Ram Dass: "Judaism and Spirituality"

i [Music] m because of my brothers and friends because of my sisters and friends please let me ask please let me see peace because of my sisters and friends please let me ask please let me say these [Music] there are basically two kinds of people in the audience those of you that know ram das after all uh three million people bought at least a copy of his book and books be here now etc you don't need an introduction and those of you who are not that familiar a few months ago i was privileged also to be at an event uh at a private home for ram das and uh we met and was very lovely and i gave him a little button and uh the button said a nice jewish boy and i expected him to put it in his pocket but he didn't he actually put it on i'd like to call your attention to how significant and exciting this event is uh people are very excited i got a call last week from baltimore from a journalist from the baltimore jewish times everybody is is very very up for this look at the sheer numbers um we could have should have taken the form it's it's this is this says something it definitely says something and um please give your attention now to a profound spiritual seeker and social activists please welcome a nice jewish boy ramdas feels good to be here thank you i also want to thank lily goldfarb and where is she there you are thank you lilly and i want to thank uh david gordos for hosting this event and the university of judaism i'm sure it was not it was probably a mixed blessing i want to thank george fletcher for helping to create this annual event in honor of jerry goldfarb i want to thank david zeller for singing so sweetly he just came back from israel and i told him he's getting better and schwartz thank you um was a close friend of jerry goldfarbs and jerry used to go to shlomo's house on friday nights and uh there jerry would be yakov he said he felt safe enough to use that name and i feel safe enough today so i can be ruben ben hayem joseph [Applause] i would like to um share some personal reflections i think that we can gain value out of sharing each other's stories and what i notice is that as i keep changing i look back on the events of my life but some things that were a figure have become ground and some that were grounded become figure and i keep seeing it differently and i i just did a book that came out i think yesterday called compassion in action with mirabai bush in which i did autobiography around the issue of where is compassion how does it feel when does it awaken what isn't it etc so when i was invited to give this lecture on judaism and spirituality uh this gave me a chance to look back at my own life now with another perspective and i've delighted in doing it i've done it for this past while in preparing for this so my thank you to all of you for inviting me is not just the usual social thank you it's a thank you that you were a uh you you invited me with the respect that allowed my heart to feel safe enough to open to look at judaism without a defensive stance so thank you for that so let me start with a little um going back just a little bit now i would like to do one disclaimer is that i am very naive about a lot of very subtle issues about judaism so if you're keeping score you'll do very well tonight but just be compassionate because this is what you got uh as i understand it the earliest jews to come over to the united states were sephardic jews and they came as a result primarily the inquisition some of them were those beings that you know about that seemed to convert publicly but privately continued to be jews they were few in number but they they did very well in this new emerging society then in um about 1818 or 20 to about 1860 150 000 more jews arrived in the united states these were jews primarily from germany and surrounds and they also were they were getting away from economic hardship and anti-semitism they were treated rather very badly in many cities in europe they weren't even allowed into the cities without permission when the german immigrants came here they very very quickly adjusted in fact they did very well and they uh it was within their midst that the reform movement judaism started to emerge in the united states between 1860 and 1920 realized there were a few more than 175 200 000 jews between 19 between 1860 and 1920 so many people came in that by 1920 there were four million jews in the united states most of these people were from poland and russia and latvia all those different places that go back and forth of my family two of my grandparents came over from poland or russia and two were born in the united states and previously had come over from poland so i am descended from that particular wave that came to the united states in the late 1800s an interesting description of the kind of world that i was growing up in it's a hard assessment but uh pedoritz called it the time of the brutal bargain it was a time when jews were becoming americans by learning how to be ashamed of their parents and their parents were conspiring in it for their children can you feel the pain of all that um my answer is to settle in boston in those days very few jews came to los angeles in fact they said the only reason an orthodox jew came to los angeles was because he either had one lung or two wives [Music] i'd like to explain tonight about the rules of tonight i'm going to go slowly because i really savor this material and it's interesting but you know when you've had enough so when you've had enough just get up and leave i will not take it personally because i'd like not to have to rush to make you comfortable okay so you're free you're completely free [Applause] now my dad was the oldest in his family and his father was a second-hand furniture salesman called an antique dealer and there was tremendous pressure on my father to succeed because this was just getting settled so he went to went from high school to law school at which time my grandfather died so my father supported his five brothers and sisters and his wife and new baby and his mother playing the violin at night and going to law school in the daytime and he was uh incredibly motivated to achieve and succeed but the predicament was that in boston as a lawyer the the inside of the law scene in boston was all yankees the power was in the yankee group in boston and also the wealth was still concentrated among the german jews so during my growing up period my father did two strategies really he became active in the jewish community and he was a lawyer so he spoke well so he started speaking for the local uga and [Music] he found a patron among the yankees in boston a supreme court judge who gave him a receivership which put him into the law field in boston during the time of my growing up we started out as orthodox and became liberal conservative i would say where you only ate pork in chinese restaurants the pain for my father and mother was that they went through that transition i never knew the other end they went through knowing what the laws were and then choosing not to follow them we moved to the suburbs and i grew up in the suburbs i had a large synagogue connected with a large synagogue which my father was on the board now as i see it there were very clearly two judaisms at that time there was the judaism of the torah which is the judaism of the spiritual longing and the dialogue with god and then there was the social communal political i'd call it the holocaust and redemption track that was primarily concerned with jews as a social group these were not mutually exclusive of course and the power of judaism in the united states was because it was a mixture of both of those the track i grew up in was the social political one the social economic political one so in my bar mitzvah in my confirmation in singing in the choir [Music] there was no spiritual feeding there was sentimentality but there was no spiritual feeling i don't know whether i was looking for it maybe it was there and i didn't see it but i would have seen it if my parents were focused on it but they really weren't they were focused on being part of the jewish community raising a good family and they were good people and they are in my mind and heart good people nobody cared that i'd be religious they just cared that i'd be a jew and it's interesting that out of my parents my eight-year-old my brother that's eight years older than me who grew up much more in the orthodox end of the continuum he ended up as president of his temple in long island and i didn't is this too slow are you comfortable with this is this okay all right because it's fun and i don't really want to i want to enjoy it [Music] so what dad did was interesting uh in the jewish community he started to speak for the joint distribution committee which was an organization that had a large number of german jews in it that raised money for children in germany to relocate the children my father was a hell of a good speaker i've watched him numerous times on that speech about the children where he said what would you give if it were your child well i'll tell you if it were my child i give every penny i could beg borrow or yes even steal i once was doing a public speaking contest at prep school and i was using that speech and my father walked in so dad took a page from joseph willem's book in new york who was uh amazing at fundraising and after the speech he would have the cards and he'd say mr goodman last year you gave fifty thousand dollars but you've had a good year and we'd like to know how you feel tonight and then mr goodman would say something with his wife looking up at him and then my father would say that's wonderful and they'd all apply and say and i understand that you have a new grandchild myron that just had a brisk you want to say it to give anything in honor of that and you get a another quick ten thousand just like that the reason it was so easy was because in the jewish community giving is not a voluntary act of grace but it's inherent in one's membership in the community and it's um it's like taxes for membership and there are a lot of pressures and psychic rewards used to raise money in maimonides eight levels of giving they certainly didn't give grudgingly they certainly didn't give inadequately they did give after being asked which is the third type some gave before being asked but very few the fifth sixth seventh and eighth are interesting the fifth one is not knowing who one is giving to giving anonymously is the next where it's anonymous both ways is the next and helping another person to become self-supporting is the last one that was a very profound and then dad got involved in creating brandeis university which he was the founding father of and he raised lots of money for brandeis and i remember him fighting with the board over whether there'd be three chapels or one chapel he was arguing for one chapel but now when i look at it from the orthodox jews point of view it would have been difficult on the other side he worked his law work up and up until he was able through his law to shift over into business and he became president of the new haven railroad so there we were dad was highly respected as a member of the jewish community and he was president of a railroad we had j.p morgan's private railroad car for fun then it went into bankruptcy of course i mean everything changes but the moment was incredible i mean it's like you win both ways you know dad was doing very well it's heady stuff of assimilation but you can even feel pain in it now you can see in some way i'm a chip off the old blog here i am speaking and um i'm actually uh just setting forth to raise an endowment of five million dollars for the saber foundation which is my favorite vehicle for the relief of suffering at the moment but it's interesting that my strategy is different than my father's my father raised money by working with emotions with fear with group identification my strategy is different what i say to people is i grew up in a culture where i'm really hung up about money i'm so hung up about money that if i'm looking at five people and one of them is rich i can see god in all four people but when i look at the rich person i see a rich person see the problem so my exercise is to see god in rich people now there are rich people who have a problem too because they're so paranoid that everybody wants their money and they're holding it they don't know why they're holding it but they don't want to let it go and all that stuff they got guilt everything they got a problem so they see everybody as an object too so my bargain is one on one let's sit down and both of us grow spiritually till we see concede god in each other through the fact that i'm a hustler and you're rich and it will roughly cost you a hundred thousand dollars a shot i may be as good as my father yet you wait and see [Music] now my turning away from practicing judaism was part initially of a large movement because i was trained as a social scientist and i was a neo-behaviorist and i was on the harvard faculty and i dealt with anthropologists all the time and in addition i taught freudian theory so from both ends from freud religion was sublimation of sexuality and from anthropology religion was an interesting folk ritual to ward off fear of death so i in a way lost my link if i had one which i had only a sentimental one but not a profound one i lost my link again through my intellectual scientific mode then in 1961 i took the psilocybin mushroom which was a a mushroom that used by oracles and the devination in by mexican corinderos and mushrooms go back in history the mushroom stones a lot of religions had mystical experiences through the mushroom and what happened to me in those few hours uh changed the rest of my life because up until then i had seen myself as a social entity a set of social identities in other words my identification was in my phenomena my ego structure but as i sat in the room in the semi-darkness of that room i began to see different roles of myself about eight feet distant from myself and one by one i kept letting them go and letting them go and letting them go even down to the name richard which i watched who that was and i sort of let it go and i thought what's this chemical going to do am i going to have amnesia afterwards okay and then i thought well at least i have my body and i looked down on the couch and there was the whole couch there was no body sitting there now remember i'm a psychologist so i'm saying interesting hallucination but the predicament is you can intellectually try to make yourself feel comfortable but if your eyes are open and there's no and you're a philosophical materialist it puts you in a peculiar position and i was about to scream for help when i thought in a traditional way but who's minding the store and what happened was there was a discontinuous moment and a flip and i entered into a quality of being which i would call soul or spirit or something which was the essence of being it had very little to do with my personality and i felt suddenly peaceful at home like i this is where i've been all my all the time i was just busy not thinking i was there or thinking i wasn't there intense ecstasy i ran out rolled in the snow it was a huge snowstorm that night the way i described the experience was was that it was ineffable it was indescribable i experience the oneness of all things i experience the beauty and radiance of the manifestation of god on earth i and i experience feeling at home for the first time since i was probably in the womb there's a way when god says i am what i am there was a sense of having touched something so divine it was so powerful that it was stronger than my socialization i'll show you i walked through the snow at four in the morning that night snow was very high big storm and i walked to my parents home where i had been staying for the weekend i was at harvard as a professor and the snow was piled up and i went and got the shovel and i went to shovel their walk so when they woke up it would be all shoveled now it was four in the morning pretty soon my parents faces appeared in the window i mean you little idiot don't you know what time it is i could see their mouths making those words behind the window and i looked up at them and i realized that those were the voices i always listened to you know everybody was telling me who i should be but you know in my heart of hearts it felt perfectly all right to shovel snow i wasn't disturbing anybody particularly they didn't mind so i laughed and waved at them and went on shoveling snow you hear what a revolutionary act that was so later when i got thrown out of harvard i wasn't surprised because once you learn how to stand up to an organization or trust your own intuitive heart i remember when i was being thrown out of harvard there was a press conference and everybody assumed i was a loser i was the first person in the 20th century to be thrown out apart and everybody assumed i was a real loser i mean it was like they were interviewing the boxer that just lost the championship and was sufficiently brain damaged so he would probably be sweeping the gym the rest of his life you know once i had seen that it was ineffable or indescribable i started looking around for concepts conceptual models because what happens is you keep trying to organize things that's uh that's part of the way our we as separate entities work perhaps out of fear we want control whatever we want to organize and so i was looking around for concepts at that time to help me understand psychology had some of them william james was extraordinary he said at one point this was a very esteemed professor at harvard and he had said our normal waking consciousness is but one type of consciousness whilst all about it parted from it by the filmiest of screens there are other types of consciousness we may spend our entire lives without knowing of their existence but apply the requisite stimulus and there they are in their completeness and i had just experienced the validity of what he had said but certainly in my psychological world my world of cognition and psychology cognitive psychology and social psychology i had no metaphors for what i had experienced psychology had nothing to say about what it was that i found to be the greatest truth of my being had that at that point had i been in a warm relationship with judaism it may have well have been that i would have found through the kabbalah through the maps in the zohar and the book of brilliance i would have found the maps that would have given me some structure to what i experienced but i didn't have that entree and the result was that i we were given by all this the book the tibetan book of the dead which had a whole structure about what i had experienced it described it see when you say something is describing something that's ineffable it's like naming god you're never naming god you're naming an aspect or an action or quality so the same thing is every structure does violence because the thing it's pointing at is much more than the finger that's pointing but the mind wants a structure and so i found that led to that led to that and that led me to all of the eastern literature which had incredible maps for the thing that i had experienced now i now realize that had i turned to judaism i probably except in hasidic circles would not have gotten a very good hearing because there would be the question of false prophetness or the question of whether the vision i had had and the experience was harmonious with moses's experience because it's what uber calls historical mysticism but when something is very valid in you even though it may turn out to be hutzpah you can't make believe it isn't you just can't do it i can't anyway the experience way boober described it the experience is the finality of thraldom the shaking off of the last better the release that comes from the dismissal of all that is earthly when a person moves from strength to strength and beyond and beyond till he reaches the realm of all learning and law to the eye of god to simple unity and limitlessness as he stands there all the wings of jewish law and of the commandments are folded and become as nothing for all his evil desire is destroyed and he rises above it he also described the way you deal with it in this quote one more if you don't mind he said it's the revolutionary moment when we when we encounter a dimension beyond the text beyond the case beyond the thought beyond the immediate act we confront god in the moment it calls into question the laws etc it haunts and disorganizes us jewish life is giving a form to the spiritual life and not letting its anarchic potential render us incoherent when i came back from india in 1968 there was the unveiling of my mother's tombstone and um i went there at the time i was wearing i had a long beard i had lots of beads i was wearing a dress an indian outfit but that's what it looks like and i had never met the rabbi who was the rabbi of the synagogue of which my father was a member of the board and i'm in robes and the rabbi is there with his sunglasses and his soft hat and we do the service and then he comes up and he grabs me by the elbow as rabbis are want to do at times and he says what have you been up to [Music] whether he was there to save me or he's his curiosity got the better of him i don't know maybe it was the dress i don't know but so i said do you really want to know and he said yes and so i proceeded we leaned against two tombstones and i proceeded to tell him all about these miraculous things that had happened to me in india with my spiritual teacher and as i listened i saw his face softened and then he said to me you know when i was studying for my finals i took too much no doughs and i was reading the bible and suddenly it fell away and i was on the sinai desert and it was all happening around me for jew to experience that truth of we are all in egypt we were all escaping from egypt and he was lit up and i said what a wonderful wonderful experience i bet you've given a lot of sustenance to the congregation through that story and that experience and he looked at me strangely and he says you know until now i've never told it to anybody but my wife he said judaism is a folk religion and i'm an interpreter of the law why don't we join the rest of the group can you hear that that's when i reached out a little bit that's what i got back the question i had to ask myself was is the experience i had valid or what how do i deal with it but i think that perhaps the first order of business was once you have touched something so divine that you're connected with i can assure you there is a desire to return to that experience and in those days it was called getting high and i did everything i could to get high and stay high i mean everything that chemist modern chemistry had created but by 1966 of seven i couldn't do it i kept coming down and the pain of coming back from that space into your normal mind the attachments and habits of thought was so painful it's like going back in a prison cell and i was so eager to find that all out that i took the existing maps i had and i thought maybe i can't read these maps properly but maybe there's a cartographer alive in india that can read these maps so i went looking for a spiritual guide in india and i met a being who was very much like what we would call it sonic um i can just describe that he was a real man she was a full being a full being i'll just take a minute those of you that have known me have heard the story so many times i'll give you the brief form but it's important here just for me to give you the feeling of that first visit with him um i'm out the night before uh down in the plains of india and during the night i have to go to the bathroom and i go outside under the stars and while i am urinating i become very aware of the presence of my mother you freudians can do anything you want with that but i did it first and she had died six months previously and i felt her presence very very strongly and then i went back to bed i was with a a fellow who had been in india for many years and we were on the way up to the mountains about 100 miles distant to see his guru to get a visa to help him get a visa extension so he wouldn't be thrown out of india so i told him nothing about this and the next day we drove up to the mountains in this car we this land rover that i had borrowed from another friend and we came to this little tiny uh place by the side of the road shrine and so on and this young fellow jumped up and ran up the hill and i went up to see this whoever this was i didn't want him i thought hinduism was very schlock and too much fluorescent lights and too many dayglow calendars and it was offensive i was a real buddhist type person you know like really empty clean and so uh he was a hindu guru i didn't want to meet him but there i was and um i came up and uh he was sitting under a tree with about six or eight people this young fellow was uh bowing to him i thought i'm not going to bow to him so i was sort of just watching and he looked up at me and he said you came in a big car he said this in hindi now this is my friend's land rover and i said yes he said you'll give it to me i thought boy i mean i've been hustled before but never like that you know so i said well maybe i don't know i don't and the other fellow said it's yours if you want it and i said you can't give away and i completely lost it [Music] and everybody was laughing at me and then he said you made much money in america i said well i made some i said that a lot you know compared to india good good then he said take them away and give them lunch so we were taken off for lunch and i was called back and i was told to sit down in front of him i sat down in front of him and i'm still i'm not touching his feet i'm not doing any of that stuff you know i'm just listening he looks at me and he said he closed his eyes and he said you were out under the stars last night i said yeah i mean anybody could figure that out i mean it was it's easy to go out he said you were thinking about your mother now you gotta remember i i'm a professor psychologist still no matter how many drugs i've taken you know and this part of me that's saying what is happening you know because i didn't tell anybody that you know he closed his eyes and he said she died last year and i'm getting more and more uneasy i mean agitated uneasy and then he closed his eyes and he said this is all in hindi she said she got very big in the belly before she died and what she died for was a spleen that had grown to compensate for the fact that her bones weren't creating blood i said yeah and then he closed his eyes then he leaned forward and in english which i had never i mean later on i never heard him speak more than a few words of english he leaned forward and he came up close to me and he said spleen and it just i mean it went tilt i gave up what was i to do because when he did that i experienced a violent painful wrenching in my chest something opened like it had been closed for so long it was painfully open and i started to cry and i cried for two days solid they took care of me and all that in addition to being with maharaji and subsequent to that and he started to subject me to various teachings uh he had people teaching me various yogas yoga is a word which means coming to one with god and i was learning various strategies for doing that primarily what was called raja yoga from patanjali's work and in the course of that i started to adopt a renunciate path because the the stress was on getting free of being bound to the earth in order to be back in the light with god that was the model and the not that the earth wasn't fine but that the power of the desires were so strong on earth that the most intelligent thing to do if you were really trying to become free or get to god was to get as far from those desires the gratification of those desire systems as possible so i really did push away the earth plane as much as i could and in the course of that i started to meditate to extricate myself from the attachment to the thought forms in my mind that kept me trapped on this plane of reality rabbi nachman of brussels says the days pass and are gone and one finds that he never once had time to really think one who does not meditate cannot have wisdom in truth the one thing a human is afraid of is within himself and the one thing he craves is within himself and he also said a person can become part of god's unity only through forgetfulness of self one cannot reach such a divine state except in aloneness by withdrawing into intimate dialogue with god man can attain the abandonment of his passions and evil habits and return to his source this is best done at night and in a place where people don't pass by when a person attains this level his soul becomes an existential necessity that is he ascends from the realm of the possible to that of eternal once he has become eternal he sees the whole world in its aspect of eternity so i have since 1970 been practicing meditation but using those techniques i began to see that without chemicals i could extricate myself from my own definitions including that of myself and begin to penetrate into the vastness of truth that was not conceptual and i was addicted to that i was addicted to getting high all the time through meditation through being with my guru through all of it i mean i did nine days of fasting with three or four hours of pranayama that's the breath the see you do that for about two and a half minutes holding your breath then you begin to feel a little buzzing at the bottom of your spine and then you take you see there's a serpent three times with its head coiled down at the bottom of your spine and you take it and you hit it over the head with your consciousness and it raises its head and it starts up your spine and it is so interesting but around the middle of the 70s we're up to the middle of the 70s now around the middle of the 70s i began to appreciate the difference between getting high and being free but getting high was going from here to there and there everything looked beautiful then when you come down here it's like landing in los angeles in an airplane you're up in the sky it's all blue then you come down through all of our excretia and that was what it felt like each time i would come down but around the middle of the 70s i uh appreciated that getting high wasn't the same as getting free because i was still pushing away something and as long as i pushed away something i was attached and as long as i was attached i wasn't free now many of you will hear the word attachment as a positive thing i'm not saying that one doesn't love and be involved with other people but there is a clinging quality of the mind that i'm specifically referring to as attached to a thought form where you can't see the truth that's fresh in the moment because your mind is so locked in and i heard the mystical statement there is nowhere to stand that any belief system or conceptual structure or lineage or anything you stand in is less than what it is and you don't get high and you don't come down and there's no high and there's no low because you are living simultaneously in the realm where there is time and the realm where there is not time it's like shabbos is lasting seven days a week but you're working too the awakening to that made me turn around and see that from the language i would use my incarnation had within it a curriculum and that i had been busy not taking the curriculum and the curriculum was to become human on earth imagine you know i'd spend all these years trying to get to god and then the instruction is go be human so i turned around and i realized that i had to attend to that which i was avoiding until i was no longer avoiding it in order to be free so i looked at the existential nature of my life and there were all these social and emotional and familial and political identities that i had and i saw that what i had to do in being human was to honor them all in some way or other there wasn't any rule of how to honor it i had to listen to hear how to honor these identities there was one other thing that i saw as i turned around to approach life and that was the immense amount of suffering i couldn't and i realized that why i had pushed away the earth was that suffering freaked me too much i just couldn't stand it the the issue itself is pointed up exquisitely by a woman that i was i was teaching a course in new york several years ago around homelessness and all of the class part people were participating in some kind of work in the community around homelessness and there were homeless people in the class and so on and we would keep diaries and then we used an open microphone and this woman got up and she said you know she said every day i leave my apartment and i go to the bus stop she said for the past eight months there has been a man standing on the corner and he's got a paper cup with coins he's like our local homeless person and everybody knows and he says hello and she says i give him money now and then she said and then she smiled and she says actually i've worked out a budget 250 a week and i give it to him now and then she said but as a result of taking this course i realized that i had never acknowledged his existence as a human being she said i realized that i was afraid and i thought what am i afraid of i'm not afraid he's going to rape me i'm not afraid he's going to steal my pocketbook he said when i reflected and i realized that i was afraid that if i opened myself to him he'd end up living in my living room now don't underestimate the power of that image for her because the implication is that her heart's innate response is her enemy if i open to my heart i'll end up you know the heart is constantly saying here you want it use it you need my life take it the mind is saying now wait a minute you've got health insurance because the mind is protecting the separate entity and i looked around and i saw that there was so much suffering that the way i was dealing with suffering was closing my heart to it and that's why i hated being on the human plane so much because my heart was so hard can you hear that is that coming through all right now there are different ways of looking at suffering suffering is a drag first of all you don't want to suffer you don't want other people to suffer and often if you have a choice you'd rather have them not suffer than you even if you have to suffer but the quality of suffering is the hasidic prayer god do not tell me why i suffer for i am no doubt unworthy to know why but help me to believe that i suffer for your sake what i have seen of the universe is shows me such exquisitely articulated law and i'm not talking about the law of words now i'm talking about the nature of things the way of things that even though i don't understand the suffering of a little child dying of diarrhea in a developing country my faith in what lies behind that is is such that i see i do what i can to alleviate it without doing the questioning of god i mean job even though he questioned under did it he did it the biggest suffering of course that you and i have experienced and probably maybe if we're lucky the world will never know it again is the holocaust in which a third of all the jews in the world were killed just a little digression last summer i went to dachau and even now the the horror of that space is so intense that it's like a physical force that beats against you but there was there an interesting very profound thing there was the jewish memorial there were memorials from each of the religions and there was the jewish memorial i'm sure many of you have seen it you go up to a an iron fence that is like barbed wire you hold onto it and you look down a long dark um quonset-like tunnel big dark very dark it's depressing it's dark it's heavy it's just like the camp is and then at the end as your eyes get accustomed to the dark at the end there are light stones against the far wall that lift your consciousness up and at the far end there's a little hole in which light is pouring down and that's what i felt in that camp i felt the immensity of the darkness and still the faith connected with that light the the way one responds to suffering is that you can recognize as my guru once said to a girl he said do you like suffering or do you like joy she said omar raji i've only known suffering in my life i've never known joy and he kept asking her and asking her and she kept repeating again and again and he finally said you know he said i love suffering it brings me so close to god now that is such a horrible horribly beautiful thought that's what it is it's horrible beauty now i don't ever ask that another human being say oh boy suffering this is grace my job is to relieve their suffering as they experience it but for myself my own suffering is grace it's something that helps me to work on myself and the joy of being with somebody else even when they're suffering and they know that is immense and that's partly why much of a lot of my time is spent with aids patients and with cancer patients people like that as they're dying because as people get close to death there is an opening and in that opening there is wonder again and wonder about suffering one minute break it was interesting that i had the opportunity in my role to be the son who took care of my father during his last years of life i was unmarried and my other brothers all were uh busy with their worlds and i could move into the basement of his house as my base camp i'm out a lot but make sure things were well taken care of with he and my stepmother and then she died she was much younger than he and i helped her die and then i was with him until he died at 90. it was so interesting how i started out doing that with you know people would say to me oh you are so good to be living and taking care of your father and i'd say something like well somebody has to do it that's the beginning then the next was well i'm really taking care of my father it's good the next was mindfully noticing myself taking care of my father and then finally i was just taking care of my father i had slowly it's like going into a hot tub i slowly let myself in to an identification with the role of being son honoring my father after all he'd taken care of me i owed him much more than i could ever repay him and at that point taking care of him became feeling so right between us and for a father and son who i mean what i put him through you can imagine but in the last years we were just i'd sit by the bed and we'd hold hands and just look at the sunset he had gotten very quiet inside and it was so interesting that my uh one of my relatives would come along and uh he'd say hi how are you doing and my father would just smile at him and say nothing this fellow would go outside and say he hasn't changed a bit he still doesn't talk to me and then my aunt who loved my father came in and said george how are you doing and he just smiled at her and she said oh george what's happened to you where are you and i realized that both of them were suffering because of the model they had of who he was but he was happy and i was happy and it was interesting i've learned a lot about opening to what is with other people instead of having models of how it should be for them and when my father finally died i felt like i had completed and had been blessed to be allowed to do that and i've said that in many of my lectures and i can't tell you how many letters of people that said i was taking care of my parents and it was a real drag and then i heard you when i began to think about it and i started to work with it because it's the moment when a parent a child can meet in the presence of god it's possible at that moment when it hasn't been up until then often i'll just finish a couple of more things then we'll take a break i'm close so by the middle of 73 i realized that i wanted to do service for people but i was still an untouchable because of my drug history and because of being thrown out of harvard so people wouldn't let me touch anybody that mattered in the society so i was allowed to work with prisoners and with a dying because those were sort of expendable groups so i started a project called the prison ashram project because prisons are like monasteries i mean they give you clothes and a cell and food and they tell you what to do all day so i thought if i could get a group of inmates to really think they were in a monastery instead of a prison they could really use their time to get free they could escape right in prison that was what we were marketing on that one and the other one was the what was called the dying project because whatever had happened to me through psychedelics and through meditation and through meeting my teacher and through my studies and the books i had read my attitude to death was very very changed from all the people around me because i saw death as transformation and i had no problem with it and i didn't even feel it was a terrible loss because as i got to the balance between this plane and other planes the person's here they're doing what they do the person's there they're doing what they do and it's amazing how few people in the presence of somebody that's dying are ever equanimous everybody's always busy somehow reacting to the dying because of their own discomfort whether it's religious people or doctors or nurses or family or something and sometimes just going in and sitting with a person and allowing it all to happen yes trees drop their leaves yes death is occurring okay here we are creates a space or a field in which opening happens with that it is 8 38 i'd like to say we stretch for about five minutes this is not a going-out stop this is just a stretching and david will will you play something and then we'll come back and those of you that want to leave feel free so going to india studying meditation having a teacher yearning yearning to be closer and closer to god and realizing that when i said to my guru my spiritual teacher which is what it is the name term guru it's like sadiq my rebbe when i said to him how can i know god he said feed people so i figured there was something lost in the translation so i thought i tried a different way i said how can i get enlightened and he said serve people now for a western a head tripper like me you go to india and you expect mysterious teachings secret incantations i mean what kind of jazz is that serve people feed people you gonna get enlightened and i kept rejecting that i thought no i'll meditate i mean what does he know but slowly i began to see that my path through because each of us there are different strokes for different folks and my path through was what what in the east is called karma yoga but it's the path of living life and compassionately in a way to become free so you can imagine with that kind of orientation that i've just arrived at in the past you know five ten years how ripe i suddenly am to be invited to speak about judaism and spirituality because if it had caught me in my renunciate phase no way it was too esoteric for me to get hold of in judaism i mean there's obviously nachman referring to it but and there is a tradition but it's very minuscule compared to mainstream judaism now what i'd like to share with you in all my naivete of fools russian where angels fear to tread is how i am now hearing judaism as a spiritual path and i'm sure everything i say will be my putting both feet in my mouth but that's the way life is because you're part of my growing process first of all i saw that judaism was revealed religion which meant that it came from [Music] realms of unmanifest being into manifestation through word and the torah is that manifestation now in that sense that manifestation that vision that prophecy that whole uh body of material is the uh the godhead coming into word directly in that sense it is not open to rational analysis it just is it's a given and it's the root and the base camp of the whole practice because the practice is one of um acting in such a way as to allow you to remember from moment to moment the divine nature of manifestation that's what it's designed to do it's a method it is a love affair between god and an individual and these are the rules of the game of how to make love that's the closest i can get about what i understand from the rules and all of that the implication of the term chosen is interesting what i hear is that for one reason or another a group of people are defined as a class of people who are in other traditions would be called the priest class those are people who are expected to live their lives in a certain way so as to stay very close to god to the extent that you do that you are fulfilling the mandate of the path the net is spread very broadly in other traditions for example in uh in buddhist tradition there are lay people and then there are monks and the monks maybe have 218 things they can't do can't sleep on a hard bed you can't do this you can't do that and the game is designed to keep you remembering all the time in a way it keeps you separate from the mainstream of the culture because in order to carry out all those 218 you really can't hang out with everybody else but that's only for a few people that's not for the lay public they only take a few of these five or eight but for the for the israelites it was defined in my understanding that the entire population was the priest class and therefore everybody was expected to realize in their own lives the covenant that god had entered into with the israelites through moses in fact in judaism the experience is that you as i said earlier you personally were there you are part of that lineage you are part of that covenant that was entered into and that covenant is very much like a marriage and it's an interesting marriage it says god and the individual will be partners in making the world just and in bringing love and the spirit to the world that's interesting because you say well if god is all-powerful what does he need you for and that's one of the wonderful contradictions in in theistic religions that god is both all-powerful and out of the all-powerfulness has been the creation of you as a partner to complete an act and you are left in a position to choose god is saying remember me and you will be redeemed meaning you'll come into me as a result of remembering me all right so as i start when i came back from the south pacific the first thing i did was go to the jewish community center and buy a mezuzah and i stuck it on the door i thought well i'll start i'll kiss the mezuzah every time i go out the door that happened twice so pretty soon i was so busy going somewhere i forgot the message the minute i realized that i took a string and hung it over the door it hung down so it hit my forehead when i walked out which reminded me the mezuzah was there which led me to turn and kiss it because you've got to retrain yourself it takes a while the key and profound issue here is that for the jewish path just as in karma yoga your incarnation is your curriculum your life is your path it's the playing field it is life focused choose life said that god conceals is concealed in the dazzling hiddenness it's an idea that creation has inherent sanctity and is the job to hallow life the way in which what we are in the system is sparks of divine that have been exiled from the totality and are somehow on their way back but the way back is through living life fully and so you nurture the spark and you see it in other people but you look around and earth isn't something to be renounced in order to get high it is the way to become free now i want you to notice the distinction between the thing i was saying about there's nowhere to stand and this path that says your incarnation is where to stand but what judaism does from where i'm hearing it thus far and again i'm embarrassed because of my naivete but i'm going to go on anyway is it says true you will live in time on this plane but they play with time such that every seventh day you will enter into eternity i mean if you can hear a more dazzling game what it is saying is that for six days you get caught and hung up in all the traps of power sex all the stuff you're working with it by kissing the mezuzah and doing everything you can but you're probably going under anyway even if you're doing all 613 of the rules it can all become row two which is the horror of a lot of it but you're doing it but then come the sabbath the whole game changes now those of us that have been doing spiritual practice for many years have watched the way in which we spiral and cycle in the way we do our practices like i'll come out into the world and i'll serve and i'll sit by people's bed and i'll raise money i'll do the whole thing and then slowly the toxins build up one of them being righteousness i i'm so good you can't believe it i mean even my mother is proud of me but that's not free that's a hard one to hear because as g manly hall says as a reference to god speaking one who knows not that the prince of darkness is but the other face of the king of light knows not me that the dark angels and the light angels are all part of god so here you have a situation in which uses time very powerfully because what happens to me when i get toxic is i pull back i go to burma and sit for a few months in meditation or i go do something else and detoxify i just did it in the south pacific i mean you wouldn't think snorkeling is a spiritual path but it is it is because it breaks through stuff and it brings you into temples that are new to you and then after a while i come back into the scene now what you also do what i also do is that every day i sit for an hour in meditation and i quiet my mind and i just listen more deeply to what is there's a quick spiral that's a 24-hour spiral or cycle i say spiral because as you do these practices over a period of years there is a transformation in your being and you're doing it from a different level so at first you're doing shabbos well it's troubles let's do it like taking care of my father you're doing it out of righteousness and then later you're doing it because wow you're going to have a chance to go beyond time you can have a chance to be with god for a whole day and there's prescriptions about what you shouldn't do all day you shouldn't talk about business i mean that you know so what i found in my studies was an exquisite practice for awakening in and i know it's hutzpah for me to be judging but i'm just sharing with you a practice that said take every part of your life how you go to the toilet how you make love how you keep your bills how you make money how you deal with your neighbor all of it we've got a rule that covers it now the tricky thing about it is that if you lose the spiritual connection those rules can become harsh law and in some of the orthodox tradition that is what has happened and that's why many of us have seen those traditions as very patriarchal punitive evaluative threatening fearful as i understand it within the hasidic tradition which has a dionysian as well as an apollonian aspect there is a direct experience that is balanced with the imposition of the structure and the more you like if you say to me and i am unawakened um don't steal and i'm hungry i'll steal unless you have a policeman on the corner but if i awaken and see that when i steal all of us get more paranoid and i have to live in it then even if i'm hungry i may not steal because i realize the implications of it you're not doing it to them you're doing it to us and i don't want to live in a world of thieves and you start with where you are so in that sense as you start to have direct experiences of the intimacy with god or spirit then you the whole reason for doing the purifications change because the more you do of them the closer you're going to get and it's it's you see that that's what your business is in life now another part of judaism that was somewhat i hadn't estimated as powerfully as i now think it is was the role of community and family it's interesting that on the days of the day of atonement when you're reciting those sins it's we in other words you're taking everybody's sins as we're all in it together in fact there's a in the talmud there's a discussion of what you should do if somebody says look because you're supposed to protect life somebody comes along and says i want to do this and they say look it's dangerous don't do it and they say no i want to do it i'm going to do it at that point you are to flog them for rebelliousness because we're all in it together now in that sense i realized that me as somebody called ram das who was born of a jewish mother and a jewish father and was bar mitzvahed and confirmed it's hard for people to hear the way it is not a betrayal to the community and to the extent that it has i mean i read articles in which it says i have i have led more people away from judaism than anybody else it was not certainly an intention to lead people away from judaism it was responding to the truth of my own heart and i just don't have too much choice in that matter and that is called lack of humility in orthodox judaism now the the delight of the of the jewish tradition is that there are different strokes for different folks there is reform judaism and conservative and orthodox and the husids and the reconstructionists on and on and i had a sense that when all the rabbis from many of these different traditions met with the dalai lama in india that was referring to i think that they saw from his point of view that although there are many tibetan schools they're all tibetan buddhists and he was saying to the different schools of judaism acknowledge instead of saying our schools better than your school recognize that all the schools are there and they're part of judaism and they're all there to bring people to god and appreciate individual difference instead of condemning it another thing that i always get when i get close to judaism is the appreciation of study and when you think about studying the torah at the four levels the literal level the hinted at level the searched for level and the esoteric level can't you hear all those talmudic scholars ferociously debating each other wrestling with each other searching for the meaning of the torah what it's saying is this is the word of god if you keep studying it and studying it and studying it you get into deeper and deeper understandings of it and in the process of studying it will transform your life and by following the external structures because the net has been spread wide to involve all the priest class it's saying do the behavior even if you don't understand it heschel calls it spiritual behaviorism if it doesn't have a direct experience it's too superficial it's done out of fear instead of out of love it's done out of fear that comes from separation rather than out of love that comes from recognizing the unity of all things may my child's eye shine with torah the instruction to bring so much love to those words in the way you study what orthodox judaism offers is regularized mystical experience it tries to find and the hussids do this so beautifully i think it tries to find the balance between the transcendent internal experience and the way in which you bring that back into the form of living your life in such a way that you are a collaborator with god in making the world in redeeming the world you shall love the lord your god with all your heart with all your might with all your soul that's the practice it's right there that's it once you have awakened and you understand it isn't the way you thought it was what else is there to do what else go ahead make some more money get some more power have some more do this do that but unless all that is part of this covenant it's missing the mark which is one of the definitions of sin missing the mark to the extent that you are celebrating your separateness instead of the balance between your separateness and your unity with god you're out of balance if you get too caught in the unity and lose your uniqueness forget it you blew it you're out in la la land on the other hand if you get too caught in their individual differences stuck too uber says mysticism in theism is not dualism of subject and object but the duality of the eye and thou the eye of the mystic that's you seeks to lose itself into the thou of god but this thou of god or after the eye of the mystic has been merged in it this absolute eye of god cannot pass away the i am of the human must vanish so that the i am of god alone remains gandhi said when you surrender completely into god you find yourself in the service of all that exists it becomes your joy and recreation that's what the game is that's what the process is so the living edge in judaism that i hear is the balance between the conditions that bring about direct experience spiritual experience and the external structures that optimize the chance you'll have it's a balance balchemtov says reality is a series of meetings each of which demands of the person what can be fulfilled by that person just by that person and just in this hour the balsham told saying it's perfect you're doing fine you are the absolute perfect neurotic underachiever at this moment it's not some terrible error most people go around life thinking they are in some terrible era if i was only standing here i'd be free the secret of judaism is standing where you're standing and being free and the beauty in judaism of being carrying on a dialogue with god that your life becomes the dialogue and that's what i experience my life as a dialogue whether i call it with my teacher my teacher is dead from 73 on and what i experience now are the qualities of a liberated being and my life is in alignment with that process continually in everything i do that i can remember to do it because the suffering in the world is immense and the only way one of the ways in which you must work to free others of suffering is for you to be free of suffering yourself not of pain not of adverse conditions but of getting caught in suffering about it because if you're suffering all you do is reinforce the trap of mind that somebody else has that has them caught in suffering and one of the predicaments and i say this with all humility i think one of the predicaments in judaism is that it milks suffering rather than growing from it and i realize the power of the pain i don't realize but i i understand the way in which suffering has been part of the covenant with god because in some ways god is saying and i i'm hearing many of you feel upset at what i'm saying but it's okay the covenant is saying you are the priest class your purity is bringing you close to me and that you're living your life as a way of healing the entire world of everybody and therefore your suffering because you are chosen your suffering is going to be really intense and my understanding is you can be used by it or you can use it to get closer to god and i choose to use my suffering to get closer to god and the way i do it is by not getting caught in my own melodrama and that doesn't mean turning off the pain of the broken heart finally compassion is an action where your heart is breaking again and again at the incredible pain in another human being and at the same moment inside you is a place of such equanimity and peace and faith in god and strangely enough joy to be part of the whole process of alleviating suffering and all of that path is a potential in judaism that is realized by some and not realized by many finally i see that the tensions in judaism are very constructive i see that the tensions are quintessential for jewish life the tension of whether the jews stay as a separate group or integrate or assimilate because in a way it's the balance of those things that has given judaism its staying power it's a question of the tension between being separate from god and being one with god which is what every sadiq is is living moment by moment the pain of the separation from the beloved and yet you understand that we are separate and we are all part of god and that balance of those two things is an incredible tension that is maximally creative the tension between a traditional mysticism and an experiential mysticism the tension between torah judaism and social cultural judaism the tension between free will and god's will the tension for example in the state of israel between those that say that it is god's word that this land must be with the jews and that commitment to that land must take transcendence over saving human lives versus others who say if you read it right god put saving human lives ahead of having our land it's interesting when the attachment to the storyline of the lineage leads one to act in ways that are not harmonious with everything one feels in one's deepest heart that is a tension and there are forces in both sides of that game that are very powerful and very deeply committed if god came to you and said to you hold on to that house even though other people may try to take it over and somebody says but that isn't fair and you said look i don't know what's fair god said it to me that's a predicament that's a tension in the system so finally one more thing i want to say is that those those there are people i've met in montreal and vancouver in new york that are in the hoveraan movement in which women are playing a significant role and i can see that there are movements of foot in judaism that are re-awakening the lightness and the joy of judaism and bringing back the balance between the responsibility for fulfilling the laws in order to stay close to god and the joy of the direct experience and all i know is that all the spiritual work i've done in myself has made me lighter and lighter and lighter in life and that feels okay i was in santa cruz a while back and a rabbi was in the audience and he said he raised his head he said what have you gotten from your judaism rhonda and i thought about it that moment and i said well there are three things that come to mind one is that i understand that behind the many there is one and the second thing is i understand that the the mind the intellect the mind can be used as a path to bring one closer to god through study and the third thing i've learned is how to live with suffering in a way that's compassionate now as a result of preparing for this lecture i see in judaism the love affair between god and human i see the role of support of a community support the satsang or sangha of the community for judaism and the family i feel the path has one of balance between study of the torah service and loving kindness to all things i see that judaism is a way of remaining in the present and i think that chavez is great as a reminder as a structured use of time to remind and awaken the bashem tobe said his father said to him as death approached my child always remember that god is with you never let this thought out of your mind go deeper and deeper into it every hour and every minute in every place that is an extraordinary beauty of this of this practice that is called judaism thank you can we have some lights more lights in the hall if there's anybody back there um right i'd be perfectly happy if you want a few minutes of asking questions and i'll i in in the south pacific there was a girl that i was teaching english because it was a french island and when she didn't i'd point at the chair and she'd say chair and i point the table and she'd say taylor and i point the floor and she'd look at me and she'd say i don't know and i came back with that mantra from the south pacific so i'm ready to take your questions yes sir uh i'll repeat the question for the other room or for anybody that didn't hear it the way in which you free yourself from personal suffering let's say you're growing old and you're suffering because you're growing old it's an interesting one it doesn't apply to anybody but it's theoretically now can you see that um then um lunch is ready and there's a wonderful um vegetarian simmers and you get so busy eating it you're not busy growing old okay at that moment you see your predicament you see the way in which your own mind is what's causing the suffering the phenomena of growing old is just growing old like i have these wonderful spots on my hand and i have these veins and bones and i was 60 my body was 60 this year i mean i have these spots that the porcelana ad says [Music] it says they call these aging spots i call them ugly but for me they call them ugly i call them aging spots and i think they're i mean the appreciation of the phenomena of the universe as they're unfolding is possible when you are not clinging with your mind to how you think it ought to be for you to be happy so ultimately the way you work on yourself is to extricate your awareness i'll give a technical answer and i can't go into it tonight you extricate your awareness from identification with your own thought forms until ah like depression it's quite different from i'm depressed to there's depression wow look at that depression will he ever get over it or won't he poor ruben joseph do you hear the issue [Applause] he asks how necessary it is to have a teacher or a a being obviously if you can be around at sudden jump at it you know grab it hang on to the feet watch him tie his shoelaces the whole stick you know if on the other hand you don't have that opportunity that doesn't mean you've lost it because as the valhem tov said you're in the perfect position that you're supposed to be at this moment if you really trust the system you could spare you could get enlightened through spending your life searching for your teacher by the time you get your teacher you don't even need it anymore okay because you finally realized you were your own teacher where were you going i mean the the final teacher that you say that's a mention i really agree with is somebody who's resonating with that place in you that's the deepest truth that's how you know and in the east they say there are three ways to get to god one is to god one is to a s a representative that you use for that because that involves your human heart and the other is to go inward deep enough until you come to the same place so you come to the spark of the divine okay so if you don't have them outside go inside she said that uh she's gone to many temples and shows and she's never felt the juice or the shakti or the energy she'd rather be out in nature um president um elliot of harvard said that the reason harvard is a repository of some knowledge is because the freshmen bring in a little and the seniors don't take any away and [Music] and in the same way when you go to shul to get it from an institutional setting after a while there's nothing left because everybody's taking it away as you yourself work on yourself and get spiritually connected you come in and you bring it with you and then you start to enlighten the space you can take a prayer that you read you go to a church or temple and you listen to the prayer and people are singing it or reciting it like a shopping list and then something happens to you and you begin to see that that prayer is living truth and you say it with that spirit you invest the whole institution again so your decision is whether that institution's worth saving and if so get on with it yes the question is do i think women need different practices from men my my sense is that at the level of sexual difference there are methods that are most in harmony with the uniqueness of sex and i think therefore yes there are different methods that a woman might find harmonious it's interesting like for example let me jump just to india for a second in india it's set up so that the the man is considered somebody who gets into his mind a lot and he can do the practices that will get there but he doesn't have the juice to do it on his own the wife has the energy the shakti she has two forces on her she has a nesting grounding force in her and she also he keeps flying up and coming down and flying up and coming down all the time and so the combination of the two of them is that her energy helps get him off and his getting off keeps both of them high and the two of them both are grounded enough through her to have babies and reproduce and keep the species going so now i hear that and it's beautiful to me it's not horrible it's beautiful and i mean i can see how it can be used in a tremendously persecut bad way but i do think there are individual differences and therefore i don't ever push anybody to do anything i'm doing i say this is what i'm doing you've got to listen to your own heart yes she said that she's noticed that in other in eastern traditions there is an inordinately large number of jews in the in the 60s many many people whether it was through chemicals or through the zeitgeist of the moment or what it was many people had transcendent experiences and they experienced the living's a connection to living spirit one way or another and after that they started looking for systems that acknowledged what they were experiencing and gave them some help in working with that experience and the predicament in judaism is that although there are certainly exceptions to the rule judaism historically in the one judaism that's available to most people in this society has treated the kabbalah or the esoteric judaism as available only to a few and it has not been widely available in a living spiritual transmission and so many of us went to other systems my sense is that that the religion you grow up with is often the last religion in which you find the living spirit and that you've got to go around the whole business before you can finally if you were raised a christian before you can finally find it because you had a bad experience as a catholic child or so on and to me just i when i am part of what you say i'm returning i don't know whether i'm returning to the to practicing judaism i'm returning to my heart being open in the presence of judaism into loving it then i will do what practices are my practices in harmony with my intuitive heart questions yes within judaism there are obviously as we've been talking about methods for awakening what i would like to do is bring people into the spaciousness of consciousness where they will be fully open to what is in their particular unique incarnation and for somebody that was born a jew in the sense of in this culture with all that implies that is something to be worked with in order to honor your incarnation just as taking care of my father was part of my honoring my incarnation to honor and acknowledge judaism does not necessarily mean that that ends up being your practice but it might it may well be that as you open to your particular incarnation you find that when you stop pushing it away within judaism are practices that are profoundly in harmony with you because of the nature of your birth but it also may be that as you study and open and honor them you find that isn't particularly the path for you and but if the the denial of it the denial of your of the fact that you have a lineage and that you was you were born into a jewish lineage with that covenant has got to be explored in order to be free you can't just walk away from it and make believe it doesn't exist i have to honor my body my family my religion my nation state my ecosystem all of it i have to find peace at every one of those levels or i'm still stuck pushing it away or grabbing at it thank you very much great evening shalom elephant [Applause] this is the house the i house the best for you this is the house the house of the lord i wish the best for you because of my brothers and friends because of my sisters and friends please let me ask please let me say peace [Music] and friends please let me ask please let me say [Music] peace is the house the house of the lord i wish the best for you [Music] this is the house the house of the lord i wish the best you

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Length: 118min 20sec (7100 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021