Ram Dass on Dharma - Full Lecture 1973

just our being together here is such grace so much blessing for one birth just as last evening Harry described how is Larry with a sore leg from a fall during a morning ritual under LSD and despite the subway ride and despite the fact that nobody would join him to go he still found himself going to hear swami Satchidananda in new york city and he said he was already working on me that he could overcome my Temasek nature to get me to go through all that to get to him you certainly cannot believe any less of this moment that forces are afoot in every one of our lives that brings us here it is not by chance that we happen to meet it's interesting to examine that chance occurrence because it's certainly easy at the moment when it's all beautiful to say what grace what a blessing certainly the Guru is smiling upon me to have allowed me to have satsang again the reason it's worth examining is to see if the concept of some overriding plan it can become such a dominant theme in our consciousness and that when the when the drama changes when the melodrama gets heavy when you've just fallen from the tree you can equally say what grace oh thank you Swami Ramdev is reported to have said when he had been thrown out of a temple one night and had to sleep by the riverbank where the mosquitoes were particularly fierce and thus he couldn't sleep at all he kept saying oh thank you Ron for coming in the form of mosquitos to keep me awake so I could remember you in the Ramayana there are two places in the Tulsi das version where ROM makes it very clear that unless one honors Shiva one cannot come to ROM now ROM is a an incarnation of Vishnu generally connected with the preserving and maintaining and great loving and supportive forces in the world Shiva on the other hand is often connected associated with the chaotic or destructive or unpredictable or what are often called the malevolent forces in the world and rom says unless you honor Shiva you cannot come to me there's a temple right the very tip of India called Rameshwar rameshwar it's where Rama did pooja to Shiva before going across to salon to Sri Lanka to rescue Sita his wife it's interesting to reflect on what does it mean to honor Shiva it's so easy when you get high in a situation whether it's that song or whatever meditation and you say oh I feel the presence I'm being given grace but what about when you're despairing and you don't feel the presence you think that's any less grace last night toddy said one thing which I I guess I disagree with the roughly sort of attitude that he reflected he said he guessed he said he was doing karma yoga a lot because he guessed he was just too gross to do any other form of yoga now I must say that I shared that opinion about karma yoga when I went to India last time in 1970 I went in order to meditate in order to get holy I had been lecturing and teaching in America and doing whatever my hypocritical poor light would allow and my own hypocrisy overwhelmed me and it drove me back to the feet of my guru I was just drunk for satsang I just needed I was hooked I needed to get back to my connection and my plan was to check in with him get his blessing and then go to a cave which he would bless me to do this was my mind okay and there I would sit with his blessing and I would meet Babaji and I would meet Buddha and I would meet Christ and I would hang out with the astral team and they would they would give me all the secrets and maybe I go north to the edge of Tibet and I would get some deep teachings from the Tibetans and I would take deep meditation practices on various visualization exercises I might even be walled into a building for 3 years 3 months 3 days 3 hours 3 minutes and 3 seconds and I thought when I come back to America next time boy it's gonna be different I'm not gonna be just a phony yogi I'll be really the real thing and I went to with the group that was together at that time I went to Boyd gaya where Rudy got enlightened seemed like a good place to start because I couldn't find my guru because he was as he is wont to do so we all enrolled in these courses these 10-day courses and we took a series of them and it was very intense and very austere and we learned how to cheat and cut corners but it still was pretty fierce and there was no doubt that some headway was made in that meditation but after about four of the courses I could see that the slippage was increasing considerably and that the thing that was missing was that my heart was very dry in that situation I couldn't open my heart and just at that time I had been invited to Shivaratri with a Swami Muktananda in Delhi and I thought wow a good Shiva festival it'll really get me moving again but I didn't really want to just walk out on the meditation cuz I fell that's kind of a cop-out I mean here I came to meditate and I'm walking out you know to go dance and sing like any sloppy bhakti would do so I entered into an arrangement with the most essence meditation teacher that during the monsoon I found out where he would be up in the mountains and we went made a survey we went up there in advance and we found another house that would hold three people and we rented how to fix up the house put a new roof on the water system got the house already and I arranged that when he went off for the summer for the monsoon summer monsoon three of us would go and we would be with him four of us three or four of us and we would just get all this intense training and meditation I thought well as long as I've organized and prepared for now and go dance and sing because I knew my sort of sloppy stuff and I because I'm really undo the work later well on the way to shear a tree had turned out that we met maharaji my groom and in my puffed up pride I said to him you know like a good little boy reporting his work I said I've arranged for this teacher and this house and I'm gonna meditate and I told him this whole story with a question mark at the end like aren't I good or isn't that wonderful or isn't this just what you want or and his answer was if you desire it well that left me hanging because what he was saying is you want to ego trip go ego trip now I couldn't understand that what self-respecting guru would say that meditation was ego tripping I mean that stat seemed like the height of profanity yogic profanity so I thought well he's just a silly old man and he doesn't really understand and maybe he's saying something much more profound that I'll only understand later after I've meditated so I'm gonna do it anyway hey I said humbly so when the time arrived I went up there and I was so happy to get to this place because up until then everywhere I gone there were always Westerners and it turned out I was always hanging around Westerners who and after all you don't go to India to hang out with Western consciousness and I was always hanging around Westerners who were looking to me for some more other which seemed absurd I mean they come to the well to drink and then they're looking to polluted water they brought from the city you know I mean it's so bizarre but there's a certain culture shock in India and it's nice to have something to cling to and I was sort of in so I went to the mountains and I was so happy I was finally away from all of them and that draggy having to be with them and answer and deal with this stuff all day and I put away all the musical instruments and all of bhakti schmaltz and I was gonna settle down for serious business that was gonna bring me to God you got the set of the mind well when I arrived there within about two or three days Westerners other than three people had been invited started to trickle in first three then five and eight and eleven Tiller about twenty others and they all said I say what are you doing here because I thought we were hiding out and we'd kept it really secret and they all say well Maharaja sent us he said go be with Ramdas so we took over a hotel in the town but I stayed up in the house you were the group up there and I wouldn't have anything to do with the people down I said look if you're in the town that's up to you but I'll come down visit every week but that's all I don't have anything to do with any of you I'm here for serious business well then another week went by and the teacher didn't show up and a letter comes from him saying unfortunately due to circumstances beyond my control I will not be able to come this summer and now I could see whose big hand was behind that there wasn't any doubt about that so we arranged to take over the Gandhi Ashram in the town we all moved into the ashram and we ended up having an ashram for the summer we all discipline ourselves we read the Ramayana and fasted and meditated and lives in silence we had a very profound good summer together very beautiful holy place okay now the next component in that training program that is an answer to Harry's point last night was when I got to India this last time when I was with my guru he said who do you want to see when you're in India and I said well I'd like to see an under my MA because to see the mother to have the darshan of the mother Wow he says I cha that's good who else I said I won't see anybody else just you she said to me see Lama Govinda I said Lama Govinda I said I've already seen Lama Govinda I said he's a very nice man he's a good German scholar he's a wonderful Lama and that's lovely and he's written some incredibly good books but you know and he says see Lama Govinda so that was that so I kept stalling and then I heard that he was going to be leaving for Dallas so Krishna Das who's going to be playing the drums with me this afternoon and on a porta and I went over to visit Lama Govinda just to put a little flesh on the bones just to give you a little feeling for the little divine play in the whole dance I really let me tell you the story in the rich way rather than the bare-bones porn because the means in the ends are one by the way so there's no conclusion anything I say it's just like hamburger just keeps coming up we had included a picture of my guru and Lama Govinda in in the be here now production and in the picture was also legal Tommy Lama Govinda's Shakti his wife and she had taken the picture on an automatic camera and we had cut her off in the one we had used in the book and since we were not acknowledging anybody's contributions we didn't acknowledge that she had taken the picture and since all her pictures had stamped on the back of them taken by lega Tommy we knew she might have a slight investment in this matter and I expected to get a little flag from her about this when I should see her now there was a little additional matter that Lama Govinda had written a letter to a editor of Newsweek in Chicago mm-hmm who had photostat it and sent it on to me in which he said these Westerners go to India and they take the first guru that comes along they're so hot to get a groom take dick Albert he went and he got hooked up with his second-rate mind reader so now I knew that see so I figured if Liga Tommy gives me any trouble about the picture I will discuss second rate mine readers but otherwise I won't do it I mean I'm not gonna just start out with you know I just have a little thing in restore in the case yoga glove it's just the social dance so the time came for taking pictures which it does that most of Lama Govinda's scenes and I said well I'll stay inside will stay inside you go ahead and League of Tommy says no you've got to be in the picture too I'm gonna get back at you 400 she just did it so as we were standing posing for the picture Lama Govinda and I with some other people I turned to him and I said do you really think he's a second-rate mind reader that's all I just looked right at him well he went through just long enough to go through the chain to realize that he had just been had and he lit up and we looked at each other with total love we just broken through all the formalities and from then on our relationship was totally joyful so that evening the five of us sat together after the other guests had left and his mind was beautiful it was like an exquisite crystal like a beautiful jewel very clear mine now he represented to me the kind of meditative Yana yoga the intellect and meditation aspects of yoga which to me have always been the manly tough forms of yoga as opposed to the bhakti and karma things which are what you do if you can't do anything else if your minds too gross to do anything else so I said to him Lama Govinda what is it you want me to do do you want me to go in to study do visualizations what is it you'd like now what kind of Maharaja sent me to you he must have sent me you for teaching I now take you as my teacher tell me what to do next I said I can go on with my Southern Buddhist meditation or my northern go into northern Buddhism I've been interested in the Ning mapa and I can go on with my HUD massamba vu mantra or what do you suggest I sat as a seeker and he said no you don't understand at all he said I've looked at your book and all that he said um he said you are your path he said your path is the path of the heart and he said your heart is opening it's all happening to you don't have to do anything now he said that and I wouldn't hear it see I said oh I know all that but tell me what should I do say because you certainly couldn't assume you don't do anything and he says no you don't understand he said you're doing your path already so know it coming from him see I mean it's one thing if a bhakti says to you go be bhakti you say sure he's protecting his own investment but when Lama Govinda he's got to go against everything he ever talks about roughly to tell me to do that when I've asked him for teaching so in a way it was incredible that Maharaja would send me to lama govinda to get him to tell me that my yoga c was bhakti that was part of it back to you so I began to reassess you know bhakti yoga took on a new dimension for me now I mean it was to be made be respectable Hooda caught it so later when I was sitting with Maharaja I would say to him things like um Maharaja um how do you awaken Kundalini I mean just a question in the passing of the day you know passing and he'd say feed everybody feed everybody I'm ready for pranayama bhastrika long belong feed everybody Maharaja how do I get finished love everyone and all he kept instructing me was and all of us was loved serve remember love serve remember now the I couldn't help but break up over the cosmic joke that I should go to India to the deep dark mysterious East to learn the secrets that will bring man to final realization to bring them back home to the primitive tribes in the outer lands right and I come back bearing the gift of three words love serve and remember which have already been hanging around here for years as I seem to recall Christ reminding us and in the two years I was in India I think enough in total there were fourteen days when I was not surrounded with Westerners doing exactly the same thing I do in the United States so what I was forced to recognize was I was forced to do what we call a figure-ground reversal because what I saw hanging out and talking about God with people as was what you'd do until you do the real thing and now I had to flip it over and see that maybe that was the real thing and all the other things were support systems now faced with the possibility that the rest of this incarnation or at least at this time my Dharma was to do karma yoga and bhakti yoga I started to examine the nature of these yoga's a little more carefully since I was stuck with them apparently and I must say I shared that little tone of that quality in the way Hari put that although I'm not attributing to him that he shares that opinion but the tone that I got from the way he said it but I'm you know you're so gross you just do Karma Yoga bother you it's sort of we used to think of their a gentle Pat's like going to church on Sundays a very gentle path then there are steep paths like Zen Buddhism we just sit and think of nothing and most people can't stand that because that's too steep they need a support system like a God or something or a church or a ritual to cling to and there are these different steepness of paths and Karma Yoga has always been connected with doing good GRA ladies serving in hospitals and you know sort of a nice gentle way to come to God over next ten-thousand incarnations so a deeper study of the bhagavad-gita which of course is the the text for karma yoga among other you and I entered full steam into karma yoga figured well if it's my yoga then I'll do it now when I came back to America in 72 I was living not in time I was going to live like my guru lives he's just somewhere until he isn't there anymore and then he goes somewhere else you never know when he'll be there or when he won't figured I'll live outside of time because time was really scaring me about the West schedules and you're going to lecture like you got a lecture Thursday night at a like Saturday morning at nine o'clock and many hundreds of people are going to be expecting your consciousness to get them off at nine o'clock on Saturday so everything you did Friday night everything you did Thursday Friday you know if you had a lustful thought on Wednesday that was gonna affect Saturday mornings he had to watch it and you had us get so programmed and if you had two a week you know it wiped out the whole week you had to just sort of sitting like in a straitjacket to just stay together enough I was like time was my enemy I was always like afraid to let go so I thought look I'm not gonna live in time I'm just gonna live I'll just be where I am and people would call me from New York to New Hampshire and they'd say would you be there tomorrow afternoon I want to come see you meaning will you be holy tomorrow afternoon at 2:00 I'd say I don't know they'd say well what do you mean you don't know say well I don't know where I'll be that tomorrow afternoon - meaning not only I don't know where I'll be geographically but I don't know where I'll be in terms of my consciousness cuz my consciousness unlike Swamiji's consciousness is not nice and even and smooth and together I'll tell you I'm not going to be the only one to do karma yoga this morning I'll tell you my mind is a little bit like a rollercoaster and it's not a knee roller coaster that you ride the same route each time each time it's a different route so you can't tell if you felt you get really very it's all pouring through you and everybody looks at you and they see the highest light and you say oh boy all I got to do is keep cool and this is the way it's gonna be you know and I can just be the transmitter and see you make a plan for tomorrow with 3:00 tomorrow at 3:00 comes and somebody drives up the drive when you think oh god do I have to see them Oh God you know I want to see Perry Mason on television now I want to want to see Perry Mason but I do want to see Perry Mason see because I want to see Perry Mason I hate these people driving up the driveway and I don't want to hate them because I'm a holy man I want a lot more but I hate them so I thought okay I'll go change alright I'm only gonna be holy when I feel holy right people coming I don't feel like see him I'll say go away or I'll just disappear whatever you know I just won't be holy unless I feel like being holy when I'm holy I'll be really holy because I was tired of being a phony holy man because if they've driven up that they've driven from Ohio see and they come to see Ron Das and they walk in and you wait the last minute turn off the television set in your Russia and you light an incense and candle you sit down and they come in and you say welcome well that kind of hypocrisy you can only live with yourself so long I mean it's just too heavy it's just too ugly you know it's just too horrible so and my guru had kept saying to me tell the truth tell the truth Rome knows he kept catching me not telling the truth that was though I mean really little things you know I'll just give you a little quick example as I mentioned this in lectures in the password once a I won't tell the whole story just a little part of a judge hi Supreme Court official from Goethe Pradesh came to have Maharaja's darshan and we we were sitting on the outer rim the Westerners and the Indians were in close and which alternated from day to day and Maharaja gave this High Court official a tremendous buildup about what an important man I was in America which he had never done and I never even thought it was remotely relevant to anything he and I did to you he said X professor University you know he just full of lies all incredible stuff and he snowed the official no finally the official with great awe really because turned around he said well I'm honored to meet you I say well how do you do he says perhaps you'd like to visit the High Court now in truth I had no desire whatsoever to visit the High Court I come from a family of lawyers I've been in courts and I didn't go to India for that particular trip so I said to him well that would be very nice so he said well tomorrow at 10:00 so I thought also I said well you'll have to ask my guru Figgy he'll get me off the hook so he says Maharaja can Ram Dass visit the High Court tomorrow and tomorrow ji says if he says it'll be very nice it'll be very nice so he's pointing like this like watch it baby hell it's really just little ones little social those little white ones you know those little those don't hurt anybody you know there's a woman with him one day and he came up and he said do you remember her and I said oh yes and I didn't and he said yes she's Dada's sister in law and Dodd is from Allahabad so I said oh yes we met at Allahabad she says no we met right here I said all Mara she went like it's just these little ones he was always getting Mia you know it's like tell the truth baby come on tell the truth hips truth gets you high tell the truth so I thought when I came back to America I'll just be straight if I'm not feeling high I won't make believe I you know I was trying to get very very straight okay so it came I sort of floated around the country just being wherever I was and when I felt really together and like it was clear and I was calm and centered and loving and had something to offer I was with people and it was beautiful and I could feel Gru's grace coming through on people and then what I wasn't I just went off and you know read and studied then I decided I had just done a four or five lectures with Allen Ginsberg as benefits for trungpa rinpoche and I decided those were in time those were the first things I had done in time and then I thought I'd go into a retreat for a month so I rented a cabin in Tucson Arizona in the mountains south of it which had a kitchen refrigerator stove beds it was a bird estuary so there were lots of bird lovers those were the only people there me and bird lovers so I was not relevant in the universe so it was a certain kind of privacy even though there were other cabins and I walked into this place and found to my dismay that the one other thing that the cabin had was a television set now I had gone in to do a prayer I was going to do a prayer for 30 days which was the Sutra of the third Chinese patriarch of Zen which is it just a little tiny booklet and I was just going to work with that for 30 days but I spent the first eight days roughly 12 hours a day looking at television now after I looked at television for the first day see I was so horrified that I might spend the next twenty nine doing it that I took a screwdriver and I out of my car and I unwire the television set and I put it in the closet and I put a blanket over it put away behind my bag and everything and I closed the door and I sat down and around five thirty I thought well I could just look at the news so I took the television set out wired it up again looked at the news and suddenly it was 1:00 in the morning right three or four cans of beer later now it's very hard to think of that as sadhna however however in that cabin besides the television set and all the food that i had filled the refrigerator with and the bed and the bathtub that I could take frequent baths in and all the different ways I could play in my sensual delights there was also my consciousness sitting in that cabin saying far out imagine that you know you're gonna tell anybody about this one I mean sitting me with that guy that said gee I think if I take the broccoli and put some of that spaghetti sauce over it it'll be and bake it it'll be just like a pizza and boy and if I do that you know and then I can quit get that done quick so I can watch kungfu that guy was doing his thing and this other voice was saying far out Maharaja was saying teeth teeth the way it is okay right there was the voice in me that was sitting watching all this just noticing it witnessing it watching with at first horror see because when you meet Shiva in yourself you are harf when you meet him anywhere he's really scary and the Shiva stotram it's s when Shiva dances the beings in all three worlds tremble in all three worlds tremble because his dance is so violent and when I'm sitting in there with the television set you know I get in this funny predicament I do I get the food ready just as the program began this particularly happened to me not long ago when I when the Watergate hearings started see Watergate even more than my orality is watching Watergate okay and I was sitting with the Watergate hearings just began and I had the food but I couldn't eat the food till I consecrated it but I couldn't stop watching Watergate long enough to consecrate it and if I didn't consecrate it quick the food would get cold okay I mean you can't look at television go bra of an umbrella wrongly bra it's you know it's just too shoddy you know hey I mean you're faced with these real dilemmas in doing Sadhna and I think you should recognize that this is where it really hurts you know this is where we live most the time you know unfortunate well then the next week I managed to I would just unplug the set and put a cloth over it I wouldn't put it in the closet and I found I was getting a little bored so I was only look at television three or four hours a day and then I got into feeding birds and studying bird names and things like that by the third week I was sitting a little quieter and deepening a little bit and I could sit by the river for a few hours and I was starting to eat more simply food and I was losing interest in television and by the fourth week I was really in pretty calm centered space and I was trying to feel that that energy again I was getting that place that you get when you've been here for nine days that connectedness that yeah right oh that's all that's what it's about Wow boy this is the real you all know I'm sure well while I was in there I looked at the whole scene and I thought you know really if I'm gonna do karma yoga I really should just go into it really just go into it and I had a big folder of places that had invited me to speak and I just kept them in a folder and wrote back saying I don't do that kind of thing but if I ever do I'll let you know benefits and lectures and all kinds of stuff so I said okay I got the inner message because I live totally intuitively now I because what I call what we in the West call intuition I would call The Voice that's guiding me from within and sometimes my intuition is a reflection of certain of my desires and sometimes it's a reflection of a deeper voice and I never know which one it is and sometimes it tells me to do something and I start to do it and it turns out it was just another ego trip and I it falls away I get I see it's impurity and sometimes I started doing and it feels right on go go go and I just stay right in this space as I'm doing that I know right that's right on it's all huntin pet process of learning to hear that inner voice because you can't hang on the coattails of the Guru every minutes saying Swamiji what do I do now should I sharpen this pencil now shall I sit what shall I do now when I was coming to America I said to Dada mahadji's devotee I said Dada you're lucky you hang around Maharaja if you do something wrong he tell he's always telling him do let us do that he said look at me I'm you know thousands of miles away I can really go off the deep end and I don't mind doing myself in karmically but I don't really like doing other people in that's a heavy and I can do that because I have a lot of lost left and stuff and I may manipulate the whole game just to make it with somebody I don't trust me at all say and he went to maharaja and he told maharaja this maharaja sent back the message Rhonda's shouldn't worry I wouldn't let him do anything wrong now how does he not let you do anything wrong do you think suddenly a little angel comes fluttering in and says stop you know like in fairy tales or no it's the guy sitting in that moat in that duck cabin in Tucson saying you know more kung foo more beer more baths more Wow Yeah right it's that place in me that knows it knows and it's just letting me do what I need to do as I'm getting closer there and it never lets me out of its sight to let you in on the secret of the game from where I'm sitting perceptually the universe that I live in has only two beings left in it there is who I still think I am who I think I am okay that's the illusion and there's Oh Sam you can call Sam God or you can call Sam guru or you can call Sam whatever you like I call it guru and as far as I can understand it my universe the universe of the illusion of who I think I am exist solely for the purpose of bringing me to it to the guru that is that everything that is happening to me that has happened to me or that could happen to me is a teaching being given to me as grace to bring me to the guru not just sitting in satsang but tripping on the rock as you walk down the path it's all of it the teaching if you can flip around and see it that way now under those conditions karma yoga takes on quite a different aspect as I point out in the brief time that's left to me by my inner clock so deciding to do this tour I decide alright I'm really gonna do it to myself I mean if you're gonna do karma yoga really do it don't just screw around do it so I took a big map and I laid out all these lecture dates in terms of of schedule and geography and I got to the point where I had scheduled myself to lecture in a different city every night for two months and then on the third month I started to loosen up a little bit so I was only doing say one every three nights so I started and I went up the coast of California and Washington Seattle and Portland Olympius yell everywhere I went either Swamiji had just been I was about to be it turned out I get to a place they'd say you know who slept in this bed last night but the difference between us is he doesn't do it as karmayoga he's just doing it because he is it he is the statement of the yoga and I understood that's what Karma Yoga is about not to say I am serving but to become the service you become when I here's what happened see I started out and every night here's the routine every day you get up have your morning beverage as it was said last night which for me is coffee sometimes a bagel okay then you go to the airport you go through security open your bags you go and you get on an aeroplane and you sit in the airplane for so many hours the plane lands you get off the plane you walk down the runway gangplank and you walk whatever it is and you walk into the hall and there are these beings saying all ramadasa rom doesn't you say how do you do and they take you you pick up your bag they take you to where you're staying you either do some press conferences or radio stuff for me to group and then at 3 o'clock I take a nap because I say to everybody I had hepatitis and I have to my liver and I go to nap for a few hours then I get finished then there is dinner which is usually some kind of a satsang gathering very beautiful potluck thing somewhere and we all get together it's very lovely around 7:30 moved to the lecture hall I sit down tune up the tambura or they get the Shruti box ready whatever it is work with the musicians that have gathered to help me out 8 o'clock I start 11 or 12 I stop I am delivered back to the hotel or motel or room I take my peanut butter and crackers and my milk drink that look at the late news go to bed get up the next morning meditate for a few minutes have my coffee go to the airport go through security get on the plane get off the plane pick up my bag say hello namaste have you got the microphone I prefer a mini boom because I have a beard and when the lavalier is there you can't hear through the beard oh yes I understand I your cushion because I yes you of course go to they take the rest go have supper go to the lecture next morning get up have your coffee go to the airport go through secure it's no different than working at a lathe see you know every day you get up and you lecture now what happens is I saw that the only way to survive I started to get sicker and sicker and sicker first of all because the schedule was grueling and by the time I got to Vancouver I didn't have any voice which was funny I mean I was about to head for Anchorage Alaska and I didn't have any voice left to speak and I was sitting over a hot vaporizer and you know doing the whole thing mantra and everything saying tomorrow gee what do you have in mind now it's pretty far how I speak without a point and he had said to me in Indy says it's going to come a time when you're not going to want to lecture anymore and I kept repeating that to myself and I kept saying this must be the time but I still wanted to do it because quite honestly what I'm working with is power and fame and all these worldly things that are connected with exactly when Swamiji said who doesn't know robbed us of course everybody applauds and and what am I supposed to go through then you know you know like it's like if 40 people come to see me at a day in the farm in New Hampshire I get stoned out of my head from the satsang and I walk in and my father says to me had a pretty good crowd today like he's counting cars see I mean that's a cultural background that I come out of you know and I got to work with that all the time that's my work you can understand what karma yoga really is it's working with your desires right in the middle of the fire right in the field they it's dying into the thing it's dying into the service so that I was becoming I realized that the only reason I was getting fatigued and wiped out and physically run down was because I still wanted something like after a beautiful satsang I be just hardly in my body I just be sort of floating around and we'd all be staying nobody wanted to go home that place where nobody wants sleep somebody would come up and say say have a beautiful place just a few miles out of town and there'll be about ten of us and we'll cook a beautiful thing once you come on back now it's around twelve o'clock at night now I know if I go back that's at least till 4:00 in the morning next morning does the airplane the security the coffee that's not going to change the so I realized that as long as I desired to go and I'd say to them oh I wish I could go but I can't I remembered oh that's what I hated about time time kept making me turn off life and then I thought no time is merely making me turn off my desires all I have to do is just desire to become the pure instrument of service that's all I'm going to become like one of those 747 planes not like the pilot but like the plane somebody gets in the plane and moves it from here to here it doesn't say oh boy I'm flying in New York or oh I bet I'll be big in Denver you know it's just an airplane you move it from here to there and it does its thing it goes over and it just flies it and I recognized that for me to understand the exquisite nosov karmayoga was going to mean that I could do this every single day until there was nobody doing it at all it was just being done every day every day there was just the moving the flying and it was all sodden it wasn't one tiny bit of it you come up to the security guard and the guard sees you as a potential bomber you know that's maharaji that's my GRU who's just taken through Central Casting gone to the costume department and he's come out as the guard and he's saying to you well see if you see through me this time they do you know I'm got in here oh do you think I'm a security guard are you so paranoid that you're busy reacting saying I'm not the bomber I'm not the bomber I'm a nice guy and everybody I meet every day is the grew in drag as far as I'm concerned and the sickness and the fatigue and all of it is the grace it's all the grace it's all the grace it's all the grace there is nothing left in my life other than teachings that are bring me to God it's the only game in town nothing else has a meaning what else am I gonna make meaningful just as I make it meaningful like I'm busy watching the Watergate I can't wait for Dean to get on the stand you know and at the same moment I'm sitting inside saying you can't wait for Dean to get on the stand because let me tell you that once that thing has happened enough to bring you into this room as far as I'm concerned it's all over now it's the mopping up operation which may take many lifetimes it's all purification from here on out it's just cleaning up it's getting your body together getting your heart open getting your mind calm down and understanding that a conscious being recognizes that she or he has taken birth and the function of an incarnation is to end suffering and that means wherever it exists on any plane it exists that and you recognize that the optimum thing you do to end suffering is to work on yourself and how you work on yourself depends on your Dharma what is your route through and for me my work on myself is through doing what I'm doing this minute if I think I'm doing this I still got a way to go until this is just being done and I'm just as much part of the audience as you are am i attached to being the speaker my looking for the rush of your appreciation now the honoring of Shiva it's now five minutes past I will allow us five more minutes the honoring of Shiva it's easy when you talk about Shiva you know over there in India with his ashes and his you know all his buddies he hangs out with it is so scary you know and his wife my colleague Wow Wow jeez far out that's easy then you can bring it over here and you say well like look at pollution and and look at lying and stealing in government and look at murder and paranoia and rape and oh boy that Shiva but get a little closer still when you're ready and realize that in you are all those forces as well the bhagavad-gita is talking about an inner battle an inner battle the battle between that voice that says kung-fu and broccoli with some sauce on it and the guy that says I want to watch Kung Fu and I want to broccoli that's the battle those two guys and that goes on and on and on and on and everything you do you know people come to me they say should I do this or do that and I know that is a good yogi I'm supposed to say good yogic things like do this or stand in your head or some way but I must honestly admit what I mainly say to people it doesn't matter because whatever you do you'll do as consciously or as unconsciously as you are do it all to bring yourself to God don't get caught in the form you're gonna do it in just do it and as you come closer to God you find out in fact there are only certain things you can do because you can't do things which increase the illusion you can't do things which increase suffering you just can't do them because they're just too absurd it's like taking needles and sticking them in your hands why are you gonna do them if I screw you I'm just screwing myself who am i hurting it's only us that's what I'm sitting I've got this just this little economic story that's fun it's just a little fun image to play with I've talked about before my father heard that we were putting out some records very cheaply and we were lowering trying to lower prices of things and doing everything very economically and that I was not trying to collect and her masse money he says what's the matter you against capitalism this is the ex-president of a railroad right so I said no dad I'm not against capitalism for you I think it's great it's just not my style he says I don't understand you I said well that I understand we it's interesting we love each other incredibly even though we're on different trips because compassion doesn't mean you lay your trip on anybody else it means you become it's so perfect that you become the light that draws you don't go out and say come on dad wake up the but I said I'll try to share with you since you don't understand I'll try to explain I said didn't you just try a case for Uncle Henry he's a lawyer he says you said you win it he says damn right I didn't it was a tough case I said boy you worked a lot on East as I sure did I said I bet you charged him a big fee he says of course not it's my brother in law I said well that's my predicament hey everybody's my brother-in-law okay boom I got ripped off and he could hear that see he could hear that out of a Jewish middle-class background he could hear family you do one thing would and then you do something else with say hey and if he's meshugganah enough so the whole thing is his family that's you know he's a good kid anyway in conclusion when you leave this place and this blessing this Mitzvah when you leave this I can assure you that you will come down and I can further tell you although you may forget it but that is as much of the teaching as this is and the down and up is all part of the dance and the game is not to get high but the game is to B and B includes highs and lows until you are no more attached to your high than you are to your low there is bliss there's depression right there it all is there's the whole panorama of Maya all the positive states and negative states it's all more stuff divine stuff The Leela and in it all here we are here we are and the the meaning of honoring Shiva is to give space to all these forces to recognize them to allow their being to not try to shove them under the rug there is a terrible habit we have of getting holy too fast intellectually we know where holy is and we figure out well I want to be like Swamiji so I'll put on those clothes and I'll act like that and you do it from outside in you can't do this game from outside and you can play at it but you're going to keep that inner voice is going to keep being horrified by your hypocrisy and then you say well I'm really nowhere and the statement I'm really nowhere is the recognition of being somewhere that is it see people come to me and say I'm no good I'm depressed I'm up or I hate everybody and I said to them well if you hated everybody you wouldn't tell me you hate everybody you know it's that story I've told about I now two minutes over because I have lack of self-control it's nearly 4 it's ok Amelia run out some years back at Millbrook of a girl called in the middle of the night and she had taken some mysterious chemical and in Los Angeles and she was freaked and she called up and she got me in the line she said I've gone crazy and I'm gonna kill myself and I'm insane and she laughed hysterically and she did it she showed me she was insane and I said to her well I said to her well who dialed the phone you know the four digits and the three digits and the three digits and the one digit and gave the number and the whole thing she said I did I said what would you put her on the phone cuz you're crazy so let me say that once you have tasted once you've touched once the connections been made once we have acknowledged each other's existence once we know we're here you can't get away you can't get away you may go under really deep and feel I've lost it and then you'll see yourself standing there I lasted and you'll break up Oh have I lost it Oh am I depressed you know get bored oh I'm bored on so bored I'm bored see and then you let yourself be bored on still bored I'll try to meditate now I'm bored with that bored I'm bored oh I'm so bored oh oh and everything is boring nothing's it oh yeah and then you become totally bored and if you become bored and then it's done alright see the game is if you sell afraid of all the Shiva force as you keep pushing them away they keep clinging it's very interesting to use the golden chain to pull yourself out of the mud let's call this such wig chain of being good and pure and doing good and pure things it's good to help you get out of a lot of other stuff but remember you're holding on to a chain and that chain can bind to and to get caught in good and evil while you're using good and evil as a method just remember that behind good and evil we are behind good and evil we are Shiva and Rama two more phases of that which is indescribable and unknowable and unseeable but only be able it's really very very good to be with all of us and I guess this afternoon after a few more rounds of the drama we will sing together namaste

Channel: Baba Ram Dass

Views: 225,899

Keywords: service, bhakti, Hanuman108108108108, karma yoga, grace, Ram, Dharma, Dass, teacher, ram dass dharma, ram dass bhakti, ram dass bhakti yoga, ram dass karma yoga, ram dass service

Id: UBSJF5x5iO4

Length: 70min 31sec (4231 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 29 2014