Who starts. My question is, how can we maintain our own integrity
or identity in our relationship, especially a close one without compromising the integrity of others? Okay. Which you do you want to preserve? [inaudible].. selves Okay. Let me play with it a little bit. When I look at relationships, my own and others all I see a wide range of reasons for people to be together and ways in which they are together and I see ways in which relationship, which means something that exists
between two, two or more people, just for the most part, reinforces people's separateness as individual entities. And it doesn't just honor it, it treats it as the reality of it. When I perform or I used to perform, I don't anymore,
but I used to perform weddings. I would marry. I had a license for a while,
but it was revoked by the temple here. I don't want to perform. His was to what we used to be able to perform weddings and I do a lot under the table. But the image I always have
when I'm performing a wedding is the image of a triangle in which there is the the two partners. And then there is this third force, its third being that emerges out of the interaction of these two. And the third one is the one that is of the shared awareness
that lies behind the two of them, and that the two people in the yoga of relationship come together
in order to find that shared awareness that exists behind them, in order to then dance as to so that the two nurse brings them into one and the Oneness dances as two, and that that's a kind of a vibrating relationship
between the one and the two so that people are both separate and yet they are not separate and they are experiencing
that the relationship is feeding both their uniqueness as individuals and their unit of consciousness. Now that's extremely delicate because it's so easy
to get entrenched in your own. I need this, I want this. You're not fulfilling this for me
and seeing the other as object, but the delight which all of you
have experienced, of being with somebody where you are sharing an awareness
of the predicament you are both in and you're sharing
an awareness of the predicament, even when you're having an argument
with each other, there's an awareness that you're both almost delighting
in the horrible beauty of it. I don't know
whether any of you have had that. I've had it quite often, you know. Because I'm around pretty conscious people
a lot of the time and we fight, you know,
we have differences, but we're enjoying, we're hating it and enjoying it
both because this these levels that we're playing it all the time and but we come into relationship often very much identified with our needs. I need this. I need security, I need refuge,
I need friendship, I need this. And all of relationships are symbiotic
in that sense. We come together because we fulfill each
other's needs at some level or other. The problem is that when you identify
with those needs, you always stay at the level
where the other person is her or him satisfying that need. And it really only gets extra nearly beautiful when it becomes us. And then when it goes behind us
and becomes I and so when you when I ask you which person are you saving or protecting or whose integrity you're protecting, I can see, for example, that I enter into relationships. I understand that to enter into the yoga of relationship
is an extremely difficult thing to do. It's the hardest yoga
that I know of, actually, because your ego is so vulnerable. When you start to open up to another human being,
you feel so tender and so vulnerable. And before that one place gets going
strong enough, the you get frightened and you pull back
and you get entrenched. And that happens all the time
in relationships. People that come together with the
greatest meaning of being feeling love. And then they get caught in their needs
and their frustrations and they separate. One of the problems
is that we tend to put relationships a little bit on the back burner in life
when we get a relationship, and then we go out to a job
and we go out to other things and we sort of, well, now
we've got that together. We'll go do life and for relationship to be a yoga of relationship is like a full time
operation for years. I mean, for me, one of my examples is Stephen and Andre. Yvonne, Stephen and Andre used to be really nice,
friendly, sociable people before they met. And now this is not a tape to them. And then they met. I used to like. Stephen and then and then they met. And. They really started to be together and the amount of energy that had to go into staying clear with each other
because what happens is so much goes down so fast in relationships, it's really hard
to process it fast enough to keep clear. So you keep getting this kind of residual of old stuff that
isn't quite digested enough and you end up separate from
the person because you didn't have time to stop and kind of work it through,
clear it and so on. So what they did was they moved on to land with no telephone and put up a big sign,
no trespassing. And they just started to work
with one another and after some years during which you really felt like you were cut off as a friend and it was hard for me because I counted on Stephen
a lot for sharing consciousness. And then after a while, I began to be they began to open up to me
and allow me in. And then I began
to see the effect of that. I began to see what happens when people
learn how to really open trust, meditate together, keep emptying, keep clearing
work until they are a shared awareness. And if you watch them
when they're teaching together, when they're on the platform or when they're together, they are really
they've done some extraordinary work. They still have a lot of work to do.
I mean, they're not cooked by any means, but they have done some really good stuff together
and that's hard. And it's rare. It's rare. But I, on the other hand,
have gone into relationships and realized that I can't hear my own truth
in the relationship. And I've had to stop it because I didn't wasn't
willing to surrender the life games that I was in for that relationship. It just wasn't worth the effort. I treasured what I was doing in my life too much to invest in that relationship
that deeply. So I've heard it both. Ways. To hear that you say, Oh yeah, it's not fair to say that any relationship
that isn't involved in the yoga, a relationship is not useful
and fulfilling to people because a lot of people come together
because it's just really comfortable living with another person and there's
a wonderful kind of sweet intimacy and it's fun to cook with each other
and fun to sleep together. And it's fun, too,
to just live life together without trying to get too deep
in is a spiritual practice. And many of those people
have other spiritual practices. They go off and meditate
and one else one does something else at Tai Chi or something else. And that seems fine to me. I don't think you should make believe
that a relationship is really yoga unless you are willing to really put the
effort into making it such. And if you are, it really fills all the space for a long time. Am I hearing the issue clearly,
or do somebody want to say something? The when I'm in a relationship with somebody else and what they do upsets me because I understand
that my life experiences are the gift of my guru in order to bring me to God that if somebody upsets me,
that's my problem. Yes, this is a hard one because we don't
usually think these ways in this culture when I see other people is as I see them as like trees in the forest. You go into the woods and you see gnarled trees
and live oak, some pines and hemlocks and elms and things like that. And you're not inclined to say, I don't like you because you're a pine and not an elm. You appreciate trees the way they are, but the minute you get in here, humans,
you notice how quick it changes. There's a way in which you don't allow
humans to just manifest the way they are. You take it personally. You keep taking other people personally. All they are are mechanical runoffs of old karma. Really is what they are. I mean, they look real
and they think they're real. But really
what they are is mechanical runoff. So they say or so. And you karmically go raw. And then one of you says, we've got to. Work this out.
And the other says, yes, we must. And then you start to work
it out. It's all mechanical. It's all conditioned stuff. I mean, I'm really being the last one so that if somebody I mean, somebody comes along
and gets to me, they get me angry or uptight or they awaken some desire. And while I am, I'm delighted they got me. And that's my work on myself. If I'm angry with you
because your behavior doesn't
fill my model of how you should be, That's my problem for having models. No expectations, no upset. If you're a liar and a cheat,
that's your karma. If I'm cheated, that's my work on myself,
my attempting to change you. That's a whole other ballgame. What I'm saying is I will only be happy
if you are different than you are. You're asking for it. Really asking for it. Think of how many relationships you say
I really don't like that person's this. If they would only be this if I can only manipulate them to be this,
I can be happy. So that weird. Why can't I be happy
with them the way they are? You're a liar, a cheat and a scoundrel. And I love you. I won't play games with you,
but I love you. It's interesting to move to the level
where you can appreciate love and allow in the same way you would in the woods instead of constantly
bringing in that judging component which is really rooted
out of your own feelings of lack of power. Judging comes out of your own fear. Now I fall trap to it all the time, but every time I do, I catch myself. Okay, that's a beginning. Let's go. Question You are more jittery. You still hear? Yes. No, that's okay. You get. You don't give me feedback. I'm going home now with your. Okay, Let's go. Braavos. Basically,
we had a relationship in the beginning. Everything is exactly like that
is you marry that person all excited
and tighter and writing information. Well, and that's a problem. Which leads to my question. In my life,
I have been in some relationships of my nature and getting married and divorced twice and I'm searching for something special, something I've been told is called solely. Do you believe in such a person
and what would that mean? How do we not know that kind of, Oh. Keep looking. Okay. I mean,
I'll give you the farthest out answer, first of all, and then we'll come back
to something that everybody can handle in the farthest out answer. We have all been around so many times
that every one of us has been everything with everybody else. Yeah. So when I look at you, you and I have been
in so many relationships together, it's just we don't remember. Do you know how many times we've been born and died? Remember that story? Voodoo says if you take a mile, mountains
six miles long, six miles wide, six miles high. That's the distance
a bullet walks in a day and a bird flies over the mountain once every hundred years
with a silk scarf in its beak. In the length of time it takes the scarf
to wear away the mountain. Oh, that's
how long you've been doing this. Huh? We just think of it once
every hundred years. The scarf over a scarf and a mountain goes on and on and on and on. I mean, in India there are you guys and cultures of hundreds
of thousands of years of. And then they just start cycles
all over again. And we've been through all of them again
and again and again and again now, behind all of it is the one. And that's all there is. This is all all of us
here are one in drag appearing to be many. And so we are all soul mate. There's only one of it. It's not, mate, because it's not even two. It's just one. There's only one of us. So what you're really doing
is constantly marrying yourself at the deepest level of God, marrying God. Right now you come down into soul, and each soul has a unique
karmic predicament. You could call it a psychic DNA code that in a way guides which way its life will go. And it is entirely possible that souls, when they take birth in parents into parents that are part of their karma, will at some point meet a being
and they have agreed in advance to come down
and do this together and meet. And that's
what we usually call soul mates. But once you have found from your past marriages, is that what you are attracted to
in a person? Isn't what you ultimately live with that what the after the they say the honeymoon is over and it's after the desire systems that were dominant in the relationship
that have the attraction in it pass and all of it passes,
then you're left with the work to do. And it's the same work
when you trade in one partner for another, you still have the same work
you're going to have to do sooner or later when the pizzazz is over
and it just keeps going over. And you can't you can't milk
the romanticism of relationship too long as you become more conscious. It's more interesting than that. It really is. And people keep wanting to romanticize
their lives all the time. Culture is part of the culture,
but the awakening process starts to show you the emptiness of that form
and you start to go for something deeper. You start to go to meet another human
being in truth. And truth is scary. Truth has bad breath at times,
truth is boring. The truth, you know, burns the food. Truth is all the stuff. Truth has anger, truth has all of it. And you stay in it
and you keep working with it and keep opening to it
and keep deepening it. And every time you trade in a partner, you realize that that's all it's not. There's no good about about I'm
not talking good or bad about this, but you begin to see how you keep coming
to the same place in relationships and then you tend to stop because it gets too heavy, because your
your identity gets threatened too much. Because for the relationship to move
to the next level of truth requires an opening and a vulnerability
that you're not quite ready to make. And so you entrench, retrench,
you pull back and then you start to judge and push away,
and then you move to the next one. And then you have the rush of the openness and then the same thing starts to happen. And so you keep saying, where am I going
to find the one where this doesn't happen? And it'll only happen
when it doesn't happen in you, when you start to take and watch the stuff and get quiet enough inside yourself
so you can take that process as it's happening and start to work
with it and keep coming back to living truth in yourself
with the other person. Even though it's scary and hard. You hear what I'm talking about. So the other person has to work with you. Well, that's interesting. The ideal, of course, is
where two people work together. But in like in India, where many marriages are arranged and you don't even see your wife
until after the wedding. I mean, they wear masks at the wedding
in some color in some villages. I don't know whether they do. In southern India, in North Krishna
and Radha, they wear masks and then they take off the mask
and there they are for life because there's no divorce. I mean, you don't see divorce
in a village. If if, if the husband dies,
the wife goes on the funeral pyre. And so this is it. This is it for life. It's got its benefits. But yeah. But what's interesting about that is that when they understand
dharma of relationship, there is a way in which it's like what the Marines say,
that if you can change it, you can you change it. And if you can't painted. That. And when you can't change a marriage,
you start to work with it. I thought if it stands still, the same can move it. Yeah. The the
when you have something that you're in like I couldn't
trade my father in for another father. He was given to me. That's the given. I can't divorce my father. I can go away from him,
but I can't divorce him. And what I found was because I had to keep dealing with my father,
who called me random and who. You know, he. Loved me a lot. And he but I was very sweet
and well-meaning and and we were buddies. And but it was weird because he didn't
really understand what I was doing. And he attended a gathering in New York
on the Central Park West, where Judith works, also in a church
where they have Christ washing the feet of the disciples
and the mural in the back wall. He was back there
with my stepmother to be, and I was up there in a white robe
with beads, I said, And he he whispered to he as
I feel like the Virgin Mary, which for a Jew was pretty good,
but she was. So it's. Okay. We forget that don't about. That. But that was interesting work for me because he was a given that he couldn't
trade in in the last years. I was with him a lot and and I began to see that
that was work on myself to not judge him,
not to try to change him. He was what he was. He was a perfect statement of that. He was absolutely perfect who he was. It was only when I had a model of how
I would like my father to be that there was trouble. I wanted him not to suffer when that. So I wanted to understand
what I understood about dying. And he didn't want to understand. And I was frustrated because I meant well. I knew if he understood it,
he wouldn't suffer. The worst problem was trying to take
the suffering away from people you love. That's the stinker. You keep wanting
to take away their suffering and you don't even know why it's there
in the first place. It's so interesting
to allow people to be who they are. Finally, I think in relationships you create an environment
with your own work on yourself, which you offer to another human being to
use to grow in the way they need to grow. Your parents are an environment
for their children. Lovers are an environment
for their partners. Children are an environment
for their parents. And you keep working. You become the soil
moist and soft and receptive so the person can grow
the way they need to grow. Because how do you know how they should
grow? People have two children. One of them is a very old incarnation,
an old lama who just dropped down to bless everybody. And the other one
is immediately posting the end result, you know, and they're their siblings
and they are my children, you know, And they are two entirely different
two beings. So you've just got to listen to hear
what a human being needs, who they need to be in a lifetime. So when you work with a situation
where you don't change it, you just work on yourself a different way. The idea of manipulating the universe
in order for you to be happy is just one model. The other model is manipulate your own
mind to you, happy with what you got. Which is probably the only way to do it. Finally, that's the only way to do it. Because if you keep manipulating
the environment, it's never right. You never notice that thing. I mean, I've going to I'll go to Kauai
and, you know, in Hawaii, rent a house, get a car, have a lover,
get art supplies, get fish, get. But do you notice the weather is a little clammy
today down at the jeep they gave us. It's not running on all cylinders. That damn restaurant was closed tonight. I mean, I can watch how you can create
an absolute hell out of the whole thing. That was to be heaven in paradise. And then you just laugh at yourself. And then finally, the the image I have,
which I've told so many times of being in Bali
at the railway station in India, when I realized
the train was going to be two days late and the. Station was full of. People who were living there and these were families with kids
that were peeing everywhere and they had goats and chickens
and vendors selling everything. I mean, it's life. It's real life in the Bali railway station
and I didn't have much money at that time. And I had I was barefoot
because I was a yogi in those days. And the latrine I had dysentery and. Then the train hadn't. It had stopped up maybe or a few weeks before. And so the. Fecal matter was sort of everywhere and there were flies,
I mean, millions of flies. And I had to go about every 15 minutes and now my mother raised me. She she had very different models
of toilet training. And she taught me she taught me what hell was. And the closest to hell her mind was
the Bali railway station, the train. I mean, if she had ever seen it,
that would be she would realize she had. She had met her fantasy right. And there I was. It was interesting because I found myself
sitting there knowing I had to go to the bathroom, feeling it
coming, and knowing I had to go in there. And then coming back and then sitting. It's got toilet paper for those that. See, Claire. Has a roll of toilet paper. And there was a moment when I realized
in the midst of all that that I was happy. Be. Home. And I thought, This is impossible. Everything my training prepared me for
was to not be happy. At this moment, I and I am happy. And it was interesting. I was happy because there was
there was life force, there was openness, there were people, there was realness,
there was softness. It was alive. And also
because I was really at peace and myself. And this was just the stuff to deal with. And in a way, that experience
shifted my consciousness about manipulating the universe to be happy. I'll still make
it as nice as I can for me. But then where it isn't, I don't sit around
being preoccupied with what isn't low. It's just open to it. So here we go. Here we go. Because the amount of time
you create a hell with your own mind because of your attachments
to your models of how it should be that are different from the way it is. You can see it in this culture
about growing old. You see the model
that a person develops about themselves and then as their body changes,
which is inevitably part of nature, how it this confirms their model
and how they suffer. Because I used to do 100 push ups
and now I can only do 70. And there's a deep depression that interesting. I can't even do one and I'm not depressed. You should be the next question. And I find that when I'm feeling pain or anger or fear, and especially
when I'm sharing it with somebody. I do a manipulation thing where. I think I'm facing I'm facing it,
but a lot of. It gets pushed down. So yeah. And I so my question,
I guess is how to really keep open to. Those things and that claim that balances. You talking about manipulating them or yourself,
do you feel you're selling out to be with them or do you feel that
you're trying to manipulate them? What are you telling me? It's not a it's
not a real conscious thing. And it's it's an ego. Well, most
everything we do is on this plane. It's hard not to be. I mean,
the spirit is mediated through ego. It's just the question of how identified
you are with it. To tell me these things in yourself is acknowledging
the fact that you see them some level. And when you're with another partner
that you're really trying to work with by acknowledging
that stuff with each other, it doesn't mean that
you have to extract something from them. It's just that the relationships
that are the most exciting are where the contract is to share truth. Many relationships
don't have that kind of a contract. They have a contract of You won't threaten
my ego and I won't threaten yours. We'll both feel comfortable. But if the relationship is designed where you agree and agree, let us when I say to you, will you help awaken by sharing your truth with me? It may be difficult for me to hear it
well, but that's work I will do with myself. And then you say to me, Would you help me awaken through sharing your truth with me? Sometimes it'll be hard for me,
but I'll work on myself with it. That relationship gets very exciting. That gets loaded. That's. That's juicy. I mean, GI
and I have been friends for many years, and we have that contract
and sometimes it's been hard. There have been moments
when truth to me has been painful for me to work with as mine
has been to him. But we trust each other
because we're both committed to awakening, because we both love Maharaj so much that we take that truth and
we keep working it and working with it. Or that's the same in my relation with Judith, who I've been
with for many years, same way now. Those kinds of truth relationships are very precious. They're very delicate. But you anything less than the truth. So what you do
is when you see that stuff in yourself, you can say to the other person,
I see how I am manipulating and you just keep bringing it out and
the two of you bring it out and examine it with good faith. You keep doing that. You keep working
and get as close as can with it. And if the ship doesn't allow that, then the work has got to be in yourself of bringing it up
and seeing the way you're doing it. I mean, I have a very manipulative quality in me that I have had to work
with a lot over the years to the point where when I see myself doing even somebody pointed out to me
or I begin to see myself doing it. And then the interesting question
is, what do you do with that moment? Do you get into, Oh, you're a no good bum
because you're doing that again, or you just kind of
let it go and let it flow by us. So there I am again, Manildra,
who was one of my wonderful meditation teachers once I came home
and I was so upset about something and he says, Ram Dass, don't
you see it's just old karma running off? And I really heard that. It's just old stuff, all of us running off and bring it up,
look at it and. Let it go. Thank. Yes, my question. Is unheard. Of, and I think it has to do with the relationship to the spiritual teacher
and it has to do with one view is that the student should never accept blindly
what the teacher puts on them or tells, but one should check it out for myself when also put it able to should totally surrender. Is being a teacher
now if you are a student in this kind of situation,
which way you go? I want to. I think you surrender only to truth and your intuitive heart has to be the final arbiter of where the truth lies, the final judgment,
where the truth lies. And you're surrendering to what you're surrendering to
is God in the form of another person and there are often times where because most of the beings that we call
gurus are really teachers, the likelihood of finding somebody
that's a cooked goose is reasonably slim. Since they're not cooked geese, they have their own karma,
they have their own stuff, and so they become somebody through whom a teaching comes. But they themselves are not truth. They are merely a vehicle through which there is a purity in your heart
in the way you seek truth. You will take as the as the swan is able to separate
milk from water, you separate the purity of their message from the stuff of their karma, and you take the truth
and you work with it. So my like some teachers will say, I've given you so much,
you know, you've got to do this for me. I would
say the only thing you owe a teacher is for you
to give lying, enlightened or free and so on. You old because they're doing it
out of the grace and good fortune that they're able to do it. And that should be enough for them, you all of them, to take care of them. You may want to out of your love for them, but there's not an obligation
in that sense. My sense is that that
when we surrender to a teacher and then end up feeling burned
by their impurities, there was a conspiracy between the teacher and you for everybody
to do themselves in through each other. And everybody's. Getting their comeuppance. I have watched this again and again because there is a whole panoply
of impurity in the teaching scenes. What if you don't do that? So what if you feel that no matter
what happens. What you talk about might come? Why do you not feel that way? I feel that the teacher themselves is very human. So it's kind of from your
lack of knowledge and you don't feel that. If you intuitively feel that,
then you listen and you go as close to surrender as you can go. But you've got to hear that the the final spiritual surrender
is no surrender. It's a surrender where there's nothing to surrender. Because you already see, because the highest thing in
the other person is the same as the highest thing in you. But I don't know that you know,
but you are surrendering constantly into the highest part of your truth and intuitively, there's a place in you
that does know that even though you don't know, you know it so that you're making approximations
And what you may do is fall on your face. Well, I think it's one for surrender. Which one's really going to get burned? The fact is that
you can't really decide to surrender because that's just another trip of power. I'm surrendering to you,
you know, give me the truth. It doesn't work that way. Doesn't work that way. The relationship between a pure master and a chamber is a matter that has nothing to do
with the intellect whatsoever. There's no choice involved in it at all. That is such deep karmic unfolding that you are drawn to the master
when the moment is right and the unfolding happens
totally at a level where it when it's right, you just. Are. And all the should I shouldn't I. You know. I recall I was traveling with a swami who was a very beautiful man, and we traveled around the world together. And then I came to his ashram
and it was a very big ashram. And he he he sat on a throne and he had many wealthy devotees
and many poor devotees. And he created a little throne for me
next to his throne. And thousands of people came to see him
and he made all of these people touch my feet
and were judges and wealthy people, and they gave me coconuts
and they put flowers around my neck and he had me have attendants
and he gave me special rooms and it was really lovely. People came up to me and they said,
you know, he's never treated anybody like this before. You had a guru up in the mountains. Him. But, you know, he was nice to start you going, but this is clearly your master. And I thought about my grew
up in the mountains who had a blanket that kept falling off. It's now in most relationships. The relationships are based
on a conspiracy to stay separate. It's based on the idea you're
you and I'm me, and we will interact, we won't merge, we will interact. So the merging is a whole other game that is not part
of the usual social contract at all. And when you come together in a marriage
or in a relationship with a partner,
even that isn't based on merging. Usually it's
based on a partnership of egos of I won't threaten your ego
and you don't threaten mine and we'll do very well together. Thank you. But to do it
as a as a technique for merging is very difficult
because it involves a surrender that has and a relationship
that attempts to be a relationship that is a yoga form often walks
the fine line between chaos and cosmos because it's very scary since it doesn't have the protective device
of a conspiracy to keep separate, it starts to get dealing
with the issues of surrender. And very often, if you start to choose
a yoga, a relationship that becomes your primary yoga,
you can't use that along with other yogis. It's just it becomes your main method because it takes most of your time. You can't have a relationship
and put it in the back burner and then go do other things and call it
the yoga relationship. Most people have relationships
that they find, get, make as comfortable as they can make,
and then go do some other yoga like meditation. So the dance, as I said earlier
today, is like a triangle in which there is the
the two that come together in order to know the one
and then the one dances is two. So it's a very vibrating thing. It's the two energies bringing them into
the one and the one dancing is the two. And it goes like this all the time. So when you make a marriage that is designed to be a technique
to bring you to God, you are using the other person to see through the veil of separateness. So then what do you look at? Because you come together,
attracted by body or attracted by personality or attracted by comfort
or security or whatever, and then through meditation, technique,
you have to look through that veil to see beyond that and see beyond that. And you practice
looking through the veils of other people. That's the yoga of relationship wrestling. And so the art is to extricate yourself
from identification with your somebody ness and extricate
the person you're seeing from their identification
with their somebody ness. So it is really nobody meeting nobody. And then when nobody meets
nobody, there is a merging. And the minute there's any somebody ness at all
in the whole thing, it can happen. The minute the awareness is identified
with anything, it makes it solid. And you can feel after a while when you meet a liquid consciousness
and when you meet a solid, it's amazing. And after a while you walk in
and you meet, you meet people
and you can feel the liquidity. You can feel that the awareness is
just keep emerging all the time. And yet there are forms,
but nobody's invested in them. Nobody's playing them. Nobody's seriously involved in form. And that becomes the yoga
you're working with all the time. So your job is to keep working
on yourself, to extricate yourself from your somebody ness. And at the same moment, seeing through
the veil of somebody else's, somebody knows to
the one that lies behind the many and you can practice levels of this. For example, you can look at me now and you can see my body. You can see me as a 58 year old attractive, balding gentleman. Then you can shift your gaze and
see my personality, and you can see me as a teacher, as warm, as charismatic, as whatever,
you know, as slightly neurotic, whatever. Then you can shift your gaze once more. You can see that I'm an Aries, you can see that
I'm my astral mythic identity. Then you can shift once more and you can look
and you can see that I'm a fellow soul. You there? I'm here. What are you doing in that one? And when you see me as a fellow soul,
you see me as a soul packaged
in this astral personality body matrix, just a soul that came into this. And we just all of us are just souls
hanging out in these funny packages. And each package
has its own trip to live out. And then if you flip it once more,
you look and you're looking at yourself. Looking at yourself.
There's only one of it. This is the yoga relationship. Yes. How does it compare
to a monastic or a single life? I think that you've got to really get over
the cultural models, that everybody has to have a partner or
everybody has to be alone to get to God. I think relationship is a very hard yoga. I think it's a hard yoga
because it's so easy to get caught because it gets so frightening
to get so close to the to the to the void
with another human being because you feel so vulnerable on the way
through to your invulnerability. And so that most yoga or most relationships end up agreeing
to settle for something or other. They run out of will
to keep breaking through, and they quickly settle
for some very beautiful things. But it's a really hard one
to keep at it all the time. And so marriage and family, I think are certainly routes to God,
but they are difficult routes. They're difficult. But a single see, what you've got to do is
you've got to hear what your own incarnations, function, role and function, what your soul needs from a birth. If your if you are to marry
and have children and you resist it,
you will feel out of harmony with things. If you marry and have children
and you are really a single yogi,
you will feel out of sorts with it too. And you've just got to listen
and feel your way through that because there's
just no rules for the game. Each person has their own unique dharma. The question. Is this same. Analogy on many different relationships. And my question is,
do we have such a thing? Do I have such a thing as a soulmate? And I was just wondering
if perhaps you could give me a telephone number if. There be a sign up list for this gentleman outside. My. First of all, when you say wasted,
you didn't waste them. After a while, you begin to see that your journey, spiritual journey,
as you awakened more and more, you begin to understand what was going on in all this stuff beforehand. Like I had periods in my adolescence
that were hell realms for me. I mean that I was extremely unhappy
and miserable and lonely and isolated. And now in perspective, from as I look
back, I see the way those things drove me inside
to certain parts of my being, and they deepened my compassion,
they deepened my awareness. They did a lot of things for me. I wouldn't lay them on anybody
and I wouldn't want to repeat them. But I now see that it was a process. And in a way,
don't look back at your life. Don't look at things as wasted
parts of your life. Just say maybe I don't understand yet
what the meaning of it was, but understand it's all process. People don't fall off the path
in the real sense of the path. It's a continuous process, right? The only way you would know a soulmate
if you met one was if you were residing in your soul. As long as you're in your personality,
it's all a little game. The whole idea of soul mates, which is used a lot in this culture,
you know, I want my soul mate. That's a personality speaking
and you know, it takes one to know one, if you will. Right? And what you will feel at times is you'll feel an incredible familiarity
with somebody when you meet them and you will feel that
we are connected to each other, even though we have known each other
in this life. But that's probably true. There's probably
only about 500 of us in the world anyway, and we just keep going around again
and that we've all known each other many times in many ways. I mean, I have a feeling we that it said that everybody was
everybody's mother and father and child and murderer and murder
and all sorts of things. So you get so that you're a surprise when you feel these complex emotions
regarding other human beings. I'm not sure I understand
the term soul mate other than people have work
to do together at times and then they may come together
in many different forms. You may come together with a brother
or a sister or a mother or a cousin or an employer
or employee that have incredible work together. I mean, Judas
and Jesus had work to do together. They could have been soul mates
in that sense. Yes. And I don't have any phone numbers
for you. It's a big group,
so we're not going to take questions now. Okay. Go ahead. Except for the group until we get done. Who's
next? Is there a difference between marriage
and just living together? Is there a difference between marriage
and just love? And we'll forget the word Just
is there a difference between marriage and living together? Okay, Well, it really depends on
which culture you're living in. For example, in the villages in India, when you get married, it is till death. And if one person dies,
the other person lives in mourning for the rest of their life and doesn't remarry. Well, that's not true for the men. It's true for the women,
which is a very sexist thing. Of course, fact, in some cultures
the women goes on the funeral pyre when the man dies,
but there's no divorce it's not heard of. But that's because the culture isn't
focused on personality so much. In California, where I live, it is serial monogamy that is, you only are married to one
person at a time, but you can be married serially and marriage
has come to be a special friendship. See, the difference
between these different models are your parents, are your given karma. You can't trade them in. You can't turn in your father
and get a new one. And then you have friends
that are acquired Karma. Okay? Those are those are people you take on
and you work with them. And then if it doesn't work,
you can go on to somebody else. Now where does a marriage fit in between given karma and acquired karma? In some cultures it's given karma. The minute you make
the contract, it's til death do us part. When you say till death do us part, it
then has become given karma
in the same way that a parent is. It's nothing you can turn in now. What marriage has come to be in
the West is much more like a special friendship
where you take it on and work with it. And then if you both find you're
incompatible, you go on to somebody else. From a spiritual point of view, ideally you would find a partner who wished to awaken
and you wish to awaken, and the two of you would use the relationship
in order to awaken, and you would use your raising of children
and your lifestyle and you're working with your money and all of it as a way of awakening
that would the ideal. And if you end up in a marriage
where you got married before you started to awaken
or you got married, and then you find that one person
doesn't want to awaken and another does, doesn't want to work on itself
and another does, then the person that wants to awaken
has really a choice. You can see that relationship
as given karma and work with it, or you can say, I really want my marriage
to be satsang or Sangha, so I will give this one up
and try another one. I'll find somebody
who wants to work with me. Right? It actually from a spiritual of view,
you're going to grow both ways. From a psychological point of view,
it might be harder being married to somebody that's not the least bit
interested in what you are interested in. You go to retreats all by yourself
and they don't care and they don't want to meditate
and they want to look at the ballgame. And but from a
in terms of your work on yourself, that will get you
there just as fast as as. And what you usually find is
when you keep trading in your partner's the next partner you get,
you will slowly make the relationship over into what you had last time anyway. I mean, because these are happening
on much deeper levels of unconsciousness. I mean, if you're neurotic in in London,
you'll probably be neurotic in Paris. You know, it's not like suddenly
you're going to move or shift people. It's all going to be roses. It'll still you'll still have to deal with
the stuff of your attachments of mind. So after a while, you
don't really care so much who you're with. You just keep doing it. You could say that
a marriage contract deepens the commitment
to go through the suffering together. The problem is,
I think from forget the problem. My sense is that love
is the only marriage contract and that people should stay together
so long as they want to be together in love and that to be together with somebody
because you signed a paper at one time does not seem to me
to be a valid reason to stay together. I don't hear that right now. And all of the vacillation when you're
living with somebody, shall we marry? Shouldn't we marry? That's just grist
for the mill of spiritual work on oneself. About what the issues of commit. Because what does commitment mean? Commitment
means says this is a useful process for us to be working on ourselves
through from a spiritual point of view. That's what it's saying. And that doesn't have to be a contract
between two people. That is something each person
makes a decision to do about their life. So I know some of you are upset by that,
but that's okay. Question This follows what you just said. Can you make a distinction? I know some Tibetan masters
who have wives, and it would seem as if their relationship with their wife
is not particularly consciousness. She stays in the kitchen and, you know, it's in a pretty
traditional sense and washes the dishes and they don't talk, though
this master is very busy teaching consciousness
and we travel all over the world. She's probably the Buddha. She's Yeah. I he's just the front man. Well, exactly. I mean, I think what I'm saying
Graham does is there it is a sacrament. Is the chicken soup. Yeah. Excuse me. Go ahead. I mean, is there a distinction
between a path that is yoga of relationship as a way to God and being a spiritual warrior
on the way to God and as part of that, having a conscious,
supportive relationship. But that is not the primary focus. Yeah, I think that most people
that are in spiritual. Work gets to call. The marriage the relationship. Yoga is such a stinker, you know that
the best thing to do is to form a marriage that gives you support and gives you
intimacy and all of the things you need. And it's comfortable and safe and secure. And it's a base camp. And then you do your practices
and as you both do your practices, you get you get clearer and closer together. But the yoga of relationship
wasn't the primary yoga. I think you're absolutely right. And I think that's
a very valid thing to do. I think that's a more intelligent strategy
than trying to make the relationship the yoga tell you the truth. Because this is the question I've discussed with
some people is I was recently getting married and I ended it because I was saying, I really want to go to God
and to look in your eyes. And my partner just wanted another gin
and tonic and I sort of ended up it was quite impossible to do the work. And yet I see that I had probably intended
something that wasn't my social nature to go much too high, that was even higher
than I could probably do. And so somehow I sacrificed myself for it. You know, I just could have chosen
a nice middle of the road with a little bit of personality comforts and coming to retreats as well. I mean. They come out of I mean, you know. I mean, I think. She escaped just in time. Yes, sir. I, I mean, I'm putting myself up as a scapegoat,
but for many years I have really tried to live a very rigorous spiritual relationship. And there was always the pain because I would deny myself
certain things that I had, not, as it were, evolved enough to not me. And you see, it also begs the question
that if one is on the spiritual path, is one necessarily of a different vibrational rate
than someone who isn't? Or is that yet another glamor? I mean, because, quote,
I'm on the spiritual path, therefore I can't be with so-and-so
because they're not. I think that I hear point and I think most of the time
that we use the spiritual path concept as a way of giving ourselves
some status in our own mind. And it's a little fraudulent. Yeah. And I think that somebody
that is really working spiritually in the deepest sense
will just use everything in their life. They'll use the gin and tonic,
they'll use the they'll use the not marrying and
the marrying, and they just quietly keep using everything they can use a process
and they don't make a big deal of it. They do it in a way. They do this spiritual practices
behind the screen in a way of life. And they just seem like regular people
doing it. They the whole showbiz
part of spirituality is a little showbiz. And finally you let that go
and you just nothing special. You know, I agree totally. You know, but also, Ram Dass isn't the, you know, someone who does work
on themselves and someone who doesn't. If they get together, that is a kind of difference, you know,
But for the person. But for the person
who is working on themself, that is very good stuff to work with. That's very good stuff to work with. I mean, it's just a fire. It's a harder fire. It's a harder fire. If I want to go to God,
I really do my next part and look funny. But no, I wouldn't. I, I would try to make it easy
for yourself because you could fall, I mean, not fall off, but you could, you know, you can get into the olives. Iranians, Viagra.
You know, I think that you what you would do is you would find you look around
and you see you find somebody who shares your journey
as well as you can. But then if you find after you marry
that you're with somebody who primarily is on the gin
and tonic yoga, you know, then you work with that. That's what you work with. That's all I'm suggesting, right? Because you were attracted to that person
in the first place. And the problem is you've got to look
for the truth of where you are. A lot of people, for example,
say I'm on the spiritual path when in fact really
what they want to do is have good sex, but they don't want to admit it
so that they are attracted to somebody that wants good sex. And then they put them down in order to not identify
with what they themselves really want. So at least be straight with yourself. If that's what you want,
that's what you want. It's better to be truthful
than to be wholly to be phony. Holy. All right. We have enough trouble with that. And that that'll just blow your way.
Phony holiness. I mean, it just keeps. You've got to go back. Go back to go and start again and start. Okay. Next season. On the question of more open relationships,
I mean, I'm not saying committed marriage relationship, but we seem to be limited in our ability to express the impulses
that stem from deep within, deep within oneself. Is this inability, a limitation inherited through the mores of culture, or is it a human limitation and thereby meaning
we must always be alone with this? Wait a minute.
You got to start this one again. This is a very complex one. Say it. Start again. I'm not talking about. You're talking about open marriage. I'm not talking about marriages
or I'm talking about relation. Relationship with others. With others? Yeah. You know, can we seem limited in our ability to express the impulses that stem from deep within ourselves? Is this limitation. Inherited through our culture, or is it a basic human limitation? And if if it is, must we always be as we were alone with our experience? I think our inability to express our to acknowledge impulse life is primarily a socialization process. It's the process of culture. And I think that it's the way in which we get acculturated
so that a society can function. It's because it's a society
has a hard time when there's immediate impulse expression
for everybody all the time. It needs a certain amount of delay
of gratification, a certain amount of control,
a certain amount of actually suppression, not necessarily repression,
but It usually ends up repression. It is certainly possible
to work with truth in a relationship to get to the point where more and more
you are safe in expressing what your impulses are
and your truth of your moment. Truth is one of the vehicles for deepening spiritual
awareness through another human being. And if there is a license for that
in the relation, in any relationship with guru, with friend, with lover,
with whatever it is, it is a
an absolutely optimum way of coming into a liquid spiritual relationship
with another person. But it's very delicate because people. Are feel very. Vulnerable. They have parts of their mind that are cut that the idea that's been socialized is if I show this part of me,
I would not be acceptable. And the ability to risk that. Finally, you learn
how to have your truth available. It doesn't mean
you have to force your truth on anybody. But if you find somebody else
that is willing to enter into a contract of truth with you,
then you can share that and you can get closer and closer
to the impulses. Doesn't mean
you have to act on the impulses. I mean, I can say I have I've had the impulse
has arisen in me that I would like to see you cut into pieces. If I felt that or I'd like to make love
with you or something like that. And that might not be socially acceptable or might not fit in
with your model of reality. But if I feel safe enough,
I can share that truth with you. And as you and I share
those truths more and more, then our entrapment in our minds
gets less and less, and we are able to allow the awareness
to flow back and forth between us because we're both looking from the same place
and our human condition together. The impulse, the repression of impulse
is what blocks energy and what keeps other people as them
rather than us. And the idea is to get to the point
where you really live with us, not with them,
not with him or with her, but with us. And finally,
if you're really doing the yoga part of it with I, there is only an I in many forms. Do you hear that? So truth is one of the exciting vehicles
work with with relationship. And what I've learned
is to use my lecture role to make my truth as available
as I possibly could. And what I find is people say to me,
Thank you for being so truthful. It makes it easier for me to be truthful
about myself because you've done that. And I think, well, that's it's
a cheap price to offer yourself up for that purpose. If it if that just in itself starts
to help other people, that dealing with the question. You know. I want to go back one second to the issue
of committed relationships. You can enter into a contract
with somebody that says we will not have relationships
with other people while we are together, and that will allow for a certain kind of safety
and a certain kind of deepening. I think I can hear that as a very viable thing. You could equally enter
into a relationship which says we'll have an open
marriage and, we will work with it. If you I think the a contract
between human beings should be honored. I think that creates an environment
that's safe for inner work, it doesn't matter which contract it is,
as long as it's a contract that's on it. And when you want to renegotiate
the contract, you say, I want to renegotiate the
you don't renegotiate it unilaterally. You don't decide
you're not going to fulfill the contract, then go off
and do something else on your own. It has to be honorable between people. You know, those create the conditions
for for more subtle inner work where you can play it,
You can go deeper and be safer. More questions from this group. Yeah. Okay. Um, you you mentioned earlier
something about sexism, and I wondered if you think that men and women have got similar challenges this time on the planet too, to awaken through your relationship, Or do you think that, that different and. I think this is a very interesting time for women because the history of religious traditions has, for the most part, treated men and women very differently. And in India, for example, the way a relationship is seen is that the woman has two forces
that are very powerful in her. One is that she most easily
can get into a transcendent state because of her chemistry, that in
her menstrual cycle she can get out. There are a lot of ways
she can get out of her worldliness, but she also has a very powerful earth pole
because of the nesting need so that they see a woman
as having these two forces very strong and they experience the man as having much less of an earth
or nesting pole, but tending to get much more caught
in the mind and not having the energy to get out. So what they see a marriage is as the wife is the Shakti or energy which gives the relationship
sufficient juice for the man to get out, then he isn't pulled back so hard and then he can keep her out so that they see that as a team venture. He can't get out without her. She can't stay out without him. And that's the way historically
that was understood in the marriage and it was in when you understood
that you understood why in in India, most of the stories,
the historical stories of the saints revolved around
the men who ended up in caves rather than the women,
because the men, once they got out there, there wasn't anything
pulling them back to Earth as much because they didn't have this dual
function in life of reproduction of of taking care of their young. Now, that was an excuse for a culture that really didn't give women
the opportunity for spiritual practices that were that should have been available
to all human beings. And what we are finding now and there
certainly were plenty of examples taken under my MA or Mirabai or many, many Teresa or people like that. There have been many, many women who have certainly come as close
to enlightenment as men have come. And in terms of their spiritual work. So now it seems to me
that the whole situation has opened up and you're
taking cultural traditions that had a sex difference and you are trying to redefine them in a way
that gives everybody equal opportunity. The predicament
you can't confuse equal opportunity. You mustn't let that mask the fact
that there are differences in biochemistry and there are differences
in the function of an incarnation, and there are differences
between men and women in why a being takes an incarnation
as a woman and as a man. And it's not lesser, just different. These are different functions. So that I think what happened
in our societies most recently, I can see it in the United States
that when the women's movement started or feminism or whatever
that was called, that women's movement that women interpreted as being equally in the mind, as men were, and they in many ways
started to reject the qualities of them that were part of the reason
for their incarnation. They started to get alienated
from their own truth in order to have equal opportunity in the business
marketplace or something like that. That seemed to me
to be an immature level of equality. And as time has gone on, it seems to me
that it's maturing a great deal so that women are beginning to hear that they have a choice they have freedom to choose
and they have freedom to honor their uniqueness
rather than to mask their uniqueness. And so that we can arrive at the way. And in fact,
it seems to me that in Europe, men and women have a much deeper
intuitive sense of their maleness and femaleness
than they do in the United States. In the United States,
there seems to be much more of a kind of a superficial macho ness in men and a kind of a hysterical femininity
in women that isn't coming from a deep truth
of their beings. Now, in terms of spiritual truth, what you notice it's interesting in the in the gurus that as the gurus get further out,
most of the men start to develop breasts. This is interesting. And the there is a quality of androgyny
in spiritual identity that is not social, but it's at some very deep level at which
you are the mother and the father. And that happens to both women and men. I mean, a non to my mother
who was an incredibly delicate and graceful being was also
an incredibly fierce and strong woman. And you could feel that both
those forces were acting in her. And Maharaj v,
my guru was incredibly tender and also extremely fierce. And I can feel that the qualities
that we attribute to women and men often start to merge in beings
as they get more evolved spiritually. So I think that men have, in the terms
of the religious traditions, they have a more clearly enunciated
spiritual path. Women have got to, it seems to me,
have start to have still a time now to be very creative
about how they work with these paths in terms of what is true
and what isn't true and what appropriate to take from another tradition
and what must be created on its own and what and it's going to take
several generations for the maturity of that process to happen
where people aren't just reacting against the suppression
that happened for so long. Am I dealing with your question? I think so. I would love for us. Oh, I think so. I think that in the traditional sense,
like in in India, for example, in the family, the woman is seen as the core
and the central part of the family. And her being a conscious, a Dharmic mother and a Dharmic wife
and a Dharmic homemaker, she was doing a yoga
that brought her closer to God than if the man was being
a lousy businessman or even, you know, I mean, it was because people understood
individual and each person played
their part as Dharma. We've lost that a little bit
in our understanding. But and that's what I say, the maturity. When we mature, we will understand
which of the things we threw over out of a wrong interpretation of. And we will begin to honor
what is true to each human beings needs to manifest. But I think it's absolutely right
that and part of why women weren't historically pointed out
as the spiritual teachers, because their role wasn't as a teacher,
their role was as a support system. That was their way. They became saints. They were saints through their supporting
night, through the front. The front work was I mean, you
I laugh as an anthropologist when I've studied those cultures
where the women kept the family together. They carried the wheat
and they did all that. And the men sat in the
marketplace exchanging beads. And the men were the important people and the women were treated like,
you know, nothing. And yet
they were the root of the whole system. And I can feel in India
that the woman is much more the center of the whole social structure
and that her spiritual consciousness, because every home in India and the villages I live in has its own
puja room. The woman keeps the pew. Jerome The woman does all the services. The woman is concerned
with all of these issues and she becomes the spiritual connection in the situation. And when you look at most of these gurus
like Maharaj, most of the people who came to see him
or the women, the men came and discuss their crops
and things like that, the women came and did Aarti
and did Puja around him all the time. And so I think
that women have a very challenging time in the West at this moment
to find their way through, to find
what they must honor in their beings and what they must demand of the society
to be heard. You know, I'm just taking questions from the group at the moment
until we get through everybody around us. Yes. Yes. You've answered our questions. Thank you for that.
