Ram Dass Full Lecture Compilation: Volume 5 [Black Screen/No Music]

[Music] foreign [Music] ER of this weekend let's consider this room our Temple for we are investing it with a great deal of Shakti and love when you come in here come in quietly begin to honor the space tomorrow morning the incredible Hanuman which is already Hanuman has already gone into so it is quite living will be hung on the wall over there just at kissable hype so that you can all share and invest in it with a proper amount of love and then it will be hung on the wall of the little Hanuman

Temple we will have in New York for it's really a thing of great Beauty there has been a very large amount of input today already for some of you who already have a deep philosophical structure of what this is all about it's all second nature to you for others you are totally confused happy feeling a sense of well-being perhaps but confused that's okay for I've said before and I'll say again the forms are not what it's about what you are receiving this weekend and I think you're beginning to un

derstand what I'm talking about you are receiving a transmission of the Living spirit through a lineage and you don't have to know all the words to receive the transmission by any means often when you're in India you can go to a Wong a Tibetan Wong where for eight to nine days there will be sutras recited you will not understand a word of it but you still receive the transmission for as I said earlier today we are beginning now to acknowledge realities other than that which is comfortable to the

rational mind and Hanuman is certainly a beginning of that this morning when we're out of the lawn doing the breathing we went up over our heads came back down into our heart up over the head back down into the heart if you wish we went close into the quiet impersonal presence of God we came back into our emotional involvement with Humanity now that is that is a pattern of this lineage and that's why Hanuman is characterized it has kneeling and is represented as a servant of Rama a servant of G

od for once a being has worked out their individual Karma his or her individual Karma by surrendering into God you come to a point where you now not talking about your body your body's merely your package but you the wires that attach you to this plane are so subtle that with one snip you go into God you merge back into that which is without form you you do and what is Left Behind is the residue of the package your body's left behind and your astral bodies saw dissolve and you are slowly your ph

ysical body disintegrates goes back into dust into Earth you leave most beings when they get to that point recognize a choice the choice is at that point of going into not the samadhis that you go into prior to that where your breath stops your body becomes stiff and you go out of your body those are different levels of samadhi there are even somebody's where your body doesn't stiffen but there is a choice of going into what's called Maha samani which is where you indeed leave your body behind a

nd merge back into God you understand most people that die don't have this option because they still have a lot of personal Karma and that personal Karma it's like you are a um uh say this flower or the soul it has connected with it a lot of what would be called I don't know what you want to call them uh there are names in Buddhism Hinduism everything for it uh sunskars they're predisposing Tendencies You might call it it's like a DNA code it's it's clingy stuff it's a set of desires that is sti

ll lurking in you and this Soul Demands a form again to keep working out these desires the desires keep projecting out a form they keep creating form the form may not be on the physical plane like this you may end up in heaven that'd be nice but after so many hundred years or thousand years because time is different on each of these planes it's still time but it's different units of time you use up that Karma and you leave that play you may just dis-cooperate you may not die because you don't di

e on those planes and then you are still an entity with certain Karma and you might come back then and take another human birth but at some point in your evolution you come to the point where the veil is very thin because the desires the personal desires are pretty well gone there's nothing much you want you're not attached to being in any particular form in heaven or Earth everything is what it is and you can acknowledge it ah so yes you're right here the only poll that is there now is the pull

to merge back into God which is like the pull in sex after a long foreplay the pole for the orgasm and as you approach that moment your third eye is wide open your eye be single your being be full of light you see the entire scene you understand Karma you understand the laws you understand the Divine Law of the universe you understand all the Buddha Fields you understand the whole way of sanskara you are wisdom at that moment you see that all form is suffering you see that anything in time has

suffering in it you see just what Buddha saw before he enunciated the Four Noble Truths that moment you have choice to give up the form go into the formless or choice to play in the formless but come back into the form why would you come back into the form SWAT in Tibetan Buddhism is called the bodhisattva vile why would you come back into the form not because of your personal Karma anymore that's all over there's nothing in you pulling you don't want anything you even see the Perfection of the

universe you see the Perfection of God's work you even see that the suffering itself because you began to see that the suffering was what awakened you you begin to see that the suffering is Grace even though most people don't see it because they're too deep in the illusion where there no need for the suffering there would be no need for this world and none of us would be on this plane at all wouldn't exist this exists because of the karmic needs of the people on it what you experience is collect

ive Karma you identify with the suffering of all sentient beings and that identification can keep you informed at that point your form is no longer personal you are at that moment an instrument of God you are at that moment just as Buddha was when he returned from his Enlightenment you are an instrument of the Dharma you are a statement which will Enlighten those that are ready to be enlightened that is your only function it's the only reason you're on Earth the only reason you hear it all four

you're not going to get your rushes here since your rushes come from orgasm with the infinite and when you've had a lover like that there's nothing in the world that has much pull you can enjoy it all but you you have the choice to go into God you have the choice to have it all why take little bits of it see at this point you come here the setting is beautiful you will have some deep meditations but then the pull of the world will be strong and it'll pull you back and you'll have to make an effo

rt to meditate when those feet shift when the weight shifts you just sit in meditation and then you think oh now I have to leave this to go into form and the weight has shifted it's like getting up out of a bed where you're all cuddly on a cold morning to go and light the fire or let the dog out or the cat in or change the baby or go to work when this balance of feet shifts when you start to awaken you and you it Dawns on you that the whole game is perfect the whole game is perfect including all

the you've been through it's all perfect even the way man's will screws it all up it's still all this perfection in it there is a tendency to get enamored of the impersonal the cold impersonal the beauty of it all the beauty of the Leela and you keep saying but it's all an illusion anyway what are we getting so upset about nothing to do it's all an illusion he gets so fascinated with God with Enlightenment with the wisdom of the ages and in your Zeal to do that it's very easy to forget to forge

t Humanity to forget politics to forget human concerns to forget human suffering to overlook the daily stuff around you the image I've used in lectures that I got from my teacher you get so busy looking at the snow the pure white snow and the peaks of the Himalayas because for so many incarnations you've been looking out and down and you finally look up and it's so beautiful you've never been identified with so much Beauty in your life that you'd rather not have to look back down and see that ri

ght beneath your feet is blood on the snow which is the blood From The Heart of Jesus it's the blood of the suffering of form it's the pull of humanity it's the pull of humanity now does it seem premature that I'm talking about this to you after all most of you are much more pulled by Humanity than you are by God you are much more concerned with the crying of your child or the hurt of the puppy dog or the inequality in politics or the way in which blacks are treated or the way in which uh the re

ligious struggles of peoples why am I talking to you about the pull of humanity that's your problem see some of you have the disquieting feeling I've got to be careful because all these people that go to God they forget about the world and what about politics and what about economics and what about social responsibility I mean am I really playing my part in the dance as you go up if you're going up in perfection as you go up you keep looking down as well as up you have one eye going up and one e

ye going down one eye is in the world and one eye is in God if both eyes are in the world you have nothing to offer mankind except more suffering because you are lost in the illusion if both eyes are on God you've forgotten about the world and you couldn't care less so you don't offer them anything anyway the predicament is that when you start this journey you get a little bit of clarity and you want to rush and use it for other people to help your family your friends others who are suffering bu

t that desire is not one that is without attachment it is an attached desire it has to do with the guilt that maybe you got something special it has to do with your attachment to this suffering and the motivation for why you're doing that does not liberate those people what most of you will do to help other human beings will help them on one level on the physical level if you feed somebody and fill their belly you help them if you give them clothing if you help them raise food if you help them w

ith medical things if you help them because they're hurt if you help them because they're lost you will help them on the physical plane but your motivation for helping them May well have been such that though you help them on one plane you perpetuated the illusion of their separateness and thus their suffering to know that does not drive you to not serve but it drives you to remember and serve Humanity as an exercise and a vehicle for becoming enlightened for ultimately the only thing that frees

another being is a free being as ramakrishna said if you are in quicksand you cannot free another from quicksand I'm an example of that I'm not a fully realized being and quite honestly it's very difficult for me to leave my meditations with God to come and do this this is my work this is Humanity this is the pull I have to do this this is part of my being this is my root to God I've got to do this but as I do it I am only doing it as an exercise for my own Liberation because if I am doing it m

otivated to helping you as my motivation I am attached to me being a Helper and you being that which is help and I am actually pushing you away and the way I'm helping you as somebody who needs to be helped in the long run I am perpetuating your illusion of separateness that's a very subtle point and it may be just too much for you to grab do any of you hear what I'm talking about and what I just said is part of the way in words that you are protected from that illusion that I still retain becau

se I'm telling you there it exists but more more directly what's doing it is that in my heart and my being my work is with God and you are the instruments and the vehicles of my coming to God and because of that you are protected I can't explain to you the subtlety of the way this works because it's an astral type subtly but you are totally protected from being hurt in the spiritual sense by my being because of the purity of my commitment to God maharaji in India once said I said Maharaja you ca

n't send me back to America because I'm so impure and I can't I don't mind my own Karma but I can't stand Lane Karma on other people and maharaji said ramdas could not hurt anybody in America and the not hurting anybody comes not because everything I say is totally the statement of God but because of my motivation in being with you for I don't in truth want power over you I don't want to control you I don't want you to worship me I don't want to collect you I don't need you there is no rush that

you give me that is anywhere near one billionth what I can get from sitting down in front of my Puja table and being in love with God not one billionth of it it is that preoccupation with God on in me that is what liberates you through whatever it is that I do with you it's because I don't want you and I don't need you for if that was the least vibration in me of wanting you or needing you that would feed your paranoia it would feed the place in you that is looking because of your long history

of being had looking for the way in which you are being conned or exploited this round most of you since you were little children closed off from trusting other human beings because everybody wanted something they wanted your body they wanted your soul they wanted your mind they wanted your money they wanted your power they wanted something they wanted your adoration your adulation they wanted something and that closed offness closes you off not only from your fellow men it closes you off from t

he flow of the universe it closes you off from God you can't afford the paranoia that most of you have lived with most of your life the funny thing is you don't need it either because you aren't as vulnerable as you thought you were as you begin to recognize who you are as I'm trying to show you who you are who you are is not vulnerable to the human foibles nobody can do anything to your soul that way they can screw around with your body and your mind that you aren't as vulnerable as you think y

ou are and before you will know God you will be able to stand naked and wide open with heart wide open as all of the possible horror shows of humanity surround you and pour on you and through you you will be able to look at disaster at starvation at flood at Hara at death of beloveds you will be able to look at violence at ugliness whether it's done to you or another with your heart wide open with blood pouring out of it upon the snow and at the same moment that other eye is looking up and sees

the total Perfection of the dance and you will have perfect equanimity most of you now when it gets ugly you turn your heart off you get cold you go into your mind in order to protect yourself because you feel so vulnerable and most marriages are battles of who's hurting who when you understand what this dance is nobody can hurt anyone else if you come on to me and you're ugly and angry and violent that's your karma if I react to it that's my karma and my work is on myself not on you and if I'm

sitting with a partner who is a shrew and a that is her karma if I get stuck in it that's my karma and when I know I'm going to God I eat that bitchiness that is known as consuming the mother when I was talking about it's supper time see the day has some method in its matter this is very heavy stuff I really have to give it very small doses because this is like baklava you know it's very thick and Rich and you get nauseous if you eat too much all right it's funny to run these these Workshop thin

gs you know because I know that about a 15-minute message is really about the capacity when it's dense of human consciousness but then we have 24 hours a day and it's very delicate to design a dance that allows for the density of this transmission and as you if we went on for a month we would get so that would be 15 minute messages about three times a day and all the rest would be meditation that's all you really need but you don't know you need that yet so I have to keep doing this stuff becaus

e you think you need it hmm [Laughter] you gotta understand how humorous the whole bizarre predicament is we're all caught him you see up to a year ago a year and a half ago I had been trained in many ways I had a groove that my girl left his body I was honored and respected as a spiritual teacher in America I had my gig down pretty cool people loved me respected me honored me I could earn a living right be here now is uh maharaji's gift to everybody through me I could have ridden that for this

lifetime and I have a great love of humanity but it wasn't pure because the balance wasn't even because I wasn't deep enough in God I knew of God and I wanted to want it but I didn't really want it that bad but then I began to become horrified by the way in which I was perpetuating the illusion and when that despair got deep enough even though everybody around me was reassuring me that I was doing great things for everybody but I couldn't live with myself that was the point that the next teachin

g became available to me and I was brought to the teachings that I am now receiving I described in the lecture I believe I gave in Gainesville last spring which some of you were at the way in which I came to this present teaching the reason I must tell you of it now is because I must have you understand if you're receiving the transmission of this lineage the function and the role of what is called the spiritual hierarchy it was a year ago last July I had finished teaching at The naropa Institut

e in Boulder I was depressed and determined to stop teaching and seek further training I didn't know how to do that because I had already up leveled every scene in America one way or another trunkba had been my last hope and he turned out not to be pure enough I didn't know where to go I decided to return to India to once again seek some spiritual guidance I was in a motel in Pennsylvania the electricity went out I was watching television I meditated I was forced to meditate I had nothing else t

o do and it was too early to go to sleep I meditated and in the middle of the meditation maharaji came to me and he said to me you don't have to go to India your next teachings will be here in America and that Vision was so real and vital that at that moment I changed my plans and I decided I would go to New Hampshire to meditate next day I came to New York City I was at a chiropractor's I was waiting for him and there was a phone in the room and I called a woman who has been a spiritual friend

and teacher for me and she said to me there is a woman you must meet in New York I said I don't want to meet anybody she said I think you want to meet this woman I said no I'm not I'm going to New Hampshire and I talked to her for a few minutes went hung up finished with a chiropractor went to visit some friends and then walked this woman who I've been on the phone with again and she says you really must meet this woman that I that is lives in uh Brooklyn I didn't really want to meet a woman in

Brooklyn I mean there's just nothing in it that pulled me but she called the woman on the phone the woman said tell him that his Guru is here in my basement and that turned the tide and the next morning I uh went out with the woman I had called to Brooklyn and I came into this house and was taken to the basement where there was a very beautiful woman sitting with her eyes rolled up her body's stiff no pulse no heartbeat uh I was having a very very intense reactions to her first because of the sa

madhi state which was very impressive but then her way of being was also very impressive she had incredibly long false eyelashes and heavy mascara the low-cut dress she looked like uh something between uh Sophia Loren and Anna manyani or something like that I mean he's that kind of person and she came down out of samadhi and she looked at me and uh to her side was a blanket an empty blanket and she said um something to the effect of what the do you want and this woman that had brought me there s

aid oh dear this is ramdas she said I don't give a damn who it is she says does that dirty old man belong to you get him the hell out of here you see God has great sense of humor and you learn you learn after all when I met maharaji who has affected literally millions of people now through be here now and through me and all the people that came in contact with him he was this funny old man with no teeth sitting in a blanket in the mountains of the Himalayas I mean there I was an ex-harvard Profe

ssor you know big deal from the west and there was this simple little man and uh he was vast but he was little physically little I guess I always saw him he's about nine feet tall but I guess he was little and now again I'm meeting this completely unbelievable situation what I say this afternoon about we learn to be able to handle dissonance handle situations where it doesn't quite fit in I had no model at all of a spiritual teacher that could teach me anything that would have false eyelashes an

d mascara I want you to know right off that I just don't have those kind of models I mean I'm just much too middle class for that my middle class Guru is all either a Tibetan or Indian and they all look wise and Mona doesn't have long beards and they say in Wise things you know not like what the do you want you know that is just not my idea of a guru hmm so I looked over and I didn't see anything on the blanket so I said well I don't know whether that's my Guru or not at which point she went int

o another state of consciousness and um maharaji started to speak through her and he proceeded to discuss with me a number of things that he and I had talked about in India before he left his body things about the temple and the temple trust and various little sort of incidental things about the life in India at the temple that we would relate to each other over none of which I would particularly ever talk about in the west and there would be no reason for this woman to know any of that stuff an

d after about 10 or 15 minutes there was no doubt in my mind that maharaji's Consciousness was in this space with me well he wouldn't leave her house and um I went to New Hampshire to try to get away from this situation but I was pretty hooked and I came back once in October and once in November and then in December I moved to New York and I just sort of surrendered to the whole business and uh that was just a year ago and since that time I have been in full-time training by maharaji this woman

and numerous other beings on other planes of existence many of whom speak through her or are available for her to teach from here is a woman who has a 10th grade public school education who teaches me things from the Kabbalah from geometry recites hour upon hour of poetry of high beautiful poetry Mystic poetry who speaks other languages fluently who knows my mind inside out she's not a public teacher she's not available to you she has a husband and a family and they are not the least bit interes

ted in all of this business which makes it very difficult for her and in fact were she to become public it would destroy her family life and her family so that she must be protected in the past year there has really been no place I have been and nobody I have met that she has not known about if I were to speak to her on the phone and mention any one of you can you tell me about this fellow that I saw down in Gainesville I'll give you an example I told this example before it's a very far example

I know what I told it when I told her before she said to me once you're going to go on a trip now down south this was last year last one I came down through here she said you're going to meet a fat lady give her a hug for me so I promptly forgot this instruction and I went through Columbia South Carolina Durham I think I might have been Gainesville on that trip I'm not sure and I was in Durham giving a lecture in the hall at the University of North Carolina Duke and the second row there was a gr

oup of middle-aged people and there was one woman who had very fat arms she was full very jovial woman she's laughing and everything I said in the lecture she'd laugh at she wasn't laughing at me she was laughing with me and it blew my mind because she was so uh I couldn't figure out what she was or who she was and I was fascinated by her I remember as I lectured I kept my Consciousness kept being pulled by this woman but I had forgotten the instruction and I went back to New York and the first

thing that Joya said to me was uh did you hug the lady for me I said what lady she said I told you you meet a fat lady and you want to hug her I said oh I forgot I said I don't think I met she says you know she was the one in the third row down in North Carolina I said oh that one she said yeah she said she was your mother in a previous incarnation but she said you'll meet her again don't worry how many levels you want that's the way it is and when you have no space to hide in you begin to under

stand the difficulty of surrender when your mind becomes wide open to another human being when there is nowhere to hide at all nowhere to hold on to your arrogance your specialness your false Pride your self-pity your unworthiness like I have models models of how life should be lived by reasonable people right I have reasonable model like a reasonable model is if you want to be rested for a full day's work you should go to bed say at 11 o'clock and get like six seven hours sleep that's a model I

have it comes out of Western medicine seems like a reasonable model doesn't it So at around 11 o'clock I'd go to bed around 11 15 the phone would ring which is just as you're going to sleep and it would be Joya now is my predicament here is the spiritual teacher my source calling me but it's 11 15. she could have called me at eight but she didn't she called me 11 15. and there is that little irritation in me more than a little irritation like what the hell do you have to bother me now I mean co

uldn't we do it tomorrow or something like that especially because at that point she will be in a very high plane of Consciousness so the words are coming out very slow okay very very slow so there is an exasperating frustrating because a sentence may take that long when it could have taken that long and this is a time you could have been sleeping because otherwise you'll be erect tomorrow right so you'd feel frustration and anger and she'd go on and on and on talking until you understood what t

he game was the game was that she was going to talk indefinitely until you gave up the anger and frustration and then then it just surrendered okay talk all night I don't give a damn the hell of it she'd say have a good night now this is very very subtle teaching it seems like total Mickey Mouse stuff but it is the most incredibly subtle kind of process of cleaning away the stuff in you the models and molds you have of who you are and what you're about that keep closing you down and closing you

down it's like I walked in and I met um one of us who I've known for many years and he said this is going fine but he said I've got this stomach problem and all this stuff and and fasting is my metabolism he gave me a whole model of who he thinks he is and there is a certain humor in that from my point of view because I will be having a raging fever and a virus and I'll have every Good Grounds for doing what I love to do which is curl up in bed with hot lemonade and and be sick because that was

the thing you've always got your love from your mother I always did I don't know about you but I always got incredible love no matter how bad I was when I was sick enough right and I'd say Georgie I'm so she'd say what do you got I'd say God I feel so sick she said well give it up I mean I say you're the Divine mother why don't you love me and feed me lemonade and stuff like that she says just give it up and she would make me go to class do everything just as I come to see her just as I would re

gularly have to do sickness or not until the sickness was just going to be such a nuisance I had to give it up because I didn't get it reinforced at all one by one the models and molds of who I am and how I function slowly eaten away slowly eaten away I now not here because I'm away the mouse is awake it's away from the cat and it does play but in New York City for the past uh 11 12 months at least in the past six months I sleep um three hours a night because she keeps me going right to the end

I get two in the morning she stops and I have to get up at five and I'm boxed in there's no way I can get out of it I gotta either run away but if I run I'm running from that which is pure but I don't want to surrender to it you hear what the predicaments are of life so you keep surrendering you keep surrendering you keep surrendering and the more you surrender your models and your moles in your mind about what you think God is about and how it works and who you think you are and how you work th

e more you were open to the flow of the universe the closer you come into God thank you the reason I wanted to tell you all of this the quality of this woman the quality of maharaji that was the most critical quality of both of them was the degree of their purity of being for I had never met beings this pure before the last time I had ever touched that kind of Purity was when I was part of a contingent from San Francisco of hippies I was sort of the hippie from the hate Ashbury and I was meeting

with the Hopi Elders to arrange a Hopi hippie being in Grand Canyon right and I was the representative of the hippies and the Hopi Elders all gathered in hota Villa in Arizona and I remember sitting around a kitchen table with these elders and there weren't enough cheers so I was on the floor so I could look under the table and over it and under the table were all these gnarled the youngest of them was 68 and they went up to about 110. these lots of turquoise but these old hands that were like

Roots reaching into the Earth it was incredibly beautiful hand and the young youngster in the group The 68 year old one was telling me about their predicaments with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and he said our young man one of our young men was in an automobile accident with a car belonging to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and uh the Bureau of Indian Affairs car was over the yellow line but they the police the next day they found a bottle in the gutter and they said our young man was drinking and

then he said to me we ask our young man he say he was not drinking he speak truth and he looked at me in such a way that I knew at that moment that that was exactly the way it was and I realized that we who live with lawyers and contracts and total distrust had lost that connection where people spoke that way with one another they just said it the way it was and I felt like I was connected to something very almost primordial something that was before my own life experience because I come out of

a family of lawyers where nobody trusts anything and here I am with my Guru in India and now with joy of Feeling Again a quality of purity of being that makes there's one thing in the world that's left that makes me cry and that's purity when I see somebody purely wanting to go to God a purity in them I weep I absolutely weep I can't stand it it's equality in beings it's a it's an innocence it's a regained innocence and the person may have been as jaded as can be it's most beautiful when somebo

dy is very worldly and jaded and tough like I am in many ways and then opens to that Purity again that's the purity of the sweetness of God coming through of being that's part of the transmission part of that transmission for as I said earlier what I offer you is that I don't want you and I don't need you and that I love you independent of what you do or say I love you allowing you the choice to go to God or not to go to God and very rarely in your life have you ever been in this situation befor

e with another human being I want nothing from you I need nothing from you and I can love you because my love is not conditional because I don't need anything from it I don't need you to love me and that space is a space that frees you from a paranoia that is so deep within you that is a part of the transmission that is the transmission of being to being we are offering each other our beings and the forms are just the forms last year I was teaching at the Abode a Sufi uh ashram in uh made out of

an Old Shaker Village in New York state and after I finished teaching there were about 500 people for the weekend sufis invited me to meet with them for the evening and uh it was going to be a Frank and open discussion in which they told me that um really I should get on with it that I had been teaching second grade just about long enough but we must accept our Dharma joyfully and if I am to be an eternal second grade teacher so be it just to even know of the concept of Dharma is such incredibl

e Grace that blows me away and I don't really care what part I play to tell you the truth every now and then I try to conceive of what this is about and there are so many scenarios you can run off but everyone that you think is the one that brought you here let that go and just think of all the rest that are available we are these beings from you know we we agreed we'd all meet you remember oh you may not Jesus I keep remembering I'm supposed to start slow there is a Chinese curse that says may

you be born in an interesting time and I think you can almost get the gist of it immediately because we are in fascinating times as Walter Cronkite points out every night it is rather Tower away and uh the bringing together of the spirit and daily life or figuring out how to deal with interesting times it's much of my business each day and I assume it's much of your business as well because um in my sequence and I I will say at the outset the one term I may have mentioned this last time and then

I won't say it again okay because between each month I've given maybe 15 lectures or eight lectures and they all turn into a wash of images and I come here and I really don't have any sequence in a fine sense of knowing I didn't tell you this last time but uh realize how many times I have to hear all these things and you'll find out that the oldies are the goodies and it's okay okay so just relax and don't say I heard that before you should organize there may be a subtle difference that you'll

just be too gross to notice so oh but after the 60s when we had charts on the bulletin board at Harvard and uh later at other places um showing when everybody was going to get enlightened and um but then we all kept coming down and then it got interesting to figure out why you come down and it turns out you come down because of your attachment so you're clinging or your karma and all of us were learning through Better Living Through Chemistry or diet or fasting or breathing or running or jumping

or cooking or whatever to um go out and play in the um in uh what a friend of mine calls La La Land or other planes of consciousness the reason it's called La La Land is because most people lose their ground they just get so hooked on the higher energy and these other planes and for me um I really felt if I gave up money and stopped driving and stop wearing glasses and ate uh just fruit and vegetables and didn't see many people and kept quiet most the time I would probably stay in a state that

would just flicker on Earth I just touched down to go to the toilet or you know just check in now and then for some very you know but the generally and I could be a luminous light so for some years I kept trying to do that I live in a cabin on the woods I'd really struggle and I'd hate people when they came to see me but I kept hearing uh maharaji my Guru saying um when I'd say maharaji how can I know God or how can I raise Kundalini he'd say serve people or feed people or I like that and um see

what I was caught in was the polarity that occurred in the late 60s between the political activists and the spiritual Seekers and um I remember sitting in the temple in India in 68 winter getting clippings from Alan Ginsberg about various political activist things he was chanting Alm in the middle of a park and police were beating on him and and I was sitting by a stream wrapped in my blanket in a quiet Himalayan Temple eating one meal a day and taking baths in the river and being on silence wo

rking with a chalkboard doing hot yoga and a lot of pranayama and reading the bhagavad-gita and the Bible that winter and I remember here I was reading the Gita which was about a battle and I thought gee uh there's Alan Ginsburg out on the front lines and what am I doing I'm copying out I mean I should be there where the action is I should be doing it what am I doing sitting in this Temple sitting with my mind with my Neurosis with my you know wild thoughts and fantasy and then in the course of

the morning it flicked around and I entertained the possibility because of the way the Gita is written and the chapter I was reading that day I entertained the possibility that maybe I was on the front line and that Alan Ginsburg was in the rest camp and in a way that polarization really caught me as numerous other polarizations have caught me and still do and in the late 60s it was very clearly the activist who was saying get off your asses and get to work and the spiritual people who was sayin

g you are also angry in the way you're doing your activism you're just creating more of the stuff you're trying to get rid of and why don't you work on yourself foreign early middle 70s I began to realize uh though something wrong really wrong there were a lot of forces saying to me you're missing something about the game Alan Watts had really uh said it to me quite distinctly some years earlier in the 60s one night when we were sitting drunkenly in a Benedictine Monastery around two in the morn

ing in his room he said dick your problem is that you're too attached to emptiness and those of you that have read the third Chinese patriarch no it says do not be attached to Enlightenment or and there's constantly that reminder not to be stuck that way he says don't you see that when you look at the physical plane if you turn a microscope and tune in you will see that when it's out of focus it's all a homogeneous field but when it comes into Focus you see man woman stage picture you've seen Go

d made manifest why aren't you enjoying it well um being a kind of protestant ethic Jew I couldn't conceive of enjoying it but at least I might acknowledge it you know I mean that's about as far as I could consider going then I had this conversation with Emmanuel did I tell you about Emmanuel last time hmm yes yes and Emmanuel um who is this disembodied being who um I hang out with a little through a woman who speaks who through whom he speaks and he said to me ramdas you are uh you ought to get

on with the classroom you're in which you took a human Incarnation try being human and it's suddenly it started to dawn on me that perhaps the reason that I was seeming to be plateauing and not experiencing the transformation as I had been experiencing in previous years was that I was pushing away the very stuff of which my Incarnation was made which was part of the totality and since God is all if I pushed away that chunk of it I was always going to have that attachment of rejecting my humans

see maharaji didn't help me any he kept screwing me up I mean that was his way of teaching um he said Rhonda should be alone he shouldn't see people he should eat alone you know he'd build me up like that and I think she I must really be somebody you know I mean I got to be this special he should have his own dishes and implements wow man this heavy stuff yeah okay so I went back to the hotel we were all staying and I put a sign up in the door do not disturb you know like uh sort of Yogi at high

er work typeframe and that that night um two of the sung had a terrible fight a married couple Mohan and Radha had a terrible fight all during the night the next day they went to we all were at Mar with maharaji at the temple and he called them up and he said uh what happened last night and they said we had a terrible fight well what did you do well we didn't do anything we just fought well did you go and see ramdas no he had a sign saying do not disturb oh and he looked at me with disgust [Musi

c] so it sort of wasn't clear which way to play it [Music] foreign so being um realizing that uh what I started to figure out what does it mean to honor your incarnation properly I mean I had already been working with my father and uh my family and I had a whole set of things down like keep your ZIP code remember your ZIP code and I was paying my taxes and um but it wasn't fully doing it I could see that and when people would say to me um what are you doing about ecology I'd say we each have our

own Dharma and each person we must play our parts we can't all do all of it this is my part but then I began to think about the possibility we all do have to do all of it that if I'm going to honor my Incarnation I have to honor whatever it means to be part of an ecosystem I have to honor whatever it means to be part of a uh a country to be part of a religion to be part of a Community to have a sexual identity to have a family identity and um but I I know one of the pitfalls that we Western int

ellectuals have well I have it I don't know about you but the minute I think of how it ought to be I immediately try to make it that way and it misses the mark do you understand what I'm saying it's sort of you what I call Head trip your way into it and you're doing it because you think you ought to do it or because you've thought about it but it hasn't really happened to you and I've fallen into that trap so many times it's like um intellectually if I give up sex I will get to God I'm going to

be celibate so I'm stuck with this thought now I announce I'm celibate and then I'm stuck with this thought and all it is is a thought it didn't come out of my being and all I am is a horny celibate now that's process two you understand I mean I really want to point out to you that once you have a spiritual perspective everything in your life is the process of the spiritual unfolding every time you go down or up or Plateau or anything and the experience of oh my god I've fallen off the path is j

ust more of it just another one that's an interesting process place in the journey really feel it I've fallen off the planet of God I've fallen off the plan Jesus there's no hope I had it I used to have it I used to get these Visions this thing but I've fallen off of him it's just more process you know okay great you've fallen off the path and here we are you here I'm here well now what are we going to do we've fallen off the path now what I mean the game is Just much more interesting than just

staying High As Trump parente says it isn't all just spiritual materialism okay so because I was smarter than to just jump in with my intellect I thought I'd just wait for things to happen that would pull me in I just be tuned to them I just started open to the possibility that I had honor Incarnation instead of calling up um you know Jane Fonda and saying where do I sign up or something like that so it just turned out that I was touring and with uh Jai and with a group of people and we ended up

in Boulder Colorado the day of the Rocky Flats demonstration the first request and people said rhondas you're coming to town would you come to the Rocky Flats demonstration I thought well there's the first one there's one right there it's a real live one you know I mean I I I'm not in favor of nuclear energy but I'm really embarrassed about it you see because I was an activist back in the 50s late 40s you know at college and stuff and during those days the excitement of peaceful use of nuclear

energy was going to free us from ever having any energy needs ever again in the universe and I was really pushing to get it in sooner I was a good guy then just like I'm a good guy now and there's a lesson in that of course I mean that you can make mistakes and as Gandhi said my commitment is to truth not to consistency so when it doesn't feel right you just say hey I blew it which I do all the time people say oh God ramdas blew it Jesus how can you trust anybody that blows it okay then some peo

ple say geez maybe we can really trust him I mean if the United States just said to Iran you know in the way we backed the Shahs regime we really blew it do you realize how different this game would be now but you know there's just no there's no wisdom in our diplomacy we just really caught in ego tripping in power and pride and insecurity and the bad guys and the good guys and it's all a lot of it's a media event [Music] see the Iranian students really spiritually up leveled us I mean I I shoul

dn't use as a political platform but why not because it's all part of the same dance is if you can hear that I can play with it and yet not get lost it might help I mean I realize that for us to treat the Iranians and the Russians the same was silly I mean the Iranians were saying look we're doing this because of the Quran yeah we've always had the corner on spiritual righteousness what right do they have they must be them they're just bad people the fact that we use the embassy as a spy center

has nothing to do with the fact that they kept our people that's really bad we're good we were spying to preserve democracy you and I are in very delicate position here I want you to know as spiritually Awakening beings I don't dig not honoring the embassy freedoms and turning the uh turning your head away from the world Court which is supposedly the highest thing that human intellect has ever done which is a set of laws for the world to live by I don't dig walking away from it but I do think it

has been prostituted badly and I'm not upset when it gets shaken around a little bit when somebody has the Huts because they're so old they're going to die anyway you know to say screw the world Court we're going to throw all the liquor from the Hilton into the alley because Western with Western technology and Western thinking and Western materialism has gone a loss of connection to God and as far as we're concerned that is like that's not the way to go see it actually Gandhi did with his spinn

ing wheel and his techniques what Mao did with isolation of his country what kumaini is trying to do with law which is protect a certain set of values from Western influence among other things I mean there's economic considerations too but the media just tends to look at the economic and political consideration they miss some of the other issues because when you live in a place like India or in a place like Bali or in a place like China or you live in places where you feel a connection to the un

iverse that you don't necessarily feel in our culture for all of its nagas to Boulder they call me up and they said that um that they were going to have a meditation at the Rocky Flats retreat that Alan Ginsburg had set up but he wasn't going to be there when I joined them and I said I'd love to and um somewhere and we wrote a statement to be read because we were all going to be silent just sitting on our zafus and um how does people know why you're doing it so we had to write something to tell

them we'd sit for 20 minutes and then walk and it was raining and we would sit and I sat there listening to all lecturers and I would hear all these incredible facts about nuclear fallout and what it was doing to children and so on and I could hear in the tone of each speaker's voice how much they were romanticizing at all to treat the audience as objects to be emotionally manipulated and how much they were sharing Consciousness with fellow human beings with whom they're saying look this is the

way it is and you and I got to get on with it right because the old-fashioned style is the emotional rhetoric that fires up the audience kill you know serve you know you know and Consciousness says look it's heavy and this is the way it is and we've got to do it and I trust that you'll do what you got to do because you're as conscious as I am why should I tell you and I really think we're ready for that kind of thing and what blew my mind was that there was a lot of that at Rocky Flats Rocky Fle

x was a combination of a political statement against nuclear energy and a being we are meditating here today because we feel that a quiet mind and an open heart are the optimum conditions for social change we have no enemies either here at Rocky Flats or anywhere we are all part of the same organisms striving in our own ways to maintain the health and unity of the whole it is the nature of our beings as individuals that defines the quality and the power of the statement by focusing on each breat

h we are affirming the Dignity of life in the simplest way possible we extend our compassion to those everywhere who live in fear of nuclear annihilation may we all experience Clarity of mind and learn to share it constructively with each other and that was a beautiful moment well there have been a lot more the most recent one was that I was with Wavy Gravy in New Hampshire during the primaries uh pressing the campaign of our candidate nobody for president our candidate's record speaks for itsel

f Mr gravy told a scattering of passers-by that's how it was by the way nobody solved the problems of the poor nobody brought about racial Justice nobody made a fair distribution of income nobody cares [Applause] so I went along because wavy is somebody I love and Revere is a magnificent clown he he spends a few days a week at the leukemia award at the Children's Hospital as a clown and he's just everything he does he does with great Beauty and just great wisdom he's a clown in the deepest sense

of the term so I thought I'd Apprentice to Wavy I mean you can't really do it but I found myself sitting at a table in Durham New Hampshire selling buttons and bumper stickers the buttons said apathy sucks and the bumper stickers said get the us out of North America [Applause] and you know people would come up and they'd say run to us oh how wonderful to see you and then they just buy whatever it was because I was selling it you know and then they'd look down sort of uncomfortably and then put

it quickly into their you know shoulder bags or whatever and I got a chance to stand at the runway where the Republican at the Republican caucus where all the Republican candidates walked in from their cars into the high school and they walked down this Runway where the lights were really brilliant and they had all because of what happened to Nixon in the running against Kennedy they were all made up to the hilt you know they don't Diego out of the hotel room without thick pancake makeup on fulf

ill the television cameras we'll show them looking Hagrid foreign and they came down looking like mannequins I mean Ronald and Nancy were unbelievable I mean they they just came through like that you know and I thought is that what power does wow I mean how would you like to be vying to be president of a diminishing economy and a diminishing political power block my God I mean that's really masochism and you can see what happens to the presence the before and after shots are great they look like

the reverse of the elixir of life now they've been having blood taken out of them but each day at Point but I used to sit in the temple you see reading patanjali's Ashtanga Yoga which told about miracles thinking when I do this breath and my throat opens it says then you will have the power to enter into anyone's mind set it right there and I mean it was a shloka so I'm sitting there and I'm thinking well now what will I do when I get that one thing I thought I should do good with it well I'm a

little concerned about Lyndon Johnson's mind so I will get down to Washington and he'll be sitting in a study and I'll just enter into his mind it said when you did another breathing you could appear visibly to anybody so I was going to do that one and I would just appear in his study and he'd say what are you doing here and I'd say he'd say I'm going to push the button call a secret service and I'd say you do that and I won't appear and they'll think you're crazy I've come to help you and then

I would give him a cosmic perspective you know I mean there's no sun you might as well help help your son then I thought well what we need to do is have the leaders of each country up level and go to the we've got to invest the United Nations I mean we can't keep making it impotent we've got to Juice It Up So Linda Johnson will go as our representative of the United Nations metal forces all the other presidents and so on it will really juice up getting rid of kind of these ego extensions that a

re called nationalism so now we're sitting around the UN table and I decided I'll make myself everybody's mind I mean you can do it as much as you want so I'll be talking to myself literally you know well by the time I had done about a six hour fantasy I had so screwed up the world because I would have just made peace and I'd forget about the economics some minor thing like that you know now it is interesting that there are beings on this planet and there are beings other than on this planet who

have much clearer Consciousness than anybody in any political Arena or any of us probably certainly than me and they are totally in tune with all of this scene and they understand and they have the powers to change it they do have those Powers patanjali isn't talking through his uh beard and yet it is just the way it is if you accept that it's kind of perplexing isn't it I mean don't they give a damn or maybe it's the way it's supposed to be that means just a creepy possibility I was at lecture

last year when it gave when the lecturer gave a list he was an anthropologist he was talking about major changes in cultures and he says usually A Change Is preceded by the alienation of the individual mental illness in the society going up violent crimes going up sexual Hedonism going up religious cultism going up and economic inflation [Music] so from an anthropological point of view it's clear what's happening to us just before I forget I want to complete the Wavy Gravy part of it but as I s

at there at that table selling buttons and stickers I thought this isn't really my way you know it's cool and I love it and I honor wavy and I really want to support his doing it and he now is going to probably go to Thailand to be a clown for the kids in the camps and uh he's arranging benefits for the Savor foundation and all kinds of good things but I realized that I I'll tell you when I realized that uh wavy was going down to the Caribbean and Paul Gorman from WBAI in New York said he wanted

to do an on radio a live interview about nobody for president would I sit in for wavy so I mean it's one thing to be marching in a parade or we were like in Wisconsin wavy had nobody in the back of a pinto in the parade because nobody in his right mind would be in the back of a pinto see and you can see that humor isn't really incredible process for up leveling or for awakening people I mean if you look just compare nobody for president with all the other candidates and you will see that there

is a qualitative difference maybe it is my bag I didn't realize you know warming to my topic tonight I didn't expect to do that see because when Paul interviewed me I realized that I wasn't going to be able to get away with just nobody cares nobody knows the truth about Chappaquiddick nobody you know all of these routines that ravey was using so I had to get heavy because I'm the heavy part you know so I had the list nobody looks beyond politics to people nobody will tell it like it is nobody is

ready to up level nationalism into humanitarianism nobody admits errors nobody is interested in reducing the gap between rich and poor Nations out of compassion rather than out of fear nobody is free of international paranoia nobody cares to see that every human being has a right to be fed and should be fed first you know that in order to feed water house and educate I assume clothed although what wasn't on the list originally all of the people that needed in the world it would roughly cause 17

billion dollars a year which is a lot of money it is exactly what the world spends on arms every two weeks that's who we are I mean this is this is just I'm just holding up a mirror saying this is who we are just let's appreciate Who We Are because it's our Collective paranoia that's doing that nobody is demanding the media assume responsibility commensurate with their power nobody is reducing bureaucracy nobody's calling industry on the carpet for toxic wastes no one is respecting the agent no

one is investigating investing in a Grassroots Communications Network to decentralize power nobody really thinks small is beautiful nobody espouses the politics of love and forgiveness nobody sees worldly power as secondary to spiritual power nobody honors the basic institution the individual human heart see and I I did that but I saw that um that the really essence of the nobody campaign was in the humor and The Awakening people getting them to just think about what candidates really represent

I this is a part of it and I think it's useful but the essence of that particular form it had its form has formed what's going on today that you and I are facing you can write whatever scenario you want and you and I are buying in usually to one or two major scenarios and sometimes with flipping during one day between one and the other let me quickly give you scenario one scenario one the Aquarian age is upon us this is the Golden Age human consciousness is rising to the point where compassion

is finally breaking through the media travel have all cut down our concepts of time and space to the point where we are beginning to truly experience the Brotherhood of humanity it's all happening slowly but happening the polls have shown that Americans are beginning to desire simpler Lifestyles which also goes with higher consciousness tofu is appearing in the supermarkets there are a major breakthroughs in DNA research that may change the whole feeding picture in the world do you know that eve

ry two seconds somebody dies of malnutrition you know that I mean somebody like one of us you ready to die you pick your second two three four two two three four two three four two two three four three four two two three four they went four of us no it's not us it's them it's okay it's them it's those third world thems it's cool but now can you imagine a DNA breakthrough for example just a simple one like the fact that the seed of the cotton cotton seed another little furry thing the seed in it

isn't edible by a single acid stomach like us so it's given the cattle or it's boiled up and made cotton seed oil on it and you know all the countries that graze cotton to like India and they don't eat the seeds well it turns out you can play with the DNA code very simply because why it isn't edible is because of a little thing that appears on it that was probably functional in the uh pleistocene age or something like that and now it's linked to a certain uh to a to one Gene and now you can mani

pulate it and get that Gene turned around and that thing doesn't come through and the cotton seeds edible realize what that does to hunger in the world so when you hang out with people who are into technology they have this is the model this is the this is the scenario it's all cool we really you gotta believe there's plenty of energy it's only a question of being smart enough to figure out how to get it in fact there's enough energy and there's enough Transportation but we can't figure out how

to get the money to the people to buy it there's no purchasing power where it's needed that's what technology tells me part of the new age myth the East and West are coming together the incredible spaciousness Clarity quietness peace of the East is merging with the Exquisite material technology and appreciation of the physical plane of the West and out of it is coming not only holography and curly and photography and on and on and on but a a new kind of spiritual awareness that brings things tog

ether so it doesn't end up like India where every where large segments are starving while the spiritual domain is uh is practiced by some and ignoring the economic physical plan it looks in this positive scenario it looks very much like nuclear energy is going to dry up of itself just because of its economic burden it looks like uh the pressure came from other than just activists although that pushed the button to make it so expensive so that all seems to be happening that's part of this positiv

e scenario there's obviously a Reawakening of religion look at all the Christians have their own television station there are 40 million people in America doing something or other spiritually and there's a lot doing Eastern meditations and there's a lot doing stuff this is all pretty good we are going through some Growing Pains what did you expect when a new age came that the birth wouldn't be a little painful a little bloody around the edges but the baby is coming through healthy and there is a

ll like what happened in Marin County when they ran out of water everybody's Consciousness went up and so it'll be as the stuff hits the fan for us and it's all part of The Grand Design that's the that's one scenario it's a pretty good scenario you sure can breathe a sigh of relief with it let us just reflect a moment on scenario two scenario two we are in the Kali Yuga this is the age when truth is lost when deception Reigns Allah things like Watergate the bull has no feet on the ground in the

Hindu mythology the feet of Truth it's the age when all connection to the spirit is lost morality goes by the wayside the family unit dissolving we in California now statistically are a serially monogamous Society over 50 percent of the marriages end in divorce and over 80 percent of the divorcee is remarried so there it is that's who we are now it's a hard one to keep the family unit together violence and rape and lack of respect for property is way up the Hedonism and the use of cocaine and ot

her related kinds of experiential drugs is at the point where one feels very much like the Roman Empire Revisited we laugh hysterically at the joy we're having as the world Burns we have been called the narcissistic people we are so busy preening before Amira and working on ourselves and worshiping ourselves we've lost it we have no compassion left we have a very deep fear a feeling of impending doom and the fear is so deep that we tend to buy any belief system with Incredible fanaticism and try

to press it on other people so there is incredible proselytizing and almost and lack of respect for one another the rate of entropy is staggering at this moment the way in which we are using up non-renewable resources and moving disequilibrium into balance or into no energy potential entropy is upon us and it's just becoming all too obvious very quickly not only in the usual energy things but in a lot of the metals we work with and so on we are just and let alone our air and our water and our f

orests we are absolutely unconscious and just destroying the very chance of survival Alan Ginsburg came to me from a meeting in New Jersey and he said well I've just been at a meeting about toxic wastes and I want you to know around us it already happened gee and I had a moment thinking gee isn't this interesting now it's a new one now it's already happened we'd have to worry about will it happen it has already happened we can now all get ready to die which is great for my dying project we have

punk rock and all of its implications and part of punk rock's very complex by the way but one of the things it does represent at or at one level it represents is a repudiation of the entire spiritual consciousness movement of the 60s saying oh that's a Croc I mean all you've got to do is go to a Beer Parlor around any college these days and say uh are you really growing from your experiences of being related to the wise people who came out of the 60s and early 70s and you should hear the answers

I mean if you ask it even it's more subtle than that of course say what do you think about the 60s ah nothing happened there a lot of creeps you know nuts part of the Seva Foundation was trying to collect money at Ann Arbor Michigan at a football game for Cambodia and people were yelling at the guys that were collecting the money ah bomb them screw them screw the Cambodian that's us it's part of this scenario and that we are in a swirl of paranoia that gets worse and worse and even our boy scou

t leader Jimmy who generally tries to be good is caught in the military power complex finally and he's you do this sir except it doesn't really work because Fran says well now we ought to think twice about Jesus you know it's far out it's incredible incredible process and that's paranoia and fear leads to Authority so we will very very possibly elect Ronald Reagan and we will out of our desire to hold on to the standard of living we're familiar with we will give up civil liberties left and right

and impose all kinds of authoritarian structures on the society to try to hold on to how we thought it was that's all part of the second scenario now each of those scenarios I think is real to you it is to me and I certainly can get into it but I also am aware that they are both just scenarios I've got another one for you just to throw into the pot see in the cosmos beings are working through millions of incarnations I mean you remember that story about how many Buddha said if you imagine uh a

mountain the length that a Bullocks walks in a day which is six something or others but figure a couple of six miles it's six miles long by six miles wide by six miles high it's a real mountain mountain you know rock and every hundred years a bird flies over it with a silk scarf in its beak and runs the scarf across the top of the mountain in the length of time it takes the silk scarf to wear away the mountain that's how long you and I have been doing it gives you some perspective about this one

doesn't it geez I don't think I made my appointment wow time's a funny thing huh we've been doing it again and again and again and again now imagine see there are all beings I'm just giving you a scenario now it's not true all these beings are at different levels of the game some of them just got got out they just got into human form for the first time others have been through about 40 000 times and you'll learn something each time or you work out Karma whatever you want to call it so now any p

lace everybody's tuned there's a great big computer system everybody knows what's going on and there is there are moments where it's really good for doing certain work to be at a certain place it's like on Tuesday in uh in the year xd4 it would be good to be at this place because anybody there is going to get enlightened so the really high beings who pick up on that and they're ready they go and be there let's assume we all found out that if we took birth at this time we would all simultaneously

be enlightened through a bomb a large mushroom cloud a large white light and we would all be free just take that scenario for a second you and I are these incarnates now we are in human births so that has in it the mystery that we gotta have an illusion you can't you've got to get caught in the Illusions you can't know this by the way only at the moment it happens when you say oh wow this is what it was about well thank God it's over that's nice okay you've got to go through the whole suffering

thing you got to go through the father why have you forsaken me the whole trip but what a precious moment to be born you want that scenario the other scenario is it's just another time and we are doing our work and it goes on and on and on and on and it'll muddle along and some people will die and some will live and you know like an old car that just sort of goes along an old Volkswagen Microbus what you and I are reflecting about is how one lives within scenarios without getting caught in them

if any of you are feeling fair about the future how silly I'm absolutely silly that's not going to help the future it's not helping the present it's not a functional thing at all if you're feeling hope for the future how absolutely silly it's not going to help it's just going to take you from this moment Paul Brunton said to Ramana maharshi in India will Maharaj will Ramona maharshi will he had expressed an opinion about the future of the world as we are living in critical times we're always li

ving in critical times these were the critical times probably in the 50s true pretty critical not as critical as these times and Romana maharshi said why trouble yourself about the future you don't even know about the present take care of the present the future will take care of itself as you are so is the world without understanding yourself what is the use of trying to understand the world this is a question that Seekers after truth need not consider people waste their energies over all such q

uestions first find out the truth behind yourself then you will be in a better position to understand the truth behind the world of which you are a part it's so clear that the obvious Optimum strategy if the world is going to end in a minute or if it's going to end in 10 billion years is to be clear conscious presence and hear I mean all of the training you and I will be talking about when we talk about dying has to do with coming to the moment of death and being so here that you are not pulled

or pushed or frightened or grabbing or holding you just right here and then here and then here and then here and in that sense life and death and living and dying are exactly the same thing and the optimum strategy for you to be totally processing everything and be in harmony with the Dao is to be in the moment be with the moment fully which includes the past and the future it doesn't negate it it's all in here I know that in two days or three days or two days I'll be in Iowa City speaking at th

is time and the next night in Omaha Nebraska I know that that's part of the future but at this moment I'm right here that's also here too but I'm not busy not being here because of that the present you and I are living in a time where change is obviously happening the style of our lives in our lifetimes is going to change our political role in the world is going to change our chances of survival are changing who our friends and enemies are is changing whether you can get in a car and take a Sund

ay drive is changing whether you can have on your table the foods that Fascinate You When you go to the supermarket is changing when I walk down the alley of a supermarket I used to get my appetite used to get greater and greater and I want this and I want this now I lose all my appetite because I can't the prices of whims are beyond my tolerance and I noticed my diet getting simpler and I'm not suffering it's great and there's the key right in there not to assume that every time it changes it's

worse not far out I mean that's part of my tradition my family tradition if it changes it's going to be worse we've always done it this way we've always had pot roast on Sunday all I can tell you is working with people that have terminal illness that as each of their techniques for controlling the universe Falls away they awaken a little bit more potentially they can use it they can get caught in oh my God I can't any longer walk to the bathroom and they can be busy being somebody who's not wal

king to the bathroom you imagine that who are you well yesterday I could walk to the bathroom but today I can't heavy isn't it so you don't want to laugh but it's funny it's one of those things but the fact is you know I was with this fellow again I don't know whether I told this um from that was dying of um he had Hodgkin's disease and he was in the final stages of it and he had he had had chemotherapy and he had a wig and he was a pusher in San Francisco and he decided he was going to die by o

ding on heroin and taking LSD and he came to me to discuss it consult not seemed reasonable to me and um so we went for a ride and we went for a ride up on Route 1 over in Marin and he I had a rental car and he said um could I drive it'll probably be my last time and he was about 22. you know what it is like for 22 year olds to drive I mean I know it was like when I was 22 to drive so I said of course so he started to drive but the problem was he didn't have the strength to turn the wheel and on

one you know it really uh does require that particular skill and I would find us headed for the ocean and I'd reach over and turn the wheel and finally I said look just because you're gonna die doesn't mean I have to die yeah we've got to recognize that who you were a few days ago you aren't now now you're somebody that rides you don't drive so Let It Go Lightly that's the way it is I'll drive so I drove and he rode and at first he felt sad and then we worked with the sadness till he let it go

and we were just with the beauty of Route 1 and we were just being together in the love of and our shared presence and it was enough the minute he let go of the model the model what was was what was creating the suffering not the existential situation and as the change hits in economics in politics in Social relations in all of it you and I may find ourselves eating out of a tin can meeting next time maybe next time within the next month maybe you and I may find ourselves under a girder of a bri

dge sharing a can of something cooked over a a little fire of trash we found and I'll look at you and I'll say are you here I'm here far out here we are well this is sure a change you'll probably say isn't that terrible isn't it terrible God I've lost so much well you can hang on to that as long as you want but we have a new existential moment how you deal with change which is absolutely inherent in all forms is what is the issue of suffering it all changes the minute you have a model of how it

is you stop the change you fix it thank you okay okay there's a beautiful change story that Larry brilliant tells Larry's the um Founding Father of the Seva Foundation and he was involved in the smallpox eradication program in India and um Larry was a political activist doctor in Berkeley in the 60s and he's very committed to each person has their right to do it the way they want but he found himself part of the World Health Organization team to eradicate smallpox which causes pox and blindness

and death to countless people and it spread in such a way that you've got to isolate each village where it is and inoculate everybody and then just keep getting Village by Village by Village and they got it down in Indian Bangladesh to a very few villages but in one of these Villages it was the religious belief of the people that smallpox was the gift of God and to stop it was against the will of God now here's Larry in a peculiar position because he's pro-vaccination if they don't vaccinate thi

s village where there is smallpox somebody from this Village could go to a railway station interact with 500 people in within the course of about two minutes in India all of whom will go back to 500 different villages and there we go again so Larry found himself part of a midnight raid on this Village with vaccination needles in hand and they came to the the hut that belonged to the head of the village this old man and his wife and child and they broke down the door of the Hut which was barricad

ed and they wrestled the old man to the ground and vaccinated him while all the towns people stood around waiting to see the outcome of this and then they wrestled the wife to the ground and she bit the doctor and blood flowed and finally they vaccinated the child and the whole vaccination drama was over and everything stopped and everybody stood up and then the old man turned and he walked out to his little garden which was very dry but there was one Loki there was one squash there and he took

the squash and he brought it in and he handed it to the Indian Doctor Who was the head of the vaccination team who also had been bitten by his wife he had it in the squash and Larry couldn't understand what had happened and so he asked what had happened and the man said he said it is our belief that smallpox is the gift of God and to eradicate it is wrong it is my Dharma to act in harmony with my beliefs so I had to protect me and my people from vaccination you come from a different place it is

your understanding that is God's wish that smallpox be eradicated you were doing your Dharma there are many of you there are a few of us for us to be defeated is no shame now you are a guest in my home I'm sorry I don't have more to offer you okay now there is a statement of Dharma there's a statement of change there's a statement of conscious living with change hold on tightly Let Go Lightly hold on tightly plan oh my land so how do I serve I keep listening I got a call would you be at Earth Da

y you happen to be in Boulder Colorado in Longmont Colorado on Saturday Sunday would you be there for Peace Day well I was going to be in town on Sunday's sure unfolding It's Just Happening the participation is happening the heart gets pulled this way and that the thing I have to watch for is righteousness I said to an audience the other night in Santa Cruz where I was doing a benefit for Cambodia I said I really feel like I'm ripping this scene off I'm getting such a dose of righteous Merit loo

k how good I am I'm doing a Cambodian relief benefit there's an interesting line in patanjali that says no giving and no receiving it's in the purifications the Yama now I'm killing non-stealing non-lying non-sexual misconduct non-giving wow non-giving and receiving isn't to give good to give is good to be busy being The Giver is a drag because if you're busy being The Giver then the other person you force them into the role of object of being the receiver well if you happen to be that part of u

s which is giving and then there is that part of us which is receiving ah how different how different when you do social action out of intellectual art you are caught in the righteousness game when you keep dealing deepening your emptiness and the openness of your heart and your quietness and your spaciousness and your love and just keep deepening these The Compassion keeps deepening and the actions come not out of guilt or fear or ought or should but they just come out of it's obvious because t

hat's who we are if I am taking care of a baby and the baby falls and hits its head I pick it up and comfort it I didn't have to decide should I or OD I if I stick my hand on a hot stove and it starts to burn I take it off I don't have to decide theoretically whether I should well finally the Cambodian mouth is the hot is the finger on the on the fire and you're doing it not because you're a good guy you're doing it because obviously this is who we are and that's the Awakening consciousness that

's the compassion that's coming out of Awakening Consciousness that's what's kind of fun I met with a group in the Seva Foundation when we had our board meeting and here were people from World Health Organization communicable disease thing in Atlanta Wavy Gravy I mean mashugana people and people with briefcases and neckties and a whole you know and we all looked at each other like what are we doing here my God locked in the back woods of Ann Arbor Michigan for three days a woman Ophthalmology op

hthalmic surgeon from you know with a sort of a that kind of person with the journals and the what is what is your belief system I said I don't have any belief system it's just all true so there was a few days of delicacy but then came the recognition which was an incredible mind blowing for me that across all these differences there was a reason we were all together and that was because we were all tuned to the Fulfillment it gave to our beings as just beings to be involved in this serving shar

ing process with other human beings and none of nobody in the group was busy being a good guy we were all almost guilty we were having so much fun in service there was a very beautiful Saint an Indian named sambari Maharaj in the common Hills and he had a devotee who was dying and they brought the devotee to see somebody Maharaj in those days they brought him in a a little basket with uh Four Guys carrying it miles and they brought it in and Mara Maharaj Guru sambari Maharaj said take him to the

river and bathe him and the man had drunk one drop of milk a day now for six weeks and they couldn't bathe them because his skin was so dull and they said maraji the river's cold and he'll die bathe and bathe him and he went and he cooked a big greasy thing of potatoes and then he brought they brought washed him and they brought him up and he forced the potatoes into the guy's mouth and the guy lived to have four more children and you know that's one of those stories okay I'm just telling you w

ho somebody Maharaj is so um one day sambari Maharaja um is with a devotee and he says to him he had a very uh Fierce disposition he said to this devotee here are two potatoes take these down to the river and eat them both those are the instructions from the guru so the devotees been a devotee for years so he rushes down to the river and he starts to eat the potatoes and he's eating the first potato and this beggar comes along sadhu maybe very poor hungry looking fellow and he says Mahatma G he

says you have two potatoes I have none I'm so hungry would you give me one of your potatoes so what could the guy do you gave him the potato and then he came back up the hill and as he was climbing the hill and came towards the cave where somebody Maharaja was which was out of sight of the river some very marriage came out screaming you fool you idiot I told you to eat both potatoes well I guess it just wasn't in your destiny the resolution is that that man became a leading judge his children al

l married well had health had wonderful children and did well in business that was all the first potato now those kind of stories are real stinkers aren't they because all you and I all want to be the person that gives away the second potato see I feel every time I get a letter would you appear here would you do this somebody calls I my child is dying would you talk to me would you would you would you could you would you could you please would you could you how do you say no that's the second po

tato of course of course of course of course of course now if I can really hear what maharaji is saying how do I know God feed people and serve people and I can flip it so that every one of those is merely service to bring me to God not merely but his service to bring me to God I'm home free but if I can't convert it all and it starts to weigh on me and I think oh my God I can't answer another phone call then maybe what I've got to do is stop giving away the potatoes for a while and only I know

that's why when I meet somebody else who isn't busy out protesting and somebody who is out protesting I really can't judge one versus the other so obvious that each of us can only convert that amount of Fire like in the story of the ramayana Sita Ram's wife Rama's God and Sita is God's wife and seat has been stolen away by ravana who's the bad guy Robin has taken her off to an island called Lanka Sri Lanka and he's been with her for quite a while and he's quite a ladies man because he's got 20 h

eads or 10 heads and 20 arms you can make a lot of love with 20 arms and when he's finally when Sita is finally rescued from ravana and brought back ROM isn't so sure she's been true to him and some of the people are questioning it and she says if there is any doubt of my Purity let me walk through fire and if I'm impure I'll be burned up in those days they did those things because that was a different Yuga and Faith was much stronger then so everybody could be a fire Walker if you appear enough

so they built a big fire in the middle of the square and everybody gathered and she got on and stood in the middle of the fire and not even the Hem of her sorry was burned because when you've got pure gold and you run it through fire nothing happens because it's already all the fire the fire is done it's purified all the stuff out of it the dross is gone but when you are attached still to the dross the fire burns and it really hurts if I am busy being somebody who's doing something that means I

'm still attached to my ego doing something that next telephone call can hurt because it can be the straw that breaks the camel's back on the other hand if I merely am and there is answering the phone and serving and helping and being and quiet and I'm quiet in the midst of it it is all just more and more stuff and I am sitting quietly and getting deeper and quieter and more present as death life fear hope sexual desire all of these just keep coming coming coming coming as they do for you as wel

l as for me until we are just right here all the time heart open mind quiet not sitting like a zombie not imitating Buddha or Christ or anybody but being fully in our Incarnation so while this being is sitting here you are mowing the lawn protesting collecting the bottles eating the Curry playing with the kids making love being tired being angry being hurt Desiring loneliness jealousy fear guilt greed pain Joy innocence corruption cynicism and here we are and with your many arms you're doing all

of this while the heart is right here and the mind is right here and it's all happening within the spaciousness that is The Quiet Mind ah now I have a car and I can go places ah my car just blew up now I can't go anyplace awesome and there is a way of acting in which you work from a quietness that is listening all the time so your actions come out of this just quiet listening place the best story I know about that is um the cutting up of the ox Prince When wheeze cook was cutting up an ox out w

ent a hand down went his shoulder he planted a foot he pressed with the knee the ox fell apart with a whisper the bright Cleaver murmured Like A Gentle Wind Rhythm timing like a sacred dance like the Mulberry Grove like ancient harmonies good work the prince exclaimed your method is faultless Method said the cook laying aside his cleaver what I follow is the Dao beyond all methods when I first began to cut up oxen I would see before me the whole Ox all in one Mass after three years I no longer s

aw this mess I saw the distinctions now I see nothing with the eye my whole being apprehends my senses are idle the spirit free to work without plan follows its own Instinct Guided by natural line by the secret opening the hidden space the cleaver Finds Its Own Way I cut through no joint chop no bone a good cook needs a new Chopper once a year he cuts a poor cook needs one every month he hacks I have used the same Cleaver 19 years it has cut up a thousand oxen its Edge is as Keen as if newly sha

rpened there are spaces in the joints the blade is thin and Keen when this thinness finds that space there is all the room you need it goes like a breeze hence I have this Cleaver 19 years as if newly sharpened true there are sometimes tough joints I feel them coming I slow down I watch closely hold back barely move the blade and whoop the part Falls away Landing like a clot of Earth then I withdraw the blade I stand still and let the joy of the work sink in I clean the blade and put it away Pri

nce Juan Hui said this is it my cook has shown me how I ought to live my entire life you are ready for change because change is all there is and you have no models to which you are attached as to how it is you have models but you hold them tightly and let go lightly you listen to hear what your dharmic part is in the play and you honor every part of your Incarnation as impeccably as you know how you don't get lost in the many and forget the one you don't get lost in the one and forget the money

and you do it all lightly knowing it's just one scenario or another and here we are in Journey to the east Herman hess's Leo says to HH the heavy AJ says it's not you don't think it's all a game do you Leos is just what it is a beautiful Exquisite game Walter Cronkite may have lost the game but you don't have to it's easy to get caught thinking you're the thimble or the top hat on the Monopoly board but behind it all here we are and in this here we are there is no fear there is no hope there are

no emotions and there's no emptiness there is neither form nor lack of form it just is and it's all coming out of this this Exquisite form fear anger hope desire love and we play in it all we are it's all the Delight to be in it deny nothing get caught in nothing so simple poem by Rumi the minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you not knowing how blind that was lovers don't finally meet somewhere they are in each other all along that last line interesting the minute I heard m

y first love story I started looking for you not knowing how blind that was lovers don't finally meet somewhere they are in each other all along this year last year it was two planes any two this year I'm pushing three planes out of the infinite variety of planes I'm just pushing three one is what we would call The Eagle plane that will include the physical mental and emotional body then we'll call the second one the Soul Plane and that will include the way in which you are a somebody awareness

you're still somebody you are an entity with unique Karma and the third plane is the plane of pure awareness which is really not a plane but we'll use the word planes now we could use spheres but we'll just use planes for fun don't think that planes mean the higher is better they're just different from one another so if I were to review our storyline thus far from let's say the Soul's point of view the middle level I would say I had some business to do which we will call Karma psychic DNA some s

ome unill digested attachments aversions and attractions and that Karma led to the manifestation of me in a physical form in other words I took birth in an incarnation and when I was born I was still fully out there with my karma to run through of course but that Karma involved a certain experience of socialization and in that process I knew ultimately of my separateness I experienced my separateness from God or from all or from something in other words I began to get attached to the form in whi

ch I had manifested I'm now speaking as a soul foreign there is a kind of a moment of incredible fear when the form starts to solidify enough so there's a boundary so there is a form and other there is uh and other you pinch your toe and you pinch the bed post and they're different and you keep pinching and pinching and pinching and pinching and you're learning that's me and that's not me or something like that now it can be as early as when you leave when you get born when you leave the womb it

could be that separation or it could be the separation when you first experience um sucking and there's no milk coming that is when you experience the separateness so that the Universe isn't all one thing anymore this is an awareness that there's something separate you have separated and you have gotten caught in a part of the universe rather than the awareness you are the whole universe so you have what Rajiv talks about been imprisoned by your own mind in some way I mean this is the mind that

's done this because the hunger was so strong and it wasn't being fulfilled and there was pain and this is these learnings of very deep when there was an emotional component to them and most of us got very deeply socialized into being somebody into our incarnation it's as if there is a when you take an Incarnation and I'm just going out this is Advanced course when you take an incarnation there is it's like getting into a spacesuit and the whole program for running that space suit on this plane

of existence physical mental emotional social psychological that whole mechanism is something that is like software in the system and it has to be developed you you develop the software and that happens through your DNA code through your socialization process through all the people you meet and talk to yeah but notice an interesting thing that your whole sense of separateness is really rooted from some discomfortable dis uncomfortable experience of being separate in other words you didn't jump i

nto separateness as a celebration for the most part you were kind of pushed into separateness maybe you would have jumped a moment later and maybe you did jump and that's just the experience you had was one of pushing against it as you obviously did and I did the other day when I was thinking back over all of this in my life I can experience that the power of my mother to deliver milk to me and keep me fulfilled dry and warm and loved I traced how the separation from my ability to be that so tha

t I got into separateness so that I tried to control it as soon as you become somebody you get a new power thing because as a somebody as a baby you're awfully little and the forces around you are very big and so I re I somehow experience in myself having experienced the pain of separateness and having not the power to control that that I couldn't get what I wanted when I wanted it once I became a somebody who wanted some and I only became the somebody who wanted something because I couldn't bec

ause I didn't have what I wanted all the time I hadn't even had a want up until then I had to learn once by the way I wanna and really most of my life from all my education because these were all surrogates for that power person that held the control of my being and I developed as you did incredible skills of looking into other people's eyes to know who you were am I good am I enough am I achieving am I successful am I beautiful am I fulfilling am I attractive am I smart enough whatever judgment

al thing you imposed on yourself and I and myself and I kept trying to be satisfied all the time through various things but notice how all of it all of my separateness was built on relationship my relationship with my mother with my father with my surrogates with all of the things that then became so on and how much the whole web of what I call my ego is basically relational so for example I'm working on the field of Aging now on conscious aging and what I notice is the karmic effect of that in

old people when they end up feeling lonely isolated lack of self-respect that's the whole Chronicle of things that are primarily relational things and they are suffering because of them because of their identification Within and as you know my story I guess I would have continued to be that somebody having then been trained as you know in somebody's specialness just like you were so we aren't just somebody with somebody special and then we all go around being somebody special and we form relatio

nships based on our specialness and their specialness and we look for symbiosis around our specialness and it's all very dramatic it's all As the World Turns and it's all so poignantly beautifully horrible and so thick and everybody's in it right up to their eyeballs and it does she does he will they won't they can I can't I what will they think if I do oh yeah goodbye I miss you I love you go away it's all relational stuff I mean you just look at your language your Concepts all of it it's so th

ick you keep saying I want to be alone don't kid yourself you don't want to be alone you wouldn't exist funny way you only exist relationally at that level it's the funny thing about the ego How Deeply it is in relationships and that's why I got interested in what happened in the 60s when was a certain thing culminated that was kind of bubbling around in the in the history of the culture which was the um undivided loyalty to individualism after communism and after fascism and communism we got in

to individualism in it what's in it for me am I growing who am I what do I need what do I want what do I desire almost a worship of our somebody-ness I have a right to be somebody and that came out of years of feeling you didn't of carrying around the feeling I'm powerless and something I'm wrong because I don't I'm not the whole universe like I used to be which you experience as a baby must be incredibly painful the moment not just a physical birth but of psychological birth of the experience o

f separateness as an entity when you have been the whole thing I've described uh in many lectures and on tape and I can't do the whole story but the experience in Hawaii with that community of meditators in Hawaii where finally they had pushed me to my limits and they all were had their hands on my body and I was screaming and screaming and screaming as to their orders and it suddenly I was back in a crib in my room in at home and um I was screaming the same way and my mother was holding me down

just had her hand on my chest I was having a temper tantrum obviously of some sort and she was just being a good mother she wasn't giving way to it she wasn't reinforcing temper tanters which he didn't do in those days later you did and look what happened but she didn't and she wasn't out of a like I'm a mean mother she was just calming me down but it was firm and the firmness had a resistance to my power I couldn't control the situation anymore and the experience was one of loss of power and w

hen I see when I look at business and I look at government and I look into the personalities of all of the politicians and don't you see all that fear and don't you see all that sense of not being powerful enough and if I had the power it would all be all right it's we are caught in a drama so thick of ego ego structures ego constructs that have come out of our intellectual extrapolations from a basic root conceptual models of who am I and how the world works which has to do with fear it has to

do with feelings of pain of separateness it has to do with with power it has to do with a yearning a yearning to come back to a certain feeling at home in the universe at home at one and I think most of what we live with in politics in um business in most of our professions most of our lifestyles deeply deeply deeply emerged in these particular conceptual plane of reality that everybody conspires to see is real like in the book I'm doing with aging it's absolutely amazing how this Society conspi

res to Define what aging is and then sucks everybody into believing it's true and then they live it out and it's a hype it is a complete hype it's a creation of mine so that if you look at Aging in almost all the literature it is seen as a problem that's the first one is that bizarre you know it's like the leaves turn red in the fall and you say we got a problem let's get out there with a green can and paint them all green what the hell we can't have these leaves turning red what's that about I

mean it's so absolutely bizarre bizarre the first thing you have to realize is you're in prison you've been had you bought into a conceptual model that you got trained into from birth to deal with your separateness and it's a whole structure that you've invested with reality and from your point of view it's the only reality most the time when my father would say Richard come back to reality that's the one he meant now where are all the other planes of reality when we're so busy investing in this

one rather uninteresting plan it's not uninteresting it's actually passionately beautiful but it's also on interesting if it's your only one it's a very sparse it's like having not having cable [Laughter] but the minute you realize you are in prison that's the relative reality perception you realize you got a problem you realize there's more than one channel you realize there's another place from which to look however you want to say it you understand the theory of relativity you understand tha

t everything is real depending on where you're looking at it from just like you dreamed last night and in that dream that stuff was real and you woke up and then you said I woke up into what I mean you you ultimately must realize you just woke up into another one of them didn't the one you were in last night seem real didn't seem like you were in a hall with all those people [Laughter] and then you woke up and they're all gone still here long dream and once I had realized that I was in prison wh

ich is what my first mushroom trip absolutely ascertained for me with certainty or as certain as relative reality can get I look back at all the years in which I had taken it all so quote seriously and I thought didn't I have any clues any of those years I mean did I go 30 years without a clue that I was caught in some weird psychosis group psychosis at that time I didn't I didn't quite see it over the years I began to see that as my vision of where I was looking from changed then a number of th

ings that had been in the background in my life started to come out as a figure and things that were figures started to recede in the background and suddenly I could see that there was a web of that information and that wisdom available but I was busy not seeing it because of the intense nature of the plane I was seeing the interesting example of that uh that predicament was the one um uh in which my Guru said to me on the second time I saw him after he the first day he told me how my mother had

died the second day he said your mother is a great Saint and I said didn't maharaji say was a great Saint and the translator asked maharaji Margie said no is a great saint and she was dead so she was a dead great Saint so what was that and what I experienced at the moment he said that was the realization that my mother wasn't who I had thought she was that I had trapped her in being that Jewish middle class nurturing very responsible mother and that was just who she had incarnated as and he was

saying she's a great being and suddenly at that moment there was a figure ground reversal and the very few maybe four or five times in our life that I could remember when there had been that reversal and where we had recognized one another as fellow beings I want an example that I always use is she and I were coming back from the dentists I was maybe nine so and we came to a stoplight and we were playing a game to see who could hold a note the longest and we were both screaming at the top of ou

r lungs and we looked over and there was a man in the next car looking at us as if we were both completely insane and there was a moment when our whole game of mother and child dissolved into the the hate of the moment and at that moment we were outside of our roles for a moment and then back in and those were so few and yet they had existed and it's interesting after he said that Ever After that's who she and I have been with one another and all that other stuff has disappeared or dissolved int

o the ground and it's why I say to people when they're grieving you're grieving for all the forms of the Incarnation but why you're grieving is because you connected with love to the deeper nature of the other person and when you stop filling your mind with yourself pity anger hope fear wishing and quiet you experience nothing happened nobody went anywhere it is barely because I've measured you in terms of your forms I've reduced you into form and now you're dead and you up leveled me you said f

ind me now go ahead you really love me find me and you keep wanting the form back because that's that's the one that turns you on But ultimately you have to turn on from somewhere else otherwise you're always desperate for external Russians so the Awakening is the is an Awakening could be said to be I mean the word Awakening is used in the spiritual liturgy could be said to be the moment when you realize you're in prison the moment when you experience another reality the moment when you see ther

e are other ways of looking at it all I mean really other really other I'm not talking about other places in your thought process but other now what you call that place from which you look at your life when before you were just busy busy thinking you were it your Incarnation life where do you look at it from and that's where we're using the word Saul which could at the deepest levels of the use of the word witness could be that but usually it isn't now let's look at the Soul's predicament the so

ul had some Karma to work out took an Incarnation got lost in the Incarnation and then starts to awaken and realize that it has just taken an Incarnation and it had to get lost and go through the whole process of Awakening for the Incarnation to work out the karma this is not an error in the system the predicament of the word soul is that it's got all kinds of Christian overlay I guess it's got Jewish overlay and probably every other religious overlay too I don't mean to lay it on the Christians

just that they are so soulful and and and actually that's because that plane is a wonderful leverage plane to get able to see the plane you've been stuck on it's a very useful plane it's like a step in a ladder and it allows you to take your pressure off your foot on the lower rung because you're on the Middle Run so that you could say that one of the ways of Awakening is you awaken to realize you are a soul that has been lost for quite a while in an incarnation which you created or which is th

e Manifest of what your karma needs it's all fine there's no errors it's just interesting oh my God have I been had I'm not that being at all and the experience of the Awakening of the Soul which one is not just the Awakening because with my mother and all we were Awakening into that place of just being two beings sharing the peculiarity of the predicament we found ourselves in as an incarnate as incarnates like as Golem said what are we doing here where this is real what are we doing stuck in t

his place where it's real that's the Lazy Man's Guide to enlightenment so from the Soul's point of view as you start to awaken you see the way in which the Incarnation sticks to you as you're sort of shaking it off like shaking off water or stuff like that now there's a tendency because you've been trapped in the Incarnation for so long when you awaken to see it in negative terms it trapped me it's thick it's heavy it's something and you push against it and that's called it's like the renunciate

path I just won't think of rhinoceros you know I just will push away life and then I will I will push away Incarnation and then I will be as sore as a soul in other words I want to get high and I want to push away the low and low and high are still seen as value things that higher is better than lower higher I feel connected to the universe I feel I'm in my soul lower I come down back into my psychodynamic social physical somebody specialness trapped back here again from the Soul's point of vie

w the the curriculum of the Soul has two components to it they're really interesting it's the middle level remember now first of all it's working with its incarnation and it sees ultimately that Buddha was absolutely right on that the clinging of mine the attraction and the aversions of mind are what juice the whole system and the suffering and the whole stick so the soul is using the experiences of incarnation to get lost in than to awaken out of to see one's predicament and to get to the point

where one can be as Christ said in the world but not of the world you are not pushing away your Incarnation because that's an aversion and you can't afford any aversions anymore his aversions are from the ego level the soul doesn't have aversions the soul just sees aversions and attractions within the ego every time you're identified with an attraction or an aversion you're identified with your ego so the job of extricating oneself into one's soul is slowly cultivating those qualities which all

ow you to see the whole process and to calm yourself into realizing that your Incarnation is about extricating yourself from attractions and aversions so that you are not lost in Incarnation anymore but it doesn't mean pushing against it as you'll soon find out in the horny celibate period [Music] is if you push against it it still got you the game is to go beyond that into the point where you are fully in the world and fully not in the world there are stages where you get into your soul where y

ou say oh I miss the passions of life meaning the passions the excitements that were caused by being lost in it and you think I'll never have those again I'll never have my first romance I'll never have this and I'll never have that because those were so adrenaline rushy heady stuff you must remember and that's a lot like what is often called The Dark Knight of the Soul where you have sort of realized that you're not going to have the intensity of the excitement that came from being totally lost

into the linear drama and not knowing how it comes out it all comes out the same it all turns back into whatever it is that's the nature of the transitory nature of phenomena whether you like it or not the soul is unique it has its unique Karma it's working it out through Incarnation as it awakens to its own existence it starts to shed the attractions and the aversions that had it stuck and closed down into the prison of incarnation it awakens so now the soul is present and the Incarnation is u

nfolding its storyline is continuing ramdas is continuing its Story Goes On hello how are you yes I'll do that hello good evening this is ROM does that's all the storyline and slowly more and more behind it is just ah wow look at that one mild curiosity at first that's a subtle attachment Fascination my you wouldn't have believed that would you the synchronicity was appalling and then you get to the point and then the point of it's all precious see you can't experience the all precious beautiful

Yum Yum Yum of the Beloved as long as you're afraid of being trapped by it you've got to get through your original uh reaction to the trauma of what you've been through of being trapped when the soul wakes up it's it's like oh I mean it's very shaky very shaky it isn't of course but it thinks it's shaking so now when somebody says I have a special relationship with you the question is the souls have special relationships egos certainly do souls are working out their stuff through ego special re

lationships but the question is do you want to identify with a special relationship or do you want to identify with a soul and if it's a soul we just you hear I'm here hi well what have we got to do well this time we'll just wave now this time lets you be my father and I'll be your child now this time let's be competitors okay it's like when the Dalai Lama was asked what he thought of The Big Bang Theory he said which one foreign and the mature relationships that we develop that you when you whe

n you work on yourself deeply enough and you meet another person who is working on themselves deeply enough is we meet just as you hear I'm here and then if we have a dance to do we dance and if we don't have a dance to do we don't dance but the dance of the not dance doesn't matter to either of us and yet we love each other deeply deeply and I don't mind really playing with different ones of you in these different ways as if it really matters but it's much more fun if you also realize it doesn'

t matter much more fun the game is much higher and I keep saying everybody hey play it a different way come on out it's like having a ball bouncing outside at Sunset and everybody's got their nose pressed against the window saying we can't come out mother said it's too late we can't come out and I'm just waiting for somebody to come out and play and most of you we play for moments and then people go back into stuff and I go back into stuff and that's our work is to extricate ourself from having

to look at how we are with each other as egos rather than as Souls and I think it's a confusion the term soul mates I mean I can understand it I can see Souls traveling together through series of incarnations because they have work to do most of the people that use the word soulmate do it from an ego level and there's a whole way of describing spiritual planes from ego that is really basically ego stuff a lot of the New Age movement is that it is basically an ego rip-off of spiritual Concepts by

people who still want Power because they are rooted in fear the soul isn't rooted in fear the soul is doing fine and when maharaji said to me ramdas don't you see it's all perfect he was saying hey couldn't you come up for air for a second you know couldn't you come out and play a little bit and I'm saying no it's real damn it it's wrong it's bad there's good and there's evil and this is evil and he's saying we'll wait you know he's flipping through the deck of incarnations and seeing that abou

t a hundred thousand incarnations down the line I will say oh God you were high but he's in no rush where's he gonna go laughs huh I mean when Souls look at people who are busy being egos just realize how poignant it all looks how poignant it all looks and you love the person and you but you love the soul and the the storyline is so poignant but my storyline's poignant I mean my storyline is no more interesting to me than yours is to me it's all vitally interesting it is and it's all empty I'll

give you vital if you'll allow empty if you don't buy empty you can't have vinyl see if you don't understand what I'm saying you've got two choices either I'm insane or you are and I have the faintest idea I wish I could help you because it seems real to me what I'm saying to you so good luck the fun is that when the hubbub and clamor of ego entrapment gets lightened and I mean light and so that you're not pushing against it but so you're really in it but you're not caught in it like taking care

of my father through the years of his last years was going from being caught in doing it from one level which was ego level slowly to extricating until we were Souls just completing the business of ego and Incarnation together so as it gets lighter not through avoidance but lighter through harmoniously fulfilling one's Dharma fulfilling one's stuff on Earth doing what your thing is hearing your uniqueness and manifesting just not getting caught in it as you get lighter into all of that then the

Soul's initial business comes to light which is its relationship to the one or to the to the non-block no words the what the fingers pointing at the finger of religion points at something it's the mystery it's the relation of the soul to the mystery and that ultimately is the only game in town that's the language of the Mystic poetry it's the language of the Soul yearning to be with God to be in God to be one with what is to be Beyond boundary to ultimately run the strings that keep a boundary

between something and something else in other words is to become in love which is boundaryless it is to die into love and what's happened if you notice the sequence is you went from one into soul soul took birth into separate Katniss separateness awakes to soul and then when soul is at in harmony got its act together then Souls yearning for the coming back out of its own ultimate separateness that is created by it's the karmic structure of it all then it starts to come back into the one and that

yearning is the call toe is the Beloved and many of you know because I've read this that almost every Retreat these words from Ananda maima she said this body has lived with father mother husband and all this body has served the husband so you may call it a wife it has prepared dishes for all so you may call it a cook it has done all sorts of scrubbing and menial work so you may call it a servant but if you look at the thing from another standpoint you will realize that this body has served non

e but God for when I served my father mother husband and others I simply considered them as different manifestations of the almighty and serve them as such when I sat down to prepare food I did so as if for God whatever I did I did in a spirit of divine service hence I was not quite worldly though always engaged in household affairs I had but one ideal to serve all as God to do everything for the sake of God now can you hear there's the whole ego storyline going Bengali woman wife does it all bu

t she's on the level of soul doing her life as an offering to bring her to the Beloved when Hanuman is with ram and RAM says to Hanuman who are you Hanuman and Hanuman says when I don't know who I am I serve you when I know who I am I am you okay now we're talking about the second and the third planes that I'm asking you to consider because the second plane is the soul and you and I are fellow Souls that have taken Incarnation and we're meeting in this room in Marin with our story lines coming f

rom distances all of our life stuff and we're souls coming to meet as it's a convention it's a party of Souls it's a party of Souls and we're meeting each other through our our psyches and personalities and stuff but behind it we're laughing far out what happened to you this trip well I really had you should have seen the my God what happened in my childhood you wouldn't believe I've been milking it for 30 years I'm a fierce player by the way don't make friends with an elephant trainer unless yo

u have room for an elephant in your living room a great Hindu lion as laughs are you looking for me I am in the next seat my shoulder is against yours you will not find me in stupid or Indian Shrine rooms nor in synagogues nor in cathedrals not in masses nor keratins nor in legs winding around your neck nor in eating nothing but vegetables when you really look for me you will see me instantly you will find me in the tiniest hour of time Kabir says students tell me what is God is the breath insid

e the breath and so the predicament between the second and third planes that I'm asking you to consider is that the second has this intense yearning to merge back into the Beloved and as that merging occurs the next surrender the next death if you will that's not a ripping it's just a movement into there is the realization that God has been all of it all along that that final plane is something that includes everything it excludes nothing you could call that third plane and we will for this week

end awareness awareness see go back inside yourself a moment a few moments we're going to meditate together so you have to do it heavy now just hear the method you go back inside yourself and you sit down so that the trauma of your ego Story quiets down just a little bit and then you begin to feel the awareness the presence of soul which is still you and unique and you're seeing your life unfold you're seeing your clingings your shadows your loves your passions your seeing it all you're mindfull

y bringing mindfulness to what is in incarnation and if you keep going and saying but who's that who's that who am I what is then even in in Buddhist anata then even the sense of a separate entity turns out to just be more phenomena you're even thinking of yourself as separate finally dissolves and you are indeed back where you started would be one way of saying it although that hadn't flies start and back and beginning and end you've been there all along that's the bizarre thing the realization

you've been here all the way along it was like I had a dream and I awoke oh the dream was that I was separate even as a soul and then that soul and its separateness all comes into awareness but as phenomena as phenomena and at that moment you start to appreciate if you go inward you begin to appreciate how awareness is awareness it's not your awareness it's not my awareness it's nothing personal and when you and I rest in awareness that is the culmination of love because you're not even a breat

h apart you are the breath within the breath when people say may peace be with you peace cannot be with the ego except like for the briefest second because the ego's made up of stuff that doesn't allow for it the soul is still moving towards something awareness is peace and phenomena arise I am a phenomenon in your Consciousness at this moment just another moment just another moment I guarantee you that within 10 hours this will be gone and there'll be even the memory of it gone it'll come back

but it'll be gone you'll be so busy getting supper that just in cutting the beans this moment will be gone where was it oh I'll never forget this I hope you will because awareness is in the moment it's not in muldering butterflies of memories of awareness it's in the moment it's so bizarre as we will see this weekend as we keep playing with this how you can go through time into timelessness you can go through becoming into being you can go into through meditation of planes of consciousness of th

e witness and the deeper witness and the witness of the witness and back in until it's just and all of that keeps going in and out and in and out and in and out and that's an interesting one does it ever be all in at the same moment I don't really know that because the way we see manifestations is always from one plane or another like the other quote of an under my mom that I use are the words on one plane speaking about another plane it's the finger pointing at the moon and once paramahansa Yog

ananda asked Ananda my mod to tell him something of her life father she said there is little to tell my Consciousness has never Associated itself with this temporary body before I came on Earth father I Was the Same I grew into Womanhood but still I Was the Same when the family in which I had been born made arrangements to have this body married I Was the Same and father in front of you now I am the same even afterwards though the dance of creation changes around me in the Hall of Eternity I sha

ll be the same can you hear who that is it's you that's peace do you hear that that's Equanimity that's peace oh just the same loss gain Fame shame pleasure pain Life Death same boy did you see that world end heavy wasn't it now see this is the advanced course I'm challenging you now to get all three planes going so that you are honoring the ego and you're playing your part and you're in your role and you're doing it all perfectly the soul that is running off its karmic tab well there goes abuse

there's you know there's Financial dismal failure that's good I needed one of those to fill in that square let's see foreign Administration I need one of those [Laughter] [Music] huh comes a good golf score I certainly needed one of those Souls running off its karma interesting fascinating ah and then at the same moment it's got the yearning that yearning for the Beloved and we're going to talk later on sometime this weekend about relationships and about the difference between loving somebody a

nd loving the Beloved and where the somebodyness ends and what it is and how it reflects and mirrors but the other part of the Soul's business is its relationship to the one and for the one there is the play of all this stuff going on within itself it's all an internal matter just Souls egos stories planes of Consciousness all within awareness when you start to work with that ultimate plane the kinds of lines you use are this five line stanza from a Tibetan woman don't prolong the past that's yo

ur personal history by the way don't invite the future how do you know how it's going to come out don't alter your innate wakefulness you don't have to do anything just be don't fear appearances phenomena come up including your actions it's all phenomena nothing more than that so now ladies and gentlemen fellow Souls awareness in drag you now have the blueprint for the weekend we're going to work within this blueprint question it bring examples in learn how to work with it and use it that's what

our business is together this weekend learning how to meet as Souls meet in awareness and meet as egos without being entrapped in any of it in other words how to be free in form