes me is that keeper and he left on my steering with a check for a thousand dollars and i had at the time 26 dollars in my bank and man i come out of a family where you know like man that's money you know hold on and it took me a day to work it through but it worked through nevertheless i stuck it an envelope and i sent it back and i said neither of us can afford this and two days later a very beautiful guy john lilly who was a very good researcher with dolphins and so on a very beautiful guy taking a lot of lsd and sensory deprivation tanks he said man i got this extra bread why don't i lay some on you and he gave me 500 just like that and that was beautiful money and i could take that easily because there was no there was no subject object thing about it and that's why you realize that most of the things between parents and children have that horrible place in it that they are designed where they're keeping everybody stuck in their roles which is separating them more by carrying out the habits by my father continually here's my father sitting with a million dollars and i'm sitting with 20 bucks and i can't figure how i'm going to get from here to there and he says to me do you need anything and i must say no because i can't need anything because if i don't have the money i won't go wherever i'm supposed to go i the way it is and the fact is he wants if i will say i need something he will say here i will give it to you which is exp taking us into a contract that keeps us both separate and it's a contract that i can't afford because i'd rather grill with him i say no man i don't need anything you know i want you and i help him figure out how he can enjoy his money all you gotta do is say here's a thousand dollars and i'll take it but he never does that because he can't just share he's got to set up contracts and those contracts are things that i can't enter into that's impossible for me to enter into them because i realize that every time i do it we both lose and all i end up with is a thousand dollars and that's not worth it and the problem is that your karma is all those contracts you have made that you've got to get finished with and every time you say get turned on if you're a guy by a chick and you want to make it with her but you don't really want to be with her you just want to make it with her then you are getting into exactly that same thing you are creating a subject object contract and that is a a new karmic headache for you because at the same time you have increased that other person's isolation because how many people in our culture make it physically i mean i've got a sign on the visor of my i've got a really old buick uh limousine that i drive around the country 38 limousines and uh with rama license plate and on the on the sign on the visor it says um what does it mean if two outer coverings embrace because i'm driving along the street and there's there's something that arouses some desire in me and my eye goes up to the visor and says what does it mean if two out of coverings of race because i see somebody on the street and i don't i don't want to make contact with this spirit because i'm already in contact with their spirit just going inside it's a desire it's lust and the thing about the concept lust which it sounds like an old biblical term the concept of the thing about lust the reason why lust is so such a rough concept is because it is profane because it involves keeping something object in order to desire it the minute you get into the other level where you're making it all sacred then you have to establish that place where here we are we are one and then whatever sexual dance ensues ensues but the dance ensues out of the oneness not out of the tunis you're not keeping the person there in order to lust for them see and the problem is can you give up your lusting fantasies and still have sexual gratification and as i said last night the fact is until you give it all up you don't get any of it you don't get enough and once you've given it all up you get it all that's the rule of the game you hear that as long as you reach for it you'll never get enough you will never get enough and i've got many of my friends in the playboy organization who attest to that you never get enough as long as you're reluctant for it and the minute you give it up i don't mean anything to do with actions now i'm talking about attachment to desire attachment to desire then you start to enter into another space and in that space you have it all because in that space it all becomes sexual i mean i am more and more totally totally in love with everybody all the time and i don't feel that i am stopping my sexual life i just feel it's broadening and broadening and running and who includes everything all the time i've still got a long way to go but it's sure getting very far out i mean it blows my mind because i gotta go through all my models of you know like wow that's strange turned on by a rock because in the spirit it is all sexual it's just not all the freud model it's not on the genital sexuality it's all emerging and the oneness and the liquidity and the you know well the whole karmic trip is a unique trip the karmic trip includes your your hereditary eugene all of your environment every experience you ever had all the people you ever met people you walk down the sidewalk and see that's all one package that's a totally unique pattern and you are born into that package that package didn't exist before it was created just to work out certain things for you desire creates the universe your desires create your universe you know nothing other than your own desire that all that the world consists of is the projection of your own design so people share yeah exactly yeah see it usually works out that way like psychologists hang out with psychologists and athletes hang out with athletes and people hang out with people generally there's a very little there's some crosstalk because people feel they should be liberal and they have a few other types of friends but generally hippies hang out with hippies and you know we and them there's us [Music] until you finally get a reference group where everybody's up and it doesn't matter who you went at any moment because it's all the same because everybody's got here we all are we're always right here who will we be this time you want to be a drunk on the street you want to be a leading physicist you want to be the bus driver who i once stopped at a gas station a shelf station a man came and tried to wash my windshield wall and i had this nice car and started talking about cars and how he had one evening there was a meat strike in new york he brought a ton and a half of turkeys in the car into new york city and sold them down in the market district highlands we talked and i was looking at him just thinking he's right being gas station and all i felt was total love for him and the warmth of that thing he felt that things i mean as weird as i looked he still felt that thing and i had no way of relating to him really because he's not interested in what i'm interested in at that level of interest he doesn't read or think or relate or meditate or any of that stuff he just still gets he said would you like to look at my car sure but i went you got a mercy friend yeah i like that you meet my wife she's upstairs okay and one day for lunch okay basically basically showed me i realized i could settle down and lived right there for the rest of my life and it was perfectly all right and i began to realize that every moment was that same moment that everybody was family there wasn't every home own home the home was the place you were at at the moment i have no home now i just go i just flow wherever i am is the only place i ever needed to be ever and it was all for this moment that i'm here and the moment i walk out the door no none of you exist anymore in these forms and yet that to the extent that we've made contact we all know we've made contact with one another we're always right here and when we meet a year from now we'll look at each other and say yeah right here we are and there's nothing we have to do for to or about one another in most cases sometimes there are some people have specific problems that need something or other but generally people i can just pass people and it's enough that we have the direct moment and we say yeah right here we are and that's it that's all that has to be done because that that touches that place where you make that contact the contact takes just as long as it takes you now what i find is that i have maybe uh 15 to 20 tapes that have been made of these darshan and that there's now these tape distributing companies and they've got to distribute the paper and the tapes do it personally listens to four hours of very high tape and we made the content and i'm meeting all these people who are totally in love with that place that was coming through me and it has nothing to do with me we made the contest and i think that the pure i am the more i make that contact with everybody i meet all the time it's only when i get caught in my own identity that i lose because i'm busy i'm busy doing something i think i'm doing something i don't have time though it was a little scary to me because um in new york i ran uh public darshan's for three weeks i had the sculpture studio on 77th street and every night i was there for three weeks and people came and they paid a buck or two or something like that first week 40 people came and the second week 60 to 100 came in the third week the place was like mom i'm turning away and the same people kept coming back more and more this place kept getting higher and higher until finally i would get there and i would go and sit down and i would start speaking within about a minute after suddenly speak so this thing would take over i would just like go on automatic i just said doing my laundry and the speaking would go on it was the people speaking and i'd speak for three four hours and we chant together and we was a place would be it would be on 77th street and third avenue and it'd be not just like right in that room it was just absolutely here we just all went here nothing out of everything we've gone beyond words and then people would silently drift out of the streets and after maybe 150 of them have gone maybe 30 left i would just stay in meditation until most of them are gone around what 12 o'clock at night i get up and i started staggering around the room and i was in a very funny place in my head i mean i was using no drugs but i was in such a funny state because the person who had spoken or the vehicle that had spoken i had turned me off so much there wasn't any need to come back into there was no role to come back into and they would like people thought bring me flowers and fresh bread and just want to touch me or to love me and i was like wow man no ego can handle all that you know there was no ego around my ego would love to have had it all i would love to collect it all but it would have drowned him it was much too much for any one person to have that much love and it had nothing to do with me at all and that was the funny thing because there was no role to be in there was nobody to be at all under those conditions and i just staggered around being really confused totally confused i wouldn't couldn't figure out what i was supposed to be or do or because now what i really think of i just feel more and more that i'm just getting to be like a rent-a-roll but you know you just move the rental rover around you put it in place and you crank it up and out comes the stuff it goes on and on and on and you stop it and say well time to stop okay turn off the hamburger machine put it away keep it serviced protect it bring it out it doesn't think someone see this careful it has nothing to do with it particularly i'm not saying i've got to make more hamburgers there's nothing i could possibly be collecting that i could see that i want what could i want what could what could he want he wants it all but what is he going to do with it good how much love does a human being need power fame what what are you going to do with it i mean i've lived around so many people that had power of fame thought that what where you know they're obviously they don't have enough and they got lots of them little meaning in the president's club and there's all these guys with power and things look how much power and fame i have i have all this foreign oh you have all that power wow and there they are that's not enough you can just tell it in your eyes when i came back from india i just went into a cabin i just found them accountable and did my work for myself three or four months and um one day i was going in town for groceries and my father said here i just got new cars take it try it i thought that was pretty funny big new cadillac and i went down by groceries and i saw some hippies and they came in the store and then when i came out they said man you got any asking i don't know why i said well we got a connection coming from boston we saw a guy with a beard at the cadillac [Music] all right i'm sorry i'm not that kind of [Music] i never heard of my drug and they came up and visited a few times then they brought their friends and they brought their parents parents ministers and some of the parents invited me to speak for the indian forum at university of new hampshire and then uh a postcard was sent to india from bucks county seminar in pennsylvania and i answered that and they said i was back would i come and give a weekend and then they asked if i give a lecture in new york city and then i just kept doing the thing i just i never create anything in my head i'm just responding and i respond as you know as much as i can feel the harmony of it all but i don't i used to be a promoter you know and i can't assess what effect it has or what effect it has to have or what's good or what's bad it's just happening because it's happening and you're hearing what you're hearing and i'm doing what i'm doing that's the way it all is and i've been traveling i spent six weeks out of big sur i spent some time in new mexico i went to a benedictine monastery at the time catholic brothers living event then i went to new hampshire i came back there just sit there all summer and people decided to come and come and pretty soon my father said they're all so beautiful why don't they stay around so he offered them land and pretty soon there was a whole community going there like 50 people with tents and building buildings and we built a huge meditation house and we had meditations and just dancing and all the stuff weekends more and more people kept coming until the last weekend there were like 250 people coming a day becomes a bit of dark you can sit around like some people from franklin local people the rotary club asked me to come and see the first year i got back to this little conservative republican town they spent all their time wondering whether i just went i had no game i had no hustle so there was no reason that i could threaten them i just fast but the chief police figured i was the big pusher in the east he called in the federal people investigate me and i was building all these big dramas about that i was using my father's state proportion because these young drug users were coming up to visit me and i kept saying tell the chief he's welcome to come anytime you want he doesn't need any letters from the court he's welcome come investigate ask me any questions i'm always sitting right here and there was nothing you could do i mean you know all you could do was fuel and then one of the mothers wrote an article in the concrete monitor about a holy man comes to frank and then uh sort of a wild-eyed lawyer in franklin decided since he was to have the speakers program for the rotary that he'd have me and he had me come to the rotary as sort of an act of defiance and then the rotary asked me if i was mine at the mayor's drug committee who came to the rotary meeting also i said i thought it'd be great and they had the biggest rotary meeting they had in years middle summer and they told me i could speak for 20 minutes and two and a half hours later nobody was moving nobody was moving i mean they were just stoned out of their heads and we were talking about god and the spirit and it was fantastic it would be really high because all i had is one word for all us like you know they kept thinking of me as him but i refuse to be him [Music] that was fantastic and i said to the mayor mr mayor i realize i am weird i'm here with fear and exceeds and i know that i've been connected with drugs and i don't put down the drugs and i do advise the young people and i'm you know but i that i don't think i represent a force that's destructive in this society but i make the statement to you if you or the council feel at any moment along the way that i should leave franklin that is threatening to your community i will leave the next day at the time and that blew their minds too because i said i gave i gave all the power to them and they all came rushing no we want you to stay and the mayor put in the newspaper i feel this man is a great contribution to our community [Music] and the baptist minister put this man brought me back to the spirit i had been so involved in social communities and the local gas station man said uh when you forget about his beard he's a great guy and one of the mothers said uh i send my children to him he's very good like uh i had all these testimonials on newspaper and then came an invitation to speak at the unitarian church in franklin and uh that was a wild thing i mean the place was just standing room only of all the old conservative people in this republican conspiracy and i spoke about christ and the spirit and i got cross-legged up on their podium and the thing was absolutely very very then i became a consultant the mayor's drug committee i came a long lecture about drugs the difference between opiates and you know i played dr alvin i spoke to women's professional and secretarial association their annual monthly dinner meeting and i just kept having these doctrines and public weekly things free no money anybody that wanted to come live on the land they could come as long as they they want to live and when they couldn't use guns because my contract my father was to be her cousin and the kids could come and and i was very uh nobody had to pay anything and dad said well how are you gonna live i said don't worry it'll take care of itself i started out this summer with 300 at one point i just kept buying rice and stuff we bought all wholesale food so everybody could buy cheap food he has a little store there for everybody they had to buy their own food and provide their own tent and at the end of the summer when i went to take off i had a thousand dollars and i don't know how it came from just with the people that had green energy shares i guess let's see how it happened because there was just a big bowl of money sitting there and people put on putting the food and i had never been in a scene that was that pure i had never because i'd been through millbrook and newton and mexico and all these things and i had never been through a scene where nobody was invited nobody was invited there was no game i had going i there was no reason why i wanted anybody there i was perfectly content alone or with people i didn't need anybody and everybody came because they were secret and the living was very fierce because the mosquitoes were wild and you know was living and so it didn't collect all the people that just came to hang out in the gloomy scene at first later it got a little change but i watched the power of the thirst of people for these kinds of things there were a lot of people who were ready to go and create a little meditation room out in the woods to go sit down for a week and then come and share their experiences and there were many people that were willing to get up at five in the morning and do meditations and and chanting sessions and going fast and special diets and so on and these were all of us that we're ready to do so i learned from that now i'm going to mexico we have a place up in the mountains a group of people created beautiful fantastic ones we're going to have 16 people there for the first run seven weeks we have eight separate meditation rooms buildings and they'll all go into these separate fields and it's again another experiment western ashram i'm going back to india here this is emerson and at that point i hope my trauma is complete my western calm then whether i come back or not doesn't matter i'll come back or not depending but i'll just go and go to the feet of my crew and say okay baby now and if he doesn't exist then whatever happens i just watch it all unfold see i don't you know i just watch what i'm saying it's extraordinary how it unfolds you see the thing is that when the when you keep working in yourself and the spirit stays something's coming through people keep reaching they keep hearing and the thing keeps gathering and it's all purely organic it's just all out of that inner place not on it the minute there's an impure thing in it you know it and they know it and everybody knows it and the thing is that there are enough people at the level now that they are demanding total truth and total appearance any sick games there's no room for them anymore nobody wants richard albert around anymore he's a drag i think he's a dragon so does anybody else he's greedy lustful you want power same he's lurking in the wings waiting to take his just credits all around so let him work that's who i am [Music] how does the dancing the uh stupid [Music] you stand in a circle or you move around in a circle and you're going like uh at one point you're holding hands and you're going and then in the middle of the circle going in an opposite direction are two people who are going yeah and you keep doing this and the rhythm keeps building and the movement keeps building and it's a method of trans induction it's a method of going out beyond your own state into oneness with god and then you're finally whirling and whirling and whirling and whirling and that's just taking you out and out and out and out and until finally i have some pictures of my room we had one with 50 people in it i don't know my father's golf course i've got a very far at the end at the end there's 50 people lying all over the lawn you know just looks like after gas attack i was interested in having all forms of religion the mysticism of every religion represented this summer so we did the uh we did the uh rakshasana and yom kippur services it's a hebrew religion we did a number of uh we never got to doing the gregorian chant that i had learned at the benedictine monitoring it's complicated we did a lot of reading from the bible and we did the sufi dancing and we did a whole day of zazen from the buddhist uh did a sashimi a one-day machine with a big stick hitting people on the back when they spend and uh we did hindu chanting and all kinds of various forms of meditation because i really see that the westerner is interested in that which is the spirit not in the in the structure of the religion per se but only the rituals that bring him into the spirit that's what we're interested in now and i had this most extraordinary meeting because after the unitarian church the secretary of the clergy association franklin called and advocates the clergy could all come and visit they were gonna sort of check me out i guess i don't know what and i said it would be wonderful now they asked if i would meet well the guy came and he saw me and he asked if i would meet with the clergy at their regular meeting their you bring up sack lunch meetings and i said yes he says i understand you have a temple up here and i said no we don't have a temple because there are no ordained people that would consecrate a temple but we do have a spiritual meeting house would you like to see it i took it up and it's in a pine grove and it's a fantastic place i mean it filled all with love it was an exercise in conscious building everybody had to build it keeping purely conscious with every hammering of male and film which was more or less done and it's a beautiful building great big building when he took it it started blew his mind so he said well maybe we'll hold our meeting here well that would be great so 13 ministers came up and we had a big fire in the middle of the thing and like we didn't have enough money to put a floor on so we had a dirk floor but the building was all broken we had a big fire and uh it was a rainy day and they all sat we brought up chairs for them because we all sit on cushions and they sat in chairs around the front after two and a half hours we discussed the spirit and all the young people were there and it was this very very beautiful beautiful music and they owned as though as that they had lost spirit out of their the meaning out of their lives and one man went out and he just embraced me and he says it's like this is the first hope i've had in 30 years and when i was at the drug committee i was sitting there and talking and two nuns were in the audience and one of them said may i say something and i'll say yeah he said i think two of you are people were like church life [Music] when is it going to blow up because it was so beautiful because i couldn't handle that much beauty either along with everybody else she said they were up at the railing taking communion and she said the priest passed by and i couldn't help but notice she said the beautiful look on their faces she said it was so spiritual she said all i could do was cry she said i felt like christ was in the church she said all i want to do is thank you for bringing these young people here wow man like those are hippies those are the hippies we've got a problem we've got these hippies i thought that they spare it with the spirit and that there was and that the exquisite thing is the church has all the rituals and all the structure and all the language the minute the spirit can be invested back in and that beautiful thing what i was hoping to do for next summer since i'm a little scared to do the same thing next summer because of the numbers i was hoping to get all the clergy together in franklin and get us to collaboratively do something next summer nobody comes on about their religion we'll still have it completely interdenominational all forms available and i mean a kid was perfectly welcome to come to the scene if he didn't use drugs to go after the woods he never had to come to any meetings he never had to see anybody he could just walk and meditate by himself or he could come and sit and play his flute all the time you know during the hours you could play flutes i mean he didn't know nobody was there was no come on to anybody to do anything and that's the way it's going to be the thing is that the minute you put it into the hands of men who are traditionalists they feel we have to impose these rituals and there's none of that at all but i would love to because i see these kids finally want to come back into the forms of their religions because that's their karma i mean i'm still fine trying to find a way back into judaism it's a really heavy religion i'll tell you it's really heavy because it's primarily a folk religion it's primarily rejected it's mystical tradition christianity is much more closely linked to mysticism than judaism this podcast is brought to you by the love serve remember foundation and ramdas.org we appreciate you listening and we appreciate all the support that you've given us please continue that support and donate at ramdas.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: 12,803

Rating: 4.879518 out of 5

Keywords: ram dass, ram dass be here now, ram dass podcast, be here now network, ram dass meeting guru, be here now, ram dass here and now, be here now youtube, be here now video, ram dass india, ram dass lecture, ram das, ram dass meditation, ram dass love, neem karoli baba, ram dass guru, meditation podcast, full episodes

Id: pH7FUlOo2Y4

Length: 54min 22sec (3262 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021