Ram Dass (1931-2019) Part 1 Complete: Compassion in Action - Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove

thinking aloud conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove hello and welcome I'm Jeffrey Mishlove our topic today is politics and spirituality with me is ramadasa noted spiritual teacher and author of many books including be here now grist for the mill miracle of love a gradual awakening the psychedelic experience and most recently how can I help during the past decade Ram Dass has been active in social causes including the prison ashram project curing blindness in May Paul in India working with refugees in Guatemala and working with American Indians and health issues welcome Ram Dass Thank You Geoffrey it's a pleasure to be with you you know I think if we were to go right to the core of the issue it strikes me that at the very bottom line at the root of things spiritual premises that we are all one and therefore politically we would want to treat the whole world as if it were our own body in a sense that would seem to me to be the the basic premise of spirituality and politics well yeah but there are many levels to understand that you can understand it with your intellect and you can understand it because you are that and that's a very different place to act politically like Mahatma Gandhi said when you make yourself into zero your power becomes invincible now any politician or anybody in the life of trying to institute social change in a society would like to have their power be invincible but it only happens when you aren't but it is and that's the one that is really hard that you have to in a way die in to not my but I will for that kind of potential impact on social change I think there's paradox there in a sense because if we totally sort of bow to the will of God it might lead us to to not want to resist it's an incredibly interesting risk and you've got to trust that when you have surrendered we'll hear so clearly douses the truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing and your longing to have a different than it is is ultimately a trap because it keeps you from hearing the whole Gestalt the whole way things are and as you hear the totality of it you trust that out of that will come an appropriate action a dharmic action and that's the trust of Dharma that's the trust in the wisdom of the universe that is greater than your own personal ego wisdom so there is certainly as a exquisite risk in it I mean you know you're we're so used to working out of I ought to do it I should do it getting behind ourselves and pushing but the whole idea of trusting that if we didn't push something would still happen is very interesting to explore in people well there must be a fine line between trusting and not pushing on the one hand and on the other hand being really passionate about social change but again it's where passion comes from if passion comes out of what I call milking the drama or comes out of identifying with the emotions I think it's short of what the possibility is there is for example what's called dharmic anger where a Zen monk will beat his student out of the incredible amount of love and compassion he has I would say that if you if you're deeply enough in love with the universe then the passion that arises out of it is different than if you aren't and I I think the passion is a passion that comes out of a joyful involvement in the universe but I think it's the passion of a river or tree I don't think it has to be although it could be well you seem to be suggesting that the quality of one's actions in a political or social arena or any arena for that matter is really determined by internal factors and that would make a diet would seem to me impossible to to judge the actions of anyone else even a Stalin or a Hitler I think it's pretty tricky business I think you can make judgments about actions that you don't judge beings you judge their actions and actions are good or evil in the sense that actions increase paranoia and separateness or they increase unity so you can judge actions and you can be opposed I can say I don't I don't know I don't agree with that action you're going to do it in fact I'm going to stop you from doing the action but as Kabir said do what you do with another human being but never put them out of your heart but if I have to harden my heart in order to oppose you I lost we both lost that's part of the art of the inner and the outer a dialogue you know George Orwell in in nineteen eighty-four refers to Bray big brother as this sort of one gets the sense that the game is that he's this loving tyrant or at least his people believe that that all of the the cruelties are done out of some kind of a benevolence it and it seems to me that that there's a longing that people have for perhaps a benevolent tyrant who will come in and straighten things out for us dusty Eskie spoke about how people longed to to take their freedom and lay it at the feet of a benevolent church that might act in a tyrannical way yeah I it I think the deeper issue is whether the universe is benevolent or not because we all see that when you invest in an institution or another person you are investing external to your own deepest inner truth and you've constantly got to be running that back against your inner truth you can't just join a club and then say I surrender to the club like the whole misconception of a guru is that you surrender to a person you only surrender to that which is the truth where God guru and self are one and the same thing so when you surrender that way you're surrendering that way at the same time I could never imagine surrendering to something that would be that would invalidate my intuitive wisdom and as long as you keep connecting to that but the question of whether or not then you know that you don't to judge whether it's benevolent or malevolent you just judge is this harmonious with my inner being I don't to judge you I just have to keep my own game on a straight path the question of whether the universe is benevolent online that's an interesting one I because I have a sense I was talking Jerry Brown who used to be a donor here and in California and we're talking about that issue of whether you have to assume a benevolent universe in order to trust deeply enough to surrender and we both could hear the lawfulness of the universe and I would say that there is an evolutionary thrust it's not a Darwinian kind it's much more of a consciousness evolution or I mean it kind of metaphorically with is the one manifest as the many returning to the one or something with it so there's directionality and in that sense it has values connected with it but I don't think you'd call that either benevolent on malevolent any what you wouldn't call a clock benevolent a benevolent malevolent cuz it's going forward instead of backwards well I know it's it's a deep philosophical issue there's a strong trend amongst existentialists and amongst behaviorists and atheists and and left-wing political people to suggest that the universe is fundamentally and different and it's up to us to create our own reality and I guess often people feel that it should be created from the intellect from rationality well that's I think giving us really short shrift because to me the intellect is a kind of is a very small system within a much larger context and to deny the context in which the intellect functions is to leave one little segment of nature trying to subsume everything under it it's a lot like the drunk looking for the watch under the street lamp you know when you lost it up in the alley but there's a light here and it's this sort of it it what it also does is it makes the whole world object the intellect makes the world objects it's all thing you always think about things and that always puts you one thought away from where it is so you're always an alien in your own universe when you're when you mediate everything through your intellect so the fun is to have your intellect as Ramakrishna said it's a wonderful servant but it's allows you master and I think that's probably true you spoke a little earlier about making political decisions and judgments in terms of how it fits I think with one's heart you know and it seems to me that it's not hard emotional heart you know heart like Chinese cincin or the Atma meaning the deepest place of truth the core the deepest intuitive place in one's being you know there's anything well that would seem that notion would seem to contradict what we see very much in the world about us now which are religious political movements you know the moral majority or the Islamic fundamentalism where in the name of a particular religious dogma certain political planks are established and everyone within that organization or within that tradition is expected to support a particular political attitude when when there is a lot of fear there's a lot of uncertainty when there's a lot of uncertainty there is usually a lot of fear attended to it and how people react to fear interesting some people just consume more they say I'll get it while I can because it's all going to blow up anyway you become more and more materialistic some people want it they want to be on the right side when the doors closed so they become fundamentalists in one sense or another they grab on to right as opposed to evil they want to be one of the hundred and forty-four thousand that gets in the door and the other group uses it the uncertainty as a way to deal with their inner relationship to uncertainty and they go inward and you can see the society dealing with the fear that way and so that that real thrust to the kind of righteousness is staying at the plane of good and evil it's staying at the plane of polarities and it's not seeing as G manly Hall said that he who knows not that the Prince of Darkness is but the other face of the king of light knows not me that's the one if you it's interesting that all these religions and our Western since I mean Christianity and Judaism in Islam are really monotheistic they believe in the one like shmaaya soil I don't know I don't know and yet they always live within the - it's like it's all one it's it's one except for me or except for us and so we end up Mia culpa ourselves because it's hutzpah in exoteric Western religions to think that you are one with the one we say it's all one but we don't really act as if it were all one which is much more like holography no we typically act is is if we're very distinctly separate distinctly this thing and we got the bad end we got the bad end of the stick original sin absolutely uh-huh because we fell out of something and if you see it as the one exploring itself through us I mean through these multiplicity of forms that are all part of the one and that it goes into the dream or the illusion or they it gets entrapped in the separateness in order to awaken out of the set in order to see itself and it's just a beautiful dance of this delicate form of the one at play the whole thing lightens up a lot what I sense you saying is that you're making a clear distinction between spirituality and religion here between institutions that that see religions do provide exquisite practices to get deeper into the spirit the problem is that every practice is entrapping you I don't care whether it's meditation or Catholicism or the Torah or drugs or whatever yoga or whatever it is they're all traps and the game of method is that you've got to use the trap and risk being entrapped with the expectation that it will self-destruct if it really works the problem is if it really self destructs the whole priest class is out of business in institutional religion so that the game has a funny kind of top a false top on it because it's a any institution that starts to have you know salaries and institutional structures and all that immediately can't self-destruct it doesn't it's not designed that way well you suggest in your most recent book how can I help that through service one finds a path to to realization to God or to enlightenment I sense that in all religions there is this path of service and that seems to come as close as religion really gets to political action and yeah but the the difference is where you do the service from there an awful lot of religion religious organizations that do service but they do service like will help the poor that's not exactly karma yoga or the use of serving somebody to transcend the dualism between the server and the served I mean I'm talking about it as a very precise method of enlightenment of serving where there is no server because the bhagavad-gita says be not identified with being the actor and be not attached to the fruits of the action but still you do it now how do you help somebody where you're not attached to how it comes out and you're not busy being the helper that's the art form then you're just doing what you're doing because you're doing what you do you are the help you're not the helper you're the help and who's getting helped remains open to question if you're not getting helped by being a help or forget it you must be standing the wrong place it seems that the bhagavad-gita really puts the issue in its starkest form doesn't it ever when you consider that what's being discussed here is warfare and that warfare against one's own family yeah well that's an interesting one of which level to take that in because you also can take that metaphorically of the warring between the ego and the higher self and a whole internal battle I mean the fun of the bhagavad-gita bahadur gita is it's that you can play with it so many levels like any good holy book I mean any good holy book is a multi level smorgasbord of possibilities of interpretation I have seen some very right-wing mercenary type people wearing t-shirts that were the slogan to the effect of you know kill them all now and let God sort out the ones later Wow God yeah you haven't heard that slow no I mean it seems that some people love take and it's almost a religious or a spiritual attitude that they're going to do what they think they have to do when when they kill people God will figure out who goes to heaven and who goes to hell and they're not to blame isn't that interesting well the fact that they don't even know how to get hold of that one the fact that they're that they're I mean the Karma of an individual who will kill somebody because that individual feels they have the right way or the only way already their mind has made another person to them so what they're saying is they're going to kill all of them there are two ways to kill them as one as you go you know with a machine gun and the other is you extricate yourself from a world of us and them in your own mind and then you kill evolve of Em's and there's only us left because in Guatemala and one of the women these women widows whose husbands have been murdered before their eyes one of these women said to to me through a translator thank you so much for leaving your home and family to come to help us and I I just open to it and I said I didn't you're my home and family I mean who's leaving one and I felt that the truth of that at the moment she was defining it in terms of that she was them but I didn't see her as them she was us and that's part of the excitement of being willing to risk in service seeing the beloved in all the forms and seeing yourself in all the forms instead of averting your eyes from pain and suffering to turn around and embrace it into yourself without being afraid you're going to be drowned by it because you know you can say no without closing your heart these are all a part of a piece the beautiful service is a yoga is when you seem to be if one carries your position to its logical extreme it means being willing to look at if the grossest most hellish misery on the planet all of it and embrace it all of it all of it you look just directly at you learn how to keep your heart open inhale you see the horrible beauty of the universe I remember once I was teaching down at Big Sur at Esalen and they gave me a house to house it and it came with a cat and the cat and I became buddies and every day the cat would come in when I was meditating in the morning and bring in it's morning breakfast which was a lizard or something which was usually still alive and it would sit down between my legs to eat to be with me and I would be sitting there being with God and I'd hear a squeak squeak crunch crunch and I didn't know who to hate I mean I loved the cat but suddenly the cat was a killer and I loved the lizard because I identified with the you know and I went through all the changes and I saw it is the phenomena of nature you've got to be able to look at it all and say yes I acknowledge it I acknowledge it without being so busy reacting to it that you don't because you don't even understand why it is that way I mean my ability to see around the edge of the as Rilke said the billboard at the edge of town being able to see just around the edge of the veil and I can just see a teeny little bit just like we all can leads me to understand the game is much farther out than I thought it was that suffering has I mean I can understand the term suffering as Gray's I can't live it I can live it at moments with little sufferings but I can understand that there is a beautiful unfolding of awareness through suffering that's what my work with the dying is about yeah I remember once when I was a teenager I heard a rabbi talk about what well he felt was the essence of Jewish ethics and he said that if I saw another man and he had no clothes and all I had was a pair of pants I would take my pair of pants off and and give it to him and it struck me that well that's very beautiful it really is but I don't live my life that way and I don't know anyone else who does and yet I think I hear that coming from you that when we recognize the one as being ourselves how how can we not want to share our last pair of pants I hear the question see it's a very delicate one Seimone while of philosopher she was a wealthy Belgian I think and then she was so she wouldn't take any more than the poorest person in the world had and the result was she starved to death in her 20s I think now there's something interesting in that story and there's always also something that is poignant about it that you and I have a unique predicament karmic predicament that we were born in this time in this place with these potentials these opportunities I'm not sure all people have the same game in I'm not sure that I have to be just like everybody else so that there may be a way in which I know no I've got to listen carefully to hear I'm not rationalizing having more than another human being but I know that if I have to spend all like my guru said to me God comes to the hungry in the form of food now if I am worrying about my survival every day there's no way I can be on be here with you all right and if I can't be with here with you then all of us can't be sharing nor could I be here with you exactly so that in a way we are part of the microcosm of human consciousness we have a part to play which means we have to have the pants in order to play so I'm not sure I would give away my pants at that level I would you know I'd explore it I'd stay with the moment and see I either water I wouldn't sort of the way I deal with that no I don't try to I'm trying not to con out of it but to deal with that well it's an issue one maybe another way to look at it might be I don't think I'm a bad Jew for not giving away my massive pair of pants but well that's an extreme example but how about for example building elaborate houses of worship cathedrals synagogues and well you can look at those both ways I mean I wouldn't do it but at the same moment I can see that for people in very poor countries that have very little mythic identity to give them joy when they go into their Cathedral and they look up and they worship and light incense and is the beautiful Christ I can see that they get their lives enriched in a way that a lot of the regular daily stuff of their life doesn't do and you could say the church is milking it so they're not getting an extra meal but maybe it's feeding them in another way which is its justification I don't think it's a black-and-white issue or now it seems to me what you're expressing here is is a willingness to accept reality as it is that's a big one isn't it accept our humanity yeah and to accept that an institution could be serving and it could be a corruption of was intended to do and it's probably a little of both and so are we and we've got to deal with that we've got to accept our own humanity first and then and really accept it not judge it so much I really shifted from being in a judge of everything to being an appreciator of it to just appreciating how it is and it brings me into a much more intimate relationship the judging mode is always distancing myself from everything now so I'm not even judging judging now but it would seem to me that you must be much more skillful as a social activist or as a political actor in any sense if you're not judging people it should mean to me that you can communicate with anybody well in ideally yes and I that's what I'm working on that's when I'm working on what I'm doing is I'm going closer and closer to the fire all the time because see it's very easy for me to stay in my own little bailiwick around all of the people that are my yeh sayers my constituency and everything I say they say Oh mom does oh that's great wisdom it's quite different to mix it up with some social activists who say Ron who you know I mean they don't know me from anything and you've got to be there with the truth of your being in that situation and that to me is beginning to be exciting for years I wouldn't do it I wouldn't risk it I said I can't I think Vivekananda once said debates are for school children and I thought I will just represent what I represent I'll do what I do and the people that want to play will play and the others will do what they do and that's okay I'm not judging them we have different business mm-hmm but now I see that we can maybe talk together and that's going to be interesting that's that's really the 60s anti-vietnam and the 60s spiritual turning inward is starting to find their way back together again which i think is kind of interesting it seems as we're moving into the 90s that were yeah at a point where all of the old definitions of who we thought we were are falling away and and we find ourselves dialoguing with people we didn't imagine we had well now I mean how much more could that be than with the invention of the telephone or the invention of the radio or the invention of television or air traveler and I take care of my father and he's 90 and he was born in 1898 and I think when I'm thinking about this is a time of great change I think of what changes have occurred in that man's life I mean he and I got went on rides and saw the horse and the tracks that had the horse and buggy that he went on made when he was a child that he lived in that world and I realized the immense changes in our culture sometimes consciousness has gone along with it and sometimes consciousness has just gotten more deeply entrapped in externalities and that's what interests me not the evolution of technology but the evolution of the way the technology allows the liberation of consciousness well people have always commented so long as I can remember that our inner growth hasn't kept up with technology but perhaps we're above many person we're seeing the evolution of inner growth I mean when you think of the us living with the bomb I mean I grew up at a time we didn't have a long mm-hmm I'm going to have to cut you short now though our time is out round bomb just came yeah thank you so much for being with me Jeffrey it's been a pleasure it's been a pleasure for me too and thank you very much for being with us you

Channel: ThinkingAllowedTV

Views: 186,051

Keywords: Ram Dass, Buddhism, service, humanism, compassion, acceptance

Id: _skjT_uOzyo

Length: 27min 33sec (1653 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2011