Three Interviews with Ram Dass

hello and welcome I'm Jeffrey Mishlove our topic today is politics and spirituality with me is ramadasa noted spiritual teacher and author of many books including be here now grist for the mill miracle of love a gradual awakening the psychedelic experience and most recently how can I help during the past decade Ram Dass has been active in social causes including the prison ashram project curing blindness in Nepal in India working with refugees in Guatemala and working with American Indians and health issues welcome around us thank you Jeff it's a pleasure to be with you you know I think if we were to go right to the core of the issue it strikes me that at the very bottom line at the root of things spiritual premises that we are all one and therefore politically we would want to treat the whole world as if it were our own bodies in a sense that would seem to me to be the the basic premise of spirituality and politics well yeah but there are many levels to understand that you can understand it with your intellect and you can understand it because you are that and that's a very different place to act politically like Mahatma Gandhi said when you make yourself into zero your power becomes invincible now any politician or anybody in the life of trying to institute social change in society would like to have their power be invincible but it only happens when you aren't but it is and that's the one that is really hard that you have to in a way die in to not my but I will for that kind of potential impact on social change I think there's paradox there in a sense because if we totally sort of bow to the will of God it might lead us to to not want to resist Aker incredibly interesting risk and you've got to trust that when you have surrendered you will hear so clearly the douse is the truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing and you're longing to have a different than it is is ultimately a trap because it keeps you from hearing the whole Gestalt the whole way things are and as you hear the totality of it you trust that out of that will come an appropriate action and dynamic action and that's the trust of Dharma that's the trust in the wisdom of the universe that is greater than your own personal ego wisdom so there is certainly as the exquisite risk in it I mean you know you're we're so used to working out of I ought to do it I should do it getting behind ourselves and pushing the whole idea of trusting that if we didn't push something would still happen is very interesting exploring people but there must be a fine line between trusting and not pushing on the one hand on the other hand being really passionate about social change but again it's where passion comes from if passion comes out of what I call milking the drama or comes out of identifying with the emotions I think it's some short of what the possibility is there is for example what's called dharmic anger where a Zen monk will beat his student out of the incredible amount of love and compassion he has I would say that if you if you're deeply enough in love with the universe then the passion that arises out of it is different than if you aren't and I I think the passion the passion comes out of a joyful involvement in the universe but I think it's the passion of a river or tree I don't think it has to be although it could be well you seem to be suggesting that the quality of one's actions in a political or social arena or any arena for that matter is really determined by internal factors and that would make a dot would seem to me impossible to to judge the actions of anyone else even a Stalin or a Hitler I think it's pretty tricky business I think you can make judgments about actions that you don't judge beings you judge their actions and actions are good or evil in the sense that actions increase paranoia and separateness or they increase unity so you can judge actions and you can be opposed I can say I don't I don't know I don't agree with that action you're going to do in fact I'm going to stop you from doing the action but as Kabir said do what you do with another human being but never put them out of your heart but if I have to harden my heart in order to oppose you I lost we both lost that's part of the art of the inner and the outer violin you know George Orwell and in 1984 refers to Big Brother as this sort of one gets the sense that the game is that he's this loving tyrant or at least as people believe that all of the the cruelties are done of some kind of a benevolence it and it seems to me that that there's a longing that people have for perhaps a benevolent tyrant who will come in and straighten things out for us Dostoevsky spoke about how people longed to to take their freedom and lay it at the feet of a benevolent church that might act in a tyrannical way yeah I I think the deeper issue is whether the universe is benevolent or not because we all see that when you invest in an institution or another person you are investing external to your own deepest inner truth and you constantly got to be running that back against your inner truth you can't just join a club and then say I surrender to the club like the whole misconception of a guru is that you surrender to a person you only surrender to that which is the true where God grew and self are one of the same thing so when you surrender that way you're surrendering that way at the same time I could never imagine surrendering to something that would be that would invalidate my intuitive wisdom and as long as you keep connecting to that but the question of whether or not then you know that you don't to judge whether it's benevolent or malevolent you just judge it is this harmonious with my inner being I don't to judge you I just have to keep my own game on a straight path the question of whether the universe is benevolent or not that's an interesting one I because I have a sense I was talking Jerry Brown used to be a donor here and in California and we're talking about that issue of whether you have to assume a benevolent universe in order to trust deeply enough to surrender and we both could hear the lawfulness of the universe and I would say that there is an evolutionary thrust it's not a Darwinian kind it's much more of a consciousness evolution or I mean it lately kind of metaphorically what is the one manifest as the many returning to the one or something so there's directionality and in that sense it has values connected with it but I don't think you could call that even benevolent or malevolent I mean what you wouldn't call a clock benevolent a benevolent malevolent if it's going forward to the backwards well I know it's a deep philosophical issue there's a strong trend amongst existentialists and amongst behaviorists and atheists and left-wing political people to suggest that the universe is fundamentally and different and it's up to us to create our own reality and I guess often people feel that it should be created from the intellect from rationality well that's I think giving us really short shrift because to me the intellect is a kind of is a very small system within a much larger context and to deny the context in which the intellect functions is to leave one little segment of nature trying to subsume everything under it it's a lot like the drunk looking for the watch under the street lamp when you lost it up in the alley but there's a light here that is fitted it it what it also does is it makes the whole world object the intellect makes the world objects that's all that you always think about cleaning and that always puts you one thought away from where it is so you're always an alien in your own universe when you're when you mediate everything through your intellect so the fun is to have your intellect as Ramakrishna said it's a wonderful servant but it's a lousy master and I think that's probably true you spoke a little earlier about making political decisions and judgments in terms of how it fits I think with one's heart you know and it seems to me that you're not hard emotional heart you know hard like Chinese cincin or the Optima meaning the deepest replace of truth the core a deepest intuitive place in one's being you know there's anything well that would seem that notion would seem to contradict what we see very much in the world about us now which are religious political movements you know the moral majority or Islamic fundamentalism where in the name of a particular religious dogma certain political planks are established and everyone within that organization or within that tradition is expected to support a particular political attitude when when there is a lot of fear there's a lot of uncertainty when there's a lot of uncertainty there is usually a lot of fear attended to it and how people react to fear is interesting some people just consume more they say I'll get it while I can because it's all going to blow up anyway they become more and more materialistic some people want it they want to be on the right side when the doors close so they become fundamentalists in one sense or another they grab on to right as opposed to evil they want to be one of 144,000 that gets in the door and the other group uses it the uncertainty as a way to deal with their inner relationship to uncertainty and they go inward and you can see the society dealing with the fear that way and so that that real thrust to the kind of righteousness is staying at the plane of good and evil it's staying at the plane of polarities and it's not seeing as G manly Hall said that he who knows not that the Prince of Darkness is but the other face of the king of light knows not me that's the one if you interesting that all these religions and ours westerns I mean Christianity and Judaism in the first month are really monotheistic they believe in the one that's Maya soil I don't know a line or Damona Hut and yet they always live within the - it's like it's all one it's one except for me or except for us and so we end up Mia culpa ourselves because it's spa in exoteric Western religions to think that you are one with the one we say it's all one but we don't really act as if it were all one which is much more like holography now we typically act is is if we're very distinctly separate distinctly this thing and we got the bad end we have the religion of to pet it of a stick to original sin absolutely uh-huh because we fell out of something and if you see it as the one exploring itself through us I mean through these multiplicity of forms that are all part of the one and that it goes into the dream or the illusion or they it gets entrapped in the separateness in order to awaken out of a separateness in order to see itself and it's just a beautiful dance of this delicate form of the one at play hoping lightens up a lot what I sense you saying is that you're making a clear distinction between spirituality and religions here between institutions that that the religions do provide exquisite practices to get deeper into the spirit the problem is that every practice is entrapping you I don't care whether it's meditation or Catholicism or the Torah or drugs or whatever yoga or whatever it is they're all traps and the game of meta method is that you've got to use the trap and risk being entrapped with the expectation that it will self-destruct if it really works the problem is if it really self destructs the whole priest class is out of business in institutional religion so that the game has a funny kind of top a false top on it because it's a any institution that starts to have you know salaries and institutional structures and all that immediately can't self-destruct it doesn't it's not designed that way will you suggest in your most recent book how can I help that through service one finds a path to to realization to God or to enlightenment I sense that in all religions there is this path of service and that seems to come as close as religion really gets to political action yup but the difference is where you do the service from there are an awful lot of religion or religious organizations that do service but they do service like will help the poor that's not exactly karma yoga or the use of serving somebody to transcend the dualism between the server and the served I mean I'm talking about it as a very precise method of enlightenment of serving where there is no server because the bhagavad-gita says be not identified with being the actor and be not attached to the fruits of the action but still you do it now how do you help somebody when you're not attached to how it comes out and you're not busy being the helper that's the art form then you're just doing what you're doing because you're doing what you do you are the help you're not the helper you're the help and who's getting helped remains open to question if you're not getting helped by being a helper forget it you must be staffing the wrong place it seems that the bhagavad-gita really puts the issue in its starkest form doesn't it ever when you consider that what's being discussed here is warfare and that warfare against one's own family yeah well that's an interesting one of which level to take that end because you also can take that metaphorically of the warring between the ego and the higher self and a whole internal battle I mean the fun of the bug of a geek of the heart of a Gita is its that you can play with it so many levels like any good holy book any good holy book is a multi-leveled smorgasbord of possibilities of interpretation I have seen some very right-wing mercenary type people wearing t-shirts that were the slogan to the effect of you know kill them all now and let God sort out the ones later Wow God for the 19 yeah you haven't heard that flu no I mean it seems that some people will take and it's almost a religious or a spiritual attitude that they're going to do what they think they have to do when when they kill people God will figure out who goes to heaven and who goes to hell and they're not to blame isn't that interesting well the fact that they so I don't even know how to get hold of that one we've acted there that there I mean the Karma of an individual who will kill somebody because that individual feels they have the right way or the only way already their mind has made another person to them so what they're saying is they're going to kill all of them there are two ways to kill of them as one as you go you know where the machine gun and the other is you extricate yourself from a world of Oz from them in your own mind and then you killed all of them and there's only us left because in Guatemala and one of the women these women widows whose husbands have been murdered before their eyes one of these women said to to me to retranslate thank you so much for leaving your home and family to come to help us and I I just open to it I said I didn't you're my home and family I mean who's leaving one and I felt that the truth of that at the moment she was defining it in terms of that she was them mm-hmm but I didn't see her as them she was us and that's part of the excitement of being willing to risk in service seeing the beloved in all the forms and seeing yourself in all the forms instead of averting your eyes from pain and suffering to turn it around and embrace it into yourself without being afraid you're going to be drowned by it because you know you can say no without closing your heart either all a part of a piece the beautiful service is a yoga will you seem to be in if one carries your position to its logical extreme it means being willing to look at if the grossest most hellish misery on the planet all of it and embrace it all of it all of it you look just directly at you learn how to keep your heart open in hell you see the horrible beauty of the universe I remember once I was teaching down at Big Sur at Esalen and they gave me a house to house it and it came with a cat and the cat and I became buddies and every day the cat would come in when I was meditating in the morning and bring in its morning breakfast which was a lizard or something which was usually still alive and it would sit down between my legs to eat to be with me and I would be sitting there being with God and I'd hear squeak squeak crunch crunch and I didn't know who to hate I mean I loved the cat but suddenly the cat was a killer and I loved the lizard because I identified with the you know and I went through all the changes and I saw it is a phenomena of nature you've got to be able to look at it all and say yes I acknowledge it I acknowledge it without being so busy reacting to it that you don't because you don't even understand why it is that way in my ability to see around the edge of the as Rilke said the billboard at the edge of town being able to see just around the edge of the veil and I can just see a teeny little bit just like we all can leads me to understand the game is much farther out than I thought it was that suffering has I mean I can understand the term suffering as greys I can't live it I can live it at moments with little suffering but I can understand that there is a beautiful unfolding of awareness through suffering that's what my work with the dying is about yeah I remember once when I was a teenager I heard a rabbi talk about what what he felt was the essence of Jewish ethics and he said that if I saw another man and he had no clothes and all I had was a pair of pants I would take my pair of pants off and and give it to him and it struck me that well that's very beautiful it really is but I don't live my life that way and I don't know anyone else who does and yet I think I hear that coming from you that is when we recognize the one as being ourselves how how can we not want to share our last pair of pants I hear the question see it's a very delicate one C Mon while a philosopher she was a wealthy Belgian I think and then she was so she wouldn't take any more than the poorest person in the world had and the result was she starved to death in her twenties I think now there's something interesting in that story and there's always also something that is poignant about it that you and I have a unique predicament karmak predicament that we were born in this time in this place with these potentials these opportunities I'm not sure all people have the same game in life I'm not sure that I have to be just like everybody else so that there may be a way in which I know no I've got to listen carefully to hear I'm not rationalizing having more than another human being but I know that if I have to spend all like my guru said to me God comes to the hungry in the form of food now if I am worrying about my survival every day there's no way I can be on be here with you all right and if I can't be with here with you then all of us can't be sharing nor could I be here with you exactly so that in a way we are part of the microcosm of human consciousness we have a part to play which means we have to have the pants in order to play so I'm not sure I would give away my pants at that level I would you know I'd explore it I'd stay with the moment see I either water I wouldn't sort of the way I deal with that now I don't try to I'm trying not to con out of it but to deal with that well it's an issue maybe another way to look at it might be I don't think I'm a bad Jew for not giving away my massive pair of pants but well that's an extreme example but how about for example building elaborate houses of worship cathedrals synagogues and ventures well you can look at those both ways I mean I wouldn't do it but at the same moment I can see that for people in very poor countries that have very little mythic identity to give them joy when they go into the Cathedral and they look up and they worship in light incense and is the beautiful Christ I can see that they get their lives enriched in a way that a lot of the regular daily stuff of their life doesn't do and you could say the church is milking it so they're not getting an extra meal but maybe it's feeding them in another way which is its justification I don't think it's a black-and-white issue in that it seems to me what you're expressing here is a willingness to accept reality as it is absolutely one isn't accept our humanity yeah and to accept that an institution could be serving and it could be a corruption of what it was intended to do and it's probably a little of both and so are we and we've got to deal with that we've got to accept our own humanity first and then and really accept it not judge it so much I've really shifted from being in a judger of everything to being an appreciator to just appreciating how I did and it brings me to a much more intimate relationship the judging mode is always distancing myself from everything now I'm not even judging judging now what would seem to me that you must be much more skillful as a social activist or it is a political actor in any sense if you're not judging people it should mean to me that you can communicate with anybody well in ideally yes and I that's what I'm working on that's what I'm working on what I'm doing is I'm going closer and closer to the fire all the time because see it's very easy for me to stay in my own little Bailey work around all of the people that are my a sayers my constituency and everything I played it for on guys oh that's great wisdom it's quite different to mix it up with some social activists who say Ron who you know and they don't know me from anything and you've got to be there with the truth of your being in that situation and that to me is beginning to be exciting for years I wouldn't do it I wouldn't risk it I said I can't I think viva Canada once said debates it for schoolchildren and I thought I will just represent what I represent I'll do I do and the people that want to play will play and the others will do what they do and that's okay I'm not judging them we have different business mm-hmm but now I see that we can maybe talk together that's going to be interesting that that's really the sixties anti-vietnam and the 60s spiritual turning inward now starting to find their way back together again which i think is kind of interesting it seems as we're moving into the 90s that works yeah at a point where all of the old definitions of who we thought we were are falling away and we find ourselves dialoguing with people we didn't imagine we had well now I mean how much more could that be than with the invention of the telephone or the invention of the radio or the invention of television or air traveler and I take care of my father and he's 90 and he was born in 1898 and I think when I'm thinking about this is a time of great change I think of what changes have occurred in that man's life I mean he and I got went on rides and saw the horses the tracks that had the horse and buggy that he went on made when he was a child that he lived in that world and I realized the immense changes in our culture sometimes consciousness has gone along with it and sometimes consciousness has just gotten more deeply entrapped in externalities and that's what interests me not the evolution of technology but the evolution of the way the technology allows the liberation of consciousness well people have always commented as long as I can remember that our inner growth hasn't kept up with technology but perhaps where's your mom at Leeper managing the evolution of inner growth I mean when you think of the us living with the bomb I mean I grew up at a time we didn't ever want I'm going to have to cut you short now though our time is out Randa a bomb just came now thank you so much for being with me Jeff it's been a pleasure it's been a pleasure for me too and thank you very much for being with us [Music] you're invited to sit in on a conversation with Rahm das taped at his home on Maui Brite prayer flags frame the view from his front porch coconut palms lush green and vibrant color are everywhere sacred images Grace's home and accent the natural beauty of [Music] [Music] [Music] blend Maui Ramdas hold satsang and beaches and continues his decades of work related to hospice aging and dying he collaborates as he always has with teachers from around the world and with Native Hawaiian spiritual leaders as well he's embraced Maui deeply as his home my name is Bethany toll and in the mid-1980s I worked with Ram Dass on a conflict exploring the spirit of service the relationship between social action on critical issues and the deep terrain of our hearts subject is more relevant than ever today all around us crucial indicators of human and Planetary well-being are eroding crises escalating tensions simmer and conflict erupt and in response social activism boost aligning feature of our time citizens academic students politicians all are engage is not a myriad of issues yet even our best efforts somehow seemed to fall dangerously short and the question arises what's missing in all of this dedicated work to create positive change from the 1960s through the 1990s in his journeys to India and as a teacher writer and board member of save a foundation nam dass engaged in a rich examination of the relationship between human consciousness social action and spirituality he addressed this theme in lectures retreats and writing planning his own work on AIDS issues death and dying and imprisoned his book how can I help speaks to the awareness and intentions we bring to our relationships and interactions and our work for change in the world ten years ago Ram Dass experienced a severe stroke from which he was not expected to recover but today he works and teaches on Maui referring to the stroke as a gift of fierce grace our conversation was wide-ranging but we continually circled back to the question of creating change and avi epic challenges we faced in our time as we talked Rhonda shared his views on this dilemma of action and intention and how these difficult issues arise and how we can most skillfully address them I see it primarily as a a consciousness a human consciousness issue it's called worldview and all those things you mentioned primarily were started at human consciousness and we take we take what is and then we manipulate it we take the wind ocean the end and the Sun and the earth and we make it into our specification selfishness is is endemic and it's partly it's probably human consciousness I'd say we don't we don't enter into our relationship with nature with human beings with animals that is our environment consciously I just also without hearts open and these issues are we tried to deal with them with our rational mind with that thinking line you make the limbs of problems and they don't we don't we don't live them we don't live the problems when you start to identify with your heart mind which is like awareness the rational mind has to categorize and most of the trouble that we've created is the categorization us and them us of them the precedent it and us which is we are pulling in to our Ausmus or me nuts you're going to have an emotional reaction to that which is them or it what I was saying was it the soul to soul we give people so much so much so much radius so much so much spirit so much so much hope so much because so much long yeah yes seeing everything be cut from the from human eyes from eyes that have all your motives and all their all your desires even its coloring even the motivation to eat something yeah we have our desire systems in the way of the truth and we should react on the truth and unless we can stand back with our in our heart mind and take a look at how we are in in the world and see the way our desire systems lead to what I was reacting to two problems focus on the hostility is is yes is our predicament and I was thinking the other day they say youth is wasted on the young and I think maybe aging is wasted on my yes but yes a a club or teenagers in Marin and they're all social action people and they all doing social action and the one they did was come in to the gathering place and go within themselves and then they would comment on the social action they did after they had meditated and it was beautiful they it was a rich rich experience because they found that social action was not just getting out they were surrendering to God and yes social action mm-hmm reminds me of a story that years ago years ago and we did say the conference down in California and you had done a conference in DC you save up and Joanna Macy was a part of that and she shared a story that she has shared over the years I'm sure you know about the Shambhala warriors and the bringing into being the kingdom of Shambhala at a time when barbarian hordes are battling over the world and destroying everything the Shambhala warriors arise and they don't wear uniform and they can't even really identify each other and they are armed with only two weapon and one weapon is insight insight into the radical nature of interdependence and the other is compassion and the way Joanna's teachers told her the story was that insight by itself with too cool and compassion by itself [Music] but with the two of those they could go into even the halls of power and dismantle the Royal fractures of destruction oh it's a good story that's a good story so that insight coming back to social action when I think of you know whether people are involved in trying to save the whales or feed hungry people whatever their particular avenue of action is the is the is the sense of urgency related to our viewing those conditions from a place of ego from a place of small self yes yes yes and the other place in us looks at the now looks at the situation but you've got a whole spectrum have to see the whole spectrum the gods eye that's the tough one yeah that's the tough one from here yeah the urgency it's a very compelling like it's going to be done now it's because you only saw the thing that I I let a workshop recently and at the end of the workshop at the end of the day someone came up and he said I really liked that workshop who has a lot of wonderful wonderful stuff there the only thing I didn't like he said I have to disagree with you on is I believe there is right and wrong and I said well and as we converse I said well what I have to look at for myself really is does something cause suffering or not or alleviate suffering and it and he said well it's a main cause of suffering it's wrong and I said for myself I have to be very careful with right and wrong that those are so loaded and create so much division that it's important for me not to use that distinction but to look at does a condition cause something yeah and he really wanted to argue he wanted so much to convince me that it was important to believe in right and wrong and important to believe you know to lock down and to contract yeah in a position and it seemed that it allows you to contract in a position of virtue yes absolutely and say that we had it people who really take themselves seriously in their jobs seriously as that man right and wrong here and then there's the other thing I want you I want to do as God wants me mm-hmm and he goat those two things responsibility you like down little loan I don't hon I don't play the game ud I don't play the game because they are too responsible so that's one of the challenges I guess within organization yes yes because the responsible groups don't have room for the for the people like me when people are right they don't want to hear that there's another link who was just like me harvest hmm see we were and we work shifting shifting shifting consciousness shifting perception and they were saying our rational thing is right that William James yeah Ian James said we should keep our minds open to other other ways ways of consciousness and Harvard lost me because right that wasn't really what they were about they had a building called for you James a hawk right but in practice that they were not information and empirical knowledge oh yeah no not about the possibility of other ways of knowing and being a known existing faith that's in right that's the church building over there yeah the distinction between faith and belief the year yeah so an organization that's a little a little seed that I started that you have a whole lot what to tell people for yeah it sounds good you have a whole lot of responsibility for that from the time to save up we see that we bring ourselves to it you got that you've got a people aware that that suffering is part of you and then you can and you can change that suffering by changing yourself that's that's a compassionate way of dealing with suffering the people who are cutting down the trees are part of me and the people making more than the people cheating and doing all the things for suppling and yeah and what we've got to do is we've got to change ourselves change ourselves because that cutter headed down the trees as long as we think he is evil bad you're feeling your feeding his process his reality you said in that again in how can I help I just picked it up and saw it yesterday that we need to make ourselves an environment for change not an argument so change is good you said as I work Gandhi says my life is my message my life is my message and that's where we react to from each other your institution organization organization yeah and the way you are you are into it and you are issues you are creating something that in my heart that that's that's very rich but because because of that because because of it yeah yeah in Maui really dozens of hippies come to see me I have a Sat side and I share within my satisfaction my life my stroke and so on and they take that away from my and I share within my faith my faith Maharaja so creating that potential in my possibility that space by exploring and living as deeply in our own hearts as we and moment Amina if you don't live your values change your values yeah living that that deepest truest deepest real and it's uh I may come you can I can't talk about truth and then mine I just it doesn't hurt there's possibilities for socks on those spaces that's what a place where people simply can come and be with the intention of of opening that heart being present in their heart that seems to be one of the most important services the save us that that's right that's that's what you are booth does creating that space you said I remember one time at Brighton was someone asked and on what do we do if there's going to be a nuclear war and your answer basically was well then I work is to open our hearts do it isn't going to be an unclear war I'll work just to open our heart right that's right the best place you can open a heart its Bryton bush but signing off selling me for as we're wherever we are in our daily lives that don't allow us to be in now or don't allow us to be in Brighton Russia connecting with that polite place yeah that's just radiant wherever we are [Music] wherever ground where two or more are gathered I am I am yeah hello and welcome I'm Jeffrey Mishler back with Ram Dass and we're discussing politics and spirituality welcome again thank you guessing we were talking about the threat of nuclear war and the fact that perhaps the modern political conditions are creating a situation which is challenging the human spirit to perhaps to rise to a newer level of wisdom or nobility it's not quite a socially hip thing you say but it might be the optimum conditions for for growth of consciousness because having as Don Juan's is living with death on your left shoulder or over your left shoulder which is what's happening with the presence of the bomb and living with the with the threat of the fact that our greed may underly destroy us by polarizing us so much all those things those are forcing a degree of awareness that's kind of interesting and I would think that since the Holocaust of World War two we've also been confronted with the dark side of human nature in a way that is difficult to the eyes you know see that one you got to be careful where you go near it because to say that the Holocaust I mean the human heart screams at the thought of the Holocaust from another level the Holocaust has forced us very clearly to confront and to awaken around the qualities of our humanity like when Buddha said we are born with the five hindrances with lust and greed that's one that's not even - hatred nil will agitation sloth and torpor and doubt that's what we start with then you're not surprised when you see all this stuff it's because we were busy denying this part of our humanity that we keep getting trapped in it and one of the darkest periods I think in human history would be the Inquisition during the Middle Ages and that was a time when people were pointing at the devil outside of themselves and in the name of Christ and in the name of eradicating diabolic behavior I think some 10 million people were tortured and murdered you know the externalization of the dark side as you call it as that is a familiar technique for not accepting personal responsibility for your own humanity in each of us is as Freud pointed out are all the instinctual urges to that that underlie killing an underlying pillage and all those things we also have other qualities and if you go deeper than that you get behind all that even although Freud didn't accept that possibility I'm not convinced myself that were really any wiser as a race as a planet then we may have been in the past I think we're confronted with sort of a do-or-die choice that that we have to develop our wisdom or we may not survive but I just don't know whether or not we're rising to that challenge I can't really figure out which context to use to determine the answer to that I mean because I'm trained in Hinduism I've got these vast time games like yoga's and culpers which involve four hundred thousand years units you know and this is known as the Kali Yuga within them as Masaccio good and all these differently and this is a time when you would expect things to be this way great dark gray darkness and yet those are the kind of the conditions which are optimum for the next thing which is the Sakya and they all keep going in this rhythmic cycle and if you stand back far enough if you stand back far enough nothing's happening at all that's an interesting place and that's equally as real as the question is do you think it's really changing what do you think is all molecules spinning around and it all always has been and even that's all in time and space you go behind time and space haka when the Zen monk says you're coming and going is nowhere but where you are there's nothing happening nothing is just the illusion of movement and the illusion of evolution and the illusion of reincarnation and all dream stuff well you know I like that notion I would come back to it from time to time in the interviews and it dawns on me that there's something very very profound and in that idea it suggests to me that everything that I perceive is ultimately in in my own sensorium and perhaps as Bishop Berkeley put it in the mind of God it gets one back to solipsistic me not as a trivial philosophy but as a very profound and rich philosophy i i'm a student of tara Vaadin buddhism and like a couple of years ago i spent about two and a half months in a monastery in Burma in Rangoon sitting in a Cell watching the muscle in my abdomen rise and fall with each breath and every time it went up I noted rising and every time it went down I know that falling and I did that from 3:00 in the morning till 11:00 at night every day for two months it was much once again when I got tired of that I could stand up and walk around the cell watching my feet lift push place lift push play and you're what you're doing is you're bringing your awareness to one point and then that allows you to see the way in which the thoughts keep arising and your awareness keeps being grabbed by the five and so you you keep identifying as the thinker instead of the awareness that lies behind thought and as you keep practicing this absurd game on and on and on and on your mind gets so quiet you begin to see the way in which your mind is creating your universe and that is an awesome moment it really is because up until then it's been kind of a theoretical game that we aren't who we think we are and suddenly you have just touched that place behind it it's not a place you've you entered behind thought even the concept of places of thought and and in a way that's the great liberator because from then on you begin to see the way in which you see me is ROM das or I see you as Jeffrey is all a creation of mind I don't know what's out there I just know what my mind is creating of what's out there right and it's fun because you begin to be appreciate that you're living in your creation then you say well why did I create you you are my Karma and I'm yours in that game and why did I create you and then one is thrown into the world of karma of how is the whole sequence of cause and effect how are all my relations with people in Bluejackets affecting how what I see at this moment when I look at you and and it gets quite exquisite to keep getting behind your own thought to see the way you're doing it it's like being a voyeur of your own mind and you you are beginning to learn how to rest in the place behind thought so that your mind is basically empty all the time you're not thinking at all and then thoughts rise up as they're appropriate instead of always thinking what time which is what most people are doing most people are thinking all the time and when you get behind there you begin to see other people's minds very clearly they come at you like these huge mind nets that are coming up saying this is reality this is reality this is reality this is reality and this is who I am this is who you are this is reality this Who I am and they keep their mind that so these thick things and you're walking in around all these mind nets of other people's mind and you begin to feel they're projective systems coming at you and you make yourself like a sieve and they pass through just like water and instead of being reactive to it how do you go from that space to all of the social activism which in which you've participated well the social activism I participated in is is primarily the initial focus was that it was the leading edge of the way I could work on myself see what I'm aware of is that if I'm going to relieve another human being suffering I've got to extricate myself from my own because if I'm identified with that in me which suffers when I try to help somebody else out there's a funny way in which I'm digging the hole deeper for both of us very subtle look at Thomas Merton said if you're going to help somebody that's drowning in a river you gotta have a place to stand to get them all there's no sense in just jumping in and drowning with them and so when I started working with dying people for example I could see that the basic the first chakra or the basic preoccupation of us as incarnate was survival and that the closest I could come to that issue of survival the closest I could confront that basic clinging or holding of fear so that being with dying people was the leading edge I could work with because if I could get to the point where I could be with death without flickering not through closing my heart staying right here wide open and still not flickering then I've got something odd for people because everybody's busy going death death you know whatever they're doing about it so then I end up being somebody who's working with the dying and people say oh he's so good he's working with a dying but I'm part of that circle which says I work on myself in order to be an environment for other people to come up for air if they want to and it turns out I don't really care which one I'm doing I mean that an infinite variety of suffering there's suffering in the rich that's suffering in the poor the suffering in developing countries is suffering in affluent countries which is suffering everywhere is neuroses and there's hunger and there's everything violence and terrorism and where you stick your finger in the pot if you sit around waiting what's the most important suffering I can deal with you just stay in your mind afraid of making the wrong choice it doesn't matter where you start you can start in the laundromat wall with a little sign a blind person needs somebody to read their mail if something doesn't matter where you start you can start in the grocery store helping somebody with a bundles it doesn't matter because the minute you start that process the work on yourself starts and the work in your own heart and the work on the quality of the compassion and you get to watch all the fraudulent ways you try to help somebody which is exquisite I mean you begin to see what a phony you are you know and how you're milking it for aren't I good you got to live with all that stuff and it gets cleaner and cleaner as you just keep letting it go honoring allowing them funny beautiful yoga I I would think as you get involved with people in the world of social activism there's there's a tendency amongst people in that arena to feel that work on themselves is unimportant and maybe even self-indulgent that's more it's probably true yeah and I think that I think the art is to have the way in which you work on yourself become so subtle that nobody notices it so it's not like saying excuse me I can't demonstrate I'm busy working on myself it's not an either/or proposition I mean I want to be right there with the people doing the actions but I want to be doing them in such a way that it's it's Gandhi's line that great story Gandhi was on a train he was about to go into an area where the Hindus and the Muslims were doing each other in and everybody thought this is going to be the one he's going to lose he's going to get killed in this one and a reporter was rushing along the platform of the station saying Mahatma ji give me a message to take back to the people and Gandhi took a paper bag and he scribbled on it and he handed it out and said my life is my message and I think if anything is my mantra if you will of social action it's my life is my message it's it's that the way I wash dishes in a soup kitchen is as much when I'm what I have to be about as the fact that I'm busy saying well we ought to wash dishes without getting angry or frustrated or anything it's am I getting angry and frustrated and I think that the teaching turns out to be such a subtle one I'm just learning that I'm learning you don't come on you don't come on line oh let me you ought to work on yourself more it doesn't do that you do it so that people say what is it about you you seem to be having such a good time with it and I'm not why is it you're having such a now they're asking that's a whole new ball Reggie's had a wonderful line he said if one would escape from prison the first thing that person must realize is that they are in prison if they think they're free no escape is possible that's such a beautiful mind twister good until you realize that you are not standing in the best place forget it let the person go on you don't come on you know you have an interesting chapter in your book how can I help which deals with this concept of the prison and helping as a prison feeling that I'm the helper puts me in a prison oh boy that the halt I realized that the hype of helping is that the helper often psychologically helps at the expense of the helped that it is a way that reinforces roles and the helped is disenfranchised and the helper is empowered and it's very interesting it's not the act itself I can take this cup of water and offer it to you and I can offer to you in a way where I build myself up and put you down by doing it or I could an offer it in a way where it's our cup of water you need it you drink from it I need it I drink from it in which I also appreciate that you're receiving it is as much part of the contract as my offering and and it's the question of whether you identify with a role or not and when you identify with a role it ends up being divisive it separates people there are plenty of people in hospitals who was surrounded by well-meaning people who do good and the person feels isolated and lonely and separate and it's interesting because everybody's busy loving them but they're loving them as an object loving the person is an object and they're helping them as an object and the art is being with somebody a subject not as object you often use the phrase sort of hanging out together hanging out and it's really like one awareness and two forms and we're talking to ourselves now Geoffrey mm-hmm we're just making believe that it's a game of dialogue because we're both reflecting to figure out the truth than the truth lies behind both of them and in a sense anyone who's viewing us right now is also viewing themselves it's all part of the same thing and it doesn't matter who's doing the talking that's the farm I mean I lecture all the time and I think I'm like a Renta Mouse process that's going on and I didn't say it good I'm not busy being the speaker I'm listening as well as everybody else is this is a dialogue that includes the viewer and you and me and we're all just figuring it out well I get the sense you know and I go back and forth sometimes I think when we get very philosophical like this they that it's a total head trip and it may be totally irrelevant to things happening in the world and then I think to myself no it's it's essential that nothing really changes until we change in this way by raising these questions yeah I I think your latter view is probably the right one I think that when you look at how you change a system that the component of the system has to change that the individual has to be standing in a slightly different place for the system of which they are part to change and that the minute that's where the story of a Buddha or a Christ or a Muhammad or something like that they were all beings who or you'd say they were dancing to a different drummer or whatever that expression is they were but they were they were listening to a different part of their being and the result was that they brought in an oblique entrance into the whole system that brought that allowed the system to adapt in a way and shift and you look at a system like a political governance system and the media and the constituency and you see how everything's feeding back on itself in a networking way where everybody is reinforcing a conspiracy to see a reality as real and then you see how you have to extricate yourself as an individual back in order to be able to contribute into it because you look at the conspiracy that we have collectively creating you realize people aren't happy within it and there's no reason why we can't all be happy that is really there's absolutely no reason why that couldn't see it's a it's a conspiracy of mind that we're stuck in that's Azhar that has its economic spin-off its political spin off and all of stuff well ultimately I suppose if if you take that seriously it would seem like a spiritual mission for you to to work to create a heaven on us but I'm doing that very selfishly it's because I want to live in it yeah I mean I work on myself in order to be at peace to be free to be free of suffering and to be happy and I realize that as I succeed in that I am an environment in which other people can do that as well in my presence and there's nothing in me that's going to keep them stuck in their suffering and then the question is what do you do with your time and as you listen and as you've experienced a unit of feeling with people then you're in the interesting position where if they are hungry it's not their hunger it's our hunger and then suddenly I'm in Guatemala or I'm in Nepal or I'm with the American Indians are on with somebody dying or somebody with AIDS and they call and it's like that part of us has just come into our consciousness and out of that comes in action it's interesting that you just had to open yourself to the universe and then the different sufferings make themselves manifest in the way you describe it when you're working with the dining or when you're working with refugees or with people who are hungry in spite of their misery you seem to be experiencing the most poignant moments well it's a combination and that's the art it's a combination that my heart hurts so bad because they hurt and I'm aware of the pain of whatever this situation is then there's another part of me that loves them so much because they're just another face of the beloved that's what Mother Teresa sees she sees Christ in all these distressing disguises and the lepers and the people she deals with and then there's another part of me that's just watching my own reactivity and getting quieter and quieter behind it and there's another part that's just meeting another part of myself you there I'm here you got your trip I got my trip there anything we can do for each other on the level of trips but let's not lose that we're here and I go down to Guatemala and I go into a village with a people have hardly any education of Mayan Indians and I look in the eyes of a widow and she's right there and we are just fellow beings we can't talk to each other because I don't speak her language we can't even speak but we're right there we recognize the unitive quality of our being and we realize we don't wish to do each other violence we don't wish to there's nothing we have to do other than maybe it'll be an exchange where I'll provide a home for her to hold the land who knows it doesn't matter what the game is if she had something and I didn't she give it to me is there a sense that that she does have something that we does we I'm getting it yeah I'm getting it I come back from all these missions of doing good I come back so enriched do you feel end up feeling guilty you feel like you're ripping off a system I mean I we take these meek people on the planet and strip them is we have of all possessions and any pretense to being somebody in the world and that leaves them with a sense of being which we've lost often and we've often lost when I'm in India I live in a little village in India a lot up in the foothills of the Himalayas and I live with people who they usually have one hunt meal a day I mean it's it's it's pretty good but it's thin it's way below our poverty level in this culture and I look in their eyes and their hearts and those people are much more fulfilled than the middle class in this culture and I say let me sit here and drink of the wisdom in these beings that allow them not to equate their state of well-being with their material condition and I realize that's something that I can help bring back to the West if you will in a way by my own being then the question is how what should be my style of life to make that statement do I go live in a park I mean what's the way to make the statement and then you realize that if you try to make it with your mind it's too cute you have to go in intuitively and just respond from moment to moment to hear how to do it there have been various spiritual teachers who have written on social and political issues Gandhi Martin Luther King or a Bindo Muhammad do any of these teachers really move you to you derive your inspiration for many of these writings yeah a lot of them it's a tricky one because when you go into the spiritual world you can eat the social action is the action of good guys it's the action of righteousness and in Hinduism that's known as the golden chain it's the ultimate trap you've got to go beyond goodness in order to be the goodness not to do good and so some of the spiritual teachers say look don't get involved in like Ramana Maharshi says what are you trying to help the world you don't even know who you are you don't even know what it's about what are you busy doing something you know you know maybe creating more trouble you caught you're helping and that's true and often we turn out to be doing just that but when many examples of many examples in my own life by the way so I do understand that but then the other is say you can't wait till you're enlightened to do good because there's so much suffering around you and it hurts so and to the extent that you ignore it you were ignoring part of yourself and there's a cost in turning off yourself you've got to keep it under wraps so you work with the suffering in order to free other people you work on it as part of the game along with it you know that's you method to get enlightened so the spiritual journey takes you both ways like Gandhi struggled with us all the time and he'd go back into retreat and then he'd come out and he said a beautiful thing he said when you've surrendered completely in to God you find yourself in the service of all that exists it becomes your joy and Recreation or recreation and you never tire of it there's no burnout because if I if this hand is in the fire and this hand pulls it out this hand doesn't have to go and say thank you this hand didn't do it to be a good guy there's no burnout of doing it it's just it's the way it is and that's the lie that's where that kind of service comes from love spirit my ish to dev or my spiritual vehicle in Hinduism and my name Ron das which means servant of God is Hanuman the monkey I mean I'm a monkey worshipper at some bizarre level I've got a monkey on my back and and the question Hanuman popular gods and I know it has incredible powers and he has the powers he's even known as the breath of Rahm and that's the name of God in that particular you go that's huh time Stan and Hanuman has the power because he lives only to serve God he's doing it all in order to serve God and the interesting question of and that's what Mother Teresa that's what she's getting her juice she knows she's only serving God you know I've seen these wonderful graphic images of Hanuman I collect Hindu art work and it's incredibly powerful the way he rips open his chest yes that's the story of that is that he is given by Rama a beautiful a jeweled bracelet and he starts to look at it and it's very valuable he starts to bite it with his teeth and break it and everybody says what kind of an ingrate are you here God's given you a gift in Europe he says this is of no use to me he says I don't see roms name written anywhere in it and they said well then why don't you get rid of your body and he because the roms name isn't written there you and he rips open his chest and there's Rama and Sita in the middle of his chest and every muscle and bone has ROM ROM ROM written on it it's in a way that your cellular being has become not out of a high fee thing it's just you get so list out by becoming part of this larger game of law or of laws - conceptual it's a kind of Dao the kind of way of things is a way of them what you know the name of God is a tricky Jordan that you've isn't that the business it seems that such tremendous people all over the planet understand God and in many many ways and yet it's the name of God that seems to divide the term God is a really trust one to work with well do you believe in God I mean immediately it becomes a thing and I I'm in a way I'm sorry I even use the word anymore because I don't know how to deal with it I just because it's everything and it's nothing and it's all you and I but not us exclusively Muslims and Jews are both monotheists yes ultimately they have to have the same God if they all believed there was only one God and yet they seem to believe that they worship different gods no the trap is that there's the concept of the chosen people that some people are closer to God than others that's such a hype at such an unfortunate time I mean we're all the chosen people the chosen people are the ones that listen to the Word of God when Christ standing there and they say your mother and brother are without he says my mother and brother are the people who are with God not like physical plane parents it's my spiritual parent my spiritual family and it feels so painful to me that we are using religiosity in such a divisive way in the world today that's very very painful yet there have been that's not - it's the way it is but it's too bad there have been efforts from time to time to unify politically by unifying in terms of everybody having the same name of God and yeah but usually as a unifier is trying to rip it off for a power thing that's what's interesting I mean very rarely other unifiers surrendering into the process there are some like there was a beautiful man Sufi Sam Murshid Sam Lewis and he would go to Jewish Sufi he would go out Jewish Sufi and he go to Palestine and hold these dances which had in the followers of Islam and and followers of the Torah and you know and they'd all dance together and it would be called dances of peace and he was a beautiful self very humble I mean wise guy he was a rascal he was I love that I love that role I love that role in integrating these values I mean wasn't this the basic idea of Mohammed and perhaps Aurobindo and some of the others that there would eventually be a world government and it would be a theocracy of some kind based on this notion that we're all united in God I think that the only really viable living social institution is the end of human heart I think the minute you try to create any institutional structures beyond that it has a very short half-life of living spirit before it just decays into a memory of the thought really I think it's extremely hard to keep a United Nations living truth I mean which had a high aspiration but it's a stinker to keep alive and I think it's true of all social institutions of marriage you've got to keep reinvesting it and reinvesting it and reinvesting it to keep it living true and anything less than living truth is demeaning to the human condition you sound like an anarchist well if you take that in the political way I would say that the social institutions that exist because they are true to the intuitive validity of the human hearts involved that's anarchy in a sense like like my guru once said to somebody about their marriage he said love is the only marriage contract that's anarchy that's saying you got to go back again and again and see if it's still true that we I should be together in other words if you're really in the here and now if you're really true to the to the truth of the moment then any kind of institutionalization of that would be a violation yeah unless you work you say we are coming together in this institution to keep this quality alive that's what the save of foundation is about that's what we are attempting to do we're saying can we create an institution that can have the benefits of an institution in that we can collaboratively do more as a group we can be a an organization in the eyes of governments and things like that as we are in Nepal and still keep it living truth and it's hard work the boards are like group encounter the board meetings like group encounters we've got to cut through all our stuff each time to come back to the living to our vision once again what is our vision are we just caught in a historical thought that we're now carrying out because we're good guys that isn't good enough it isn't good enough and it's least for a number of years has been working for the saver founded right on the edge right on the edge if it doesn't if you don't keep right on but it can decay immediately into well meaningless in which we're all milking it it's all good and I want you wonderfully doing such good work and oh thank you you know that whole thing and you lost it well there seems to be as you mentioned the concept of the half life of an institution a period in which when institutions are founded and the original founders are there there is this vitality they they stay in the moment they stay with the spirit and then they become hardened and crystallized when the follower it's like when the it starts there's a visionary or an entrepreneur and then the managerial class or the priests class takes over and the minute that happens they have a vested interest in the power of the institution because that's where they get their juice while the visionary or mystic got their juice out of the connection with the living truth and if you have an institution that forces each person to find their own truth the still small voice within that the Quakers talk about that kind of thing then you're rejuvenating it because that's that social institution of the human heart is to me the living interface between the spirit and the material world and that's why each you've got to keep going back to that one well we began this interview by talking about the problems that were faced with nuclear war potential for holocaust ecological catastrophe it is if we don't really get it together on this planet where we're facing the extinction in human race and that all sounds very dramatic it doesn't like in any point of view us oh well that happened again and we'll start again I mean because who we are isn't the human race the human race are like the Fords of Chevrolet's that we use that's not behind it all we just are and as long as you're afraid of death the fear is going to direct almost all your behavior we've got a ward off that and finally you say yes it may indeed we may destroy ourselves this time around and I will allow that possibility and I will do what I can to prevent it but I'm not going to do it out of fear I'm doing to do it just because it's my part to play and the damn well I have to agree with you there we really do need to take a larger perspective yeah and sort of step outside of our human skin here because in some sense life goes on some sense something goes on yeah that's all though the evens calling it something the Buddhists would take executive I love it some process continues but if I were to step back inside of my human skin for a moment and that out of fear but out of out of the feeling of calmness and love and compassion desire this beautiful thing this human race to continue yet in thinking in my own mind maybe in some visionary since how can we unify ourselves realizing what we just said about institutions and the pitfalls of it happening through institutions there's there's almost say that there's nothing to do so be it be the unification and then it will all happen around you but every time you look at somebody as somebody that you ought to unify you've just made them into somebody and you've made them separate from yourself and then you're doing something to them and actually there's only honest it's just we're all here and nothing's it's all over we won I think there's all these different ways of looking at the thing instead of I got to do all this work so we'll win we already run all we got to do is allow the fact that we are in God's grace it's all going fine with so busy making a new a hell all the time we're saying if there were only peace I could be happy there is what there is why can't you be happy with what there is and do the best you can to relieve the stuff but don't let your happiness be contingent upon it so that you start to live like a winner instead of like a loser in the game with whatever you got whatever you've got and then go and let me really push the point allude further one of my one of my mentors has been the Harvard sociologist Peter and Sorokin yes and who grew up in the Soviet Union or before it was the Soviet Union in Russia and it became a very high cabinet member in the Kerensky government before he came to harvard and when he was kicked out by lenin founded the department of social relations at harvard were you taught I was on the faculty and he was way ahead of his time yeah real his book on altruism is exquisite he wrote at one point that he thought we might be moving into a period in which the Western style of capitalism and the Soviet style of communism would merge that we would see the common unity there that we aren't as good as we think we are they're not as bad as they think they are or as we think they are well that's the benefit that the drug lords are giving us because then becoming a new common enemy it's just like if we were in attacked by beings from Mars or something like that suddenly the Russians wouldn't be so bad and this system wouldn't be so bad because we would all be United around something which is what happened in the Second World War around Hitler's vision of reality that's right and in the same way that the drug threat of of the exploitation of people of weakness and of addiction potential in human consciousness means that's becoming the prime issue now instead of capitalism versus communism and now to keep that paranoia going you've got to keep working at it to keep generating the yes but look what happened in Afghanistan yes but look at the Jews that still can't get out all of which is true but look at the way we are if you if you look at any system it all has a lot of problems with it I mean all of these systems systems themselves do not a conceptual system is not the setting that is living truth living truth is not a concept it's it's what it is and you seem to also be saying that if we're unified because of a common enemy because of a sense of antagonism or hatred we're not really winning the game it's a very short term it's a very short term unity it's a cheap unity the deeper unity is the unity of recognizing across the boundaries of russian-american jew christian islam you here i'm here you know and that that's why when they when we went to the moon and then took a picture of the earth and people saw that that picture of the earth was worth many millions of words in the sense of giving people a sense of McLuhan's Global Village or whatever you want to call it that's the kind of game but up levels but that's just on the physical plane well there's something to the global village in terms of what you mentioned earlier about about the individual as being the primary institution because with with media with computer technology it's as if we can bypass so many of these other institutional forms and people can communicate to each other on a one-to-one multinationals have made made nationalism an anachronism it's just dying hard roughly is what's happening we are one economic system now and we're just learning how to we're just learning how to be with what's happened to us it's like some major thing happens but everybody's busy holding on to who we were before it now you could say well we just moved from the industrial to the Information Age that would be one way of saying it but that's kind of trivializing it - and beyond that is the spiritual consciousness age you know you could do it that way I don't know how to get hold of it all I know is we haven't yet grown into who we are and who we are has nationalism as a quite an anachronism it's a functional unit the way our egos are but nobody wants to live there it sounds like a very optimistic note it sounds as if you know back to our earlier point about the human spirit has really evolved yeah I guess I feel it has because like in my color and my culture in this country I noticed that 20 years ago I would say the farthest out things I could find using drugs using meditation using everything and there'd be a few people sitting there going yeah yeah because they knew because they were in the Explorers Club with me now 20 years later I speak to an audience that's prime almost mainstream not quite but they're from 20 to 80 years old most of them never took drugs they never read Eastern philosophy and I'm saying same things I was saying 20 years ago and they're all going like that now how do they know that how do they know what got in what-what-what name streamed what see something up it's as if what we did in the 60s something really worked something happened and we don't yet recognize it history can't yet because history which is his story is still telling the story from back there it's not telling the story from what's happened yet I love it I love it we were talking a little earlier about Aurobindo and his concept of history being a process of the higher consciousness yeah working through people yes and opening you open to let it come through you to manifest and the you become a conduit for the for the wisdom the higher wisdom to manifest in earth it's like Mozart for example he's a good example I mean you get a feeling of Mozart most people have seen the movie where Mozart's madly writing and you think is he creating that and then you realize he's just got a door open to where it is he's a great copier he's copying down this incredible music and he and and so you get that feeling with all the great creators with Bach with with Michelangelo you get a feeling that they just were open to another plane of reality and they were just bringing it down through them and when you open to that other plane of reality you get a sense of the harmony of the universe which includes the cacophony it is not mean that all the tension or cacophony is gone it's a tolerance for the complexity of the game because if you're going to get manifestation in form you have to have positive and negative and dark and light and good and evil and you know all of it otherwise there's no manifestation and in fact there there isn't so that is so why are we talking about it well a fun is there's nowhere to stand that's the ultimate wisdom there's nowhere to stand that I can my ultimate another type but because the statement is a lie but the ultimate wisdom of nowhere to stand means any place you say this is real it's only relatively real here's where it's at yeah including the fact that nothing ever happened and there's no form yeah you just keep at first you go in and out of planes of consciousness sequentially you get high and you come down or you and I are talking and who are we are we two men sitting talking are we too old cave-dwellers sitting by the fire week exploring the deepest wisdom I mean which mythical game do you want to play about us and then you go behind it and there's only one of us talking to itself and then you go behind that nothing's happening at all there's no no no you know all this fun what you're saying reminds me of the myth of the Greek god Proteus who one wrestles with and he always changes forms to keep up with him he becomes a an animal you've got to become a bigger animal and then he becomes a different animal and you have to change with it all the time and the art is to just not try to be standing anywhere because the minute you're standing somewhere if he changes you're vulnerable and a minute you're not anyone then each moment is a new moment and you see Who am I this time because you don't even know who you are people say who are you I don't know who I am that's fun that I mean people don't realize it's like what are you going to be when you grow up well I'm not planning to grow up so it's kind of irrelevant and then it's this funny reversal of the whole game of becoming somebody the way I see it is we spend all of our early years becoming somebody then we start to awaken and we realize we've got trapped in the creation of somebody knows and we go in a nobody training and then we become nobody not nobody which is somebody but nothing special and then we're everything Collard rinpoche one of my beautiful teachers he said once you see the illusion you realize you're nobody and being nobody or everybody it seems that in the realm of politics the real survivors are the ones who are able to sort of change with the moment exactly and because they don't have such a vested interest in how it comes mmm-hmm because they're delighting in the dance of life instead of I gotta make it come out this way yeah well occasionally you get people like that and then they have their moment in the Sun but they fade because they can't change exactly right exactly right and the dance of the change in surrendering into the new moment like very poignant was Rosalyn and Jimmy Carter's by autobiography of what happened the day after they left the White House and then back in Plains Georgia with all the mementos in the attic and the trucks drive away and there they are and they got the rest of their life now the question is how quickly do you let go or how busy are you being milking your moment of worldly power which was just another trip really yeah yeah well I was very pleased to see Jimmy Carter working in the Bronx my carpenter lightning keys worked very hard to continue to grow I think he's a good example of somebody making an effort to stay and that's why I work with aging a lot because aging is got such a psychological hype going with it I've been working on a book called the wisdom of aging to show the way in which we get we conspire to make aging something that has and we treat decline of certain capacities as loss but it's interesting I go into Burma to a monastery and I sit down I draw my awareness in from my hearing from my seeing from my smelling in order to be quieter and deeper to do the inner work when you get old you lose your hearing you'll lose your sight all those things are the optimum conditions necessary for doing the inner work and everybody saying oh my god I can't hear like I used to isn't that terrible yeah terrible I don't know you have some remarkable examples in your book how can I help of people who have gone to help these so-called crippled helpless people and discovered that they had much to learn from oh yeah oh it's incredible I remember one story of a woman in a hospital working with mentally children I think of a mental age of 2 or 3 years old and she was just trying to teach them how to say a simple thing like I'm doing very well yeah I like that and in the little Choi kid putting her on yeah he winked at REI one point actually yeah and that other story of the woman in the social agency who determined to help one of the needy women and she tried to do everything and the woman just did none of it ever worked she couldn't because the woman really wasn't trying very hard and they ended up finally in a park in the rain in which the woman the needy woman said there's nothing more you can do for me you've just been here and they just sit there together in such quiet joy of just their friendship and their presence and they both grew so much and especially the one that was busy being with social agent I love those story well what you've done in this book is you've attempted to really address that question for people who sincerely want to help and when they come up against it and realizes so many of the things that we do that we think are helping end up not working but it doesn't mean not to help it means to use your experience of helping as a way to grow and there's such potential growth in helping another human being if you'll be truthful about it all and bring your truth into the situation and watch yourself getting trapped in a role and a conspiracy and then sit down and quiet down and see what you did and come back in it again there's nothing wrong with losing it losing it as part of the journey you lose it you get up is our abend Oh says you brush yourself off you look sheepishly at God and you take the next step as a lovely image and then you fall in your face again and helping is just a beautiful art form because we have such a natural compassionate heart and what we are really afraid of is our own heart because our heart would give away the store the heart says hit take it you need it you take a take it take my life take my money take my car and the mind is saying I watch it think about tomorrow Christ's image would be like the lilies and feel that's like be the heart just trust it all oh okay and we are so frightened of that that we have built stuff that has ended up starving us to death we are starving because we're afraid of our own hearts and there must be another way and that's what you do helping to explore how you can allow that spontaneous compassion and spontaneous generosity to express itself and work with it and realize you can set limits without having to close yourself down from yourself one of the things that you point out is that perhaps the greatest gift we can give to other people is just to listen yeah exactly because they feel heard heard but the it's interesting to listen and to not get entrapped in their mind to listen but to let it go but to hear them but not just buy it but hear it not to get caught up and say I hear you sometimes that frustrates people they don't want to just be heard they want to be reacted to they want to entangle you want to entangle you what did you call it their reality yeah man there was a great lady that came to visit me she was a seamstress and her youngest daughter had gone to visit her older daughter and forged a check and she came in with a tale of pity about how her husband had left her and she'd worked her fingers to the bone she showed me to take care of these girls and now this girl had turned bad and it took her about ten minutes to tell me it was like the Ancient Mariner and I listened as hard as I could it when she got all that I said I hear you she wasn't satisfied and she told me the whole story all over again and you get all done I said I hear you and at that moment I was just looking at her and she said you know she said I was kind of ahead in when I was a girl too and at that moment she came up for air you know I heard her but I didn't climb in because she had sucked everybody oh you poor dear oh oh that ingrate you know that whole thing and it's so important I think it's for people to hear themselves as they tell their stories as how they grow and then you become a mirror for them to see their own trip and if they want to see if they can and if they don't that's up to them you don't lay a trip you don't I realize you morally have no right to take away another human being suffering that's a big one that is a big one I know it I know it I've really learned a lot about that because I you look at somebody suffering and you see if they shifted and you want so especially if they're family and you love them you want to take away their suffering and that is the quickest way to alienate them to create more paranoia because you don't even know why it is stuff don't understand well I guess there's a sense you mentioned earlier the need to sort of look suffering right in the eye and yes that means to acknowledge it yes and death as well death as well I've been preparing the slideshow on the delay we're bringing death out of the closet in life slideshow taking these images and asking people to stay with them and watch their own reactions and keep that heart open and see this is another face of the beloved just practice doing this is practice doing well as you walk down the street the people you meet in a supermarket in the filling station all of them just other faces of all other faces of beloved it sounds like a tantric discipline essentially is yeah I have a little table with holy pictures on it and I have Buddha and Christ and my guru and I have for a long time I head caspar weinberger on there who used to be Secretary of Defense because I disagreed with his policy so strongly that when I would think about him something would close in me and I'd come in and might sit down and I'd like my incense and I'd say good morning Buddha good morning Christ good morning Maharaja hello Casper and then I saw how much work I had to do because until I could love him enough behind Casper Innes there was no way my mind could be an environment where he could change if he needed if he wanted I needed to change maybe he doesn't want oh that's what to him but I'm not going to be so busy locking him into who he thinks he is that he can't change which sounds like you're attempting to to live Christ teaching of resist not evil Wow that's true resist not evil I would say evil actions I resist and I oppose even I would say but I don't see people as evil I see actions as evil that actions increased suffering or separateness I see suffering rooted in ignorance as Buddha did and the ignorance leads directly into the illusion of separateness in the minute you separate your suffering and the crucial distinction here again is between the action and the person between the action and the press and the idea is you keep your heart open to the being at the same moment you're doing what you need to do about the action and it's interesting when you're opposing somebody like I was at a anti-nuclear demonstration and coming right up to the line and opposing a policeman or somebody and seeing them as another being just like you that's doing their best to find their truth and loving them and at the same moment saying I can't allow you to do that I must say no but saying no in a way that says I love you that seems to be the essence of the message of the bhagavad-gita yeah and the I had it so demonstrated by my guru in India because the word he used most frequently was JA which means go split get lost hmm I mean other gurus and people think guru Singh come come go Ron doesn't go you know I come 6,000 miles fitted his feet awesome fruit he look at me hit me in the head and say Jeff go and I'd say go and I was offended that he was sending me away and then afterwards I heard the word Jiao came out of a place where he is saying go with love everywhere is love you there's no you know to stay here it's all love you know Joe I love you I mean and learning how to say no in a way that brings people closer it's such an art form such an art form that one is the one of the deepest wisdoms that I've touched thus far and I'm just learning how to do it go with love yeah say no without closing your heart it's like when you have a child and the child wants an extra ice cream that you know is going to give them maybe a bad stomach or something and you say no usually you're empathizing with the fact the child's going to feel frustrated so you're feeling that which closes you up a little and then the child probably angry at you so you're going to be the object of anger by someone you love so that closes you what more so you say no with a different tone than you'd say yes and you become like a parent child instead of to being exactly rapid and a beautiful conscious being sees we're just dancing as parent and child we're two souls the two being and for a while I'll play like I'm your parent you play like I'm this you're the child and as a parent I say no oh yes but don't get lost in it I'm still here well Rob deaf it's been a pleasure playing interviewer we haven't add in Jeffrey me too it's been a real joy yeah very nice thanks so much for being with me my pleasure and thank you for being with us [Music] India a billion people a vast array of cultures and languages traditions and customs and yet unknown to many even those who live here the core of the heritage of this amazing land has a goal a specific purpose the whole thrust of the teachings the spiritual paths the Sanskrit language the schools of philosophy have been carefully and deliberately designed to give its people's the secrets of living in the highest and most ecstatic states of consciousness known to the human race a society whose greatest beings do not focus their lives on the material world of mortgages marriages and motorcars but instead concentrate on the universe that exists within their body within the deeper unexplored layers of their minds many in this vast and extraordinary land search for these states in a variety of ways they take vows perform rituals undergo practices that seem bizarre and unusual to those who are not aware of their purpose the goal for these few explorers of the unconscious is to directly merge with the life force itself and access the inner realms of bliss and pure energy like a drop flowing back to the ocean and finally merging with it they to attempt to become one with the whole of life and experience themselves as the pure intelligence that activates the universe some succeed some fail for those who take the journey and/or inspiring eternal and infinite reality opens up for exploration experiences so far beyond the normal that they defy definition and description what they portray is an underlying field of living consciousness which contains the entire material universe all galaxies stars planets and what exists on them exist within this unbroken field of consciousness like the myriad forms of sea life in an ocean so to do all the variety of living forms of this universe exists within consciousness the ultimate experience for a living human being is to merge their individual consciousness with this absolute consciousness and so experience themselves as the ocean of life rather than an individual drop which exists within life it is this experience which gives you permanent access to the ecstatic States [Music] one man who has devoted his life to this experience is Ram Dass originally a Harvard professor called dr. Richard Alpert his life particularly after his association with dr. Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley and much formal research into hallucinogenic substances was a journey of discovery into altered states of consciousness his meetings as a young man with enlightened beings from India radically changed his life these enlightened people had through meditation merged their own individual consciousness with the whole field of consciousness they lived on different planes of experience to the ordinary person they had powers and knowledge of the highest realms living in states which filled them with an ecstasy far beyond anything that ordinary life could offer well I was a psychologist I took my PhD at Stanford University and I taught at Stanford and then at Harvard University for a number of years and in the 60s I became very interested in mind altering chemicals that changed the way one thought because being a student of the mind I was really interested in how the chemistry of the mind affected the way in which you saw the world and thought so I actually personally started experimenting with some of these very ancient plants that have been used by curanderos and Oracle's in various religious traditions throughout time and took them in order to see what they I could learn about my own mind so the chemicals that you use were actually of a plant nature yes they were actually they were at what's called tienen octal or the flesh of the gods it's a mushroom and as such there when you're 17 years of thousand years you mean literally they were opened it was an open thing in societies that they could be used well it's hard to know because it hasn't been that open what are call the Eleusinian mysteries for example ancient mysteries were using some of these plants to alter consciousness in large groups of people within the social structure but very little has been written amazingly little has been written about about it presumably that would have influenced their society had many people using I think it did I think and it was basically within a religious framework rather than a political or social framework and what happened after that you well I worked with those chemicals for about six years and then I began to realize that there were that they might be useful techniques but they didn't allow me to integrate these experiences I was having into my normal life process and I felt that I had more to learn and we had been introduced by Aldous Huxley who was one of our community to the Tibetan Book of the Dead which was an ancient Tibetan text for helping people to retain consciousness through the process of dying and that led me to a low once I had had these inner experiences my Western psychological models that I was teaching at Harvard no longer explained what my own inner experiences were what sort of experiences were you having well I was having experiences in which the conceptual mind was being overridden probably at the synapses in a way that allowed me to see the universe in with innocence freshly without I mean I look at you and I say man because I have a concept of man and I'm taking certain little shadows and lights and frames and putting it into a person I'm doing all that with my mind what's out there I have no idea all I know is what my conceptual mind projects to be out there and picks out of this infinite range of stimuli all around us all the time so to override those conceptual things and then see freshly again without labels because you walk down a street and you see a tree and there's a party in mind it says tree you label it in order to have control and letting go of those labels or overriding them and in a way then you see how much your any frame you have for looking at the world is impoverished once you've seen outside of that so I went to the east to India and Pakistan Iran and enormous places because there were a lot of maps that these people had very old maps books Murata things like that the Baha Gilad data in India that were a descriptive of these interstates in a way Western psychology wasn't so they matched the same experience you were having in these ancient extraordinary I mean I remember having a one of these sessions with the mushrooms and then a few days later sitting with all of us reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead and coming across a passage that described an experience I had had two nights previously which I described at that time as ineffable or indescribable because my conceptual Western conceptual mind hadn't organized the universe to be able to explain those things and here was a twenty-five hundred year old text describing perfectly what I had experienced the night before the two nights before that's amazing and with these experience that you had were they purely with the flesh of the gods the mushrooms are there other things as well the chemicals they were the whole range of what are called psychedelic own mind manifesting chemicals so there was peyote used by the Native Americans mescaline is their mother that there was a lysergic acid diethylamide 25 there was a whole range of alphabet soup DMT and all those things ayahuasca ibogaine yah just at that point I was so interested in we were trying to articulate the way in which the set of the mind and the setting or the environment plus the nature of the chemical interacted with one another to provide different kinds of experiences we were trying to map that terrain and did you succeed well I don't think there's success I think it's a process in which there is more sophistication than there was but there is still fortunately a huge part of it that is a mystery and what is it that stops people in their ordinary daily life being able to experience these things quite naturally what stops people in their ordinary life is their model of who they are and what's possible it's interesting we are all experiencing all of this stuff all the time it's the natural state of our mind but in order to be efficient we have learned a strategy for seeing the universe and seeing our own experiences that makes irrelevant components of our consciousness that are exactly what this mystical wisdom is about but we rule it out we rejected we treated as error or irrelevant so it's always there accessible for anything always there for everybody and that's what's so bizarre somebody will say you like you go to a movie film and the film is so engrossing that when the lights go up you don't know where you are and it takes you a moment to say oh I'm back in the theater you know because and there's an example you just went another place and then you came back or you'll say I was out of my mind that's a one of those things or I don't know what I was thinking or my mind went blank or and we don't have ways of playing with that place in ourselves because when you have these variances of altered consciousness' one of the most profound components of your reaction is I know this this is very familiar I'm here all the time but I just don't know it so for the average person who's never experienced an alteration of consciousness what is it that they could do in order to open themselves even a little bit to some non ordinary state well I've got to take exception to your statement the person who has not experienced these who does not knowingly experience it's interesting just a little example back in the early 60s or late 60s I guess 70s I would I would lecture to very young audiences in the West because they were the people that were interested in these altered states of consciousness and one night I was lecturing and there was a woman maybe in her 70s in the front row and she had a black patent leather bag and ox solid oxford shoes and a print dress and her hair and a bun and she was absolutely a perfect person that 70 that you know a very conservative and I couldn't figure out what she was doing in this audience I thought somebody brought their grandmother or something like that and every time I would tell some extraordinarily what I would have called those days far out a story about what I was experiencing inwardly through these chemicals she would not and I thought why is she mining and I thought maybe she's got a problem with her neck so I tell a more outrageous story and she'd nod and at the end I couldn't stand it I mean I just she didn't look like she was somebody that was taking LSD so at the end I kind of smiled at her and I kind of willed her to come forward you know and she came up and she said oh thank you so much that's just the way I know the world to be and I said how do you know what have you done that allows you to hear these states and she leaned forward very conspiratorial and she said I crochet [Laughter] see and what that showed me at that moment was that the method that I thought was so important that somebody else can cook a stew somebody else can surf somebody and anything that takes you to the edge of consciousness some people during women during their menstruation there are moments when the chemistry of the brain naturally shifts in people fasting does that running a lot of people that do running move into these altered states of consciousness so do you see it as a brain chemistry issue I see the I see it as a brain chemistry issue but in a funny way not that it not that where you go is brain chemistry but what keeps you from getting there is brain chemistry the brain chemistry is like the veneer or the covering and as you shift the chemistry the whole thing becomes porous and you can move into these other states of consciousness which I do not think are Isum isomorphic with brain right you went I believe to India and they met a very famous over you made him famous enlightened being could you just tell us a little bit about him I hardly we shouldn't say I make it was I gave him all his powers I met I went to India in 1967 looking for these maps almost precisely looking for a map reader somebody that could help me understand what I wasn't understanding and I hit the jackpot sooner or later I mean just when I gave up actually after three six months and I thought oh this isn't going to work I'm not meeting anybody that interesting and what am I going to do now you'd wonder the world looking for somebody deliberately yeah and then I was brought to this man at a point when I didn't want to meet him and it was a little temple up in the hills of the kamon hills the foothills I'm honest and when I brought it was brought before him I didn't like it I didn't want to be there I didn't believe in Hindu gurus I thought the whole thing was dayglo claims and fluorescent lights and you know calendar art and I just wanted to go home and he he kidded me at first and this is just a few minutes and I was just a passenger in the car with this other fellow this who wanted to go see his guru so I was like just happened to be there and there's no telephones and nothing else and after a while he called me over and he sat me down and he said to me you write under the stars last night and I thought yeah I went out to go to the bathroom and he said you were thinking about your mother and when I had been going standing out under the stars I thought about my mother who had died six months previously and I felt her presence very closely and then I went back to sleep I was a hundred miles away from this man at that time and I went back to sleep and I never thought anything more about it or said anything he said you would think about your mother and he closed his eyes as the man in India and he said she died last year that's pretty good now I'm a professor at Harvard you know and my mind is starting to spin because how can he know this I'm starting to get really paranoid and he said she got very big in the belly before she died and she had an enlarged spleen actually and had it indeed looked pregnant I mean and then he closed his eyes again and I was getting very uneasy and all of this was in Hindi with a translator and then he leaned forward and he said to me in English spleen which was the organ from which my mother died they removed the spleen and she died and when he did that my mind couldn't handle it my mind couldn't there's no way that this man could know this and my mind stopped it just stopped it was like a tilt on a pinball machine as I'm pointing it and at that moment he was very close to me and looking directly at me and I felt my heart it was like there was an excruciating pain in my chest and I felt like a door opening and I started to cry and I cried for about two days and I didn't wasn't sad I felt like he had come inside of me like we were he understood me to my deepest being and he loved me and it was the first meeting I had with what you would really call unconditional love and because it wasn't like you say about another prison well if that person really knew me they couldn't love me this way because he did really know me and he did love me this way how did this person how was he able to do this to know these things well I have no idea in actuality I mean I can play with it I can say that he was able to his awareness was not located in time and space it was not limited in time and space he could move outside he could draw his awareness back from being this man sitting in this temple in India and once your awareness is no longer identified with separateness it is basically everywhere all the time and then whatever your needs are that awareness can be drawn in so it's like his awareness is one with the universe and then he draws it as a separate entity my need is my need to have my mind blown he listed that from him I don't think he was busy thinking about it prior to doing that right so he's just completely in the present in the now I'll give you one more story that's interesting connected with Swami Muktananda who was a man I was with and went around the world with and after we came back to India he very kindly offered to take me on a yatra visit of southern temples of Shiva temples in South India and a group of us maybe 20 of us in a caravan went to these temples and one morning Swami Muktananda was a very powerful City Yoga and one morning he woke me at around 4:00 and he took my hand and he rushed me through a little village we didn't speak the same language and he took me up to a little temple on the top of a building and he sat me down and he started to recite mantra over me a mantra is a word or sound sometimes secret always powerful that is repeated in the mind to open the practitioner to altered states of consciousness Multan anda sometimes gave mantras to people to use to assist this process of awakening and he whispered a mantra into my ear and this was around 4:15 the next thing I knew was at nine o'clock in the morning when somebody was shaking me and said Baba wants to see you so I came back down the stairs and went back to the temple I was a little confused at this point the mantra was strong in my mind and I said to him Baba what was all of that all about he said that will give you vast wealth and vast power and I said I only want those if I can have an equal amount of love and compassion and he looked disgustedly at me and he said just do the mantra I've cut the baloney just do the much I couldn't stop doing the mantra I did a day and night.i we were on the tour but overall all I could do was the mantra there was a part of me that really wanted that wealth empowering No and so we got back to gonna ship or e to his temple and he didn't want me meditating in the temple and the meditation hall he wanted me meditating in the little room that the hall was built around where he did his puja so at 2:00 in the morning I went down there and they are those absurdly with a big key and he unlocked the door and I went in and it was about a hundred and ten 120 degrees in there and black dark dark so I took off all my clothes and I lay down and I was doing this mantra and I was suddenly ripped out of my body and I was on another plane of consciousness and I was at the doorway of a room and in the room sitting on a Tucket City on table was Swami Muktananda so I rushed in and knelt down in front of him and looked up at him and at that moment I started to raise up and fly above his head so I was looking down at Swami Muktananda and I started to look around and I thought I can fly then I thought well where would I go and there wasn't anywhere I could think to go now that I could fly I'd always wanted to fly and so at that point I started my body started a tilt a little bit and I remember the thought I've got to write my body and as I did that I was brought I was down back in the temple in the little room that I was meditating it maybe five minutes had gone by and I was so agitated from this experience that it was like 220 or 2:00 in the morning I leap up shake the bars to the side who comes and opens the door I rush out into the courtyard and there is Swami Muktananda with one of the Indian devotees Papa walking around the courtyard and he comes over to me and he said how did you like flying now so he and I am meeting now on two planes of consciousness all right that's pretty interesting so there's just one little more of the story so I can't stop doing the mantra I mean it's all I don't want to sleep I'm just doing the mantra and I leave Ganesh poori to go to a Renta cave north of there we can get a cave and they take care of you and you're locked in for as long as you want so I was in this cave doing this mantra again it was hot I took off all my clothes lay down I do the mantra and I'm ripped out of my body and I'm back at the doorway of the room and I look in the room and this time it's my guru instead of Muktananda and I walk in and I look at my guru and I am so happy I am so happy and he's got his blanket in front of him and he throws his blanket in front of his face and he goes I hear it and my body feels like I'm being filled within like an inner tube at a filling station a tire like the air is being pumped in you know I'm going like this and then I'm back in the Renta cave and the mantra is gone I can't even remember to this day I don't know what the mantra was the mantras gone and I go back to my guru finally when I meet him again the only thing he would ever say about was I came up to one day and I was sitting there and he said it's good to meditate without clothes on that's all he would ever say about the whole thing incredible incredible so I knew there was a whole other level of the game being played you realize we've met I thought I I felt that my guru had sent me to Muktananda in order to be taken through certain stages of my own stuff and then when it was finished it was finished and that is not that book de nada isn't a great guru and my guru wasn't a great girl but you each each individual has their route through and you just got to listen and not judge and prefer or anything just it's amazing so this obviously didn't fit in with any of the ideas from Harvard University well by then I that was a point I think it was you see up until the time I met my groom I think I really thought of these as chemically-induced altered states of consciousness which had a lack of reality to them in some way they were still once I had met him and seen that he lived in these planes of consciousness all the time and that it was humanly possible and I opened my I said all right it's all possible I gave up my role as a Western scientists saying that I'm going to do inductive hypothetical deductive theory and I'm not going to accept anything unless I can you know empirically demonstrate it I thought no I will allow the possibility of everything in the universe because you can't really do anything with these states exactly exactly and and I just well I decided it would be more fun to open than to hold on to the kind of scientific paranoia that says the null hypothesis that says nothing really has happened so we can see that there are people who have developed themselves to open to a variety of altered state of consciousness and abilities how do they do this and what is it a person can do to access these unusual realms of experience the main technique is called meditation what the word actually means is concentration but concentration on what well the word itself reveals the meaning komm pertaining to consciousness of and centra meaning the center so concentration of this nature means consciousness or awareness of your center of your essence of who and what you truly are at the core of your being for it is only at the center of your being that you discover ecstasy people do a variety of things to release or unlock the brains chemistry to allow insight into these states and to their own essence but only one practice seems to be unavoidable and that is this internal concentration let's look now at what Ram Dass advises with regard to meditation I've done 25 years of very intense meditation practice I mean I've spent for example going to Burma and spend two months in a monastery meditating 17 hours a day and you're what you get very very subtle in terms of seeing though and altering the mind that the consciousness I've done I did a lot of hatha yoga so I did a lot of pranayama and breath control and a lot of fasting and did a lot of alteration I've redesigned my life so that it is constantly moving me towards different planes of consciousness I mean I continually use something like these beads to constantly move my mind into other planes moving back and forth to the point where more and more planes of consciousness are simultaneously existing all the time so I would say my whole life has become my practice right for somebody who doesn't know anything about meditation what exactly is that well there are different aspects of meditation I mean I can simply say just let's think of concept two of them one of them which is called Samadhi or concentration practice is the practice of taking awareness think of your awareness as like a torch flashlight a torch and what it shines on is what it shines on but it doesn't shine on itself but it's the it's the light that shines on things the torch itself is your awareness and you're aware of this or that and the process of meditation is extricated the awareness from being caught in the this or that being I caught in thought or caught in sensation so one of the techniques you can use is concentration like you can take your awareness and bring it to something as simple as your breath rising and falling or going in and out just that simple thing and then every time the mind goes back to one of these thoughts that cut each thoughts coming along all sensation saying thank me feel me thank me I'm real and each time the awareness goes to the thought you just bring it back to the breath bring it back to the breath it's called a primary object of meditation and it gets the mind very concentrated it takes you a long time to the point where you can keep you aligned on your breath for even a few seconds without it flicking like this and when it does it starts to get a kind of a laser-like power to penetrate into the universe in a very different way it alters moves your consciousness so that's one technique which is concentration once you have a little bit of that then you can move into what really is part of what's called wisdom training or it's called mindfulness also it is just not keeping one object but just in everything that you see or sense keeping aware that you're aware keeping mindful of the situation you're in so if you're eating you're eating but you're not only eating and enjoying and all but the additional plane of consciousness is you are mindful of the fact you are eating and enjoying it's like a witness that you cultivate that goes through your daily life and that continues on twenty-four hours a day so that goes on all the time and you what happens is when something comes along that fascinates you that to which you're either attracted or that is aversive the minute that happens you lose that into the drama of the moment and then that's what these devices are for to bring that back in so you keep going in and out of it and then out of it until pretty soon it's going just like that both planes are going at once so this other plane is referred to as consciousness by well consciousness is a tricky word it's got a lot of yeah you could call it touch you could call it I'd call it awareness awareness so what is consciousness it's tricky what exactly is consciousness then well depends on what system you working in for example in tera vaada and buddhism consciousness is still a phenomenon it's still stuff consciousness of something awareness is a whole other plane of existence awareness is not stuff awareness is our nan stuff component I mean I don't know how to be able to talk about it it's where see we are so busy defining ourselves in form that the part of us that is not in form we don't know what to do we can't get hold of it we can't because you can't know it because you only know things you can only be it you can't know it so it's like you can know knowledge but you can you got to be wise it says little different thing that's just different level so your and we short-shrift ourselves because we focus only what you can see smell taste touch feel think about and it's only when you free the awareness from all those that you can see that you can rest in emptiness and perfect awareness and clarity and out of that comes a whole other life pattern from where your mind is sitting inside the torch is just sitting there in life and then it can light up things but they don't grab it they don't pull it and what does this do fool you if you're able to stay in the state or when does it put you in the state of new mobile yo guru well as a statement the mystical literature truth waits for eyes and clouded by longing when you want things you see only the outward container you see only the projections of what you want like if you and some friends are driving through a village and you're the driver and the engine is sounding rough you're one person in the car and another person in the car is very sexually hungry and another person is very hungry for food and you just drive through the town at the end of the town if you interview the three people one person saw repair of service stations one person saw the person that was standing under the clock by the bank and one person saw the restaurants in town and in that traditional way motivation affects perception so as long as you are identified with one of your motives or desires or needs what you see in the world is the projection of that desire system it selects what you see out of the world as you extricate awareness from identification with the desires they don't stop but it's not it's like there's hunger not I'm hungry here the brake the question is which is the eye and the eye is no longer the hunger the eye is the awareness of the hunger so the I but is the awareness of the hunger then we've seen the world as it is see what and is this what your guru was able to do I would say yes yeah and he developed these extraordinary powers as well is that a result of just being in this awareness well you don't see that yeah the the the awareness the out of that awareness those powers exist he doesn't develop the powers they are part and parcel of that awareness so the President or anybody to access if they yeah risk the air - I see so you talk of identity being one of the things that binds us how is it that our identity does bind us when you Muse bind you mean entrap in trap yeah I should say well take you take somebody that thinks well for example at the moment I'm doing a book on aging unconscious aging and what you see in my culture is that the mythology around aging is extremely disempowering it's extremely user unfriendly to becoming old and in our society and the mythology is one that the culture conspires to make real that somebody when they're old is irrelevant or somebody who's old has lost something in a non-traditional Society see in traditional societies the elder passes down the wisdom so that they are revered but in a non-traditional Society if you don't have the latest computer information you're irrelevant basically so that's what we're dealing with we're dealing with technology helping people live longer and longer but there's no function and so that's a really interesting moment in the society it'll change of course but so what you see is people buying into the model of Aging in the society well now we've retired now we can have fun and there's a very impoverished model about what it is you're supposed to do you can only have so much fun you know you smile just so long and then you want something else to happen so part of the way what happens is if we don't examine the way our thinking structures work we tend to have learned a pattern of organizing the world and then we sit in that it's like sitting in a cell in which the walls are defining what the reality is and you can't get out Plato's cave is an image of this you don't you can't get out into another context or another frame experience of life another experience of life and you lead a very impoverished life and you see people who have wealth who have success and you feel the impoverishment of their mind and you realize they're living in their mind they're not living in all of their luxury and extra cars and you know travel and all that stuff and that's really extraordinary because in in our society people have said the external freedom and the external happy the pleasure will give me happiness and the fact is it's their mind that deprives them of the happiness even when they get that stuff and it deprives them of the happiness they would have had even if they didn't have the stuff so what would give them happiness then well a happiness the depth of happiness comes when you can live fully in a moment because the moment has no time in it it is it has everything in it it has everything in it because you are being with the universe as it is not as you wish it were or you want it to be just as it is for example if you say to me are you happy now in my presence present state of being I am happy if you say to me am i sad now in my present state of being I am sad it's not that I am happy by not being sad the thickness of this moment has in it all of it it has in it the loss of you children through neglect it has in it the violence to the forests it has in it all of the horror and suffering I'm not looking away from that in order to be happy it also has the opening of the rose it has the babies first cry it has in it just the joy of a picnic it has in it the smell of spring it has I don't have to make blue where did that go when I was busy being sad see that's all in the moment and as you come into the moment more and more thickly it is so rich it is enough when you look at the culture you will see that all the advertising all of the game is designed as if more would be better that enough is not enough and enough is enough has to do with having right so it's a it's a sort of a total or increasing fulfillment that this package it can be how you drink a cup of tea it can happy how you prune a rose it can be how you do the simplest things in life how you how you bicycle to the post office I mean it can be you know when you're bicycling to the post up so you're busy getting to the post office or leaving home or are you just bicycling with a post traffic right I see the identification part of it that binds us in this cave is the spiritual path of process of extrication yes yes that's what it's designed to do see when you go into most psychodynamic techniques like therapy what it really is doing is rearranging the furniture in the prison cell the meditation is basically spiritual practices are basically designed to get you out of the cell not that you can't have the cell to live in when you want to but the door is open and you can go in and out and they're not frightened of going out and you can also I mean I function within you know I mean I do my laundry and I cook my food and I travel from place to place and I pay my taxes and I know how to write my address and all of those things and yet I'm not trapped in being all of that alright so for somebody who spends their life really trying to build a strong ego strong personality and mimimi in the world that path is one that will end up in a non fulfilment I would say so because it's very divisive it cuts you off continually from that kind of boundary lessness bound realest feeling of presence in with all of it which is often called love or whatever isness is this something like that so can a person have goals and go for things in this state you're talking about sure I go for goals but and I will do what I can because those goals are set in harmony with whatever my deepest wisdom is at the moment whether I get the goals or not isn't necessarily under my control I'll do what I can and do it as well as I can I have lots of goals but the question is whether the awareness is caught in the goals or just I mean price talks about being in the world but not of the world and I'm a player in the world but on it's like if you play a game called Monopoly where there are iron and the thimble and the top hat and you move them around the board and you buy Park Place and the utilities and all of those things the question is I'm not the top hat or the iron I'm the awareness the player who's using the top hat and the iron most people think they're the top hat or the iron they really think they're moving to the utilities or whatever you know and it's just where you stand in relational life it's you see how tiny it's a little perceptual shift and suddenly you are playing with life instead of being played upon by life Muktananda was regarded by many as the greatest meditation master of the 20th century he initiated over half a million people into meditation in the West he was a master of what is called Shakti the energy of the universe and he could literally transmit this energy into other people at will when he did this it transformed people's lives giving them experiences of the highest and most expanded state of consciousness the way I got involved with Muktananda interested me he was he came to America with Rudy with rudra nonde whom I knew and he was at Rudy's place in big Indian in New York State and this woman Hilda Charlton called me and she said there's an Indian Swami in America maybe you should go see him and I was at that time about to go back to see my guru I've been banished and told to stay away for two years and then I could come back and I was just becoming September was the time I was going back this was now in August and in August I went up to big Indian to see Swami Muktananda and I came late at night and they gave me a room and then the next morning I was standing in the breakfast line and somebody came along and said Swamiji wants to see you so I came back into the room and there was Swami Muktananda sitting with his shades on and his orange beanie and his orange shirt and his orange lung he and he looked like felonious monk to me and I was standing there and he immediately got up and he went over and he got for booty and he put the che bite marks on light for him and I said well Baba ji that's fine but I'm a veteran of iton and that's those aren't the marks but you know and he said no he said this is in honor of your guru your girl and my guru both other dudes to do cos both Yogi's beyond forum really mad crazy formless Yogi's okay what was an honor my guru fine and so we sat there and the connection there was a lot of incredible love and he was fire love was intense you know later when we were traveling like through Australia he'd lecture and we'd hold hands while he was lecturing at first I do the warm-up I sing and dance and then I'd sit down and we'd hold hands and he'd talk and then when the translator was talking he'd look at me and we just go into these ecstatic states together and then he'd go on talking so right after I met him that first day his people came to me and they said Swamiji is in America it would be wonderful you are very well known in America be very wonderful if you take him around America and I said well because he's starting a tour I said when is this tour said he said September I said well no way because I'm going to be back with my guru in September thank you very much the next morning we were doing the thousand names of Vishnu the chanting around 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning Swami Muktananda who was an extraordinary musician was playing his dough taro and I was playing the tambura and there were maybe 200 people in the group and there were maybe three or four of us up on the stage and a little circle sort of around Swami Muktananda and the chants going and suddenly my guru appeared in the middle of this circle just fully present from my consciousness and he looked at me and he said help this man and then he disappeared and that was such a clear statement that the minute was over I went up looked in on eyes that I would be honored to help your tour in any way I could and that led me to take him to Boston San Francisco Los Angeles etc and then on to Hawaii and then on to Australia and then to Madras and back to we went it for three months I got a couple months and so the travel the interesting the fun a funny moment was that we were in Melbourne Melbourne at the late spring mmm and it was wonderful it was like we were in a living room and it was noontime and it was one of those kind of lazy warm times of day and people coming in for their lunch hour to see the Swami the visiting Swami and he was just plucking his doterra and it was that kind of quiet way and then the Shakti started to rise in the room and I remember one very dignified looking gentleman he had a blue Serge suit on it was Mara portly gentleman with a Phi Beta Kappa key on him and he suddenly got up and started to dance and the look of consternation on his face was extraordinary I mean he clearly he had no intention of getting up to dance and then a professor typed with us houndstooth jacket in a pipe in his pocket he started to do these incredible mudras and you could look on his face was a look of totals bewilderment about what was happening and McDonagh was just eyes closed lazily strumming his Otara and then at that point one of the men had brought his secretary during lunch hour and she was sitting cross-legged at one point the floor just visiting watching and suddenly she started to bounce across the floor and I suddenly looked at this and it was like the backward of a mental hospital I mean everybody was doing these bizarre behaviors and as soon as it got a little too energetic mcdonnen to just you know lowered has had a little bit of a change and the whole thing stopped now I was experiencing that nothing was happening to me at all right I thought it was interesting why is that I mean all these people are doing all this stuff later I started to understand that that loved that stuff because of the list of when Kundalini strikes in different ways the the behaviors that come out are the result of where the blockages occur when the energy goes up in terms of the chakras and and there are predictable patterns of energy Swami what the nun at one point listed 22 of them that I have a Xerox sheet of 22 things that happen to you so I thought nothing is happening me but I was doing a lot of ecstatic dancing but in the lectures I'd get up and I'd play the tum bore and I'd sing and I dance while I was playing with tumblr which I thought was the way I was we came back to gonna shrine it's very funny we arrived at the Bombay Airport with a band of 200 people playing some looked anandhan and we were in an airport waiting room and people had brought flower leis and he insisted they put them all around my neck instead of his neck so pretty soon it was about a hundred and fifteen degrees and I had about 40 pounds of dying flowers around me I was absolutely being asphyxiated and then we got in the car to drive back to Ganesh poori where there was a huge fireworks display this is around 4:00 in the morning and then I was sent to bed great I got into bed about it seemed like a tented Slayer it was probably an hour and a half later somebody came and says Baba ji wants you and I went down and there was a throne next to his throne and I was put in the second throne and all day long people came to welcome him back after this long tour judges and all of these kinds of things and each run bringing money bringing coconuts bringing something he made everybody touch my feet he made them put their flowers on me he kept the money but he put the flowers funny yeah I know and I mean I was in such a state from no sleep and from the intensity of the experience and then we would he started to sing and I got up to dance but at one moment I danced across the line between the men and the women and he immediately stopped the music and what like that it was interesting that this was a tent this was now an ashram not a place for ecstatic it's different different it's different and it's very interesting to me that it was I could be ecstatic in my own territory but in his territory he was going to keep the rules of the of that particular form which I thought was interesting in the Indian system of expanding consciousness there is one factor which is unavoidable it is called the Kundalini the word refers to a dormant energy located at the base of the spine in the West it is known as Grace and in scientific terms it is sometimes referred to as bioenergy as a result of specific meditation practice or spontaneous awakening this energy rises in the spinal area of the body causing tremendous transformations to the person undergoing the experience the whole brain awakens a huge outflow of creativity takes place so called psychic powers are revealed and become available for use and a spontaneous rejuvenation is activated this activity has been closely monitored over thousands of years in the Indian system there is a subtle energy body which powers the physical body at certain points in this subtle body are what are called chakras chakra means wheel and there are seven major ones the chakras are like transforming stations in an electricity grid in a grid transformers are required to step down the thousands of volts to a small voltage which can be used by a household the function of the chakras is to step down the full force of the electricity of life as seen enlightening to a voltage which can be used by human beings it's a force it is an incredibly vast force that is that is in us it's in the universe but it can it's in us as well in the in the Hindu way of visualizing conceiving of us it resides at the bottom of the spine and it's a serpent coiled 3 and 1/2 times with its head facing down and when you know how to awaken that serpent the mother Kundalini is called it starts up what's called the sushumna it starts up a Accord which is not your spinal cord it runs in the same place but it is amiss or an astral thing you wouldn't know if you did surgery you wouldn't see it but the energy moves up through what our chakras or energy centers in your body and when it comes to a center where a lot of the energy is blocked from going further when the energy is very insistent it then pushes outward and then it comes out as these symptoms of various kinds if it opens here or here or here or here here it'll be different ultimately the are the art is to move the energy off not when all of these are open the energy is available in these but it's not blocked and that it just keeps moving and moving up through these centers and then out through the top of the head and that's where you will you merge that's the the thousand petal Lotus will you then merge out of your own separateness into the universe so is that something people have to go to get into these high estate no it's you can you can arrive at the higher states through a variety of paths some of the paths of the mind some of the paths of the heart some of the paths of energy these are different routes through what happens is if you quiet your mind enough as your mind your awareness gets freer as we were talking about previously you will experience the opening of your heart you will also experience this new kind of energy if you work with the energy and move the energy up your system through breast control and through ways of bringing your awareness to the bottom you spine and you move the energy up as the energy arises in the fourth chakra or the heart or the throat you will start to experience emotional openings you will also experience a quieting the mind so you can lead with any of these things and the rest follow so the kundalini energy as such is something they could control they could control it see and you can learn how to do it yourself if you do that practice what mcdhh Ananda had the power to do was to take his awareness and place it at the bottom of your spine and do the thing that you couldn't do with your own awareness so he raised the Kundalini and then you would get whatever symptoms you got and it but you didn't have control over you couldn't do it and he would then withdraw that and then he could withdraw it he could turn it off and on just like a faucet and would he do that deliberately you can do it too but you can't do it as powerfully as he can do it but you turn your attention to somebody and they feel when you walk down the street if you look at somebody at some point if you keep staring they'll turn this there's a connection there's energy so he could do it to a number people at once oh yeah he could just he could up level the energy so that it would resonate at that place with everybody I think the frequency sure mm-hmm that's amazing so for the average person hearing these kinds of things with living their life are these things completely accessible to people I mean is it an open opportunity for them or or what about perhaps I should say what is it that blocks people from moving this energy through them well are a lot of levels of that I mean what blocks people initially is they don't even know that it exists then along comes your show and then they know it exists now what do they do about it is another question and a lot of people look for somebody external themselves to do it to them but there are ways to go into these practices just like I did meditation I've done extensive breath work at one stage in my life I don't do that now because it takes fasting it takes diet it takes very very delicate controls of the body because you become so sensitive that you can handle any any energies that are off-center or they'll throw you off you have to be in a very protected environment to do that kind of thing so the beings like your guru like monks and under who have the ability to do this they obviously gone beyond the sensitivity oh yeah you know they've they've opened the channels they've stabilized the ability to work with that energy and that energy is just who they are they just have this incredible force of energy with them so it completely easily handle the things and they don't have to avoid society they don't have to do it exactly they could leave any kind of a lot of them in the early stages of their spiritual work don't go near other people and my guru until he was about 45 hardly anybody else saw him he lived an underground in caves or in the jungle or things like that and he just started to come into the villages a little bit in his mid 40s and then then he'd only play with the children he wouldn't have he'd run away from the adults and he was thought of as a crazy man because to get the energy all stabilized and then be able to live in the world it takes it's quite an art form quite a novel that's right so we hear about karma could you tell us exactly what kamar is take care of you could say it's it's a very complex concept of cause and effect of what it says is that like if you drop a pebble into a clear pond there'll be all these little waves going out and out and out and out and out or not and even though you may see them almost stop with your naked eye if you looked at it with technical technical equipment you'd see that the thing keeps going and going going when you say a word into the universe that put the President so what it's saying is that every action or every every action starts a sequence of events and that who we are at any moment is determined by all the events we've started in the past that are reverberating in to us now over time over lots of times like you know for example that your childhood experiences affect your adult personality that's sort of an example of karma that it's your karma meaning it's the previous causal forces that are creating this effect this particular thing so if you look at your life and it and if you have a larger sense of who you are than your physical body I'm talking about reincarnation or the whole idea that that an individual soul goes through birth after birth after birth each birth is determined by the karmic residue of all the previous births and then in a birth you are living out the Karma created by the previous births now the question as you awaken more most people are not only living out the old karma but they're creating new karma all the time which keeps propelling them into the future more and more and more to be free means to be free of this kind of karmic law that your your just being a mechanical run off of so the beginning of awakening means that you no longer create new karma because you see how karma is created which is another little discussion but and then you're just running off old karma so a lot of the beings you see are people who have finished they've awakened sufficiently so they don't create any new karma and then they're in a body or they continue their work like the inertia from the past until it runs out how do you not create new karma by the awareness no longer being identified with the motivation so the desire if it creates karma desire because we hear you've got to give up desire what does that mean does it doesn't mean you don't have the desires it means your awareness is not identified with the designers so you can still do what you like but you don't you still do what you do but you're not caught in being attached to the doing of it and that it but that's kind of sneaky because actually when you're not attached it changes that what what happens you know yeah you mentioned the path of karma yoga could you explain what that is and how that affects you and your own life well the broadest way of saying of the issue karma yoga is that that your life incarnation I don't know how to quite how to say this but your life your incarnation your presence how you are your life experiences is really as I say the result of past Karma so you could say it is a curriculum by showing you where you aren't because if you were free this incarnation wouldn't exist unless you chose to make it that way like an oven Tariq form like a Christ or something like that but the most part you are what you're seeing is where your mind is grabbing hold into it and that way your awareness is grabbing into a conceptual model I mean and so you're seeing a picture of what you're still stuck in really each of us is living out our stuckness if you will once you become aware of that you take your karma which is all this stuff and you use it as the vehicle of awakening from the illusion that it is solid real whatever you want to call it it's relatively real it's not not existent it's just not absolutely so how do you sorry to be so dense so they thought I hated stuff how do you actually do that then what is the practice that you do when you take your own life as your spiritual path what does that mean well I had surgery a couple of months ago on my shoulder I had fallen down on the golf course and slipped in the rain and because I was playing with a young woman and I began to think I was a young man and I went running up a rainy hill to recoup a golf ball that I had sliced and I came sliding down and my feet went under me and I landed on my shoulder and I thought well that'll prove there was I wasn't being mindful enough to realize I'm 65 so I had this surgery in about two days after the surgery the pain medicine which I had chosen carefully had I was done with that and it was the middle of the night and I woke up and the sheets were tangled and I was sweaty and I didn't have the pain medication and my shoulder hurt and I was having an attack of gout which is a hereditary Karma that I couldn't take the medicine because it was of the pain medication so I was having an attack of gout so I was it was all miserable and I was in this state of experiencing how miserable I was and I burst out laughing because I saw that I had gotten caught in all of this my awareness had gotten trapped in being miserable and the minute I saw that I was out of it in other words that situation awakened me to the because I knew what am i doing feeling like this this isn't Who I am now it's who I used to be but it is know I am now and the situation itself awakened me and then the whole thing was boy are you miserable see how miserable he can be and you're really so you use the situation's of life like you're driving along if somebody cuts you off and the first reaction is frustration or anger I wanted to blow the horn which is reactive but then when you keep doing centering devices to quiet your mind you bring your awareness back to a moment of emptiness and then your response becomes reflective or risk responsive rather than reactive it's a different thing most human relations are reactive you do this I do this you do this I do this if you smile I smile if you look mean I get frightened or whatever forget the breaking of all those chains where does the break occurs that occur out here do we agree on contracts or does it occur where my mind is so that the projection that you push outward how does it just automatically lead to a reaction in me or is there a little space where the whole thing goes back into emptiness for like a frame it's like in mu in filming the frames between the frames if that becomes figure if it stands out you go back into the emptiness behind between the frames and come back into the frame that going out and coming back in takes you out of the reactive mode because you've gone into the whole site the whole Gestalt the whole totality of the situation at that moment for children that's obviously quite a difficult concept to grasp is that oh is that true or do you find the children can actually get ideas children can go in and out of this stuff much more readily than adults can because they don't have the addiction to their own conceptual mind as strongly but the question is what do you do to help a child keep space and not get caught in the story and they really answer is you work on yourself to be a spacious resonant environment that is around the child so that if a child chooses to come out and play there's nothing in you that's going to keep them stuck in being who they thought they were if they have a thimble or the iron you don't say you shouldn't be the thimble or iron because they can't the only thin balls here that and only irons here that what you are is a space that says this is a fellow soul who happens to be my child at the moment and we're playing Monopoly together and this child is really caught in this game but that's the way this child is see parents get another thing I'm supposed to do something to the child and my feeling is that the optimum parent is somebody who keeps a spacious environment that allows the child's karma to do what it does but doesn't feed the karma doesn't feed the identity of the child as being a top hat or an iron by reacting to the by reacting by saying you shouldn't be see that's a reaction that reinforces the reality of it so work on yourself to become empty and spacious and present you protect the child from biological harm and you all in the environment as much as possible to all the different planes to information but also to vertical to spirituality to wisdom to emptiness and that has to do with the nature of your consciousness so to work on your own set you work on yourself as a gift to your children and the child will respond and the child will or won't respond so you can't do it that way you can't do it because you don't know what the Karma of that child is you can have two children and one of them is a very old soul who just took birth to drop by to bless everybody and the other is immediately post Neanderthal and is just coming through on its first run-through you know and they need each other for each other's karma they are each other's Karma but you can't say well Sam did it so you should do it because there is a two entirely different beings so just finally now the when you met your guru you wanted to be in the state that he was in or have what he had yeah have you been able to do that I think in the way you're asking the question the answer be no because you'd be focusing maybe on powers or things like the Ivany powers but in terms of the nature of awareness the distance between us is diminishing but it isn't him any longer he died in 73 so for 23 years he's been a dead girl but he's the most living consciousness in my universe my dialogue it's like having an imaginary playmate but it's one that's clever wise witty fierce empty compassionate so you do feel connected with him well see that's the whole idea because the word relationship ceases to be what the issue is it goes from when he died I have his pictures and stories and I wrote a book thousand stories about him called miracle of love and then I started to get you know you have the stories and pictures I they were just pictures and story then the qualities of him started to be what I was living with the rest Cala T or the humor other and then the quality started to merge into just presence and I would just live my life in the presence of presence it seems to be this historical body because it was the same presence that came through that body that is what I'm tuning to now so I'm not becoming him he and I are moving he rests in where I'm moving towards so the grid was within God guru himself turned out to be the same thing yeah or whatever present always ever Paul was accessible yeah that's great so for somebody who's beginning on a path like this most importantly is to realize it is within you not only is it within you but there are many traditions that say you you're not beginning on the patterns are over you already are it you're just busy thinking you aren't so just relax and stop being busy thinking you aren't and you will be it's not like you got to do anything you don't have to get anything you already got it how silly [Music] [Music] [Applause] you [Music] [Music] Oh

Channel: Joby Bishop

Views: 150,800

Rating: 4.8600583 out of 5

Keywords: Ram Dass, Neem Karoli Baba, The Great Turning, Advaita Vedanta, Nonduality, Compassion in Action, Seva, Shambhala Warrior

Id: 9bao-2ZUPjU

Length: 194min 37sec (11677 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/SourBrainFry]

He speaks a lot in the same light as alan watts. From an eastern point of view. They speak about the philosophy of an eternal cyclical nature of the universe. And that one must be present in the now, as it is the only thing that exists, that the notion of the future and the past are all ideas, and whilst useful, if you spend all your time thinking about these ideas, in a sense it is just mental masturbation. That to release that control and just be, and accept things for the way they are like you would listen to a song. Let it be. An orchestra isn't trying to play the fastest song, or all you would hear is one loud cymbal crash, it is painting you a picture in the now that you can appreciate as it is.

[u/insaneintheblain]

He talks about the source of actions, and points towards the inner Self, from where thoughts (which result in actions) can be observed. There are others that say it in a clearer way, IMO. These aren't new ideas, rather they have their origins in Eastern thought - in this case a tradition of Yoga known as Bhakti Yoga.

The easiest way to understand the concepts he describes is to read Indian Mythology - the stories which were designed to tell of the qualities of the Heroes - usually 'gods'.

[u/RandomMandarin]

I read Be Here Now a LONG, long time ago. It's really very good, and not hard to understand at all.

Much of 'Eastern' philosophy is just good common sense and logic, and if you don't agree with all of it, well, so what? It ain't ineffable magic, it's just stuff a lot of smart people thought about, and just like Western philosophy, you can use your own brain to decide what you do and do not agree with.

[u/PumaMayhem]

From my perspective, it makes more and more sense as I learn about life, and specifically the more I meditate. I think that the problem is simply that the part of us that is listening in the beginning can't make any sense of it. You learn to listen from a different place and it's all here.

[u/HeeeeeyNow]

To sum it up:

I was straight laced and materialistic -> I found God while taking drugs -> I found God while I was sober -> I lectured to others on how they can also find God

His history is super interesting, have you read Be Here Now? It was the start of much of what is now the spiritual and psychedelic movements.

[u/iliketetris]

I study Ram Dass somewhat intensely, and have for several years now. He's much easier to digest with some context. It's helpful to have some knowledge of the Vedas, the Bible, and his guru Neem Karoli Baba. Also, understanding his past with Timothy Leary and LSD, teaching at Harvard, and American politics in the '60s.

[u/kfpswf]

I've been obsessing over Ram Dass' lectures in the last few weeks. Here's the essence of his belief system.

• The emergent phenomenon of consciousness is the only true self. This phenomenon is what connects us all. When an eastern mystic says that all living beings are the same, they're talking about the nature of this emergent phenomenon being the same in all living beings.

• Then you have the ego. This is a construct that you build throughout your life, due to your environment or society or through your own hardships. This is what defines your character or personality.

• With the intelligence bestowed upon us, when we're in a state of mindfulness, we are in harmony with our true self. We observe life as it is and not through the lenses of our ego. When someone is a dick to you, in your state of mindfulness, you don't just see a person who has slighted you. You see another conscious being, wrapped up in an unique ego, who is trying get a rise out of you. More importantly, when you're mindful, you start observing your own ego forcing you towards unwise actions.

• Ultimate bliss is when you're completely in tune with your 'Self'. You're in perfect harmony with the universe. You see the pleasures and pains of this life as mere seasons of life.

[u/ScorseseTheGoat86]

His ideas are tied to Eastern beliefs like Buddhism and Hinduism. its just hard to convey those ideas with the English language in a rational sense

[u/ZedsBread]

What specifically is challenging to your understanding?