The Possibility of Unconditional Love - Ram Dass Here and Now Ep. 192

be here now just be here now [Music] [Music] hi everyone it's raghu and i'm back with ramdas here and now and i want to mention a couple of things we are very fortunate to have so many wonderful different sponsors over the year years many years now it's going on five six years that we've been doing these podcasts probably more geez anyhow i did want to mention something else that goes a long way to helping support what we're doing at love serve remember foundation and ramdas.org be here now network and that is just obviously liking and enjoying and interacting and benefiting from all of the different teachings through the various content platforms and that is phenomenal and there is also stuff like at the uh we have a wonderful store that has so many different things aside from all of ramadan's books and other books and so on like a new words of wisdom book from ram das that came out at the end just a few months ago a couple of months ago and it just helps to it's obviously a number of ramdas aphorisms and quotes and they are designed so you can just pull one and in the morning get up open the book look and go oh okay that might help set me off for the rest of the day like i found one let me read this this is one i just i literally just opened to this page you and i are not only here in terms of the work we're doing on ourselves we are here in terms of the role we are playing within the systems we are a part of if you look at how change affects unconscious people you can see how change generates fear fear generates contraction contraction generates prejudice bigotry and ultimately violence you can watch the whole thing happen and you can see it happen in society after society the antidote for that is a consciousness that does not respond to change with fear that's as close to the beginning of that sequence as i can get and ramdas said it gives you a lot of food for thought certainly about uh consciousness that does not respond to change with fear i suppose once we all understand the reality of that statement we can only try and practice to get there also by the way we're working with a new company yes and they make clothing and uh they are all about a sustainable future and moving forward and they're devoting a lot of time to spreading consciousness around the environment and the earth and sustainability and so we actually we got together and they made some wonderful new t-shirts also available in the store like be here now be loved now on one t-shirt which is pretty much all you need right is the if we can follow those two things we'll be in business so those are other ways for uh you all to help support uh the work the foundation is doing thank you so this particular talk from ram das 92 1992 it's a number of different questions and answers and i like these q and a things because they tend to bring stuff out of ramdas that he may not have intended to speak about in a in a sort of themed talk i mean this one starts out with a funny thing somebody says well the you that went to harvard richard albert um where where is that in relation to the ramdas and he yeah he does a great quote which we've all heard a million times which i love so much well i haven't gotten rid of any of my neurosis or richard's neurosis but the monsters are now my little schmooze and richard he said has become the servant of ramadas oh god just love that purification doesn't coming cannot come from having to do anything if you think you're doing something as i was told by our phenomenal mentor casey tuary he would say if you think you are doing it my boy you are lost by the way that film's being completed we have a documentary on this extraordinary human that's going to come out this year that we're getting close purification out of yearning you know round relations and all the kind of judging we do around food around our bodies but the main thing that struck me here is when he talks about getting what you want i mean do you notice how we all manipulate to of course get what we want or ward off what we don't want ram does turns it around once you set this up in your life you are pushing away the divine presence whatever he called it but with mindfulness you get to see this motivational blah blah of self-interest that we go through and then you can work with it so that's probably a great definition of interacting with whatever is you are relating to with and being able to use it to to transform great stuff around guru uh what else oh i love this actually see i just share the stuff that i really love as i go through the talks to make sure we all don't miss anything that i think is really cool and important i meet he says i meet my guru in a place of compassionate loving emptiness okay that's something to talk about words of wisdom that's something to just grab and uh just that sentence just meeting what is that compassionate loving emptiness and that that's a contemplation meditation i would say and then he says in the middle of this whole thing he's like he was going to do a talk called riding the waves of change which god i wonder if we have that anywhere it sounds amazing i've never heard of it um and this is after listening to 3000 lectures or something all around the ways which change meaning the destabilizing forces we're all living with today in this culture right is he talking about today today or when was this 93 okay and and the main thing the first thing he says is what precipitates this is the polarization between the have and the have-nots this destabilizing forces ecological imminence breakdown of social structure by he really gets into it here but uh polarization to me that's stuff i talk a lot about like with the different guests i have on mind rolling the other podcast on be here now network polarization is something i talk about with everybody the idea that that polarization is inside each one of us it's not out there that's something else to think about you may be babysitting the culture of which you are part of watching it die something like that that sounds optimistic but ultimately fears identification with what's dying cultivate the sky here's yeah this is the antidote of all antidotes cultivate the sky which is that space of truth inside every one of us cultivate the sky love that well there you have it everyone that's the podcast from ramadas on ramdas here and now go to beherenownnetwork.com by the way and catch all of the great teachers and presenters and thought leaders that we have on the network we appreciate you and we as we swing into the thing of it in 2022 may we all be healthy and happy and may we really do as much as we can to reduce polarization that's it bye bye she's asking about time and whether the richard alpert that went to harvard is still existing who well of course i have my little cute response that i use all the time that uh who i was then sitting in my therapy office with my necktie and my clipboard behind the desk would have hospitalized who i am now if who i am now came in to see who i was then because he would have to respond to the perceptions i have of reality in pathological terms since it would threaten the hell out of who he was then now but yet he's here he's here but the other routine that i do all the time which is just so such a pretty image i can't resist always doing it is that what the thing i say of in all the years that i've been through psychoanalysis psychology doing therapy drugs guru mantra meditation spiritual practices in all those years in 30 years i haven't gotten rid of one neurosis not one they're all still here so richard alfred is still here with all of his patterns the only thing that's changed is that while all those neuroses with these huge monsters that would take me over i mean anything that was coming out of fear like lust is coming out of fear and i would be just like oh god is beautiful you're beautiful your god and lust would come along and it would possess me and i'd lock in and then i would say wouldn't you like to come up and see my holy pictures and i'd and i'd be horrified with myself but i didn't hear seeing at those points those neuroses were really powerful they possessed me and i was still richard alpertinous now what they are is like these little shmoops and they're my style and hi come on and have tea it's much more that quality of relationship so all of richard alpertness are now around but it's more like it's what they say about the mind the mind is a great servant but a lousy master and that means the same thing as ego because ego is a structure of the mind that who you think you are is a great servant to have around in order to control the game on this plane but if that's who you think you are it's your master and you're trapped so that richard alpert has become the servant of ramadas ramadas means servant of god so it's a progression of servants back into nothing wow that's true yes how do i keep doing the things that are that i wanted that are deep in my heart to do like painting my mural and still let go of it there was a cocktail party this was uh 25 years ago and uh at the cocktail party was the violinist isaac stern and uh he's a for those of you don't know he's a extraordinary violinist world famous violinist and so it was in the acid days and um isaac came up and he said if he took lsd would he be a better fiddle player i mean would you paint murals more and i said to him i mean i thought about i said well it would depend on why you took the acid no oh no i said it would depend on why you were playing the fiddle if you were playing the violin to please your mother which could be you know a good jewish neurotic achiever to get love like i was in you were doing that and you took acid you'd probably see through it you wouldn't want to play the violin anymore but probably after about five years when you quieted down enough it's like having a grief reaction after that you begin to feel that out of all of the existential moment you have this incredible skill to communicate to touch those feelings and you'd end up a better fiddle player than ever he said i think i won't take lsd so either you trust that the mural painting is coming out of the truth of your being and that the more you give up the more you will be a better mural painter because that's what it is that is is mural painting thus can you hear that yeah it's beautiful it's a beautiful question synchronicity which is the seeing the relationships among things and seeing the perfect ways in which they appear and juxtaposed to each other is true of everything if you're standing back far enough and what's happening when you begin to see synchronicities is that you are no longer living on the plane of linear time where you're just seeing time going in one direction and so you're seeing how it all works out as well as what's is happening and the way it's working out feeds back so that you feel in the moment the perfection of how it all is related to each other and it keeps blowing your mind and what it is is it's an opening to living on two planes simultaneously and the part of you that doubts that says i want to know what's happening is the mind the intellectual mind which is living in linear time which can't know this synchronicity that's bizarre because of the way it analyzes stuff so you're getting two levels of process inside yourself happening simultaneously i mean that's the way i hear that see to say oh it's finally how wow look what's happening now that's what would be called an astral mythic trap you know that's the messiah's coming the new age armageddon it's a trip it's an incredible trip but it's trippy it's not interesting enough you don't you don't understand what i'm saying [Music] well those are three different levels i put together i'm sorry you want me to take them apart one by one astral is a vibratory level like normal waking consciousness astral causal brahmaloka the void planes mythic means on the astral plane there are planes in which all of this seems like it's just humans hanging out in san jose another one is we are ancient souls who have come together to gather in the cave as we've done millions of times to ask ourselves what is the meaning of our existence we've been doing this for thousands of times and it just appears that we're in these bodies sitting in san jose that's the mythic one and the trip means that it's finite it's finite yeah i am a therapist i work with people who are really suffering how to help them see that that is not the absolute truth of their lives when it seems so like the absolute truth of their lives that's your inner work on yourself when you are resting in the place where it is not the truth of life then the way you deal with them will be whatever they need from you but all of it will be transmitting that appreciation that it is not the real suffering but as long as their suffering sucks you into thinking you're a therapist helping them everybody's just feeding it to each other so the art of a therapist is the work on oneself until you are resting and therapy is happening because that's the existential need of the moment is that yeah that's great that's nice yeah a mother of a two-year-old wanting a way the issue of responsibility to the child to the economics to the support emotional support of the child and and trusting and letting go see it's a scariest example but it's the same example as the mural example that as long as you distrust the fact that in a free field in the existential moment that child's presence and its karmic relationship to you and its needs would define your appropriate response so that you think you have to hold yourself in to do it right but when the minute you let go of that if it is right you'd of course do it so the answer is in a way that you use your relationship with your two-year-old child as your yoga until you are there with the child doing it all and nothing is being done because you see in your child just it's like god in drag if you will saying i'm a little child take care of me and you get sucked into mother-ness there's that great image in um the in the image of um krishna and krishna's mother and krishnas gopala the baby krishna and he's being rocked by his mother and he's already knows who he is he's in avataric form he's fully everything and so he opens his mouth to yawn and his mother is looking down adoringly at him and she looks into his mouth and there are all the planets and the stars and the galaxies and all and she freaks she absolutely freaks and then what he does is out of compassion he once again veils her eyes with mother love hear that one i mean that's in so thick you know he veils her eyes with mother love and the art of having them both going that's the having the mother love and having the just the spaciousness being the therapist and having the spaciousness it's the whole question of where acts come out of and whether you trust enough that what you're doing is in the way of things and the more you trust the more you have to let go of i ought and i should because when you open it is i mean i keep giving up teaching see how good it is how to practice compassion with people you find it hard to love well um i do lots of little exercises around that and what i see is i begin to be interested in who i don't love rather than who i love at first when you're living in a non-loving space in your head you're so excited by somebody you love you want to possess them after you start to be resting in love you're surprised when somebody you don't love and you get fascinated with why you don't love them so that what i notice is that there are people whose actions i'm so righteous about that i can't open my heart to them there are other people who are have some symbolic value awakening something i want so bad that i can't open my heart to like i'm still because i fundraise and i'm coming out of my background and i'm living in this culture [Music] wealth affects me so i can be with five people and i can see god in four of them and the fifth one all i see is a rich person you know now i know there's god in there but i can't get through to it because i got so sucked in by the veil and i become interested in what sucks me in and that's what i work with i just sit and look at that person and hang out with them and keep working to go beyond it keep going behind it keep going behind it and realize the distinction between abhorring somebody's action and abhorring them and learning how to do what kabir says of do what you do with another person but never put them out of your heart see now that's a practice and every time you put them out of your heart you realize you're only seeing one plane of reality and you reach to see behind it okay does that deal with your question it's nice yeah i think purification is a lot like what i just answered before which was as you get to the point where um you're starting to taste the fruits of your spiritual effort you're starting to understand what it's like to be in the ocean or to be in the sky or something like that in other words after you taste and acknowledge and allow the truth of the high to sink in then you look at those things which bring you down which catch you which turn you off and you start to clean them up and that's really the purification that comes out of the yearning not out of i ought or i should but really out of a yearning and then you see that the foods you eat might affect your consciousness or it depends on the attitudes you have about it also it might be the way you relate to people because you can feel that when you're in love with the world there's this liquidity and it's all fresh and happening and the minute you turn off to judging somebody or disliking them there's a whole block that locks in and it gets thick and you start to work with that edge and that's purification so you begin to see that when you lie to people or you steal from them it closes off something and you it's like pushing away the beloved and you finally realize that even though you could get some advantage from lying or stealing what you get isn't worth what you lose then it's purification can you hear where it's coming from see the early purification is like the biblical injunctions the ten you know don't do this or you'll go into hell that's the fair one you can motivate a lot of purification from fear the other is motivated by love by the yearning towards it boy that's interesting yeah you're welcome yeah she's uh interested in guruness because she has a guru and uh it's like letting do you let go of the guru or what happens do you hold on and what does honoring the guru mean and so on um when i met my guru who was a a sadhu in india in a blanket his relationship to me mirrored for me the way in which how i wasn't how i wasn't and as such it helped me a great deal and also he showed me the possibility of unconditional love because he didn't care whether he lived to die and that opened my heart in a certain way and that started a process now then he died in 73 and the question is did i miss him and for a little while i missed the form but then i saw that what was mirroring from him wasn't the form and over the time at first i had the pictures of him and the memories of the stories and the moments and then an interesting thing happened [Music] i edited a book of a thousand stories about him the miracle of love just a lot of little stories and in the course of that there were some 2000 stories collected um i just kept hearing the richness of the storyline but when the book went out a number of people read the book and looked at the pictures and then had experiences of connection to him and when they told them to me they had a ring of validity of truth to them where i realized then that they had the same guru i had even though they hadn't didn't have the storyline of the being with him so that was one of the things that started to change the nature of my relationship i saw that it didn't matter whether the guru had been a form alive or not then the next part of that whole business was that over the years it got emptier and emptier and emptier a form where now i meet my guru most intimately in the place of wisdom mind of emptiness of emptiness and just compassionate emptiness of loving emptiness so that i still have the guru but the form of the guru has been changed into the deepest part of the being and so that when ramana maharshi said god guru and self are one in the same thing you see where that leads you finally okay he said i feel a lot of fear around events that are happening like the la riots and things of that nature i've been giving a lecture a lot which i'm not giving this weekend particularly but it's been calling it's called riding the waves of change and um it talks about the destabilizing forces we're living with at the moment in this culture and what precipitates the destabilizing forces the polarization between haves and have-nots destabilizing force the ecological imminence of the results of our karma of technology destabilizing including nuclear waste destabilizing force the breakdown in changes of the social structures in the system that is the breakdown of the extended family the lack of respect for authority the inability that not having any wise people in the tribe any longer i mean there's a whole set of breakdowns of systems um now and there are more but taking just those few how do you respond in a way to all of the uncertainties and changing forces and the potential that it may end up dying that is you may be babysitting the death of the culture of which you're apart so how do you be at your own death interesting and the fear you're having is because of your identification with that which is dying and the work on oneself is to find the space in oneself or cultivate the sky or the ocean which has nothing to do with death and the more you rest in that the more you can dance with the fear and the change and that which is frightened i mean you don't deny the fear the fear is the fear of you as a separate entity the non-fear is the fear is the non-fear of you as part of everything because as everything changes like when you're inside the ocean the fact the ocean makes a wave doesn't frighten you because it's just part of yourself that's doing the wave and then coming back into itself and the la riots is part of yourself and the fear and the anger and the lack of opportunity and the all of that stuff is part of yourself and when you feel that in other words the totality of the identification it's all an internal matter as it goes through its paroxysms of this isn't that it may mean your ira isn't any good or you lose your house or you don't get medical attention or you die if you can be at peace with all those you can really ride these waves and then you can bring peace into the situation which is the optimum condition see what's happening is as things get destabilized people get frightened just like you do when people get too frightened they get very rigid they try to hold on to what they've got because they're afraid they try to stop change but you can't stop change because change is the nature of things it's like trying to stop death you can't stop it you can't keep the leaves on the trees you can't stop the process but in your zeal to do it you get very fanatic so you have fundamentalism you have neo-nationalism you have a lot of ethnic prejudice increase in anti-semitism you have a lot of these things that happen to stop you have jesse helms you know trying to stop the game and the game can't be stopped so ultimately it leads to violence and the art form is to be part of that in the universe which can handle change without being without being reactive to the fear by cultivating the parts in yourself which are not afraid am i dealing with your question that's the short form of that lecture think this is useful just yeah he's asking about the relation between the body and spirit and psychology and um it's what is that relationship and how are you working on the body is that a spiritual path and why do wise beings often have big bellies um actually most of those wise beings if you they're old at that point if you get them young they're usually really scrawny see because they didn't eat and stuff and then so you get pictures of all these nityananda maharaji all of them ramakrishna they're all skin and bones at one stage later they're fat it's like what's that thing where you throw up and eat and throw up it's like bulimia they go from bulimia to it's all pathology the other level of answer about that third question is that they uh they start to that the whole process of opening into these uh vibratory rates of existence as you awaken is that there are different kinds of energy in these rates it's like going from 110 to 220 in terms of plug-ins most toasters get fried if you stick them in a 220 by mistake unless it says on at 110 220 okay so that for example when i used to take acid a lot i would definitely go somewhere but when i gave acid to my guru who had one of those big bellies nothing happened and he took like four major doses nothing happened at all because when you're in detroit you don't have to take a bus to detroit okay now what does it mean to be fully at detroit okay what does it mean to be fully at detroit it means to be in all those different energy planes all at once and on the physical body plane the word is often used as shakti or energy and the body can be thick so that it's grabbing your consciousness all the time or it can be so light that it's a support for your spiritual liberation and so a lot of the purification of the body through diet through working with the energies of the body as a process of purifying the body so that it it is a support rather than a holding back quality now the other part of it is the whole am i supposed to read this before the whole thing is a strategy of working with energy see just as we work with the mind in meditation to draw the awareness back from identification with thing or self or anything in order to rest in itself and then we use the heart in order to love something until we merge with a beloved it's like going through the foreplay into the moment of orgasm it's that transcending dualism so you can take the energies of the body and work through breath control and through asanas and various kinds you can work to move the energy up the spine through the various centers of dualism to the top of the head where the merging occurs you can do all that through energy so that these are different strategies some people are really drawn towards working with energy and they do what's called kundalini yoga or tantra working with energy as a form others work with mind and there are different strategies for doing that and then others work with heart so it's just a different strategy am i dealing with your question yeah the question see the body is in a funny way it's like each each subsequent grosser plane is in a funny way a reflection at a thicker level of density of the same storyline so that that's what ida roth and all those people have found out that the body has a a mechanism that reflects the personality dynamics the predicament is that when you go into a body strategy you can release the the tension in the body but if you don't change the mind the mind will recreate it again right and in the same way it works the other way that because the body affects the mind so that if you start to release the mind but don't release the body as well the body will keep recasting the mind slowly the body will if you release the mind fully the body slowly will just run its stuff by and then get rid of its stuff okay but if you don't release if you only release it into still psychology it'll recreate itself the body the body's powerful of the habits are strong enough like if you're sitting like this see and you've got a whole philosophy like this you know and then you have an enlightened experience and then you come back from the enlightened experience and you're sitting like this it'll start to suck you back into seeing the world that way right go ahead you who do i feel my peers are as ram does and who do i feel my peer or how did my peers shift along that's in a funny way what i feel now is that you are my peers because we are all on a journey asking the same questions and we're comparing notes and i'm merely a mouth for a process so i don't see like i don't think i'm talking to you as somebody i'm not identified with being a teacher like i know and you don't i'm a mouth that's saying because when you hear what i'm saying i look around and i say things and people are going like that well how do you know who you must have known already you know and i'm just you're i'm agreeing with something that's deeper in you than the one you're used to getting hold of right but it doesn't mean it's not in you there's no way like you and i don't have the same thing so i don't experience that i mean i don't have a sense of peers like that and i hang out with various people almost totally pragmatically that is people with whom i have a game going like the seva foundation or the touring or guys in my work together i mean i think that i i wouldn't know how to figure who to hang out with on the basis other than that i mean it's interesting because when i hang out with the people that are the densest that just means that i got the most work to do because i see them as the densest see and the question is whether i'm lazy or not because it's easy to hang out with satsang at a certain point or sangha or the community of people who say it just like you say it who are trapped just like you're trapped i mean i'm playing many levels now that you hear am i dealing with the question now i can say well there was a stage i mean um you then the question is see who i hang out with are as much i can with my role models as possible and my role models are people like ramakrishna like jesus like i mean a whole raf my guru like ramada maharshi and then i take teachings like i was just in a buddhist retreat taking teachings from kempo rinpoche a beautiful tibetan llama exquisite being and i was in burma a few years ago studying with sayadaw upandita from a different tradition a south buddhist theravadan buddhist tradition and there's a strategy that where you see everybody is your teacher and everybody is your student and everybody is your lover and that's all part of the process of integrating all of it so that from any moment you're just in a situation this situation is teaching me as much as i am teaching right and so it's a little more complicated than who appears it's the same question see you can see the problem huh yeah living people aren't you living that's it no i mean i know what you want me to do give you a list uh there'll be uh you know um da and they'll be you know and safe like that such a sai baba and uh they're all neurotic messes and i'm the only enlightened one and uh there we are oh they're all great saints and i'm really just a deluded attached person i don't really care you know that's what's so far out that's okay this podcast is brought to you by the love serve remember foundation and ramadasa.org we appreciate you listening and we appreciate all the support that you've given us please continue that support and donate at ramadas.org we can then continue to share what ramdas has been sharing for all of these years thank you

Channel: Be Here Now Network

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

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Length: 43min 9sec (2589 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 28 2022