Ram Dass Here and Now Ep. 184: Tools of Balance

be here now just be here now [Music] [Music] hey everyone welcome to ramdas here and now a new podcast episode this uh talk from rahm das harks back to february 19 1993 just a few years before he actually had that stroke which was 96 or seven and this is from long beach california before i get into it i just want to remind everybody about this wonderful partnership that we have with better help they are supporting the podcasts on be here now network and they're a professional counseling service and it's a secure thing done online and they'll get with you and match you up with a professional therapist and you can get started talking to somebody within uh a couple of days 48 hours and i have read where it's so difficult these days to get we've had so much stress in the last year and a half from so many places it's very difficult to actually get with i tried to help somebody out and somebody i knew said i can't i have no more time i'm sorry i can't help your friend so this is a wonderful platform and uh as i say uh here's what you do of course you go to betterhelp so that's betterhelp.com be here now because when you put in the slash be here now you'll get 10 off your first month so go to better help and try it out uh it's uh it's it's a platform where many many people have taken advantage over a million people so there you go betterhelp.com be here now so in this talk ramdas well it's a number of different things but the first one that occurred to me uh he talks about personality seems to be the realest thing for most of us we are definitely well ensconced in our personalities and so that means dealing with some of the psychological aspects of our being and many people on the spiritual path kind of jettison that a little bit of maybe spiritual bypass that we all do at one time or another and so uh it seems appropriate here with this talk from ramdas that he basically addresses that and addresses some of the psychological states that we get into like victimization being victims and you tell some really funny anecdotes around people who they all say we were made to do it and so it's uh as one of the many traps of the mind and feeling like a victim and one of the things that really struck me in this talk was he he really uh centered on how busy we get being individuals and look what's going on you know especially related to the polarization with our politics and vaccinations with the the virus and the pandemic and and wanting to really claim that right it's our birthright being an individual and as he as he puts it around us it's it's all around what do i need and what do i want yeah and in doing in getting uh sort of overwhelmed by that individual idea that we have about ourselves which is separate we throw out the web of connection to extended family and community um he says ramdas says we threw it out in our zeal to be in individuals and we ended up dealing with a tremendous amount of pathology around alienation and just look out and see all of the conspiracy stuff that's out there um all of the q anon type stuff that's out there is certainly i believe a result of deep alienation that has occurred from some of the isolation that we've had with the pandemic and much of the polarization that's going on in this country again how apt is all of that you know related to what's going on now and this is from what 1993 of course this has all been developed over many many many years so it does make sense something else that i picked out that i liked that when you get to it it's a good focus talking about our belief systems which we all have and anytime you have a belief uh you are vulnerable because a lot of that belief is predicated on projections and like and dislike and that's what we are all about uh and on the spiritual path is get to the truth of our being which is invulnerable it is not vulnerable to the whims of timer's face and uh and and this really describes ramdas over all these years really he said you and i are learning to stand nowhere to help people caught in standing somewhere and that's part of that film that we did with ramdas becoming nobody and and again he re reiterates this many many times over many many different lectures that in order to become nobody you have to become a somebody first there's got to be something there that can be transformed that's always a a sensible approach and it's a real deal because we grow up into these somebodies and sometimes we don't quite manifest the maturity of that somebody we tend to use that as a bit of a bypass too we are not quite enough of a somebody sometimes if that makes any sense uh what else is there something there's something beautiful he said and this this really uh we've we've been you know we've been working as a founder and loving the different hat love serve remember foundation around education around inclusion diversity and uh this here this is beautiful what ramadan said we have to listen to one another just to hear the pain of their predicament because the minute each of us is heard and we feel heard we are freer to let go of that particular identity and then we can meet behind behind our identities and start to play but that is similar to what i just talked about in terms of becoming somebody we have to uh we haven't hearing the pain of another person's predicament is includes what that identity and in in some cases that is fluid and to be able to hear that and not react to it for reasons of different time and space being brought up different cultural influences causes and conditions it's there's a lot to hear there really is so this is ram das from as i said 1993 long beach and again please do visit our sponsor it's not really a sponsor it's more of a partner that we are aligned with and have value systems that that as i say do align and what they do is really serviceable for people basically because it's online and this is a trusted uh company betterhelp.com go to betterhelphelp.com be here now this is the 50th anniversary to be here by now by the way we're gonna have some exciting stuff coming up this fall to 2021 uh but tune in to be herenownnetwork.com and you get all of these wonderful podcasts from so many different teachers and thought leaders i will check in with you again next time namaste there's another aspect just one more thing that we seem to be in this country anyway obsessed with personality personality seems to be the realest thing for most of us and there is a very pervasive victimization feeling in this country that we're all victims of this or that of our childhoods of economics of saddam hussein of something it would all be okay if it weren't for and i've been hearing some of the i've been reading in the newspapers some of the extraordinary extremes of this like an fbi agent embezzled two thousand dollars from the fbi which he gambled away he then was fired and he sued the fbi because he said he was handicapped because he had a gambling addiction and they can't fire him for having an addiction how about a teacher who is tardy every day and gets fired and sues the school system because she has got a compulsive lateness syndrome this one i think is the most interesting one two men were having a refrigerator race which i believe means you put a refrigerator in your back and race with it and one of them fell and hurt his back and he sued the refrigerator company for not labeling the danger [Music] it's interesting that what we're doing in a funny way is we are in the first 2k we're like medicalizing sin you know there's no morality anymore it's all a medical problem i was made to do it now partly that's true we all know and partly it's a trap of mind it's a trap of mind that keeps you feeling like a victim personality has become and personally dynamics have become such a strong framework for seeing reality that we even take the opportunities for transcendence and we cast them in psychological terms and therefore close them off here's a quote from a psychiatric text the obvious similarities between schizophrenia schizophrenic regression and the practice of yoga and zen meditation merely indicates that the general trend in oriental cultures is to withdraw into the self from overbearingly difficult physical and social reality it's all pathology it's interesting how leisure time has has allowed us to become very much focused on personality that when there's no money around that doesn't seem to be that important when you're starving to death and it may well be that that particular frame of conceptual mind is one of the places that we are just about to transcend into much more a sense of community or network or biotic identity or collective consciousness because we did this funny thing we got so busy being individual what do i need what do i want that we threw over a lot of the web the framework the extended family the the the community we threw it over in our zeal to be individual and we ended up having to deal with a tremendous amount of pathology arising out of alienation and i was part of the responsibility for that in the 60s as we'll talk about in a minute now just to balance the the thing for a moment before i go on i just want to say that there are a lot of wonderful positive things at this moment in the world as you're absorbing stuff and looking at what this moment is in terms of the world the real income of the poor has doubled in the past 40 years that means they can buy more stuff the under five death rate has been cut by fifty percent the average life expectancy in developing countries has increased by one-third less than a half of children went to primary school 40 years ago now over three quarters do they used to be access to safe water for only 10 percent of the population now it's approaching 60 percent the cold war is over nuclear tensions have eased there is a growing environmental awareness especially among the young the role of women has become recognized and valued and the uniqueness is being heard the information age is giving us global awareness information age is making accessible to us all the religious traditions all the religious traditions so we are no longer just limited by christianity or just limited by judaism or islam there is an emerging world government that everybody realizes inevitably must have some teeth the united nations there is a breakdown and a realizing of the finiteness of the myths that have dominated this country that have focused on materialism there is the growing awareness that straight materialism is not an identity with happiness the myth was if i worked hard enough and amassed enough i would be happy and you need only watch dynasty in dallas and all those things to realize the incredible suffering at the top [Music] there have been incredible leaps in medical technology practically we can live eternally if you want that it's raised incredible ethical and technological problems in its wake but this is a thing that's happening morality has come back into politics interestingly enough spearheaded by tv evangelists see it is not an ill will an ill wind that doesn't blow some good and if you want ill winds that blow good look at aids aids has awakened political psychological spiritual awakening on a vast scale it's got many people to confront death that have never done it it's awakened huge amounts of compassion in many sectors of society it's dealt with a lot of our fears and prejudices and brought them to the surface [Music] [Applause] so all in all when i look at all that list when i let it all steep into me population environment nuclear waste my god we don't know what to do with our nuclear waste it's collecting everywhere we don't know what to do with it the part of me that is a separate individual human being says i got to do something about this because i'm like the frog that suddenly woke up and said boy the water's hot and all it took was an election the election brought to the surface with ross perot poking us from the edge you know ross perot was on the morning news the other day he's got a personality that irritates the hell out of me but i really admire the role he's playing in the society because you know he's outside of the government in a more or less more or less i really must point out and uh he's therefore a goad so what he said after clinton's speech the other day was he gets an a plus for salesmanship but after all he only suggests congress and acts and those there all they all sold out to lobbyists a long time ago and then he reads quotes from all the european governments to tell how the united states is for sale and he says our work has just begun we've got to watch the congress very carefully now and if anything is awakening a participatory democracy because i feel that bill clinton and al gore are very intelligent men and they have goodness in them that's not all they have but they have goodness in them they are not tremendously aware in the sense of uh altered states of consciousness because they didn't inhale that applause all came from the back part not the church of religious science so you can rest easy [Laughter] but i feel that when you put to you know what we do with our presidents is you know how those tribes they take a maiden and they they give her jewels and for a year and then they put her in the fire it's like a sacrificial ritual and we do it every four years we sort of sacrifice somebody into our greed for power and we give them all his power and we watch them frazzle as they keep their hand in the on the transmitter of this incredible energy and then when they've turned into these terrible ghastly things we shuttle them off to houston and we start another one [Music] i'm saying all this lightly by the way i i mean i think that george bush was a he was a nice man he just wasn't very clever he wasn't very wise he was not a wise man he was not a mize man but he was a nice man but what i feel is that the administration uh needs our involvement in a way that is critical at the moment i'm talking about our meaning this group of people this kind of people because you and i are attempting to do inner work we're attempting to keep our perspectives and our context going because when i read that list of perspectives i mean is this armageddon or is this the brave new world is this about to happen or is it horrible is it beautiful what's what is it is it a bubble and a phantom for us we have to have the capacity to keep all of those in mind you can't take any one of them and hang on to it any belief system you have is vulnerable they say in the mystical tradition you can stand nowhere then you're free as long as you're standing somewhere you're uh you're you're vulnerable if you stand in heaven and look down at earth you could fall if you stand on earth and look up earth could go away if you're standing in your ego it'll die if you're standing in your mythic thing it'll weave on to something else any form is changing that's the nature of form it all changes so if you try and form includes the astral planes and all the planes other than the formless so if you have any form if you're trying to hold on to any form at all you're vulnerable and you and i are attempting to awaken to the truth of our being which is not vulnerable to the winds of time and not vulnerable to space we're awakening to awareness and awareness is it has nothing to do with you or me it just is our capacity to keep that perspective and at the same moment be involved in the world is an incredible art form because the seduction of the horror of it all or the fascination with the power or the intensity of the pleasures narrow your consciousness into an identification with your desire system and then you lose the ability to see the whole krishna the ability to see the whole gestalt does not mean a kind of um a kind of um an equanimity that is in which passion is absent what's demanded of us is simultaneously passionate involvement in life real intense breaking of the heart and joy and at the same moment a quiet spacious awareness and a quality of emptiness in which you can see the clarity of all phenomena arising in your awareness this is what a changing world needs it needs as thomas merton once said when people are drowning in a river you can't help them out if you are in the river with them you've got to find a place to stand to help them and bizarrely enough you take that and apply it here you and i are learning to stand nowhere to help people caught in standing somewhere is that too weird or can you hear it because you and i sense that it's possible for a society to be compassionate and what we have done to our poor and what we've done to our hungry and the way in which greed has gone untrammeled and we you know i work with the guatemalans through the seva foundation which is a really wonderful organization i encourage you all to learn more about it and help and there's a table out there for it um one of the things we do is work in guatemala and at one point in guatemala i may um in guatemala we found 14 villages that were near starvation in the altaplana and our budget was so tight we only had money to help four of them and we said well we'll help you for this year and we'll help the others next year and they said you don't understand whatever money you give these four will divide among thirteen because in our holy book it says when you're walking along and somebody falls you help them up and then everybody walks just a little bit slower now i'd like to ask you as the affluent tiny percentage of this society of this world are you willing to walk a little bit slower so that all of us can walk along together and and is your life representing that is my life representing that i've learned all these planes of consciousness through 25 years of drugs and meditation and yoga and gurus all that stuff and at first i'd get high and i'd say wow we're all one or it's all formless ah and then i'd come back and i'd say well that was interesting and over the years of going up and down and up and down and up and down and in and out forget up because it really isn't up and down like higher and lower these aren't really that's a that's a hype because the earth is as high as any other plane but going from plane to plane to plane to plane and after a while they start to meld a little bit so that you look at another human being and you see their personality and you see who they think they are but you also see that there's the divine mother in drag again you know i see you in there i know who you are no no i'm julia yes i know who you're saying you think you are in other words you begin to see behind the veils and then you see you see the one speaking to you speaking to itself because you see you're part of the one and it's the one in dialogue with itself and you begin to feel and integrate these planes of consciousness into your being and then you see that you're going to be free when you're not holding into one plane you're not sitting on normal waking consciousness looking up at this or out at that you're not standing anywhere you're standing at the your you are god looking at your play you are a separate entity who is the part of the play looking at god you're doing both of them at the same moment and you look around at yourself and you say what's keeping me from letting this thing happen fully and you see it's your fear it's your stash that you're afraid of letting go of because i look and i see we're all one but then i act on this plane as if we weren't and i can't yet get it together i can't get it together and yet i know that when i have integrated this and i don't know what form it takes it's not the simple one if you just give up everything and then you're free that isn't it it's not the material level that's not the game it's something about the inner space and how you deal with the stuff of life but i see that's our work as black elk said we we see more than we know and we know more than we can say you and i are our wisdom carriers at this point you wouldn't be in this room you wouldn't be in the church you wouldn't be visiting you wouldn't come to hear rhymed us it's all i mean we're a select group of nuts if you will whatever but we come together and we the something we sense we sense we are part of a deeper wisdom universe and that has in it when there's a quietness of mind it has in it a compassion a deep and real compassion not pity and not kind just sort of social kindness but real kindness that comes out of deep deep compassion that cut and you take care of the environment not because i'm going to sacrifice for the environment because but because i am the environment and i hurt this kind of consciousness is what we can feed into the system at this moment this is the kind of thing that because a government can be intelligent but it's really hard for it to be wise because it is so compromised by so many powerful worldly forces and it is only in the old days kings had wise persons around them who had nothing to do with the running of the kingdom but if you look at the political structure that doesn't really happen these days now i look back you all still here okay i look back at the last time i felt this breath of change which was as you might have guessed in the sixties now in the 60s there were a whole set of factors that worked you got president kennedy that was a new generation of president like we have again today there was the um incredible affluence in the culture that had come after the second world war that had been built up which allowed a lot of people to play there were talks about what are we going to do with our leisure in life big articles about leisure new problem in society was leisure uh there were psychedelics there were chemicals that altered consciousness and the messages that happened of those people that saw that were carried by the minstrels the rock and roll movement into the world so at a moment in the early 60s there was the sense that the human consciousness was breaking free of the prison of a set of very patriarchal vertical social institutions it was an incredible moment i mean it was a moment humorously characterized by a lot of people standing around the pentagon holding hands oving so the pentagon would rise it was characterized by the person putting the flower into the rifle of the soldier pictures that are in your images your image bank i'm sure at that time there was a sense that because of whether it was information age mobility chemistry whatever it was there was a shift in the seeing of reality so that everything that had seemed so absolutely solid started to look flexible again and that was the moment when the civil rights movement could happen that had been building for so long on so many the sweat of so many people's brows the backs of so many people it was the time of the sexual revolution when we broke out of sort of kind of victorian puritanism although queen victoria wasn't that here it turns out that royal family i'll tell you watch them suddenly everything was opening up for a moment and the citizenry had the guts to say to the government i think you're running our foreign policy from values that are not moral and that was the anti-vietnam movement it was an incredible period of time what it also had in it was a naivete it was focused around young people first of all i was already old then i mean i've been old i've missed everything along the way i was always too old for everything it was focused among young people who thought that because they had seen through the illusion in which everybody's collective mind had conspired to make real because they'd seen through it that if they just held up a flower like buddha did in his famous lecture everybody would see through the illusion and the whole thing would fall i remember we used to have maps uh charts on the wall tim larry and i as to how soon everybody would get enlightened i mean ten years was like maximum max and so everybody just charged ahead but what happened was that the momentary feeling of oops here comes anarchy here comes chaos and the fact that we polarized the culture because it was us against them in the anti-vietnam movement it started a reaction in the society i started a pendulum swing of the conservative and fundamentalist groups organizing fed by the 60s to create an incredible structure to push against that chaos that potential chaos but now we're in the 90s and i would point out that the baby boomers will be 50 in 1996. and the baby boomers have now started to enter the power domain of the establishment now the game's different isn't it now there's no them it's just us now is the time when we don't have to polarize we don't have to walk over somebody to to realize our the dream of possibility we can play from within the system we don't have to push against it we don't have to set up alternative societies i work with business groups like the social venture network that are designed people like ben and jerry's and and uh body shop and groups like that that are saying let's figure out how business can be socially responsible and compassionate and have a larger bottom line and they make their big successful corporations it's no longer the the hippie on the corner selling beads that says hey man i want to give you my money you know it's a different game this is a different moment in history if you and i want the objectives and i think we have a sense of what we're talking about we have a sense that we want a more conscious and compassionate society we have a sense that we want to open to death as part of life as rilka said to embrace death fully and hold it gently to be able to do that is extraordinary it gives life its fullness of meaning to see death as part of life process not as an error as somebody made that's part of what we would like our society to do to not be driven by fear all the time and the deepest fear is the fear of death to allow the society to regain the network the sense of community the sense of the common good the sense that you understand that your dharma or your part in the game is not only your own well-being but you also are part of systems you are what are what i'd call honoring your incarnation for me to honor my incarnation when my father was old and sick i took care of him i hadn't planned to do that but when it came time it just felt right to do that because i was a member of the family and he had taken care of me when i was little so i took care of him when he was old and it felt right and i'm a member of a participatory democracy and it feels right for me to participate and i'm a jew and it feels right for me to try to understand what that means and to honor it and to listen and to feel my way it doesn't necessarily mean i'm going to do all the practices i don't have to be a jew as somebody else as a jew should be but i can listen and turn open and learn there are hundreds of identities each of us have and to honor your incarnation fully is understanding your curriculum on earth it is freedom this is far out it's far to me that most people push against parts of their incarnation and the buddha said if you have if you're stuck with aversions or attractions you aren't free so if you're pushing against something it's got you so finally you come to terms with your age your sexuality your this your that your everything because it costs less to do it really than it does to push against it i think we would like to have a society that that mends the intergenerational gap rip in which we are not acting in a way that isn't recognizing till the seventh generation that we are honoring our responsibility to the children in terms of their the their conception their growth their education and leaving them something to play with i've been learning an immense amount over the last few years about honoring diversity and i have just one emotional example of that i was talking to rabbi zelman schachter interviewing him and i said salman if you were an israeli what would you say to an arab and he said oy god fault [Music] that's the beginning he said you know he said we have to learn to grieve with one another we have to listen to one another people of different ethnic backgrounds just to listen just to hear the pain of their predicament because the minute each of us is heard and we feel heard we are freer to let go of that particular identity and the minute we're freer to let go of that identity we can meet behind our identities and start to play but we're not going to let go until we're heard so i would like a world in which people hear each other [Applause] now when you mention change i'll just go on for about 15 more minutes if that's all right with you is that all right or is you are you too uncomfortable and then then we'll take a break and after the break we'll do uh questions and answers and a meditation stuff like that for those of you that are gluttons for punishment in the thing about change is since all phenomena change it is amazing how there is fear it's not amazing but change gives rise to fear i mean there's that great image of the caterpillar in the cocoon going into the cocoon looking up at the butterfly and saying you're never going to get me up in one of those things in a way we often would rather stay in our dingy prison than come out and play because we're afraid of change and the way you can begin to see as you're quieter the forces of resistance against change and you will begin to see the way the whole game is embedded in a web of a conspiratorial reality that says you if you change this everything else here doesn't change and slowly it'll suck that back in again and you begin you've got to stand a little outside of it you and i have a responsibility to have one foot in each camp to have a foot in the in spiritual awareness that is free of who the hell cares it's all beautiful it's all perfect it's all the play of god it's all the leela it's all a bubble a phantom a dream and the other foot in this plane of reality in which we are doing everything we can to bring consciousness divinity spirit and beauty into life and it's that balance it's that balance you and i are called upon to do that's our role in this game that's the role we've been being prepared for some of us all our lives that's what the inner and the outer when they come together that's where that inward work doesn't turn into the me generation of narcissism it ends up like the hero's return for joseph campbell or it ends up like the uh the plato's cave where he goes out and sees the sunshine and goes back into the cave to help the other it's that it's the return it's the return back in but it's not you and i aren't strong enough to stand in the marketplace without getting fried because we grew up in this conspiracy and it knows just how to suck us into its reality and therefore it demands of us that we intensify our inner practices and keep working to get that balance like i look at the morning news on television but about 15 minutes before i start i sit down and meditate so that when the news comes at me i can take it in and consume it back into spaciousness rather than you know i mean the fascination is infinite the seductions of form are infinite and if you are seeing the possibility that we as the collectivity could live in the realm of form and formlessness of of matter and spirit of the integration of all these things in our beings and all at once it behooves you as an ins as a part of it as a bodhisattva to work on yourself to be that instrument as gandhi said my life is my message how you live how you walk how you walk into the supermarket how you drive your car when you drive your car what you do with your money all of it is part and parcel how you take care of your body how you honor the sacredness of life how you work on yourself to cultivate the witness how you retreat and so you can come back how you take your vacations and use them to deepen your emptiness and your love how you practice loving how you practice generosity of spirit and compassion these are there's a hundred things that you and i can do and can be to fulfill our our mythic role in this moment in history whatever it may be whether we are just the paint on the top of 108th floor or we're minor matter in a galaxy of which there are 5 billion it's as if you live with it doesn't matter but i'll work like hell for it you live with that paradox you live with paradox all the time you embrace the paradox there's nothing to do they like the spiritual statement one does nothing and nothing is left undone that's two levels of consciousness there's a level of awareness in which you're doing nothing you're just here it's all here phenomena arising passing away arising in your consciousness ah death ah suffering ah pain ah the rose ah the birth and the other part of you has incarnated and it has human pain and human feelings and yearnings and desires and that's part of the beauty of the way form works and our job is to embrace the paradox to be with the suffering of the world with the spaciousness of allowing without saying hey somebody really screwed up because you don't even know whether it's screwed up it's just your rational mind that's a part of your separateness that thinks things got screwed up how do you know the rational mind's a trivial sub-system sitting around saying hey meta-system i think you really screwed up if i were god i'd do it differently you don't even know why it's being done the way it is what are you getting so upset about at the same moment you're a human being and you're suffering and everybody else is suffering and you do what you can to relieve suffering even though at another level you understand that suffering is part of the grace of the whole system what paradoxes you got to live with you and i have the challenge and the opportunity to do that it's absolutely incredible the resistances you will see i mean there's a lot of denial that's going on in our society at the moment of all those things i told you about i mean these things were all going on for the past 10 20 20 years when we got more poverty we did that by helping the rich more we've responded to the population explosion with our pro-life movements we've a pro we've responded to toxic waste by putting it underground where we can't see it so it'll just contaminate the groundwater we've dealt with the debt by borrowing further so we'll have money to play with we do token things we do nice things but they're still tokens we save our bottles and cans [Music] i mean it's good it's good and i don't want to knock it it's wonderful but don't let it get you off the hook too easily or we go into depression and despair and say it all stinks i mean i was with john seed he's a revolutionary deep ecologist great guy an australian he chains himself to tractors and to trees and things like that and i said john where are we in the rainforest thing which is going to affect all the climates and the rainfalls and all that stuff that you might notice i said john where are we and he says well as far as i can see it's too late i said oh yeah yeah he said it's it's probably too late he said at this point he said the inertia is so heavy of exploitation and poverty he said at this point it would take a miracle i said yeah he says yeah but he said don't underestimate us after all we came up out of the ocean onto land [Music] but it's very easy when i say to people john said it's too late and i let people sit with that what does it feel like to decide it's too late that there's nothing we can do and we blew it we blew it because we weren't conscious enough and technology got out of control and our greed got out of control buddha told us the people that take incarnation on this plane have greed and it's an interesting balance we've been struggling with these balances like the balance between business and government if business rules which it has been doing and multinationals and all it's piracy if government rules all by itself it's tyranny our balance is between piracy and tyranny it's a fascinating place we have to keep working so we some of us go into deep depressions and we resist we resist as hard as we can people on the top of the mountain are not going to step off the top of the mountain if they can help it and that's just true they might give up a little maybe a little bit if they're making fifty thousand or more ten percent surtax but the deeper deeper compassion compassion is not as powerful a motive as greed that's what we've learned thus far isn't that interesting but maybe there can be some people who represent that that league of compassion that deeper spiritual truth that comes through because the more you work on yourself spiritually the more compassion just arises spontaneously and you begin to see how armored your heart has been by your mind and a fear about you fear of your own heart because when you see somebody poor on the street if you really opened your heart they'd probably end up in your living room and you can't handle that you don't know how to set boundaries so you end up armoring your heart and you go around half alive because you're afraid of your own heart isn't that bizarre isn't that bizarre we're in the funny place where we hate the illness and we hate the cure as far as democracy it is a powerful social instrument but the situation is those that have it don't want to include those that don't and the ones that don't don't have the power to demand it and only when your spiritual consciousness has arise to the risen to the point where you no longer see anybody as them but you see them as us the serbs and the croatians the somalians the iraqis the inner city drug pushers all of them us the various faces of us if you get too focused on individual differences you lose it because behind all the different faces is the one if you only see the one and don't see all the different faces you lose it if you only see the unity and don't see the uniqueness you miss the mark what a challenge for us to keep the balance and to see our lives as instruments for bringing that balance back into the social fabric you're great you're really great thank you so much this podcast is brought to you by the love serve remember foundation and ramadas.org we appreciate you listening and we appreciate all the support that you've given us please continue that support and donate at ramadas.org we can then continue to share what ramdas has been sharing for all of these years thank you

Channel: Be Here Now Network

Views: 11,850

Rating: 4.8324022 out of 5

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

Id: y_4LDySWWuE

Length: 64min 21sec (3861 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 04 2021