The Spiritual Journey - Ram Dass Full Lecture 1986

these two days are coming together of um of two institutions that I really respect uh Consciousness studies at JFK University and uh original face video I think both of these institutions are at the Leading Edge of a society they're like pseudopods that reach out to touch what is Living Truth at that moment in the culture later we're going to take questions and dialogue but I thought for a while anyway I just reflect and I'm I'm risking not out of irresponsibility but out of the feeling that the more spontaneous the moment the more fully we will be here together I'm risking not coming with prepared material I think you have seen in these past two days different stages of growth not only The Disappearance of the growth but uh different stages of uh my own Journey uh my own spiritual journey which is still very much ongoing and stretches on in an unknown distance in which I've stopped counting in the old days I used to have some estimate of when I get [Music] enlightened but that has long gone and I've learned patience and I will actually I'm uh I wish I had the long of a uh a roomi or a Kabir uh to be done but I don't I'm a little more like hanaman in many ways but in this particular way Hanan is a monkey I don't know whether all of you know about hanaman but hanaman is my ish Dev or my in Hinduism my um that face of God that is my own lineage and hanaman is a monkey which accounts for my somewhat Simeon qualities uh and Hanuman is a monkey that is he's really a he's a a very high Saint in the form of a monkey and he is serving Rah who is God and that's why my name is Ram Das which means servant of Rah which is another name for hanaman and he serves Rah and it is a form of um bakti or devotional yoga in which the relation of the um of the devotee to God is that of servant to master there are other forms like lover to beloved or a child to Father child to mother like like ramach krishna's relation to K for example that's very different that is not a service relationship but hanaman lives only to serve Rah and he serves him incredibly because he is so one one-pointed in his love of God that he gains immense power that he can do almost anything because of the intensity of his devotion and he um the the drama which I won't spell out in great detail uh involves the fact that rah's wife saitta has been stolen away by the bad guy Raven who's really a good guy in drag I mean but that's another story and um hanaman goes looking for saitta and he takes rah's ring with him to give to saitta if he finds her and Sitta is living out in the world like we are way and she's living in a very worldly place which is the sort of demon Loca in the ramayana which is the name of this holy book and hanaman is really going from God to remind Sitta who in this case is a devotee of Rah she's wife and devotee to remind the devotee who's lost in the world or caught in the world that God has not forgotten her and he brings the ring as reassurance that that has not happened and that act of coming out into the world and bringing reassurance that the spirit is still alive and well if you will and that you are still connected and you haven't lost it is such a treasure from rah's point of view from God's point of view that when hanaman comes back to rah rah Embraces him and says what you've done there's no way I can repay you this is God speaking to ranan I can never repay you for what you've done I mean you are as dear to me as my brother Barat and hanaman is kneeling before Rah and at this point Rah leans over to lift hanaman up to put him on the seat beside him with the idea that it's like the merging with God it's like the union and hanaman makes himself into stone and he pushes against God in order to keep that distance so he can stay separate so he can remain in the relation of a devotee to God rather than merging cuz when you merge it's all over the rush it's the end of it and uh Han Ram says what can I do for you what do you want hanaman he tries giving him Jewels a beautiful Jewel necklace and hanaman takes them in his teeth and bites them apart and throws them aside and somebody said how can you do that hanaman throw those Jewels aside those are very costly Jewels he says of no use at all because they don't have rah's name written on them anywhere see I mean he's so unpointed and one of the other devotees says well hanaman if you think that why don't you throw your body away and at that point hanaman rips his body open and there on every bone and sineu is written ram ram ram ram ram ram and then hanaman heals his body I mean Rah touches his body and it's all healed and what uh Rah says what can I do for you hun I'll do anything and hanaman says what I would like is to be always your devotee I would like always to be present when the ramayan is recited and I just like to be eternally your devotee and that is an interesting it's remaining in dualism and it's very interesting that there are stages in the spiritual journey where it feels like such an incredible uphill Journey where you lose it oh I lost it I've fallen I've I used to know I used to be high back in the 60s and then I lost it I mean that's a very common theme and uh and what happened I mean I got married and the kids and the insurance and the car payments and I don't know what happened I lost it well it's absurd you don't lose it I mean where can you go it just is you got probably a little pseudo High first got a little higher than you were and you have to go back and clean up your act a little bit and get your ground because you don't go into the totality pushing away any part of your life and if you try to push away your Earth or your worldly connections or your grounding send them around again Sam you know I mean it doesn't happen that way you got to keep going around and around until you're not pushing and pulling and um as it gets lighter and as you start to Delight there gets a point where it starts to be very playful I mean even the hard parts are playful which is really strange and it starts to become um like dancing or floating or surfing or something like that life the stuff of life because the balance went from where you're in the world really lost I want this I want this I have an opinion about this I don't like that give me don't give me you did this to me you you know things like that I don't have enough money my body is decaying all those and it's all real and in the midst of all those screaming trumpets there might be the tiniest little sound of the flute the inner the still Small Voice Within that the Quakers talk about the little tiny voice that says uh that's not all there is when you say I shut up you know you don't realize how tough it is being alive you know and it's at first you just kind of ignore that little voice it's it's the tiniest little Whisper of of equinity in the midst of all the Sturm and thr of what all and then uh over time that little thread gets stronger and stronger and stronger the image I often have is that story I just recently told it in a lecture um of the man that's imprisoned in a Tower and his wife is trying to get him out and they won't let her in of course and so she gets a beetle and ties a silk thread to the Beetle and sends the beetle up and the beetle keeps climbing up until it gets to the top of the tower and then the husband pulls in the silk thread and then she at ties a little string to the silk thread and then a rope to the the string finally he's got a rope and he climbs down and escapes and in a way that's a little bit what it's like At first there's just this little teeny thread of Consciousness and it only happens now and then you flicker into awareness that this isn't quite the worldly trip isn't quite what it's all about and then through a whole set of circumstances that are a process of evolution of the individual Consciousness that little thread becomes a string and the string becomes a rope and the percentage of time you get lost in the world starts to diminish and there's a critical moment when it becomes less than 50% I mean as long as it's more than 50 it still seems like you're caught in the world and then it starts to get down until pretty soon your faith gets strong enough that you are in essence a spiritual being who's living in the world which is what Christ is talking about when he says you are in the world but not of the world and that becomes such a deep faith in you that you can breathe a sigh of relief it's like your home you beginning to go home now you you've turned the corner and the Panic starts to leave you that terrible Panic of I'm going to lose it and it's going to be terrible and then it's interesting what happens CU as that you turn that corner and you start to get that strung of faith it goes faster and faster the Rope gets stronger and stronger and the reality of the spirit gets greater greater and then you start to push against it because you want to enjoy it for a while because it's so nice because you look around and you're so in love with everybody it's like every way you look is your beloved and that's quite a different thing from I love you but I don't really care for you it's a different level of Consciousness you're playing from and you just look out and it's so loving and the it's all so delightful and you're appreciating the kind of the way of things the da the harmony of things and then you get like Haman pushing against God you say well not just yet you know it's like extending the foreplay you know some of you may understand that that's an esoteric [Music] reference one of the things that um that I have sensed more and more is a term that's very very hard for me to communicate to people because every time I say it I feel the kind of resistance to even thinking the term um which is the word Perfection that the way of things is just the way it's supposed to be and that is a real stinker I mean it and everybody throws up to oneself I mean when you say perfection part of me says what do you mean Perfection look at and look at and look at look at nuclear paranoia and misery look at exploitation look at you call that perfect and it's very delicate to deal with that concept and um see if I today I spent the afternoon with a fellow who has AIDS now his body is we talking about how sometimes one sickness after another they just keep coming one after another until finally you just kind of cry and SOB because you just had enough I mean you just oh another one oh another one oh another one just so much and I was looking at what was causing the suffering in him now this is a heavy duty one and I saw that what was causing the suffering was his attachment to his model of who he was I mean if you look at the things you go through you you grow and you go through puberty and then you have love affairs and they break up and then you have economic this and that and all that stuff and a lot of the times you can say well that's okay that's part of the process of Life usually when you're in the midst of them you don't say that you say oh if it was only different than this if I only had enough money if this relationship was only working out if you always have a model of how you wish it were other than the way it is and there is a little flip that occurs when you look at things just the way they are without expectation and without model of letting go of expect ation and letting go of model you can have them around but you don't hold the attachment to them I mean for this fellow this afternoon the existential fact is there he was lying on the bed sweating nausea some bleeding pain models of himself of who he used to be pictures on the wall of who he was not who he is now constantly comparing that comparison is constantly re recreating the suffering of the model of who he is and if you have a model of life as something that has no suffering in it no unexpected reverses nothing that you didn't plan for look at how much suffering you're in for you can see it cuz life isn't like that and one of the things that Buddha taught was the continuous quality of change of all form in the universe of which your body and your life expectancy in your mind and the social situation and the world situation all of that is changing constantly changing so that every time your mind grabs hold of a model of who you are where you're going an expectation that it's going to be a certain way you're just asking for suffering can you hear is this I mean this may be obvious to all of you but it's it's a place that I get caught a lot very subtly and I was watching today and I kept saying to this fellow well here we are I mean be here now so to speak and uh I said just open let's open and open to the sweating just allow the sweating to be here it is we're all sweating sweating is and a little bleeding is and there's some pain and nausea it's all is and there's the sound of the refrigerator and there's my voice and I'm here and we're two awarenesses sharing the Dilemma of incarnation together and as we talked he went from busy being a sweating nauseous frightened person to being a completely peaceful open present being and it took about I'd say about 4 minutes now he trusted me I mean he had written me a letter and I answered and I came and he trusted me and so that when I started to guide that meditation he just went with it right away I just sat on the bed and I held him and I just went through this thing this meditation with him now I thought when I leave the room he's going to grab back again cuz he's got the pictures on the walls he's got all the stuff that's going to reinforce that idea of if I didn't have this damn sickness I could or or and my heart goes out to a human being whose mind creates their own suffering mean you say is the AIDS itself the suffering or is mind in relation to the AIDS of suffering is the fact that I am bald the suffering or is it my mind in relation to my baldness that might create suffering I mean when I went I've told this many times but when I was going bald I was busy not going bald I was a person with hair that was obviously losing it and you know what I did I got a long Strand and I sort of did this thing to it and I stood with the wind and the wind I would stand like this and I was busy holding on to a model of who I was a moment before just recently I um I had perhaps one of the greatest Gifts of my life I had five months of nursing my stepmother through cancer to her death and she died in my arms and she was a tough lady and she was very independent and she she knew she was a woman of spirit but not in any um way of she hadn't thought about it a lot she just had a deep spiritual Essence to her but she and I didn't always get along too well but we did pretty well I mean I didn't stay around too much but we did pretty well and then she got sick and at first there was all uh holding on to who she was I mean she controlled the house and she'd be in bed and very weak so that I would start to take over the house so in the kitchen there were things like she had collected these seashells and she kept them around the sink all the time and they were always in the way when you did the dishes so now as I moved in and started to take over the kitchen I sort of put the shells a little bit to the side and she came in in her wheelchair one day and she got Furious cuz the shells weren't there because she felt like she was being deposed this was her home right I mean you hear the issue and then I watched as the process went on and the suffering deepened and the Letting Go went until pretty soon we started to grow together and we were like becoming lovers we would lie in the bed holding each other and just talk we talk about death and what it was going to be like after death and and we were putting in catheters and being carried to the toilet and making milkshakes and doing all the process until finally that room was like a beautiful ashram it was one of the most peaceful spaces I mean we all loved hanging out in that room it was just absolutely so gentle and she had converted transformed into being this very soft present being she had let go of this mind that grabbed and held so tightly we just got softer and softer and softer until her death was just a whisper of just letting go at that moment she sat up she took three breaths and she left and I watched this woman who four months before I had models of keep your distance be careful because she can blow up she's very volatile and then watching and seeing how my ability to let go of my my models of who she was allowed the process to happen so much faster my father who I take care of now he's 88 and he when he when we were growing up he was very busy with his own career and he was a a a father that protected us and provided for us but he didn't have much time for us and he was a little bit remote and my brothers didn't have much tremendous love for him actually I mean they might have loved him but they really had a hard time they they were feeling they were judging him as having not been a good enough father and somewhere along the way I just started letting go of models and he has changed he's had some minor strokes he's just like the Buddha now I mean he just sits there and smiles all the time and he's he's absolutely beautiful he's totally happy I've never seen a happier being in my life I mean he can pass out and vomit and you look at him and he's smiling I mean it's just incredible say does it bother you the vomits on no and he's sharp his attack I mean he's not lost it I said to him you gave $750 to the temple last year what would you like me to give this year he said $ 350 I mean this is somebody who's out of it mostly everybody says too bad about you father he's not there anymore the H he isn't there he's he's just 88 he doesn't care to play most of the time that's I don't blame him to tell you the truth he sees through it all but know but what I've now got is this relationship with this totally beautiful present being and I was talking to a therapist and I said you know I don't have much sense of History they he said when were we together last I said I have no idea when we were together last he said was it three or four I said I don't know I said you know this man that I'm with now who is my father I don't remember who he was anymore I mean it's just he says well do you think that's exactly healthy I mean you can hear that edge you know I mean are you really dealing with your father properly but what's happened is we're living in the present moment not in what was and people come into the house continually say they remember my father as having been uh he founded brandise University he was found co-founded Einstein Medical School he was a president of a railroad I mean he was a real mover and shaker and had lots of stories and a tremendous rich life and now it's all gone he's just here and everybody says isn't it too bad too bad is a model of who he was I think who he is is much nicer than who he was I don't think it's too bad at all now that's pushing the edge a little bit can you hear I mean I really want to push things a little bit with us so when I talk about perfection I'm saying open to just what is and that fellow today suffers much less when he just allows what is to be for the moment he can still do his visualizations he can work to change it but the holding that discrepancy between what is and what he wishes were is constantly creating suffering for him and for all of us us continually continually another thing I want to talk about I'm not going to try to be uh cohesive I'd like to just play a little bit tonight and talk about things as they come to my mind is this is this all right the way I'm doing this is that our attachment to our senses our seeing our hearing our smelling our touching our tasting and to our thinking mind our thinking these are the the vehicles through which we're used to receiving information and they keep us focused on form all the time on things and because we live in a world of form or things we tend to think of ourselves as form and things and there is a very deep Western predisposition to identify with your thoughts and think you are your thoughts that who you think you are is who you are now just imagine that you are a large blob and that one tiny bit of that blob is form and there is another part A much larger part is formless but how would you know about it you can't hear it you can't see it you can't smell it you can't taste it you can't touch it you can't even think about it because Thinking by its nature thinks about something it takes an object and what this part of you that has no form is it's not an object so how would you know of its existence and if you can't if you are totally attached to the fact that the only way you can know about what is is through your senses and your thinking mind you decide that that that part of you that has no form isn't now this is a very um this is this is about as deep as mysticism gets actually like when Einstein said and I've quoted this many times when he said I didn't arrive at my understanding of the primary laws of the universe those understanding those relationships through my rational mind what I understand him to have meant was that he went beyond his thinking mind and Beyond his sense experiences and he went into his with the words start to fall apart he went into some way of being with what is hind line talks about it as grocking where you become one with it there's no longer subject object there's no longer thinking about is no longer relationship it is as if I am it he became equals mc^2 and then he came back and he articulated it because he was a physicist in the same way Bach went and became music and then comes back and imperfectly pretty good but still the con what comes to the human ear isn't the Divine sound he articulates the brandenberg kery or whatever or Mozart or or Da Vinci or Michelangelo or who Picasso like it feels to me very much like we are like the drunk the image that's very familiar by now to everybody it's been used so much the drunk who's looking for the watch out of the street light and everybody says they help him and then they say well where'd you lose the watch and he set up in the alley they say well why aren't you looking there he says cuz there's more light here but you don't find the watch and the thing is when you keep looking for the deepest truths of your being through your senses and your thinking mind because that's what you're used to using you don't find what you're looking for and you always feel like you're one thought away from where the action is you always feel slightly cut off from being in the moment being here fully because it is not what here is I mean and yet what's bizarre is we are all functioning with that intuitive non-conceptual information all the time but we have no way of noticing that we're doing it and therefore we relegate it to irrelevance is this too weird or are you hearing what I'm saying I mean I am convinced now in the studies that show how many people had mystical experiences staggering numbers of people have had mystical experiences but most of them have treated them as irrelevant or trivial or I was out of my mind or I was drunk or I didn't know what happened or I went to the movie I was confused or whatever they have ways of of denigrating it of treating it as irrelevant because they cannot gain conceptual control of it they can't get control of it with their minds all the time now what is scary is when you recognize that the vast Part of Yourself is not conceptual and is not knowable by the usual methods of knowing that in a sense you can be it but you can't know it it's like the da says the student learns by daily increments you learn a little each day the way is gained by daily loss loss upon loss until ah the way you clean away the conceptual structures you clean them away you clean them away and clean them away until it's like regaining innocence or having innocence the innocence of being just with what is without the conceptual overlay without the control that comes from knowing you know I mean look at how wetted we are to science as a religion which says what we what we want to do is build a body of knowledge so we know we know but what happens if the major stuff of which are happiness and Ultimate Survival and existence if that is rooted in something that you can't know you know what are we going to do what if it is not amenable to the scientific method what are we going to do then should we reject it or is it possible for us to become to train ourselves to discipline ourselves to go beyond our own mind our own thinking mind to go beyond our own attachment to our senses and our thinking mind is it possible for us see Western cognitive psychology doesn't deal with this at all by the way it talks about what you think about it assumes an identity between you and the thinker kogo but just imagine now how are you going to get through to that part of yourself which is not knowable by your mind by your thinking Mind by your anal antic intellect without putting your intellect down it's a beautiful servant but a lousy master and you treat it as a master most of the time in order to sort of control the universe it's wonderful to be able to think it's too bad if you can't stop it it's like The Sorcerer's Apprentice it just keeps going on and on and on and on you can't stop it when I after some years of spiritual practice when I started to not think my first reaction having been a I mean when I was a professor at Harvard thinking was the stuff I got paid for and I remember I mean I couldn't waste time not thinking I remember flying and I had a little uh Cessna aane and I was flying across the United States and I had a clipboard on my thigh so I could write down significant thoughts while I was flying so I wouldn't waste time flying and not thinking all the time because I could think of research propos to put into NIH NIH and when I first started to not think me when I first would have these moments where I just was my mind was empty when I started to think again the first thought was uhoh I took too many drugs I think I've blown my brain there it goes too bad oh god well they were right they were right after all and I got frightened because ever since I was a child I was taught thinking is better think more you're better and your analytic mind can solve all problems and look what a mess it has created for us look what a mess it creates because it doesn't recognize the deeper Harmony that exists and the deeper Unity that exists across peoples and between us and nature all those levels just doesn't do it it tries to figure it all out and look what it does Every Act it does to try to heal it it keeps creating more problems and at first when I started not to notice I wasn't thinking I got frightened as you can see and then I remember going through the next stage where I thought well if that's what's happened that's what's happened I've blown my mind what am I going to not worry about it I mean that's the way it is I'll just be sort of a dull normal from here on in I'll just be whatever it is that I'm going to be from here on in and then I began to notice that even though my mind was empty when something was necessary when I wasn't too frightened to block it and fluck flicker if I just trusted it when I needed it it was there without my constantly rehearsing it all the time I mean you I used to get down the street you know and you'd look and you say there's books and there's a camera and there's a you know a shoe and there's a tree and there's a car I mean your mind is constantly doing that you're constantly reassuring yourself you know that the world is out there the way you think it is and your mind can't stop it's like this incredible addiction to labeling so you think you know you know where you are in this complete and it's really whistling in the dark and what's so frightening about dying for many people is that they are going to lose the control of their thinking mind they can't think their way through that one and they know that at some point their thinking mind is going to let go and then what and that's why in the Eastern Traditions you spend your life learning how to to extricate yourself from your thinking mind and from your identification with your senses so that at the moment of death there isn't that Panic of loss of control because you've already died and when Christ said lest you die you cannot be born again we're talking about that we're talking about dying into who you think you are the dying of who you think you are then you are what you are this is very weird stuff I'm saying and I mean if you would just walked in from outside it would sound like a course and psychosis by a a case I remember I told I remember speaking at Einstein Medical School once the Young Turk psychiatrist invited me to speak there some years back and I had a beard and I was wearing a dress and I had a lot of beads and um the grand rounds where I was speaking it turned out that they alternated days they had a speaker and then the next day they' present a case and then they'd have a speaker and they present a case so I came in and and I the only all the chairs were very narrow so the only comfortable place for me to sit like this was on the conference table so I sat on the conference table and I watched these old vienes psychiatrists come in you know psychoanalyst and I could see they looked at me and they I could feel they thought gee I must have Mis I mean obviously this is the case you know so seeing their predicament I presented myself as a case I talked about how he took psychotropic chemicals and had hallucinations which is the way they'd say it and uh they kept nodding until they realized the patient was presenting itself was sort of the now just the models of like who Am I who am I for example Roman Mahari one of the Great Indian Saints teaches something called vichara Atma which is the form of what's called netti netti which means not that not that and he says he helps you if you've got the discipline of mind which is a form of what's called Yana yoga you are able to extricate yourself from identification with each thing like for example I am not this arm and then you just see the arm as an object you don't see it as me it's just that arm so you say I am not my organs of motion I am not my organs my inner organs and you go through step by step and each case you extricate yourself from identification with that I am not my feelings I am not I am not I am not you're pulling back and back and back and the last one is I am not this thought which thought the thought I am not this thought which is the last one you got see and that's like climbing up a tree and then out on a branch and then out on a twig and then cutting off The Twig you see usually your mind flicks at that point you're back being your body I mean it's very hard it's a tough discipline to do Yana yoga and in a way when the the Zen Coan the where you're confronted with something that your rational mind can't solve is another way of Yana yoga of forcing you to go beyond your thinking mind to go outside of it so what is the sound of one hand clapping or how do you know you're boa nature through the sound of a cricket or whatever and you keep trying your mind keeps wrestling with it wrestling with it I mean I when I was taking the ratu daash a nday hell course um where you got a five days five times a day you go into the the master ah doctor how you know your Buddha nature through S of cricket and you say anything you know whatever and oh doctor I am so disappointed in you I had such hopes for you you you seem so promising ah so and he Rings your bell and you dismiss and you go crushed back to and you got to run back to your sitting mat sit like this and if you wobble they beat you it's really quite intense and I got sick and it was cold and miserable and I hated all of them and I hated me and I was trying to escape and I couldn't think of how to get out of it with save face and about the fifth day when I was running a fever and I was absolutely miserable I was walking up to the uh to the interview with another lame thing i' thought up to say and I finally thought screw it I don't really care and I looked around and everything was radiant and beautiful and I walked in ah doctor how you know your Buddha nature through sound of cricket good morning roshi ah now you are becoming beginning Student Of Z it was the moment of letting go of the mind and just ah this moment this moment here I am first time I've seen you today good morning I can't use it the second time you can't go good afternoon roshi see you can only milk it once but it's yeah you'll forget now um uh what I've been doing recently is um doing Vash meditation with a burmes master I just got back from Hawaii last week where I was sitting for 10 days and last summer I sat for two months in a in u y Monastery in Burma rangon and in that Monastery you figure from 3: in the morning till 11: at night you are sitting in your cell following the muscle rising and falling in your abdomen every time you breathe in it it does something and you not it Rising every time it breathe out you don't fall what you are doing by doing that is you are picking a primary object you're picking a thing it's like taking the mind which is used to having the freedom to go here and grab this and think that and feel this and sense that and touch that and remember this and plan that and all that stuff and the mind's always going that and that's what gives you your solidity of your universe and it's happening so fast it always seems solid it's like a movie film in which the frames all of which are dissociated but if they go by fast enough it seems like there's a there's a real being there doing something and so we keep re reinforcing everything I mean it's just flickering around it's just so much information all the time and your your awareness is just flickering from thing to thing because you're only thinking you one thing at a time it turns out your awareness is only focused on one thing at a time but it goes so fast it goes at the rate Buddha said it went at the rate of one trillion per blink of an eye that's pretty fast now that is only fast from the time Dimension that your mind is in it turns out I mean this is really playing now with what's called living time hold that for a moment I'll come back to it so you take a primary object it's like taking a wild elephant and tying one of those rings around its foot and a a cable and then putting a steak in the ground and you're going to bring the elephant down you're going to tame it to carry logs or whatever and your mind isn't used to having any controls on it at allu and all your rule is you've made an agreement you've come there and you've made a conscious intentional choice that you are going to try to keep your mind fixed on this little muscle going up and down from 3: in the morning until 11 at night every day for two months seven days a week 4 hours of sleep two meals 1 at 5:30 in the morning 1 at 11:00 nothing afternoon no nothing but water nobody to talk to no books to read no notes to take no place to hide and you're under a vow of Truth and each time you go into report to the teacher you tell how many hours you've been doing it in the past 24 hours so that if you figure you can go into the bathroom and take an hour off and think about the stock market or think about the international situation or think about your relationships or think about what the hell you doing here you can't do it because you're wasting time you're going to take it out of your sleeping time otherwise you weren't meditating so you just it's you're cornered like a rat I mean you just got to do it and you're doing this voluntarily you understand I mean nobody's doing this to you it's it's incredible and you I saw how slimy my mind was I mean it is so slithery you try to get it to stay somewhere and it goes there and then it goes boom and then slithers here and slithers there and then it begins to think about meditation that's a good one that sucks you in and there are all these ways you watch how creative the mind is in keeping you being somebody doing something because if you were only following rising and falling of the breath where would you be since you're a thought finally there is only the rising and the falling of the breath that's all there is in the universe there isn't even you watching your breath rising and falling which is a thought about it and so you do this for a long time and first your mind stays there and then it goes off and goes off and pretty soon I mean years back when I started to do this meditation 12 years ago I could go off and I could have a six-hour fantasy a six-hour sexual fantasy sitting in Burma all by myself in a Cell I mean and it was just with great detail and the subtleties of the rustle of silk and all the you know every little thing and the smells and the images and the shadows and I just what was the rush I wasn't going anywhere you know I had weeks to meditate and I'd look like I was meditating all the time and they nobody knew you know and I I would have these six hour things you know was like having an orgy of or i' plan when I became famous and you know I mean I'd have those things when I became like the Buddha what would I do you know and I'd have long fantasies of what I would be how compassionate I'd be oh God but then after a while you see the finiteness of the creation of all this stuff all of it turns out to be finite and it's not interesting enough I mean the worst thing is to live out how you thought it was going to be I mean you look at your life and the exciting part is that it's always slightly different it always stretches it's always better because it's more than you imagined it would be even at your best imagination fantasy isn't nearly as great as what is I used to read fantasy I used to read science fiction and and um lar and all those kind of things I mean I used to read like I was addicted to them and then I realized that my life was so rich why would I go there and this was so much more so much more so much more so after a number of years my mind quiets down and it finally gets interested in actually doing this thing of keeping the mind focused but the Mind keeps going off and I feel like I am struggling to keep it focused and I'm angry at the method for entrapping me and then there some point this was about uh two years ago when after about four weeks of this I thought I'm on the wrong side of this game I'm identifying with the wild mind rather than with the the point the one-pointed mind and something released in me and I just started to go to the one point and just started to stay there and I began to feel like that was home now you got to remember this is all what's known as samadi of uh in the Buddhist sense there is uh Sheila PA and samama are the three components Sheila is purifications somat is concentration and P is wisdom and you kind of keep working with these three things so somat is concentration and you get your mind so it will stay on one point this is only the beginning this is the doorway in by the way this isn't the thing itself there's no big deal about keeping the mind in one place except to do that you have broken the identification with all the other thoughts in order to do that okay you with me I mean you hear what I'm saying now Once the mind becomes laser likee and starts to stay there all the other thoughts and senses and feelings they hang around at the periphery I remember them being like those little bugs around a light they just kind of flickering around there they don't come in and take over because you don't let them do it but they're just flickering around the edge and your mind is just staying Rising falling rising Rising and there are stages where you feel peace like you never felt peace before and I remember going to my teacher meditation teacher once and saying oh thank you I finally got it I feel this peace this incredible peace oh that's what I've always yearned for oh it's so wonderful and he sharply attuned as he is to spiritual materialism said to me how lovely now go back and follow the rising and falling of your breath get on with it because each time you stop along the way to smell the pretty flower ooh Bliss o Rapture ooh powers back to the breath oh but I can do so much good with those powers back to the breath and you got many choices to step off the trolley believe me well I think I got enough of this this is really good I mean I really do good with this I mean the the difference between where my Consciousness is now and where it was a year ago or where it was two years ago as the result of the sodna I've been doing in the past two years is so dramatically different I mean I'm speaking now from a place of such deeper being in my being than I have spoken from in the past I can feel it I know it I mean it may sound crazier I don't know what it sounds like out there but inside it's feeling really strong and there's a t tcy to say well gee with this look at what I can do and there is where the delicacy is because you've got a balance do I get off the trolley here and go do it or do I put it back in the hopper and run it through the the blender again so you come back and then once the mind gets one-pointed it becomes like a laser and it starts to slice into reality it starts to cut into the universe and some of the things you see that are are stages that they describe for example I'll just give you a couple examples because it's such a complex body of knowledge about this I mean the Buddhist tripitaka uh the the analysis of the way the human mind works is so evolved I mean it to me it makes Western psychology look like U like Tinker Toys or you know um you come to a point where for example when I look at this camera I see something that's dark and shaped and the arms and all of this I see all this now how do I know that those are arms and Camera it all happens so quickly that when I look I don't any longer just see Shadow dark light form I see camera and arms on the camera I already applied the app perception the conceptual overlay I do it all so quickly the time I

Channel: Baba Ram Dass

Views: 178,113

Keywords: Hanuman108108108108, Ram, spiritual path, Attachment, Devotion, Hanuman, Awareness, Dass, ram dass, ram dass devotion, ram dass hanuman, ram dass awareness, ram dass attachment

Id: 74HwFqOq6Cs

Length: 56min 56sec (3416 seconds)

Published: Mon May 19 2014