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Okay. We're gonna do this song. Now, uh...
Even if you don't sing, it's okay. You're gonna sing.
It's got three words to it
and I'll sing the song now. Listen, so you don't screw up.
We're gonna do it in six parts, but we gotta learn it first. Ready?
♪ Jubilate Deo ♪
♪ Allelulia ♪
We're gonna take it a little higher.
♪ Jubilate Deo ♪
♪ Allelulia ♪
You get... You're good.
Okay. Now we're gonna do it in six parts.
Now, and it gets really far out.
All right. You ready? One, two, three,
four, five, six.
Here we go.
For 25 years now,
I have been huffing and puffing and trying to get enlightened as hard as I could.
I have fasted, and prayed,
mantra-ed, pilgrimaged,
sat before my guru,
done all-night thises and thats,
meditated with real meditators.
I mean, I really put my time in, so to speak.
And two things have been surprising to me.
One is, a year ago, I met one of my old Harvard colleagues,
and after a few minutes he said, "You know, Dick,
"you haven't changed a bit."
And the other interesting one is that
many of us have been through
so many stages of this journey at this point.
We're all still relative beginners, but...
And see all these lines like we're at the beginning,
or there's a path,
or we're near the end.
These are all astral storylines.
How do we know who we are?
We might be one breath away from enlightenment,
or death, or who knows?
The uncertainty is great.
It just keeps it wide open.
Twenty years ago when I first met you,
was a retreat in England, in an old boarding school
in '94.
And I think you were interested in why someone so young
was on the retreat.
And I said, "I think I've come all this way
"for you to tell me that I'm a good son."
And you just smiled at me, and you looked, and you went,
"Well, are you?"
What'd you come here for, then?
I came here to say, "Thank you. I love you."
Okay.
I told you, and to get the keys to the executive washroom of spirituality.
When I was born,
I donned a spacesuit for living on this plane.
It was this body,
this is my spacesuit,
and it had a steering mechanism, my prefrontal lobes,
and all the brain motors,
coordinating stuff.
And just like those,
Rusty Schweickart and the others that go to the moon,
they wear their uniforms and they learn how to grab things,
and lift things.
So I did that
and I learned my prehensile capacity.
And I got rewarded. You get little stars,
and kisses, and all kinds of things when you learn how to use your spacesuit.
And you get really good at it.
You get so good at using your spacesuit,
that you can't differentiate yourself from your spacesuit anymore.
And everybody comes up and says, "What a nice suit."
And you're constantly looking into other people's eyes
to find out if you're really wearing a nice spacesuit.
It's what I call "Somebody Training."
When you're born, you go into Somebody Training,
'cause your parents know who they are
and they're gonna make you somebody, too.
My parents were very intent on making me somebody.
And they wanted me to achieve,
be responsible, be healthy,
be successful, bring pride to them,
and if it didn't interfere with any of those,
I should be happy.
The problem that I experienced, though,
was the suit that I was wearing.
It was like you're in one of these suits that doesn't quite fit,
and you're a little uncomfortable,
and you're constantly trying to readjust yourself.
But everybody kept saying,
"Beautiful suit. Really impressive suit.
"You must be very happy."
But I wasn't.
Now, if everybody, you look into their eyes,
and they tell you you're happy, and you're not,
because the suit feels so weird,
what do you conclude?
I felt, when everybody said what a nice suit I was wearing,
that I must be sick.
So I went to an analyst.
Now, he was wearing another kind of weird suit, see?
And what he did was, he said that for a pittance,
he would teach me how to wear his suit instead of my suit.
So I learned how to wear his suit
which had even more status connect.
I mean, more people said, "Beautiful suit."
And I really wasn't very happy in that suit either.
And you walk down the street
and you're somebody, you say. You know who you are.
You dress like somebody, your face looks like somebody,
everything is somebody.
Everybody is reinforcing their structure of the universe
over and over again
and they meet like two huge things meeting.
"This is who I am, this is who you are."
We enter in these conspiracies.
I'll make believe you are who you think you are,
if you make believe...
...I am who I think I am.
We just kind of bump against each other.
You can see them in everybody.
I mean, everybody's busy being somebody.
Now, in our culture we've been trained
for individual differences to stand out.
So you look at each person and immediate hit is,
brighter, dumber, older, younger, richer, poorer,
and we make all these dimensional distinctions,
put them in categories and treat them that way.
And we get so that we only see others as separate from ourselves
in the ways in which they're separate.
And one of the dramatic characteristics of the psychedelic experience
is being with another person
and suddenly seeing the ways in which they are like you,
not different from you.
In the '60s...
On March 6th, 1961, to be exact,
Timothy Leary gave me psilocybin
and it changed my life.
It changed my life in the sense
that it undercut the models I had
of who I thought I was.
All the socialization and child development
that had left me with a very strong somebodiness,
it cut that out.
And, of course, there was fear in losing that familiar identity.
But there was always also wonder because I touched a place in myself.
It was behind all my social roles.
And it was...
It was a presence.
Instead of being good
or this or that, or achiever, or anything,
I experienced a place in myself where I just say, "I am."
Not "I am this" or "I am that," just "I am."
And I think it preoccupied me because it felt like it was my true being.
And I felt like I was gypped. I was gyping myself not to have access to that.
So I did what many others of you did and other people did
was I tried every chemical possibility
to try to stabilize that state.
I mean, if you took this and then followed it with this
and you did it under these conditions with this person,
reading this book from the Tibetan this...
...you did it after fasting for so many days
and standing on your left foot. It would work, see.
And I still came down,
and I kept coming down and coming down and coming down for about seven years
through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of explorations.
And then, I went to India and I met Maharajji, my guru,
and I met a being who didn't come down.
What I experienced at that time of meeting that man,
in fact, within those first few minutes of meeting,
was the experience of surrender, which was no surrender.
In other words, I didn't begrudgingly give up my ego.
It was as if I came home to the place where I no longer needed it.
They took over my complete life at that point.
I didn't leave that temple again
except to go to Delhi once for seven months.
They took over my food, my clothing, my training, everything.
Never anybody asked or said.
It was all done from then on from inside.
I learned about what inside education is about.
And this man was at the place
where there was no other person you were giving up to.
And everything I did from then on was done with absolute joy.
There was no thing they could ask of me that was too hard.
It was austerities that were not austere,
because I was living almost within this man.
For the first time I understood what the concept of a guru was about.
See, a guru is your doorway to God, your doorway to the beyond.
A guru is not just a groovy teacher.
You know, it's not a pundit.
It's not just a wise man who can teach you things.
A guru is a spiritual vehicle,
an entranceway.
He's a pure mirror. He isn't anybody at all.
I think that the spiritual trip in... At this moment
is not necessarily a cave in the Himalayas,
but it's in relation to the technology that's existing.
It's in relation to where we're at.
It's in relation to issues like pollution,
and political interests, and activism, and stuff like that.
I think that's all part of one package now.
The game is to be where you are, be it honestly
and as consciously as you know how.
When we were all with Maharajji, I decided, well...
He keeps saying "Tell the truth and don't get angry,"
but the truth is I am angry.
And I've spent so long being phony like I love everyone.
See, all the time my heart is full of anger.
"Oh, you're around us." "Oh, yes, I love you."
And all the time I'm thinking, "Oh, I wish..."
And that hypocrisy was driving me up the walls.
And I thought, "Gee, he said to tell the truth.
"I think, for a change, I'll tell the truth."
So people would come into my room,
and I would say, "Get the hell out of this room, you...
"You're too nice. You nauseate me."
You said something that I would love you to tell me about,
about Maharajji saying, "Give up your anger.
"Don't work on your anger.
"Don't work it through and find out the root."
He just said, "Give it up."
Yeah, he did say it that way.
"Give up your anger."
Working it through
is making them...
Making them something.
-The belief that... -Belief.
I'm righteous. I'm...
Like, I have a right to be mad.
That's not good.
I keep Maharajji
as a constant companion,
so I get mad
and I check in with him.
And he...
Although, he doesn't make me feel better.
He just points it out.
My Maharajji in my head is more like a psychiatric nurse.
If I don't get what I want,
that's as interesting as if I get it, it turns out.
Did you ever notice that?
All this, "I need you."
Well, you're not getting me.
"Whoa! Ahhh!" You know?
Isn't that interesting? And then, you grow from that.
When you begin to realize suffering is great,
you can't believe it.
You think you're cheating.
It doesn't mean having no preferences,
it means not being attached to your preferences.
That's the one. If you don't get what you want,
you don't get what you want. How interesting.
Because the interesting process is the transformation.
not getting what you want all the time.
When I got out of my somebodiness, which was very cramped,
I mean, it was like a prison to me.
I didn't want to go back to prison.
It's like you go out and you smell the air,
and then they say, "Okay, chemical's wearing off,
"back into prison," and you don't want to go.
You say, "No, no," but you go anyway.
And you go back into your suit and you feel weird again.
Now, 'cause you know that isn't who you are,
but you're caught in it.
So that starts quite a journey,
because my object was to get out of my suit.
It was to get out of my physical psychological identity
which felt extremely limited.
And I would get incredibly free and high and clear and in love.
Like, I'd go to India and I'd sit in the temple or in meditation,
and I would get so high.
Light was pouring out of my head.
I was some combination of the pure mind of the Buddha and the heart of the Christ,
which, for a Jewish boy, is not bad.
You know, and I was really like...
I'd be out there, you know, and I'd come back to the States,
and I'd go to visit the family.
And my father would say a simple thing like,
"You got a job," and I'd crash.
And I'd say, "Can't go home, brings me down."
I began to have a whole list of things that brought me down.
Cities brought me down.
Money brought me down.
Politics brought me down.
But the only thing that brings you down is your own mind.
It's not the city. The city's just citying itself.
It's being essence city. What are you getting so upset about?
It's your reaction to the city that's what's doing it to you.
And I found myself, interestingly, wearing a new kind of a suit.
It was like, "I'm very high. Don't get near me."
Now, because I had felt so trapped
by my body and my personality and was so unhappy in all of that,
my job, it seemed, was to push away those things.
And I tried a number of techniques like renunciation.
I figured if I just renounced all of it enough,
it would go away.
All I did was end up a horny celibate.
It's like giving up smoking.
Like, "I haven't smoked in four years, two months, three days, and 22 minutes."
A person'll die from non-smoking.
It didn't work.
Because if you push something away, it's still got you.
You're busy not doing it.
Every time you push anything away, it's still there.
The pile under the rug gets very big.
So, it gets so that your downs
are actually far out without being masochistic.
Your downs turn out to be more interesting than your highs after a while,
because they're showing you where you aren't.
Like, I get into a depression, you see.
Well, I got angry tonight. I was fascinated by that.
Far out.
Look at how I came in being a holy man, I lost my cool.
Far out.
Isn't that great?
It's fascinating. You go out into the woods to look at trees.
You don't say that pinon isn't as good
as that redwood. You say, "Ah, a pinon. Ah, a redwood."
You see a gnarled tree and you say, "Look at the beauty of that."
You see a straight tree and you say, "Look at the beauty."
You come back with humans, you never do that.
"If she were only a little... If she could only...
"I like them best when they're..."
Instead of, "Look at that. An absolute essence slimy liar."
Somebody says something and it hurts you,
and then you feel hurt.
They did what they did because that's what they did.
That's their problem.
You reacted the way you reacted
because that's the way you reacted. That's your problem.
To interpret that your feeling is their problem
is when you start to feel you have to tell them
that you were hurt by what they said.
The other thing is if I'm hurt by what you say,
that's something for me to work with.
I acknowledge it and then I work with it.
I don't have to get them to not do the thing,
because they're just being like a tree, they're just phenomena happening.
It is said in the spiritual literature
that righteousness and being right
is one of the last gates to the inner temple.
It's one of the last obstacles to getting in the inner temple.
And that one of the problems of spiritual work
is ending up being a good yogi.
You are a really good yogi.
You know all the slokas, shlokas,
you know all the positions.
You do it all perfectly right.
You are really righteous and good, but you're not free.
And it's called the golden chain,
the chain or righteousness.
When you want to become free,
then your righteousness and your anger
are much less interesting than they used to be.
You less feel comfortable just sitting in your righteousness
than you do in throwing it back into the pot in order to become free.
Years back when I started to do this meditation 12 years ago,
I could go off and I could have a six-hour fantasy,
a six-hour sexual fantasy.
Sitting in Burma all by myself in a cell.
I mean, and it was just with great detail
and the subtleties of the rustle of silk and all the...
You know, every little thing
and the smells, and the images, and the shadows,
And I just... What was the rush? I wasn't going anywhere.
You know, I had weeks to meditate,
and I looked like I was meditating all the time,
and then nobody knew, you know.
I would have these six-hour things, you know.
It was like having an orgy.
Or I'd plan when I became famous, you know, I mean, I'd have those things.
When I became like the Buddha, what would I do?
I'd have long fantasies of what I would be and how compassionate I'd be.
Oh, God.
To the extent that we went into somebody training,
we work out of a sort of a deprivation model,
the feeling like we're starving
and we don't have enough and we want more. All right?
So let's take love relationships. That's a good one.
You fall in love with someone.
That person awakens in you
or allows you to touch the place in you where you are love.
So you say, "I am in love."
And because that person did it for you,
you say, "I am in love with you."
So you say to your connection, "Let's build a nest."
And where will you be next Tuesday and for every Tuesday from here on out?
And where were you last night and who are you thinking about now?
And you get terribly frightened that you're gonna lose your connection.
Because if you lose your connection,
you won't feel that feeling any longer, which you're very hooked on.
You begin to open to that place in yourself where you are love,
which is the same as the one that's called awareness.
It's the same thing.
It's a feeling where you are one with the universe
and you're liquid and flowing with everything around you.
Now you are experiencing "In love."
And after a while you say,
"Well, I'm going down to the store to get some tofu and veggie burgers..."
...and you're at the checkout counter.
You're still in love, you see.
You're in this place 'cause you're resting in it now,
and you look into the eyes of the checkout person,
and there it is again.
Problem.
Mmm-hmm.
Well, now what are you gonna do? Are you gonna look at anybody else?
It's gonna get complicated.
You better start wearing glasses with mirrors facing inward,
because you gotta start a commune.
I mean, what you're gonna do sooner or later
is you're going to have to let go of the model
of deprivation that you've been functioning under.
Because as you start to rest in this other space of your being,
you're gonna find this peculiar feeling
that you're gonna start to be in love with everybody.
You obviously can't collect them all.
And you get to the point where you can walk down the street
and look at somebody and love them like you've never loved anybody before,
and you don't have to do a thing about it.
At first, you can't believe it, you see,
and you just want to save them in case you want them later, so you say...
...like, "Who are you?" My name's Dick.
"Hi, let's have dinner. Well, gee, oh, God, I hate to leave you, but I..."
Then later you just go and you go down the street and you go, "Hi,"
or "Ooh," or "Do you feel what I feel?"
And after a while you just walk
down the street and you look at your lovers,
and you don't have to do anything about it 'cause you're not gonna run out.
I just notice in the landscape of looking at someone, the topography.
The bit that I notice is the unloved bit.
Not the confidence.
That's your psychological...
I go for their soul.
I see that unloved and all of personality...
I dabbled in that once upon a time.
People are so much more than their personalities.
So much more.
As you extricate yourself from your somebodiness,
from your thoughts which are things,
from your body which is things or stuff,
who you are has no time, has no space.
I always think coming to Earth, if this was one big training simulation
or a fairground ride from birth to death...
-Yes. -You have to take a forgetting pill
that makes you think you're an individual.
That's right. Yes, yes.
And it makes you think death is probably the end
or leaves it to those two things.
You've gotta live through it.
That's the learning.
You'll live through it.
Somebody says, "If you identify with a soul,
"how can you do things?"
And you say, "Well,
"humans can do two planes at once."
And you're much more fun
doing the things,
watching yourself do things.
So you're the human doing it,
and the witness soul watching it and not judging?
-Yes. -Not finding it especially dramatic.
Yes, yes.
There's big drama here.
-You watch the melodrama. -Yeah.
"Whoa, he's going to..."
I watch Jamie.
Sometimes I think I've got charge of this human called Jamie.
And I watch some of the things he says or does it's like, "Oh!"
There's sometimes when even the soul has to look away and go, "Whoa!"
Yeah, that's what happens with Ram Dass.
It slowly has been dawning on me over the past eight, 10 years
that the game wasn't to be high, the game was to be free.
And the free meant you couldn't push anything away
and you couldn't grab at anything.
There was nowhere to stand,
and there was nowhere not to stand.
And that all the things I'd pushed away,
I was going to have to take the curriculum sooner or later.
That turned around the direction of my life a lot.
It's interesting, when you want to get high, suffering is a real drag,
and you want to avoid suffering as hard as you can.
When you want to be free,
you begin to hear the teachings of the Buddha
about the cause of suffering being the clinging of the mind.
And when something creates suffering in you, you don't go asking for it
unless you're really advanced, I guess, but...
When the suffering comes down the pike,
you don't turn away from it,
because you know that the only reason you're suffering
is it's telling you something about the clinging of your own mind.
And it's being offered to you as a gift.
It's interesting, but as long as you identify with your personality,
things that get you uptight are your enemies.
The minute you identify with your awareness,
then the things that get you uptight
show you where your awareness has still sticky fingers.
Most of us in the mind, because your mind deals with polarities,
you feel that if you're happy, you're not sad.
And you want to be happy,
so you push away that which makes you sad.
But if you are going to be free,
there's nothing you can turn away from or turn off.
Like, if you live fully in this moment,
does this moment include that baby
that's taking its last breath from starvation?
Yeah.
So are you sad? Yes.
Does it include the baby taking its first breath
as it comes out of its mother's womb?
And the joy of the beginning?
Yes, so you're happy.
If you are the fullness of the moment,
all of if, these are all your voices.
If you and I are to be free, there is nothing we can push away.
I wake up in the morning,
before I even remember who I am, something's wrong.
I'm sort of feeling that pressure on my chest,
and I think I kind of drop into some...
Before I even start thinking, I want to put my hand here,
before I start attaching that funny feeling
to "Oh, no, what's the bank balance?"
or "Have I prepared for Ram Dass?"
You know, before I even let the feeling reach a thought,
I want to meet it at the feeling before it can start causing trouble.
Your body reacts to the thought.
But it's happening in a lump in my body,
so something needs to be dissolved there.
I see.
And not just by thinking, "Oh, that's just anger."
That doesn't stop all the chemicals and accumulation of blech.
That chemical is up here.
You don't think it's worth dissolving in the body?
Yeah, it's all up here.
It's not here. Not here.
But the body holds it as sensation, no?
All here.
Like, the other night I was in Des Moines, Iowa,
So I came to the hall and everybody was, "Ram Dass..."
I was "Yes, yes," and I was smiling, being Ram Dass.
You know, that's a nice role.
And I was being sweet and loving,
and every evening I always ask for a mini boom microphone.
That's one of these things.
'Cause when you're sitting cross-legged and you have a straight mic,
you got to spend the whole evening leaning forward like that.
So I asked for this,
and I walked into the hall and there was a straight microphone.
And I was all smiling, and I suddenly said, "What's that?"
And the woman, who was the manager of the hall said,
"Well, that's the only microphone we had."
And I said, "Well, we advised you we needed..."
And I started to get into this curmudgeonly... Ooh, yuck.
And I broke up completely.
I mean, I just saw myself get completely ugly,
and I broke up, because what I saw was
that my guru had come in drag as a microphone...
...to say, "Oh, you think you're so high and mighty," you know.
"Try this one on for size."
If this were around here could you hear me?
Can you hear me better this way?
I was afraid of that.
Okay.
What I usually do when I don't assume this will be any different is, um,
share notes of what's been happening.
Um, I always talk about myself, it turns out,
but those of you that know, know that it isn't really me, it's us.
And I just use myself as a case study that I know better than I know
everybody else's case study.
Because what awes me is how parallel our journeys are,
and how much when I'm going through something,
and I think, "Boy, this is really leading-edge stuff..."
...I meet somebody and they say,
"Gee, that's just what's been happening to me."
Now, let's sit up in here. Let's all sit together.
Now, in the course of the years,
I've developed a lot of very strange friends.
And one of them is a being named Emmanuel.
And Emmanuel is interesting because Emmanuel doesn't have a body.
He's a being on another plane,
and I know some of you here have
a difficult time accepting my friend Emmanuel.
I mean, you'd accept any of my other friends but somehow...
You say you have no prejudices about color,
sex, religion.
But bodies... Somehow somebody doesn't have a body,
you immediately don't know that you want to accept them.
But I feel that's your problem, 'cause he's my friend,
and, uh...
The way I figure it is I'll take my teachings anywhere I can get 'em.
Okay? I don't care whether you got a body or which kind it is,
if you got a teaching, I want it.
And Emmanuel said to me when I said to Emmanuel,
"What work do I have to do now?"
He said, "Ram Dass, you're in a school. Why don't you try taking the curriculum?"
He said, "You took a human birth, you're so busy being holy.
"Why don't you try being human?"
Funny, I'd never thought of that. Isn't that far out?
'Cause somehow being human was less than perfect.
Even though I intellectually knew
that form is no other than formless and formless is no other than form,
and I knew that the manifestation was God-made manifest,
everything was perfect out there except me.
But original sin was gonna have a last stronghold right here.
I remember being drunk with Alan Watson at a Benedictine monastery one night.
If you can handle that image, and...
Alan said,
"You know, the trouble with you, Dick..."
And you know you're gonna get real truth
at a moment like that.
It's like 3:00 in the morning.
"...is you're too attached to emptiness."
If there's one addiction that outlasts all the others,
it's the addiction to be free.
It's the addiction to come up for air,
to live in the light, to live with love,
to be spacious, to be present, to be "Ah."
'Cause you can see that it could be fun, but you're not having it.
And you feel screwed and why should you be screwed?
I mean, it's just a shift of your head you gotta go through.
So, you get greedy, so you start to look for the methods,
and you try to...
You fit them in and take more time to do it, see.
When I went to my guru in India, and I said to him,
"Uh, Maharajji, how do I get free?"
He said, "Feed people."
I said, "Feed people?"
I mean, you don't expect... You go all the way to the Himalayas.
You know, and you sit at the feet of the guru,
and you expect him to say,
"Come into this cave and I will give you the word..."
You know, and you will sit quietly
and then you will go through and you'll be free.
He says, "Feed people."
So I tried a different tact. "Maharajji, how do you get enlightened?"
He said, "Serve people."
Well, I heard him say it,
but I figured, you know, "What does he know?"
He's just considering me kind of a low-life, you know.
I mean, he's not taking me seriously as a spiritual seeker,
'cause the serious guys meditate.
You understand?
I find it humorous to see myself
trip up or something.
Or I see myself
wanting something or...
Like, some days,
my aches and pains are so, so gorgeous.
Then I complain.
Then I love it. Me complaining?
"My God! Is that you?" I mean, "Is that you?"
Are you still doing that?
-You're still here. -Yeah, still here.
This is where I feel there's confusion sometimes about this mind,
a lot of these spiritual paths or...
It's all about "We've gotta control the mind.
"We've gotta transcend the mind. We've gotta unclutter the mind."
-All kinds of the mind... -That's true.
Well, maybe.
I think you'll find my theory
a little bit more advanced, Ram Dass, if you just listen.
I haven't got just one mind in here, I've got a committee.
I've got numerous people in here immediately available.
I've got the eternal pessimist
always ready to paint how black this is gonna go.
-Yeah. -I've got a raging sex maniac.
I've got a vengeful murderer
who wants to kill anybody, I don't know, driving too slowly in front of me.
The victim who's constantly looking at everything as a persecution.
The mind is just thoughts and thoughts.
The river of thoughts.
Sex maniac, da-da-da-da-da.
But they're still thoughts,
and we're talking about thoughts, not the content of thoughts.
You ever have an experience where you're feeling less than that,
and you're like, "Maharajji, hello? Where are you?"
Yes, yes.
Yes, many times.
Look at all the great saints, they're all as neurotic as anybody else.
It's just that it's kind of irrelevant.
And, so, you don't have to change your neuroses,
you just stop identifying with them.
And you just make friends with them when they come by for tea.
A lot of people respond to that uncertainty and anxiety
with fear,
and the way they dissipate their fear, there's various strategies.
One strategy is to just buy more stuff
to get more pleasure now 'cause it's all gonna be gone soon.
That's one thing. That's the material strategy.
There is another alternative, which is,
to feel that you will reduce the fear if you align yourself with good
as opposed to evil.
In other words, it's in the world of good and evil.
And if you are part of the elect or part of the good guys,
and you push away the bad guys,
somehow you will be protected from the uncertainties of the world.
People grab on to a belief system,
which makes them feel that they are in the right,
and it reduces some of their anxiety.
In order to hold onto that,
they have got to convince themselves that other people are not in the right.
They've got to polarize the world.
And they create a lot of "ours is the only way,
"and if you don't do it, you're missing it and you're wrong."
What you have to have is just a lot of compassion
for the stages other people are in.
Hello.
I've got a great idea.
And I would say that souls are neither good nor evil.
That actions are good and evil, motivation is good and evil,
that the personalities can be good or evil,
but that the essence of a being is neither good nor evil,
it just is,
and it has heavy stuff to work out and good stuff to work out.
And you begin to look at human beings as having very dark karma at times,
very heavy stuff they're carrying with them
that makes them project into the world
in a way that creates immense suffering for other people.
And there's a point in your being where you feel this incredible compassion
for the horror of that predicament, for that being.
The minute you identify them with the acts that are creating the suffering,
you lock them in to continuing to be who they are
with your mind.
So, the art is to see actions as evil, but not beings.
You climb a mountain, you follow a path,
you do any of the methods that you are attracted to.
For example, quieting your mind,
or opening your heart.
Like meditating or singing or going to church,
or service or whatever,
or pitting the mind against the mind through Zen koans, or whatever.
All of it will push you and push you,
but sooner or later, you'll get trapped by your methods,
and they'll keep you asleep, and you'll become a good meditator.
Or, you know, "I love Christ," but it'll be a sleep kind of statement.
And then you'll have to let go of that one too.
But all of these are useful techniques to keep working,
and you've got to hear what your own technique is.
The first thing is, not to be bugged about going back to sleep.
Just to experience that it was grace
that that death allowed you to waken for a moment.
Because the minute you try to grab on to the memory of what it was,
you're just holding on to an old dead butterfly.
So, you go back to sleep and then you wake up again.
The fact that you're even asking that question,
is the awakening process at work.
You have to stand back one step further and see your whole life,
the awakening and the going to sleep, all as awakening.
Just get into a bigger time span,
and you'll be able to allow the dance to go on, up and down, up and down.
This idea that there's no self,
I just want to bust it, because
while I'm Jamie, there's a self.
I mean, yes, in the great oneness of everything,
I'm sure there's no self, and it evaporates.
But just for this theme park,
just for this 70, 80 years, whatever, birth to death thing,
you have to have a self.
The whole point is to do the self-game.
So, to come here and have everyone going,
"There is no self. It's all an illusion. There is no self,"
it's like paying money to go and see a great special effects movie,
like Avatar,
and someone sitting next to you, going,
"They're not really blue. That's just make-up."
It's like, "Look, I just paid my money to see this show,
why are you telling me there's no self?"
"I know there's really no self, but let me enjoy the self-game as a self."
Why come here to do a self,
and spend the whole time saying "I'm not a self?"
Yeah. Yeah.
No, there's a way of saying that differently.
The soul comes to the incarnation
to learn something,
and you'll learn best by involving yourself
in the way... In the game.
Lovingly watching oneself,
humorously.
Humor and love.
Yeah.
Humor and love.
When I do all the things that I do every day,
all of it is the stuff I use to work on myself,
in order to increase the equanimity and to increase the compassion.
It all is exercise. Your entire life is curriculum.
Everything you've got right on your plate,
is where the stuff for your enlightenment is.
It's breathtaking when you stand back and see the beauty of that design.
And you appreciate the perfection of the unfolding of it all,
including the suffering.
But if you just do that, which you do up here with your third eye,
your heart,
which is your emotional heart, your human,
says, "What kind of an insensitive, callous person are you?"
'Cause if you're only up here,
somebody trips in front of you and you say, "Karma."
But if you're just down here,
you look around and the suffering stinks,
and you try to do something about it,
but it is so immense, the amount of suffering,
that you go to fill the dike there, and it's leaking there,
and you go to fill it there and it's leaking there.
And where are you gonna do it? What you gonna do it?
You're on the good guy mailing list just like I am. You know.
Which one do you write your check to?
But when I come down into my human heart,
it would hurt so bad.
Because the more you open up to the suffering of the universe,
the easiest way to handle it, is to go up.
It's much harder to stay down and stay open.
It's excruciatingly painful.
And this is a kind of a rule of the game, of spiritual practice,
is the learning to trust one's own intuitive heart.
Learning to trust another way of knowing,
other than the rational analytic process,
that you start to respond to something in you that knows,
even though who you think you are doesn't know it knows.
It turned out intuition is perhaps where our salvation lies,
where thinking is apparently where our destruction lies.
We've thought our way into this peculiar situation
where we're alienated from the Earth and from each other,
and caught in greed, which is a product of the mind.
And each of us must be true to ourselves to hear what is our unique way through,
because if you get phony holy,
it ends up kicking you in the butt.
You've got to stay true to yourself.
And as Trungpa Rinpoche said in his rascally way,
he said, "Enlightenment is the ego's ultimate disappointment."
And that's the predicament.
You see the fact that your spiritual journey
is an entirely different ballgame than the one you thought you were on.
It's a different path than you thought you were on.
And it's very hard to make that transition.
A lot of people don't want to.
They want to take the power from their spiritual work,
and make their life nice.
And there is a grief
when who you thought you were starts to disappear.
You can imagine a picture frame
in which there is a painting of a gray cloud.
But the painter made the cloud bigger than the frame that he had.
Or she had.
So, what they did was they cut a little off the edge
and they just put it in the frame.
And so all there is, is gray cloudness.
'Cause there's no edge anymore to the clouds,
so all you have is gray in a frame.
And you look at it and you say, "What's that?"
But if you used either a little bigger frame
or painted a little smaller cloud,
you'd see that there's a little blue sky around the edge of the cloud,
and you say, "Oh, a cloud. What do you know?
"All the time I thought the universe was gray."
The cloud is the grief, the cloud is the self-pity,
the cloud are the models,
and that little blue sky becomes the space.
And the meditative techniques are designed to give you that space.
And the minute there's that spaciousness,
ah, it's just another cloud.
You know what clouds do in the sky? They come, and they go.
And then, there comes a period,
where you've just gone through enough,
and a space starts to... That little blue sky starts to develop,
and if you have a meditative awareness,
or just that appreciation,
you start to identify with the blue sky instead of the cloud.
You flicker, at first.
And then you start to release.
And then comes the time,
when you start to realize
you'd rather be vulnerable and be hurt
than be living dead, in the "dead-dead" sense,
not in the "living" sense.
And you can't afford it,
and you start to open again and the whole cycle starts again.
Until finally,
you start to fall in love with love.
When you take off your mask,
it's easier for everybody else to take off theirs.
Yeah, I want to be a walking permission slip...
-Yeah. -...of mask removal.
Yeah.
But our cultures are so mask-driven.
Imagine what an office would be like with no masks.
That's the irony about masks.
I've had a fascination with masks
-since first hanging out with you. -Yeah.
The irony is that we wear a mask
because the people around will only love us if we wear this mask.
But the crazy thing about that is
we don't really wanna hang out with people
-that only want the masks worn. -I know.
So, we're exhausting ourselves,
wearing a mask for people we don't wanna hang out with.
That's exactly right.
We take off the mask
-and some will go... -Yep.
...but the people that will be left are the people that love us
and really wanna hang out with us.
That's beautiful. That's just right.
Just right.
Everybody's playing with their stories
of who they think they are.
It's more fun to just
witness it all,
to be the environment in which this is happening.
We're living in a time where
it is now beginning to be acceptable
to consider the possibility that people actually die.
Usually, in our culture, it has been put behind doors, behind sheets, behind...
You don't talk to the children about it
you don't show anybody, um...
We surround people that are dying
with a certain kind of falseness that comes out of our own fear.
When my mother, my natural mother was dying,
and I'd watch people come into the room,
all the relatives and doctors and nurses saying
"You're looking better, you're doing well,"
and then they go out of the room and say, "She won't live the week."
And I thought how bizarre that a human being's going through
one of the most profound transitions in their life,
and they're surrounded completely by deception.
Can you hear the pain of that?
That nobody could be straight with them because everybody was too frightened.
Even the rabbi, all of them, everybody.
Everybody.
And for me, who has grown up in that culture,
it was quite an experience when I started to live in India,
where when somebody dies,
they are put on a pallet and then carried through the streets
to the burning grounds.
And the death is public, for everybody to see.
The body is right there. It's not in a box, it's not hidden.
Most people are dying at home,
so that most people, as they grow up,
have been in the presence of someone dying.
While in our culture, an amazing number of people,
even at middle age, have never been in the presence of someone dying.
They have walked away from it and hidden from it.
"Dear friend, please know as you pass by,
"as you are now, so once was I,
"as I am now, so you will be,
"prepare yourself to follow me."
And we are preparing ourselves.
I'm one of the strange people
that absolutely delights and enjoys being with people as they're dying.
In fact, it is such an incredible grace for me,
that in the morning when I know I'm going to be with such a person,
I get absolutely thrilled in my body, in my being.
Because I know I'm going to have an opportunity
to be in the presence of truth.
While I wouldn't lay suffering on anybody,
I have sat with people that are suffering incredibly,
with various kinds of cancer and other kinds of physical conditions.
And I will tell you that I have watched people with egos
that are like cinder blocks,
they're so heavy and thick,
and busy with themselves,
and their self-pity and their anger and their...
And I have watched the suffering eat away, and eat away,
and eat away, and eat away.
And then I've watched... It's like the shell cracks,
and it's like the spirit is born.
And I see them often very close to death
and they are... They're like great, wise spiritual beings.
And I didn't think there was a chance of a snowball in hell
that person was ever going to come up for air,
spiritually, in this lifetime.
Doctors are eager to take away people's pain.
But from a spiritual point of view,
I look and I see the way in which pain deepens compassion and pain awakens.
What am I to do?
Are doctors evil?
Are they good?
Don't you think they should ask the patient,
"Do you want to get rid of your pain?"
These are all very interesting issues
about how you help without getting caught in being a helper,
and seeing the other person as somebody that needs help,
and still helping them.
And when I said to Emmanuel,
"Emmanuel, I deal a lot
"with the fear of dying in this culture, and death.
"What should I tell people?"
And he said, "Ram Dass,
"tell them that death is absolutely safe."
Now, just put those two things together and realize what a far-out line that is.
"Death is absolutely safe."
And then he added one more image.
He said, "It's like taking off a tight shoe."
Okay? Can you hear that one?
"Like taking off a tight shoe."
Now, just imagine that you as spirit or awareness,
have contained yourself in an incarnation,
or contained it in a conceptual model of who you are
and on a storyline,
and then at some point,
you dissolve out of that, you break out of that,
and there is this incredible release quality.
Now, I came into the room,
and Jinny had cancer of the cervix.
Very painful.
She was writhing in pain.
It was a collaborative process with the doctor, and she and Laura,
all deciding about pain medicine and how long she'd live and things...
And I came in and I sat down,
and she usually would fight me tooth and nail,
'cause she was very much of an intellectual,
but she was so weak this time, she was just writhing on the bed...
So, I sat down next to the bed and I just did this meditation,
the Buddhist meditation that is done in cemeteries.
Usually, they have a bloated corpse or a fly-infested corpse,
or a skeleton to meditate upon.
In this case, I just had this decaying body before me,
and I just sat, allowing it to exist.
Watching all my emotional reactions to it,
just allowing it to exist.
And I became so peaceful and the room was so clear,
it was a purple-ey light in the room.
And she turned to me, all the time her body is writhing in pain,
and she says to me,
"I've never felt so much ecstasy in my life.
"I wouldn't rather be anywhere else than here at this moment."
And she sits up and she is radiant.
And she comes over and she starts to stroke my face,
as if she is looking at a human being,
this phenomenon of a body,
and she's tenderly stroking it.
And I stoke her face.
And then she comes up and she kisses me,
and I kiss her,
and we hold each other.
And it's a moment that is absolutely perfect in its presence.
I mean, even the little tiny thought forms in my head,
like, "Well, this is the next thing to necrophilia,"
you know.
And, "Do you know her husband is downstairs?"
and, "Quakers, what will they think of this?"
And you know, all those little niggly-piggly things in my head,
were just like little lights around the edge.
They didn't have much juice to them, you know,
because the whole thing was just what it was.
It was absolutely perfect.
And then she lay back on the pillow,
and we held hands for about 10 to 15 minutes,
and I said, "Well, Jinny, you understand everything I do,
"there's no more sense wasting time. See you around.
"Namaste. Namaste."
And I left. And she...
I flew down to New York that night.
The next morning at 7:00 I got a call, she died during the night.
The more you are aware of the spiritual nature of life,
the more you see the moment of death
as a moment for release,
for taking off the tight shoe.
And the artform in dying
is that, at the moment of death,
you are neither grabbing at life
nor pushing it away.
You're neither pushing nor pulling.
It's the attraction and aversion
that keeps you holding to form.
So, to prepare for the moment of death,
when the processes that go on in consciousness
are a dissolving of boundaries,
a speeding up of awareness,
an opening and expanding,
to be in that process
where you don't go, "No," and grab hold,
one prepares.
One prepares for the moment of death.
Sometimes, seeking in itself is just an expression of "lack."
Yeah.
"Expression of lack."
An abundance of lack.
It's so abundant.
"Abundance of lack."
His Royal Majesty, The Abundance of Lack.
"Abundance of lack."
If you had a little television receiver channel
right here, next to your eyes,
what you're finding, what we're talking about,
is planes of consciousness,
or channels on a television set.
And most of us, most of the time in this culture,
act as if we have a one or two-channel set,
we don't have cable.
And today, we're talking about cable.
We're talking about
acknowledging all these other channels that are floating around in the room,
but we're not picking them up
because we don't know how to tune our receiver.
That's basically what this is about.
So, on the first channel,
when you look at another human being,
you see old, young, dark, light,
fat, thin, et cetera.
You see physical body.
And if you're obsessed with your physical body,
that's what you see when you look in the world,
other people's physical bodies.
That's the channel you're on.
If you flip one channel,
then you're in the psycho-social realm.
You see power and you see happiness and sadness,
and neurosis, and...
It's the therapy channel.
It's the... And it's the social role channel.
It's where there are mothers and truck drivers, and all lawyers,
and all the different roles and identities,
all the social stuff.
That's all the channel, and that says the world turns,
and it's a never-ending source of fascination.
I mean, it just goes on and on and on and on.
Most people are happy with channel two.
That's... Yeah.
In channel one and two,
about 98% of the people you've ever known
are busy with those two channels all the time.
If you flip to the next channel,
you go behind all those individual differences
and you just see another soul just like you,
that has all that packaging,
that's different than you,
but is just another being just like you.
That's when you say, "Are you in there?
"I'm in here. How'd you get in that one?"
Now, our predicament is,
that as long as you're on channel one and two,
you are afraid of death.
And as long as you identify with that which dies,
there is always fear of death,
because it's the fear of cessation of existence.
Until you are rooted in these other levels of reality,
that gives you a perspective about death
that allows you to see death
as a transformation of things which change.
Is there still an excitement about it, about death?
I'm excited about what happens after death.
I'm not excited about death.
In your language, my incarnation
has been using your incarnation
for certain things.
Like, the first time I met you,
I had probably realized that
I wasn't gonna get the male transmission from my father,
I realized that I didn't wanna take my leave of you
so abruptly,
as it had been with my dad.
I am a projection of you.
And that projection you don't wanna lose.
Whether it's a father figure or a spiritual blah, blah.
I see you as a spiritual entity,
and you, you see yourself
as a... Oh...
You're a great son.
I saw your soul.
It's beautiful.
The rest of you, eh, but...
I hang out
with my family,
the family of saints
and, uh, these guys
and girls.
And you're one of them.
You're one of them. See, you don't see that.
You don't see that.
I'm talking about the places you get to
where you start to become
able to live your life
in a way that is harmonious
with what you know on all these other planes.
You literally die into service.
You die into the plane of reality where you see
that a starving person, or a dying person,
or a hungry person, or a frightened person,
is you.
It's not her or him or them.
You die in your separateness.
The whole trip of "What's good for me? What do I want? What do I need?
"What do I want?"
just becomes less interesting.
And at that moment, that's where the power is.
That's where the power is that changes the universe.
When you can make yourself into zero,
then your power is unbelievable.
You are an irresistible force,
where there is no high and there's no low,
and there's no judgments and there's no opinions,
there's no good and there's no bad,
you merely are part of it.
The signs are now here.
Don't get lost in the detail.
Let your awareness go free.
Just recognize what an adventure this transformation is.
The appreciation of death and the spiritual journey after death
is the prerequisite for living life joyfully now.
Death does not have to be treated as an enemy
for you to delight in life.
Keeping death present in your consciousness,
as one of the greatest mysteries,
and as the moment of incredible transformation,
imbues this moment
with added richness and energy that otherwise is used up in denial.
I encourage you
to make peace with death,
to see it as the culminating adventure
of this adventure called life.
It is not an error, it is not a failure,
it is taking off a tight shoe,
which you have worn well.
"But those that find the way in the morning
"can gladly die in the evening,"
it is said in the mystical literature.
So, I encourage you,
to explore and find in your being that part of you
that is on those other channels,
so that when on channels one and two,
the "world turn" series comes to its final chapters,
you won't be caught in feeling loss,
but rather, the adventure.
Because, from where I'm sitting,
life on this plane of reality,
because I live in the world of reincarnation, of karma, of...
Life on this plane
is like being in the fourth grade.
You took birth here because you had certain work to do,
that involves the suffering you do,
the kinds of situations you found yourself in...
This is your curriculum, it's not an error.
Where you are now, with all your neuroses and your problem,
you're sitting in just the right place.
Imagine that.
Nobody made an error.
And all that stuff in you of saying, "If only... If only I could be..."
No, this is it, including the "if only."
It's perfect.
And then, at the time you graduate,
and somebody says, "Oh, but he died so young."
So, if you graduate from fourth grade early,
big deal, wonderful.
Don't get so caught in worshipping life that you lose the balance
that realizing that the spirit, it says,
"Live life fully and richly as a partner with God,"
and at the same moment,
don't be afraid of the next thing.
Go towards it with openness and with love,
and not with forbidding.
"The way that is understood in the morning,
"one can gladly die in the evening."
Just for a moment, sit quietly now.
And just be with what is.
If you're hot, be hot.
If your behind hurts, let it hurt.
If you're emotionally open, let yourself be emotionally open.
If you're closed, be closed.
If you're bored, be bored. If you're stimulated, be stimulated.
If you're hungry, be hungry.
Just let it all be.
Ah, life. Ah, death.
Ah, coming,
ah, going.
Ah, joy,
ah, sadness.
All of it.
Waves that come back into the vast ocean.
When you know that quality of your being,
the ocean,
the sky,
the awareness,
then you're free.
And being free,
you can dance the dance of life,
and the dance of death.
May all beings in this very life
be free.
I've got one delicious sign.
I tell this every lecture, 'cause it's such a delicious image.
It's at a time when everybody that came into my audience
was always the same age and they all dressed a certain way.
They all wore white and had smiles
and had flowers and were...
You know, they were...
"We love everybody."
You know, they were real repressed anger, so...
Um...
This one night, they were all there smiling,
and I was, uh... I assumed everybody had had acid,
and we were all just...
I was talking far-out talk, you know.
And there was a woman sitting down at the front
who was about 70.
And she had a hat on
with oranges and cherries and things.
And she had a black patent leather bag and a print dress,
and responsible Oxfords.
I think I've conveyed the type.
And she was sitting there and I'd say these outrageous things
and she'd go like this, you see.
And I think, "How does she know?"
You know, this is not an acid-head.
I mean, I just... And I kept looking at her
and I'd say more outrageous things and look,
and she'd go like this, you know.
So, at the end of the lecture, I kind of smiled her up.
She came up and she said, "Oh, thank you."
She said, "Everything you said just made perfect sense
"and was just so clear."
I said, "How do you know all that?
"What do you do that gets you
"into the position of consciousness
"that you know all this?"
She leaned forth very conspiratorially and she said,
"I crochet."
I am loving awareness.
Loving awareness
is a name for a soul
which you really are,
leads you to love everything
you are aware of.
The sky,
the room,
your body,
other people.
I am loving awareness.