Ram Dass talks about Neem Karoli Baba, Larry Brilliant, service, and the birth of Seva Foundation

I have a friend his name is Larry brilliant and Larry is a doctor he used to be known as dr. America as part of the hog farm which was a hippie commune in the Berkeley was run by a fellow named wavy gravy who was a clown and wavy works with children and leukemia wards as a clown and among other things he also emcees and stuff and those of you that saw the movie Woodstock remember way be offering everybody breakfast in bed for 500,000 people because he gives away food they bring the hog farm bus and feed people very beautiful man well Larry was part of that and he was a hippy doctor and his wife went to India and met my guru neem karoli baba and she brought Larry to him and when Larry met my guru my guru said to Larry very shortly up to meeting an un Oh doctor what Larry heard that was saying you are no doctor which is what his mother had been saying home for years because he wasn't earning a living but the Guru kept repeating UN Oh doctor UN Oh doctor till finally it sunk into Larry's mind that what he was saying is you are you knighted nation's organization doctor UN Oh doctor and there was a UN oh thing UN World Health Organization project to eradicate smallpox that was going on in India so Larry went down the bus trip from the mountains down to Delhi and he went in with his long hair and his beer and they said we don't want hippie doctors thank you very much and he was shown the door he came back to the Guru the Guru said UN Oh doctor go he went back they said we don't want you he came back this is a long bus trip and he just kept doing it it was like seven eight nine times finally he went into the United Nations he said look if he got any job at all I mean I got to get this guy off my back I'll take any job you got they said well we don't have a job as a doctor but you could be an administrative assistant he's fine so he joined the club of a group of people who were getting rid of smallpox and I'm sure you know by now that smallpox is the one disease human disease that has been completely eradicated from the face of the earth at this point there is not another case in the world you don't have to have vaccinations you don't have to have vaccination certificates because it's gone it's a very extraordinary phenomena that human humanity could band together from Russia from the United States from Czechoslovakia from everywhere and do it together and get rid of something completely well the group that did this in Southeast Asia particularly where the last case I mean it's a very exciting stuff you've got maps with pins of each case and you go with vaccination needles in jeeps and boats and your raid villages and no it's very exciting it's like a war you know they got so juiced up that when it was over they all went to got depressed you can imagine I mean how much their identity was caught in that and they didn't know what to do next well one of the gals who is it Larry's boss was this extraordinary lady her name was Nicole Grasse she was a Swiss doctor she was a Dutch she's a dynamo and she's a very takes on projects and so she was with Sir John Wilson who is a blind man who's head of the world blindness organization he said to her you call you've taken on smallpox and beat it why don't you take on blindness because it turns out that 80% of the blindness in the world is preventable or curable extraordinary so she said okay Larry wanting to band with her and get her energy together decided he'd start a foundation and get all of his buddies together so he drew his buddies from all the different parts of his life now he was now a professor at the University of Michigan in public health he had been working with the World Health Organization he was part of the hog farm he was my guru a devotee of my guru so out of all those places he drew these people together and we met in a snow-bound weekend in Michigan for the first meeting and I can't tell you how bizarre it was because the organization he called it saver which meant at that time Society for epidemiological voluntary assistance only he knew that it also was the Sanskrit word for service so there was a doctor in a three-piece suit with a dispatch case who had come there for a meeting of the Society for epidemiological voluntary assistance and he had come from Washington and he came into the morning meeting the first session he said his briefcase down and he sat there and suddenly in walked wavy gravy who sat down next to him with a beanie on his head with a propeller on the top of it the look of that doctor I will never forget I mean it was like there's some error here you know I'm not supposed to be in this place where this guy is and it took us about three days to figure out that behind all of our facades we all really got off on service and that's why Larry drew us together so we took on blindness and we decided to take on and to me that was a light thing I didn't know what it meant I'm not an ophthalmologist I don't know it was just a nice kind of game to play we took on Nepal because Nepal is a very poor country and Nepal has a very high incidence of blindness it's hard to understand what the situation is the population in Nepal the population in the United States is sixteen times the population of Nepal and there are in Nepal 15 ophthalmologists and there are in the United States 16,000 and a survey showed us that most of the blindness because of ultraviolet light is due to cataract cataract is a famous of the lens and it can be taken care of in most cases by an operation that in a mobile eye hospital takes ten minutes and costs in dollars okay now if you want to close your eyes for one minute now imagine that you're not going to see again and you're going to have to get up and go home and think of all the obstacles you're going to have think of all the help you're going to have and as you get retrained keep your eyes closed as you get retrained you'll have a dog or you'll have Braille and you'll have all these help systems to help you in special financial aid all kinds of things the society will provide for you to help you out at this point now imagine you're living in a third world country where there aren't any of those support systems and the labor force is so close to survival that once you are blind you are out of the labor force and the expected life duration for you is three and a half years but if you live onward because your family takes care of you in this hilly region you may live until you die and you will never have your sight back because there is no ten minutes and there is no fifteen dollars that's the emotional part of the thing now you can open your eyes so we figured well we go into Nepal Nepal has 300,000 people just like that and we'll just get ophthalmologist from India Pakistan all these places build AI hospitals I camps do all this and just get it moving well when I started to learn was this was a big game this wasn't little in fact thus far we're six years into it there are more people going blind every year in Nepal the way yet getting ahead of we're still behind we're losing ground and I saw that my 60s mentality was the mentality of kind of hit and run you come in with a nice idea for project if everybody buys it fine if not well you go do something else I hadn't ever learned to stay with something to persist to make a long-range plan to make commitment this was a whole new experiment for me what we found like our board meetings where there's a sixteen of us on the board our board meetings are really fierce they are like encounter groups they are knock-down drag-out groups because what we're demanding is that the means and the ends be be of the same stuff some of us came in like Nicole they were focused on the end let's get rid of blindness and I come in saying how we get rid of blindness is important is as important as that we get rid of blindness and she says I'm not interested in how we get rid of it just get rid of it and we meet like this because we're coming from different kinds of service backgrounds and we struggle and work with this and fight it out and argue it and the growth in all of us is incredible and it's hard it's not easy and what we began to see was the dynamics of a group trying to do service together at a conscious level now there are many crises that come up where a group gets together to do inaction and they'll do it for all different motives and you say let's just get it done I mean if there are homeless people on the street let's get them so they don't freeze to death let's do something now and you don't say well if you're feeling too angry don't do it you say do it let's get it done but when you're in a long-term project you've got to understand that how you serve has a lot to do with what level of suffering you will relieve because you find out it's not just that you give somebody food it's how you give them food whether you make them feel less by the way you gave them food or more do you see them as a fellow soul so that the giving and the receiving is nothing did you end up graced by their accepting the food or do you think you did something for somebody these are all levels of consciousness of service Paul Gorman and I did a book called how can I help which is really approaching these topics that's what we're trying to do in this book deal with the way in which you can help that you grow to its freedom that you look directly at suffering because if you think your happiness in this society comes from turning your eyes away from people that are suffering believe me your happiness is riddled with fear there was a moment I've told the story of standing in Marin County at the beach naked with a frisbee I told it last time I was in this home now you may not want to visualize that that's all right if you don't want I was there with a frisbee and the question was as I said they're about ready to throw the frisbee into my mind came the image of Gandhi's tomb and over Gandhi's tomb is written think of the poorest person you've ever seen and asked whether your next act will be of any use to that person do you throw the frisbee or don't you that's our question for ourselves really see we have each of us has a unique Dharma or a unique path or a unique way through the game isn't that all of us become alike each of us is hearing a different message of what our unique path is in our inner hearts and it feels right on and for you to deny the beauty in order to deal with it humiliated or deny the humiliated in order to deal with the beauty you're all of those things you've got to listen to all those messages you've got to enjoy the joy of the good fortune you have in life to be affluent to be in this society to have these kinds of freedom that you have and at the same moment you've got to keep the heart the compassion heart open it's that balancing that we're playing with yes I threw the frisbee and I continued to throw the frisbee to me life is joy and the joy can include the service instead of the joy or the service the joy through the service it's all of it it's all of it you

Channel: Seva Foundation

Views: 426,616

Keywords: Ram Dass Clips, Graphics

Id: 2W4b2Hs8Llk

Length: 13min 28sec (808 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 14 2016