You know, there is great delight
in in tuning through a variety of different methods
and really looking to each method to move you in a in its own unique way, but also keep opening you so be very generous in your opening to methods
because if you bring to them a pure heart and a yearning to be free,
they will serve you in that way. Where you get your calm opens with methods and you use them for power. You get power
and then you stuck with the power. If you use them to reinforce
your separateness, you get left in your separateness. What we are doing is we are reviewing how we can look at our life experience in a way that liberates us from suffering and liberates those with whom
we come in contact from suffering. And you say, Well, that's a negative
way of looking at it. You could say,
We are learning how to be happy with what is. And the flip that occurs
that we're really working with is to figure out
how to enjoy the unfolding storyline of your life
without being trapped by it, how to delight in it, how to enjoy
the play of the uniqueness of each form and how it works,
and how you interplay and interact without being trapped
in the narrowness of it. I have watched again and again
in this society. People get defined into a role
and they start to be scrunched up into that role
and that role traps them. For a child to see their mother
as a friend, not a mother for a
prisoner and a guard to see each other as fellow human beings
instead of just prisoner and guard. There are whole many roles
we get trapped in, and when the role has a lot of symbolic power to it, we get very trapped in it, like wealth or beauty or or something. Some uniqueness, positive or negative. We start to be so identified side
with our symbolic value and the role we're in that we starve to death
because we're we're trapped. It's like wearing an outfit
that's so flamboyant that everybody responds to the outfit
and nobody notices you. I mean, many people
who are so trapped in their roles and trapped in their symbolic value
within the society, and we all present ourselves symbolically. We all project who we think we are
and the clothes we wear and the way we walk
and the way we look at other people. That's all the image we have
of ourselves projected outward. Sometimes that's very, very strong. You're so busy being somebody that
everybody reacts to your somebody's ness and nobody reacts to you. Nobody knows. Nobody reacts to the part of you. That's the I, not the me. And so it's interesting
to learn in this lifetime how to inhabit roles lightly, how to inhabit them with love and with joy and with passion and with emptiness. How to delight in the game, in the dance, in the Lila, in the play, and begin to see your life experiences
as grace, as a set of opportunities
through which you can become free. They were handed to you. It's bizarre to get to the realization
that there were no errors in the game, that the ones that have been handed to
you were tailor made for you. All of your neuroses and your stories and your problems
and life's all the stuff. No era. Would you just conceive
of that possibility for a moment? You have to buy in. I mean, that's my show that a business. Just conceive of it for a moment,
that there are no errors in the game in the sense that you as a soul are a karmic entity. And that karmic entity, using senses,
using forms, creates out of the stuff of the universe. Those forms through which its attachments
and aversions create, through which it interacts
in order in the awakening phase to go beyond the attractions
in the versions. In other words, to get free
of your attractions and aversions, you get to get them to manifest,
to deal with them, and then you deal with them
without juicing them up with intention. But just being with them, this is very weird, very dense stuff, but it's really tasty because you begin to look at your life. The curriculum that's unfolding
is fun for me, like because I play with my guru
who's a dead guru. I mean, he's a he's an illusion. He's my he's my imaginary playmate. I mean, if you going to have an imaginary
playmate, pick one that is wise, funny, a rascal, cosmic giggle and very loving and death is really helpful. And so what comes towards me
is in, in the game he and I play
what he's laying on me to free me now. That's real crazy. Yeah. Well,
what do you got in store for me today? Well, look at this one. Oh, so, I mean, there are wonderful little lessons in my life
along the way, and I just experience
my life as an unfolding curriculum now. Maharaj as say, I'm Maharaj Nim Karoly Bob but didn't say, well, in 1995
he will have this happen. It's not that level. It is merely the dialog between the ego,
the soul and awareness, an inner dialog
going in which out of awareness these phenomena are manifesting
and dissolving and which particular ones are attended to or noticed
is the soul's karmic determination. And then how you live within it is the egos game. And by the way, just to clean up
so that I don't overstep bounds here. There are many, many, many,
many other planes of consciousness. I mean, those of you that have studied
any of the literature about astral and causal planes and and all the planes
that Sri Aurobindo talks about and the over mind and so on, the oversell,
you're dealing with something that is not conceptual
are all these planes and you're imposing
some conceptual structure to define the differences between the chakras, deal
with planes of consciousness. So the soul is not only doing work on this plane, but is doing work
on a lot of other planes as well. Karmas being run through. So a lot of your dreams, which may not
make sense on this plane, have function. It's like your soul's dreaming. And then you wake up
and you remember little of it, and the ego tries
to figure out what it's about, but it's really the soul's business that's fun. I mean, just using soul lightly. Now, don't use it in the heavy sense
because it's because, as as every Buddhist
knows, it ultimately dissolves. It's just a step on a ladder you use in order to extricate yourself
from your ego trip. And be careful. The word extrication does not mean just association or denial. It does not mean pushing away. It means breaking the identity with but I can have my mug
and it can be my AMG. Like last night
there was an old car parade and everybody was busy
being their old car. I'm a DeSoto and I'm a Packard and I'm a cut Chevy. You, you. And you could see the identity
with the form so I can say it's
my AMG and be identified with the AMG. Or I could say yeah,
I mean it's I love it. It's a wonderful car. I take care of it
and I certainly enjoy driving it. And it's an M.G. and I can say it's a body. I love it,
I enjoy it, I'm working with it. I'm doing the best I can with it. It is slowly decaying. It's probably going to decay and die. I assume. I have no reason
not to think it's telling. It's not going. And the interesting question is how do I manage that temple? The temple for consciousness? How do I take care of my body? How do I do it without being trapped? By taking care of it? You will watch that the minute
you get something wrong with you, your consciousness will narrow if you're not very careful
until you're busy being your symptom and the
the caricature of all the old folks sitting on the bench
in Saint Petersburg or in Arizona having their morning organ recital, describing. And you the minute you start to cultivate
these techniques of mindfulness, you begin to see the game
that you're playing, the life you're living, the way
it's unfolding, the roles you're in. What you'll learn is that you have
a unique karmic predicament, and that will manifest in certain ways
at each moment. And to the extent
that you push against the manifestation, it takes a lot of juice. To the extent you cling to the
manifestation, it takes a lot of juice. And ultimately what you're doing
is dancing deeply but lightly. There's no clinging the statement
Hold on tightly, let go lightly, be in it, but don't cling
and the two separate. It's interesting because when we love
somebody, we want to possess them. We want more of them. We want to collect. We keep wanting to hold it
and we keep getting all of these old moldering dead butterflies
in our collection, you know, old loves that were a moment of love. And then we destroy that
through possessing it. And the letting go and letting go
and letting go, holding tightly, letting go, holding tightly of your interpretation
of the moment and letting go like what is this moment?
There are dozens of ways. It is for hundreds of ways. If each person defined this moment,
we would define it in each in our own unique way. And yet we are sharing a moment. And if you get into that's my take
and this is the only reality I work a lot with the third Chinese
patriarch of Zen and I just take phrases. I mean, I always work with
the first phrases, which you've all heard. The great way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences. And you think about all the preferences you have color, food, people, places, comforts, experiences. Think of them, think of them. Think of the thousands. You're a sea of opinions and prejudices and attitudes and wants and dislikes
and so on. And think of how many times
you've gotten caught in them of being a person with an opinion and feel how contracting that is. And you say,
But I've got to have opinions. I mean, how will I know
whether to walk across the street or not? Now, can you think about having opinions
and not having opinions stretch your mind
a little bit to allow for the possibility that you can functionally have opinions, but that you are not trapped by them,
that you are lightly in them? Yeah, sure. If you say to me I said, Gee,
it's cold in here, could we warm it up? But I'm not spending the rest of the day
having been cold or just then I don't. Hold it now. No moment now. Pneumonia, pneumonia and pneumonia. I don't know what you hear it. Just two of the phrases. The stanzas slow with a single stroke. We are freed from bondage. Nothing clings to us and we hold to
nothing. All is empty, clear, self illuminating third plane awareness clear, illuminating present yes sees the soul unfolding its karma sees the ego at work. Awareness doesn't see it, it sees it. It's all within it. All is empty, clear and self illuminating,
with no exertion of the mind's power. You don't to think about it. You just rested it here, thought, feeling, knowledge
and imagination are of no value in this world of such illness. There is neither self nor other than self. And you could take just those lines
and work with them for a whole year. Believe me, these are methods we're talking about now. They're methods
for stretching your consciousness so that you allow yourself
to inhabit the fullness of your being, which is ego and soul and awareness. Now there's just a few lines. The next one I want to read to come
directly into harmony with this reality. Now it's describing another method
just simply say when doubts arise. Not to, not to. In this, not to. Nothing is separate. Nothing is excluded,
no matter when or where. Enlightenment means entering this truth. And finally, emptiness
here, emptiness there. But the infinite universe stands
always before your eyes Phenomena are arising. We're all here together and we're all here
in a quality of emptiness in which if you go back in your mind
far enough behind the me and the eye and what the senses are telling
you, just keep drawing the awareness back and back and back. What you come into is just empty presence. And yet all the phenomena are here. But the mind isn't grabbing
at the phenomena. It's not clinging, it's not avoiding. It's not pulling, it's not pushing,
it's not coming, it's not going. It's just another moment. Are Maharaj you used to say to me, Ramdas,
you shouldn't be with people very much. You should be alone,
you should take your food alone, you should eat alone, you should be alone. So I went back to the hotel where all of the devotees,
the Western devotees were hanging out. And I put a sign up on my door
that said, Do not disturb. And I stayed in my room. Two days later, a couple that was with us
had a fight during the night. The next morning
they were with Maharaj, me and Maharaj, you said you were fighting
and they said yes. And he said, When were you fighting?
And they said During the night. Well, did you go to Ram Dass? No. He had a sign on his door
saying Do not disturb. You didn't go to Ram Dass,
he wasn't there for you. And he looked at me with disgust. And I was about to say to him,
But Maharaj, you said I was supposed to be alone. But in those conflicting messages,
I found a message because at first you have to be alone
by pulling back from people. But you understand what the game is. Finally, the game is to be with people, yet always be alone. Now, how many of you
take the feeling of aloneness and feel it as pathology? Have you ever thought of flipping it
around? Just that little flip. There's an incredible line about the nature
of the potential of relationship. This beautiful quote from the etching. And I it's one of my favorite quotes to use at weddings. The master said. Life leads the thoughtful person
on a path of many windings. Now the course is checked. Now it runs straight again. Here, wing
thoughts may pour freely forth in words, but there the heavy burden of knowledge must be shut away in silence. But when two people are at one
in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze. And when two people understand each other
in their inmost hearts, their words are sweet and strong, like the fragrance of orchids. Now we're talking about souls
hanging out together, souls
who don't need anything from each other. They both are just watching. The unfolding the unfolding on the ego
level may involve their interaction, the roles through which they interact, but the souls are just sharing a delight in the unfolding of the dance at certain stages in the journey. If you have a choice, it's
wonderful to have other beings around you. Sometimes called the sad song
or the Sangha, a community of other beings like
our gathered in this room that recognize what the journey or the curriculum
is about, that we are born into here and they help you. We help each other. And it's a very precious thing
to have other people you meet and know that are journeying
on the path together. And it's interesting
to examine the contracts we make with fellow human beings, because most of the relationships
we enter into our little ego level in which I am somebody and I enter
into a contract with you as somebody. And usually the nature of the contract is
I won't bug you or somebody else if you don't bug mine, I'll
allow you to be who you think you are. If you'll allow me to be who I think I am, basically is
what we're saying to each other. The difference is
that when you meet with Satsang, you say, I am trapped in thinking I'm
somebody you are trapped. Could we help each other get free? Now, the peculiar circumstance is
when you make that contract with somebody and they come up and say, you're trapped,
you wake up, you say you're trapped,
what do you know about it? Because when somebody is trapped,
they are trapped, meaning they think it's real.
And in their reality, your criticism is seen as a criticism,
not as a helpful hint. So if you're going to enter into the relation of sangha
or such son with this somebody, you've got to realize that
truth is a little scary to live with. It's much better to live with truth,
however, than with the kind of numbing deception of of all of us making believe a reality is real mean. When you look at the way the violence that consistency has done to your truth, it's staggering is when you understand that, you move in
and out of all these different levels, like Maharaj, when I was with him, he'd
just be floating around in levels. I remember once he said he looked at
it was he like he just came out of trains? He says, All the money in the world is mine. Okay. It's a great line, isn't it? I mean, I try to think
of the ramifications of that. And the pope thought he had some all the money in the world is mine. And then a few minutes
later, he's just here and he looks very says, I can do nothing. God does everything I can do
nothing God does. Are you now at one level, it's just like the Ananda
my mind quotes yesterday. One of them is I serve my husband
as if they were God. That's a dualistic devotional practice
or path or statement. In dualism. In dualism
you spend your time loving the beloved. In non dualism you are the beloved. You exist on both planes. How do you train your awareness
so that it doesn't get trapped in one plane and then cut off your access
to the other planes? That's what the issue is, and you begin to see how your definitions of yourself
keep trapping you, let alone the projections
that you have two other people, let alone their projections on you. So you and I live in a sea
of projective systems, some of which are coming
out of our own desires, needs, fears, attraction, aversions,
preferences, prejudices, opinions, and some of which are coming from
everybody else's. And the question of
how do you dance through all that without ending up completely caught in it, especially
when the one's coming out of you and the ones coming out of them
say the same thing. That's a real conspiracy. See, the predicament is as you wake
and you realize you have been the perpetrator of the conspiracy
you got caught in. It's not like it's not real paranoia. It's not like they did it to me. They've got this terrible conspiracy. You're is. You are it. We are it. We are the conspiracy. And the interesting question is,
when you extricate your awareness from being part of the conspiracy,
what happens if you're just doing it
in a half baked way? At first you're busy telling everybody
you've gotten free of the conspiracy, and then they usually imprison
you somewhere because you don't
get free of the conspiracy. But a mature person isn't in the
conspiracy and is not in the conspiracy, even to the point
of putting down the conspiracy. They're just not in the conspiracy. They're living in a different universe
and therefore they're being is free of that conceptual homogeneous field. And that freedom is what they offer
to another human being, the freeze them. And it's as if we all meet through our prison cells are in there. What's it like? Do you know how to get out? No. Do you? Yeah. Oh, my. They put me on my own. But you were. And to see the maturity of being able
to extricate your awareness from entrapment, enroll without violence,
and fulfilling the roles at the same time, but fulfilling them from a different,
different, different place. When I took care of Dad, my father
during the last years of his life, when I first started to take care of him,
as I've told you before, some of you I did it so much out of righteousness. I mean, I was giving up something to go
and make my apartment in the basement of his house
and do that as my base camp. And when you're 50 years old, to go back to being Richard in a house
where somebody else is the father, when, you know, I wasn't even Ramdas
in the house, it's very schizophrenic. And I was righteous, I was milking it. And people would say, Aren't
you good taking care of your father? I'd say, Well, somebody has to do it. And I, I just get what I could out of it. You know, I but you know, any tack you take with
your mind gets boring after a while. I mean, you can only milk righteousness. So many changing of Pampers
and so many feeding of food and so many, you know, you can. I'm righteously
helping you down the steps. I'm righteously you know, you get bored with any trip. They're all too finite. So then I moved into to another one. I thought that one fell away and I decided
I was my father was karma yoga. So I was using my father to get
enlightened for the benefit of all beings. And I didn't necessarily have to tell him
that, but basically that's what it was. I'm helping you
with non-attached movement. Now we are moving here
with not attachment or money per meaning. Yes, literally. I was really puckish. Yogi serving my father and that got boring after a while
and it just kept arriving at different levels of being together
until finally the mind trips were gone. The conscious, the
the archetypal storylines were dissolving and all there was was he was being
and I was being and the nature of the way of things
in the karmic unfolding of our lives as father child at this stage
in our lives, had this particular dynamic going in, which that was the part
that awareness played through him, and that was the part
awareness played through me and there was nothing
personal involved in it at all. It was like a tree
becoming a tree or a flower blooming. It was just the natural way of things. It was as they say in Zen Buddhism,
nothing special. It was nothing out of the ordinary. It was just the way of things. It was like
tuning into the harmony of the universe. And when you are tuned,
when you're listening to what does it mean
that I'm a political entity? What does it mean
that I'm a social entity? What does it mean
that I'm a religious entity? What it means that I'm a sexual entity? What does it mean
that I'm a cultural entity? What does it mean that etc., etc. I'm a biotic community entity hearing the nature, how freedom comes through,
the investing in form freedom through form statement in the Heart Sutra form is no other than emptiness. Emptiness no other than form. The art is not to deny form
in order to grab at emptiness, but to have the emptiness and fulfill the form. And when you quiet down
enough and listen in your own life to hear your unique manifestation and you're really quiet,
you get through the obsession with individualism that you had as an ego
in our culture at this moment. And you realize you are part of systems, you're part of family,
you're part of all of these different communities, ethnic groups,
all of this stuff. And then you bring to that
with your awareness, the listening to hear how you manifest
within that system in a way that is not with attraction and not with aversion,
but really playing your part, playing your part, dancing the dance. So I listen and I hear I have certain
skills, I have certain connections, so I have certain opportunities
to talk to certain people. Those things when I listen to hear,
how will I manifest, say, in the political field, I hear, well,
there are these opportunities, there is this skill. When I listen that comes through
and I can say to somebody that the top or whatever I can say
and it can enter into my way of being a political person. And in the same way
I'm part of the economic systems of the of the physical plane,
how can I honor the economics of it? Not by putting it down,
even though it traps most people and not by elevating it to worship
as most people also do. I mean, if you look at the dollar bill and that wonderful pyramid
that the Masons have on there with the top,
the eyes separated from the rest of it, you understand that all of the solidity
of the whole system only works when it is in connection
with what the eye of God, the eye of the one,
the balance to another plane. That is that's a perfect description
of planes, of consciousness on every dollar bill. And when I listen, I say, Well,
what have I got to contribute? You wonder what kind of a bargain
should I make about money, about about economics to fulfill it? Should I amass a lot of money
and give it away or hold it or spend it? Or what should I do? There's no rule in the book about what
you do. Each person has to listen, to hear. I mean, I deal with people
that are that have hardly anything. They are way below the poverty level
and they are a peace. I know people like that in India. I certainly know people like that. I know people who are so wealthy, they are on the Fortune
500 wealthiest people in America. Some of them are happy,
some of them aren't, but often they are more trapped by money
than the people who don't have it. And then many times the people
who don't have it are obsessed with it, and the people who have some are afraid
they're going to lose it, they won't have enough. And the amount of consciousness caught in
the domain of economics is amazing. And I found myself working with the business community
because I looked around and I said, What I have to share is Dharma,
what I've learned, what I've been doing for the past 25,
30 years, since business is the major social institution in the world
at the moment, it's more powerful. The nation states, it's more powerful. And religions can I play with the beast? So I got involved with business people and I started to hang out in a group
called the Social Venture Network. They're easy business people to be with. They're all people like Ben and Jerry
and Reebok and the Levi's and people
that are good persons in business, but the conspiracy within business to see business
as a certain way that it has to be. This is all ego level. It's very interesting when you're in India and you meet somebody
who does business as Dharma and you understand
there is an incredible thing for the West to learn about business,
about how you do business as Dharma. It's the same way
as how you raise a child as Dharma. It's the same way
as how you make love as Dharma. It's the same way as how you do any relationship in terms of Dharma. Dharma meaning how can you be in this form in a way that does not create suffering, in a way that liberates? How can I act in a way that does not exacerbate suffering? That seems very logical to me, even to my mind. Ben and Jerry told me at one
point it's been published, but Ben and Jerry's said that they started out, you know, in a garage
with an ice cream making it. They tried to started, whether it be donut
makers or ice cream makers. And the ice cream seemed easier. So they made ice cream. They were too hippies
and they made ice cream. And and pretty soon
they were making more and more ice cream and they were having other
ice cream places and they were suddenly in business
and they said, We don't want to be in business.
What the hell? We hate business. And Ben had a friend,
that old man in New Jersey, and he went to visit him
who had been in business for many years. And he said, Ben said, I'm going
to give this up. I don't like business. The guy says, if you don't like it,
won't you change it? And that's an interesting question. How do you take business
and make it dharmic? Like who is a competitor? Is that them or is it us? I mean, the the fun story,
I enjoyed telling it CBN, which again,
many of you know, but it's the story about when I put out with the group of people,
we put out a beautiful four record album with a beautiful booklet and a lovely box
that was called Love Serve, Remember, and it was a mail order
item for four and a half dollars some years ago. And my father took a look at it. He was a major business player and he said Pretty good product. I mean, he didn't listen to it,
but he looked at it and I said, Yeah. And he said, Boy, it looks like,
what do you train for? And after all, you could get a
lot more for this than that. I said, you're probably right. He says, you could charge $10 for this. Yeah, he said, Would fewer people buy it? I said, no. He said, I don't understand you you against capitalism and what have I raised here? I mean, I don't mind you being a Hindu,
but you're not against capitalism. And I said,
I try to think of how to explain to them. And I said, Dad, you remember last year Dad was also a lawyer
besides being a business person. And I said, remember last year
you tried a case for Henry? Yeah, I remember. You were quite hard on that. Yeah, I had to spend a lot of time
at the law library. That was a tough case, dammit. But you want it? Yeah, I said, well, you know, you are. Your firm is known for charging
pretty hefty fees. What did you charge, Henry? It must have been a mint. Don't be out of your mind. It's
Uncle Henry. Of course I didn't. I said, Well, that's my problem. When you can find somebody
who isn't Uncle Henry, I'll rip off from Main Street. It's interesting to create systems in which you see others. How can you get the top thing from the
get the most from them them? Not from us,
but from them for the benefit of us. And what you create is a certain
kind of boundary of your consciousness that it's really hard to get through
and you end up being isolated by it to examine in businesses the relation between a CEO
who takes something like 80 times the salary of an employee and then the CEO says,
we're all one big family. Does that mean that CEO is worth 80 times? Is that a CEO working 80 times harder? Is that benefit that much? The cost of that money is not free to the system. The cost of that money is extremely harsh on the ability of all of us to be us now. I mean, I can't be a purist about it, but I can hear the directions
it has to go. The question of How do you live with us? And so you look and you say at any business,
who are all the stakeholders? There are the
there's the board of directors, there are the investors,
there are the employees, there is the staff,
there are the competitors. There are the the suppliers. They are all stakeholders in the game. And ultimately the issue is what is a way to be with all of these stakeholders is to optimize the relief of suffering and the amount
of compassion in the system. And I am one of the stakeholders,
but just one of them. And to start to look at business
like just the issue of sustainability, of resources,
sustainability of environment, I mean, what kind of consciousness shift
in business is there where the economics
of making decision owns that recycle or renew or limit
the use of nonrenewable resources? When does that value system shift? Like I've just been through
a bizarre set of dramas about this because when these companies attempt to shift the game, the society
doesn't say, Oh, how wonderful. Well,
somebody is reminding us of the Dharma. If you are making, you know, 50 times what your next employee is making,
you don't want to be reminded of that. Particularly you want to stay
within your rationalizations. And what happens very interesting is like Anita Roddick in the body Shop, Anita is a very caring human being
and she really wanted to involve indigenous peoples in developing countries
with the opportunity to make livings serving with products
and so on. And she tried and she's also a hell of a saleswoman,
and she just said what she was doing. She's got a huge company. I mean, it's a multi-billion
dollar company. And the amount that that product is
is a tiny, tiny little segment. So the press comes along and says, phony. The press says you're bad because you're saying,
we do this, but you only do it a little. Now, I think she overstated her case. And I think that if you're going to play
this game of shifting the business, mind you, damn well better be impeccable because what you open yourself to
is the cynicism that exists in the system
when it tries to change one of the major articles criticizing
The Body Shop was published by one of the other members
of Social Venture Network. It's like one club this is a group of people
that have come together to bring sustainability
and justice into business. And so Business Ethics Magazine published this article
by and time and time just was out to get he was 60 minutes journalism kind of
mentality Connie Chung you know get them is it makes good news good media so we came to a meeting where really the places was dissolving
into camps was such a hot issue because this meant loss of millions
of dollars of revenue to the Body Shop
meant that many of their franchisees were threatened,
whether they could survive because they were suddenly
being labeled as bad guys. And one of the very wise people of our organization, Josh Mailman, who started it actually,
he said, what we need is a Quaker style meeting. So we had a meeting,
an open meeting around the issue and we said to everybody and they asked me
to lead the meeting and we said let's just deal with people's feelings about the situation since the facts are going
to be interpreted one way or the other. Let's not stay with the facts
at the moment. Just deal with the feelings. And between each person's comment,
let's have some silence and let's just hear each other. And there must have been 200 people
in the room and just different people spoke up about their pain or their feeling
of the responsibility of journalism or the responsibility of businesses
or the conflict within a family or or how everybody
should go ahead and do it. I mean, there were all the different ways in which we were hearing it,
but we were listening to one another, and we came out of that meeting
feeling like the organization was finally justifying itself
because we were growing in hearing how clean businesses had to be
and how they had to work. Like the result of
that is very interesting because the result of that
is that a Kirk Hansen, who was a professor
at the Stanford Business School, a very reputable, wonderful professor,
has been hired now by the Body Shop to do an external audit
of their socially responsible practices. In other words,
what you do ultimately is you self audit or you hire an independent agency to audit
you and publish the results. In other words, body shop is going to be able to say
We're not good and we're not bad, we're just working at it,
and this is how we're working it. And every era that Kirk will show us
will do what we can to start to clean up our end. That's a constructive next step
in this whole process of change. And I'm
sorry to belabor the story so much, but I think it's an
important way of showing you what bringing Dharma into it is about. It's to reminding people to not get so locked in polarization that you don't hear the the compassionate
human side of the process going on and turn it back into a process,
into a dance, into a movement. And I am amazed in that organization
of going from five years ago when I first went into that organization, was invited
in because I'm not a business person. They have a small percentage
of sort of weird and kooky people and they snuck me in on that one. Funding pay the dues they went from treating me
as somebody aberrations, you know. And in five years we've changed around until we are really,
really listening to one another. And I went into a situation
where when business people were talking and I come into the room,
they think there's the holy person. They stop talking until I went away
because they were putting through a deal of some sort
that I wouldn't be interested in. And over the years, we've just come
slowly, slowly, slowly to listen to one another and respect one another. We just had an incredible conference
called Spirit and Business that Bernie Glassman, who's a Zen
monk in New York and I co-chaired and the business community, invited us
in and we did mantra together and we had a fire ceremony
and they threw pinecones into the fire. I mean, they couldn't
believe they were even doing it. At one point, Mitch Kapoor, who started
the Lotus Company, was throwing his plate, looked at me like,
could this be happening? I mean, and so I think I'm telling that story, I'm sure, out of self-aggrandizement, but I, I think now we need to cool it down,
whoever does those things. Thank you. There we go. Tighten your seatbelts. I tell you that story
because what I'm interested in is us examining the interplay, mindfulness
between, in a way, the soul and the ego, between your life
stuff, the stuff of life, like the economics of life
and the moral issues and all of the stuff. So you quiet enough to just sort of
feel your way into how it is and start to work with understanding
the unfolding of your own life from a very quiet place
inside your own being. So you're not so
busy doing it all the time. Funny,
we All have this this cultural thing. What do you do? What are you going to do today or what are you doing? Hey, what are you doing? What've you been up to? And yet the thing we yearn for,
the satisfaction, the feeling of fulfillment
comes out of the being. Thus, in the moment. And this is why this book on aging pardon my randomness,
but it all fits together in my mind. This book on aging is so appropriate
for me to be dealing with at this moment,
not just because I'm 64, but also because that whole quality of quietness, of reflectiveness, of space,
of of the wisdom source, the intuitive wisdom
source is so scrunched out of the society by our obsession with technology, which makes old people obsolete with our dysfunctional mythology,
because it's all around thinking your way out of everything
and being an activist. Like there was a moment
when I was talking to a guy who writes speeches for Bill Clinton
in the White House, and I said to him, Tell me in the White House,
is there anybody there that is not in a line capacity
that doesn't have power, that is merely there to hold the space? Is there anybody reflective? Not. And he reflected on it and he said, no, there is nobody. Probably the cat or some, but all the people are all busy. It's like putting out fires all day. They're all busy reacting
and thinking their way out of and and just like that all the time. And if you recall, in the old days, heads of state
used to have elder counsels or something. They recognized there was wisdom. And the wisdom came out of people
that stood back from the game enough
to have some perspective. So they could say, Yeah, that's true,
but consider that. And we have in effect lost that we don't value it. And now there is an interesting moment
in history because as the baby boomers become 50 starting in 1996, the numbers in the system change so that the old people
are just coming into power. I mean, the AARP doesn't even know
what to do with all its power yet. That's the American Association of Retired Persons that all of us are
become members of after 50 because it's a great lobby for insurance, for housing, for food, for medical care. It has no consciousness at all about inner work, social role, about change. It's amazing
that aging in a youth oriented culture is seen as a problem. Can you imagine a stage of life
being a problem? And we get caught in it in our own minds. My skin is sagging. I got a problem. I'm not sexy. I got a problem. I don't have my worldly power anymore
over a lot of people. I have a problem. Look at the difference
between a problem and now. What will I do now? What can I be now? What can I open to? Because these things we're talking about,
about the perspective that comes from soul in relation to ego,
that comes from just standing back that little bit,
that perspective is exactly what aging as honored
properly brings into the society. Because at that stage of life,
which we have no rituals for entering the stage, we do not articulate the roles
within that stage. We don't respect it. And it's not going to come from young people who say, Oh,
you know what, we're missing? We're missing old wise people. It's going to be the fact that the old wise people have the numbers
and they're going to say, You're going to respect us
because this is who we are and we're tired of buying your model
of who we are. But we're caught in it because we were
you just a little while ago laying it on them,
and now we're them and it stinks. So we're going to change it
because when we were us, we had the numbers, but now we are them
and now we have the numbers. So it's all going to change. So believe me,
every bus is going to kneel, every senator is going to kneel. What I saw in my own life was that I
if I weren't very mindful, I was going to just slide
into a way of looking at myself. That was the cultural consensus
of who I must be because of the age I was. I just saw it happening. The story I tell, which I'm starting
my book with actually is being on the train in the evening, going from Westport,
Connecticut, to Grand Central Station. And I the Westport station was closed and
so I had to buy the ticket on the train. And the conductor came through
and he said tickets. And I said, I have to purchase my ticket. And he said, What kind do you want? I said, Do I have a choice? And he said, Regular or senior? I was 62. I had never thought about that before, the new choice. And I said, Senior, I did like when I was 18,
I went in for my first beer in New York. Beer, you know, when the bartender said,
Let me see your ID, you know, this guy didn't ask my ID,
he just gave me a senior ticket. I said, How much is this?
He said, Four and a half. I said, How much is a regular ticket? He said, Seven a half. I was very pleased,
but as he walked away, I had this ticket. It says senior citizen on it,
and I realized that I had put on a coat that was very strangely fitting. It has certainly didn't
have any inner experience of who I was. I didn't think of
myself as a senior citizen, and I saw how much other stuff went with that senior citizen nurse that it didn't come free. It come free. It came with a whole lot of attitudes
and values and expectations and so on. And if you look at the role models
we have for aging, for successful aging,
it's people that stay young that are 230, are still playing tennis. You know, now there's absolutely nothing wrong with playing
tennis over a hundred years old. I think it's superb. I mean, blessings to you. But to make that the role model seems
to me to have some massive denial in it. It really does. And I'll take it even further
to just push the idea that when the body starts to break down, to treat those changes as only pathology
and not as the conditions for work on consciousness seems to me
it's blowing a hell of an opportunity. It seems to me that your life offers you a set of circumstances to work with,
and everybody's got them. You scratch the surface of everybody
in the room and there is suffering every body little bit here
and there and that stuff. Once you see what your curriculum is,
that becomes the grist, that becomes the stuff you work
with through which you become aware. That's the soul's way of working
with the ego storyline, the soul is using the egos as the world turns. It's melodrama, it's storyline
as its vehicle for working out it's karma. Now the question is
where is your identity? Is your identity with ego, with soul? And then of course,
we've got identity as awareness. And I'll tell you that
until you figure out that you fulfill all the planes
and are attached to none of them, you don't even begin to understand
what freedom feels like because freedom isn't pushing away any plane of consciousness so that when taking care of Dad, I realized after he died
what an incredible teaching that had been for me,
what a gift I had received. First I had come back into the family. I had come back
and honoring my father in this way. That was part of my incarnation,
to honor my father. That's the way he took care of me
when I was a baby. Now I was taking care of him, but also it was the completion
of some work with us and he went from being one personality
to another. And as his personality changed,
we met in new ways and we met in new ways, and we came up
until we were just being together. And I saw that when I had completed that,
when Dad died and I had completed the estate
and all that stuff that I had honored, that component of my incarnation and honoring didn't mean holding on to it
or grabbing it or pushing it away. And I saw that back in the sixties
when I turned on and I got so high,
I said, The family doesn't understand. I can't hang out with them.
They bring me down. I've got to go do my own trip
for the benefit of all beings. You want to step. And I finally had to understand that
to honor my incarnation, meant
to honor the systems of which I'm a part. And it's led me much more to be involved
in politics, much more to be involved in social issues,
much more to be involved in philanthropic stuff, much more
to be involved in health issues and so on. Not out of any goody goody gum, you know, on ice on I good to do all that. But after a while you just it's like you're settling into a hot tub. You're settling into your Dharma, you're
settling into your way of being in life. Somebody comes up to me and says,
I love to meditate. I love to do spiritual work,
but I have these kids who have something wrong in their I love to run the marathon,
but I have arthritis. Now, where is the suffering? They're partly the sufferings in the arthritis, but partly the suffering is in the in the tension
created by having the desire of I could be happy if I were doing this, although the conditions
are not allowing me to do it, then I just look at what happens
when you get old. You start to lose your hearing
a little bit. You can't see so well
and you don't move so fast. And when I go into a meditation course,
it's funny. What you do is you pull your awareness
in from your ears, hearing from your eyes, seeing, and you sit still. Could it be that there is a message that there is an inner curriculum
for human beings, that they are finally free to explore,
but they are too frightened to explore? And so they keep clinging to repertoire
options. Andrew Carnegie When somebody said, You've got so much money,
why do you keep doing more? He says, I forgot how to stop. I forgot how to stop. You and I are playing
with this deliciously delicate process because if you push too hard
to get free of what you've been trapped in, that very pushing in traps you, the avoidance of stuff becomes a trap. People would say,
I've got to live in the country. I can't stand the city. It brings me down. They're like crippled by that concept. If I choose, I'll choose to live in Marin. It's lovely, but if I don't live in Marin, it'll be lovely. I do live in Milan,
it'll be lovely. It'll all pass. It's all disintegrating. It's all very precious. The moment is the moment. I presented a model, a functional model
for practice, for conceiving
of what the spiritual journey is about. And what we had when we looked at
the whole story of Lifetime of Incarnation is we have what you'd call ascend
a descent ascent descent you have and descent and ascend isn't value judgments is just
a directional statement of movement awareness has in some mysterious way
which you don't know has manifested as a multiplicity
of entities which we will now call souls, and those each have their own unique
karmic storyline, and those souls then take incarnation
somewhere or other. When it's appropriate to work out
whatever they working out. And we are that product to the extent that we are egos, we are somebody,
we come down and we become somebody. And as that awareness
starts to identify as a soul and immediately
feel separate from the totality, and then it takes birth as a body
and then when we are born and then we separate from our mother
and all, we begin to experience
another separation now as ego. So it's a separation within a separation,
if you will. That's the descent
into more and more dance form. And that form is what we live out
as an incarnation. Somewhere along the line in that story,
we awaken. We begin to realize
that we are not only the incarnation, that there is more
to us than meets the eyes, and we begin the more than we think we are,
we are. And that leads us to relook
at our experiences and to open to new experiences
that allow us to enter into other planes of consciousness, other perspectives,
other ways of looking at it, and that awakening starts. And at first, because you have been in such a thick
substance, you've been so feeling often
very and trapped in your story, in your body, in your suffering
and whatever. When you awaken, there is a joy, a breath. It's like coming above the smog. When you fly. But there is also a kind of fear of getting trapped again and a tendency to push against the stuff
you were trapped in. You can use that like a rocket booster
to get you out there, push against the
renunciation path, basically. But ultimately, as you get established
more as a soul, more established as just awareness,
which isn't even you anymore, as those become more real
and you become comfortable in them, then you look
and you see that the incarnation that you have taken wasn't an era
and it wasn't a failure. And you're not making mistakes. It is just an unfolding process
and it's nothing so personal about it all. Your personality isn't that interesting, and at that point you start to, from a
soul's point of view, start to inhabit your incarnation
at first resignedly and then ultimately joyfully, because it's
just God at play, it's just form. So you went from the descent into form
initially, then you awaken and awaken your awareness going into more
and more into your awareness is awareness. That's the ascent. And then there's the next stage
where the ascent starts to finally start pushing against the more dense
forms and enters into them. And then there is the descent. And then you see that the whole process
is constantly the ascent and descent. And it's all it's just a liquid process
in which both are going on all the time. You're constantly bringing spirit down into form
and you're constantly as form, moving towards spirit
or moving towards formless. It's the dance of form and formless. It's the dance of the devotee
and the guru. It's the dance of the lover
and the beloved. It's a dialog that goes the foreplay,
the consummation, the foreplay. The consummation just keeps
dancing back and forth in those things. And you begin to experience
your life as that, as moving in and out
of all of these planes all the time. And there are some there's some
just incredible literature that describes all this. If you ever have a chance to read
any of Sri Aurobindo's works, it's a great poem of Savitri, which describes the goddess coming to Earth as Savitri and her experiences on Earth with full consciousness of her
planes, her higher planes along the way, what we call an avatar, is somebody who takes birth on the physical plane
but doesn't get lost in it, remains aware of their spiritual identity
all the way through. Most of us get lost, and then we wake up
a little bit or more or less. So with that backdrop, we can see that
a lot of our spiritual practices are moving us from ego to soul. We're clawing our way up
out of the darkness, supposedly, which turns out not to be dark at all,
but it seems shadowy from where we've been and we climb up. And then when we're a soul and we're
established in smallness, then we start to have that beautiful dialog that love
that Rumi and Kabir speak about the. The intimate with the beloved,
with the guest. Where are you? Oh, friend, where have you been? Where can I find you? I hunger to be with you. And there is this other kind of. It's no longer a practice. It's like a making love celebration
of the many with the one you're constantly oh oh. And I can only invite you
to read that poetry. To feel that,
to feel that the separation of you from all of it is not a mistake. It's not a failure. It's part of the dance
of form and formlessness so that you are the one and you are the many. And then after that, the next part of the practice
is the practice of integration of, learning
how to keep all this going at once, how to have integrity across your life
so that you don't act one way at a retreat and then go out and act another way later
so that you learn how not to get lost in the stuff of your life,
but to stay aware and yet stay involved. That whole integration process is is very,
very fascinating because you keep feeling is your mind is quiet, how
you keep getting lost one way or another. You know, a lot of people
go in a la la land and as they usually hear,
they lose their zip code. They they don't they lose their ground. They forget their ground. They're so high in space. They lose their ground. And many people are so afraid of losing
the ground, they won't take a little leap. They won't even open to the soul ness of their being
because they're afraid of loss of control, their mind is so strong,
the ego mind is so strong. They're terribly frightened
of losing control. And the integrity of the whole system
is that you and I are a meeting
as personalities, as egos. You and I are meeting as souls. And there is awareness here. And all of that is true. And how are you and I going to figure out
how to be together like that, not be together
as egos, hoping to become something else, but actually be together where those three plans are real for us. So when we meet, you're meeting yourself really in a different form in marriages. When I work with couples or in or perform marriage ceremonies, things like that,
I always visualize a triangle. People come together
and when it is the yoga of relationship through each other, they meet the being that lies just behind the awareness. That is both of them the one. And they come into the one
through each other, through all of the forms of their dialog
with one another. Making love and talking and cooking and
walking and all of that are all vehicles for meeting in the space of just shared,
which is sweet, like the smell of orchids. It's that quote from the teaching, and then that one dances as two. And to get to the point
where you're involved with somebody in relationship, in work, in marriage
or children, and you're aware and you're both aware
of the play of the forms and you're delighting in it together,
the play of the forms, which are your separateness
and that's an extraordinary experiment. Extraordinary experiment. And the tricky one is keeping your consciousness mindful enough
so you don't get your self trapped in a role or an identity,
but you're constantly fulfilling your roles,
but always as vehicles for becoming free, realizing that what we are about here
on Earth is to become free. And why forget? Why just do it. And when you're free, you'll know why. That's the promise you'll be. Why you won't know why you'll be why.
