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Practices. Spiritual practices. Do they work? How much is enough? What function do they
have? Do they summate? Do you have to just go deep with one?
Every month the disciple faithfully sent his master an account of his spiritual progress.
On the first month, he wrote, "I feel an expansion of consciousness and experience my oneness
with the universe." The master glanced at the note and threw it away. The following
month, this is what the note said: "I have finally discovered that the divine is present
in all things." The master seemed disappointed. In his third letter, the disciple enthusiastically
explained, "The mystery of the one and the many has been revealed to my wandering gaze."
The master yawned. The next letter said, "No one is born, no one lives and no one dies,
for the self is not." The master threw his hands up in despair. After that, a month passed,
then two, then five, then a whole year. The master thought it was time to remind his disciple
of his duty to keep him informed of his spiritual progress. The disciple wrote back, "Who cares?"
When the master read these words, a look of satisfaction spread over his face. He said,
"Thank God, at last he's got it."
It's just a question of how soon you say who cares.
In my own life, I've watched how I've done, at times, very, very intense practices. Like
going into a monastery in Burma for several months to meditate for maybe seventeen hours
a day. And there have been incredible connections to deeper and deeper parts of being, a strengthening
of faith in the planes of awareness that we've been talking about, a quietness inside that
allows me to look at the dance of my life with compassion and with some wisdom, even,
at times. And I've come away from those experiences feeling very deeply lodged in that quality
of my being. And again and again over the last 25 years I have watched with a certain
fascinated horror at the way in which the uncooked seeds of my karma, the nature of
the seduction of form slowly draws my consciousness back into my identification with somebody
doing something, with this or that, and the spaciousness dissolves into the drama of the
moment and the role I'm in. And it's very easy when you have touched depths, great,
great depths of love and beauty and presence and emptiness and clarity and wisdom, it's
easy to assume you're always gonna stay in that, because when you're in it, is so totally
who you are. So when you start to... You've gotta realize we are living in an incredibly
seductive universe. I mean advertising's only the beginning of the game, which is constantly
saying, "Desire me, desire me, you want me, get into your desires, you are your desires,
you are your desires, you're your attachments, look at me, want me, enjoy me, fear me, hope
for me, collect me, experience me." The universe is constantly... it's the garden of infinite
delight, it's constantly seducing you into an identification with being the experiencer,
the collector, the do-er, the senser, the thinker. And it sometimes happens very, very
subtly, it comes in so subtly you hardly notice it until you're deeply entrenched back in
your story line.
So practices can serve to keep reconnecting you. You can do what you could call a maintenance
practice. Like for some people, a morning meditation of twenty minutes is a bare maintenance
if you are already connected to a deep place in your being. Because in twenty minutes,
you'll just have time, say it's in the morning, to think through all the things you got to
do all day, which will be the first thing you'll do during the first twenty minutes,
try to remember the dreams you had, get irritated about something you got left over from yesterday
that you haven't digested, and then realize how caught you are in the whole story, and
then the bell will ring and you'll go on with your life.
Sometimes, at evening, I've kept a little diary of the ways during the day that I lost
it, that I got caught into the drama of it all, that I started to take it as real. I
just make a list of it, and then look at the patterns of those lists over days. Because
they showed me the nature my desire systems, they showed me what it was that I made real.
I think that because it's often so subtle in the way it catches us, that unless you
really bring mindfulness to it, you don't see the toxicity of the culture you're growing
up in, or living in, and the way it takes you and narrows you into a certain definition
of yourself.
Now, it's tricky, when I use the word toxicity, not to get the wrong interpretation. It is
not to get the interpretation that the plane we call the ego plane or the plane of sensory
psychodynamic thought, feeling, is less than something else. But the predicament is that
you and I grew up primarily in that plane. The likelihood that we were meeting people
that were reminding us that we were fellow souls, or that we were pure awareness, is
pretty slim in our culture. And so we have been in a conspiracy to keep a certain plane,
or channel, real. So that when you start to awaken and see that you've short shrifted
yourself because there are many other planes of your own existence, which is what's called
spiritual awakening, which makes you then start to explore these, or open to them or
try to hear them or quiet enough to be them, then you see how caught you have been, in
the prison of your mind, about a certain reality, and how caught everybody else seems to be,
and that awakening begins a journey. And the tendency is, because you realize how trapped
you've been in the prison, to push against the prison, and develop an aversion to the
things that have caught you, even your own desire systems.
And that's part of what usually is the journey called the ascent. And higher doesn't mean
better, it just means meta, each one embraces the ones below it, in that hierarchical sense.
Because you're so yearning to have the freedom of feeling and awareness, to be somebody who
sees the storyline unfolding without being so trapped in it all the time, that you're
yearning to come up for air, and you push against it. It's like getting out of the atmosphere,
the booster rocket that you need to get yourself out of the atmosphere, there's that push,
that pushes you out.
But then, what happened to me in the mid-seventies, as I said, I got incredibly high from all
my practices. But I realized that I was not free, and the reason I wasn't free was because
of the aversion I had to what I pushed against. Because free meant free from pushing against
anything, free for all of it, free to be at every plane. And I recognized that I had to
re-embrace or to embrace the form, embrace the mother, embrace the shadow, I can go through
every different metaphorical system you'd like to play in. Embrace the lower chakras,
embrace the suffering, embrace the evil, embrace it. Accept the fact of what the nature of
what is is, on this plane. Without losing these awakenings that I'd had to these other
planes.
So even though I got incredibly high in the first ten years or fifteen years, then when
I started to embrace my humanity into my divinity, I was busy becoming holy. And every time people
would say, Ram Dass, we love you, you're so human, I would hate them for it. I would think,
my God, I'm spending years trying to be holy and they're telling me I'm human! I don't
want to be human! And then I saw that that was my immaturity. The art form, obviously,
was to be fully human and be fully divine, to be on all the planes.
So then I started to make forays back into the world of desire, passion, relationship,
all the achievement things, the yearnings, the physicalness of life, my emotional body,
my physical body. And then I saw that there were still, what have been, in India, called
uncooked seeds in me, there were things that arose again, when I let myself near those
fires.
I remember being in India, and I was part of a renunciate scene, and I thought, well,
the thing that has obsessed me for the last twenty-five years, twenty-eight years, was
sex. I mean, since puberty. I was sitting there, I thought, my God, think about the
amount of time I've spent thinking about sex. Will I get enough, who is it, will you, won't
you, can I, can't I, all of it, all of it. I thought, my goodness, do I really want to
spend the rest of my life doing that? And here I am in a renunciate environment, it's
time to really let that one go.
So I was doing a nine day ceremony, a Hindu ceremony with other people and it was a very
formal ceremony. At the end, you take a coconut, and you throw into the fire, that which you
let go. So I decided to throw my *** desire into the fire. I threw it into the fire. And
I felt pretty proud of myself, doing this. A little frightened.
And then the next day there was a fire ceremony, burning Ravana who was the bad guy in the
Ramayana in the Hindu Bible in that particular lineage. In this town square, they build a
huge replica of Ravana that's about two stories high or something like that and it's made
of straw, and then they lit the fire to it, and they lit the fire to his crotch. And I
thought, well, this is sort of a second opportunity to give it away, you know. And it turned out
that it was Yom Kippur at the same time, so I feel, well, I'll cover all the bases, you
know. I mean, because what my *** has done has created a lot of suffering, for me and
a lot of other people, actually. It's not my *** freedom, I'm talking about ***,
that I was giving up, that is, seeing an object to be manipulated to gratify myself.
And I went through the rest of my time in India, floating along... Here I was, this
soul, floating. And then I went back through England. And I remember the moment it happened,
I was on a double decker bus in London. And I was going down, feeling very holy. And I
looked out the window, I was just watching people go by, and I saw my eyes lock on one
person and continue to follow that person down the street. And I saw what was happening
and I said, "Uh-oh. Didn't get rid of it just yet. Still there." And then later I realized
that that was the wrong trip entirely, anyway. I didn't want to get rid of it. I didn't want
to be not human - I wanted to embrace my humanity.
Now, that's resonant with you, when I say embrace your humanity and love your stuff
and your personality and all. The predicament is that we are such a psychologically oriented
culture, that you gotta go a little bit through that cycle to get to the point where you can
come back into your humanity. If you try to stay in it and get free at the same moment,
you tend to con yourself. There is the need, at some stage of your sadhana, for either
removing yourself, or for disciplining yourself, in order to extricate your awareness from
such a thick identity with personality. Because everything in the social world most of us
live in reinforces our identity with our roles and our personality. That I'm a happy person,
I'm a doctor, I'm a whatever.
It was interesting, I was in Japan teaching this summer. And what I found was very interesting.
We did a workshop like this up at Mount Fuji. And it's really great to work with Japanese
people, because there's 160 million of them living on these very small islands, and so
the identity they basically have is that as role rather than personality. So when you
say to everybody, sing, everybody sings. They don't say, do I want to sing, can I sing,
should I sing, I don't sing those kinda things. They sing, because you said sing, and then
they're singers. Then you say meditate, they meditate. You say get enlightened, they get
enlightened.
When you go into another culture like that, you begin to see how much we have bought into
a certain kind of conceptual map of I am my desires, and what means freedom is that I
am free to desire, to want, to sense, to fear, to think, to feel. And those are all wonderful
things if they aren't your masters, if they're your servants.
And when I was in Japan, I thought, do they all have to go through the personality trip
before they can go beyond it? Or can they go directly from role, beyond? Do we have
to go into our roles?
See, we have an interesting thing about our roles. Like you watch business people who
get so obsessed with their identity as a business person, they can't get out of it. They can't
escape from their role. The role of a mother, often. It's so seductive. You get caught in
the role and you begin to think you are the role.
And then when the role isn't functional anymore, you're in deep, because what are you gonna
do then? And that's the interesting thing about aging, because in aging, a lot of the
roles you played aren't really functional anymore, and the question is whether you can
appreciate the beauty of the stages of life and honor them. Because we don't, in our society,
have rituals for transition from one stage to another, as they have in other cultures.
When they invest you into cronehood. We don't have a good crone investment, to get our old
crones, which we need, our elders and our crones.
So a lot of the practices one does is to continually remember to extricate oneself from the identification
of your awareness with your desires, fears, hopes, thoughts, etcetera. Not so that the
goal is that you stay out in la la land, but that you get established in other planes of
consciousness, and then connect fully back into life, so that you are, as Christ said,
in the world but not of the world. So that you are simultaneously dancing in life as
a human being, and at the same moment you are absolutely spacious and empty.
And it's a very interesting thing, because we haven't stretched our consciousnesses that
much, in general, so that we tend to move in and out of planes sequentially, not simultaneously,
because it takes certain discipline to develop that, to open to the fact that we are like
strudel, we're a multi-layered entity, we are not a single-layered entity. We are underplaying
who we are so much. Even by our language, because we tend to polarize the thing — "getting
high", "coming down". Even the word planes is ultimately a hype because it's all one
thing. It's all one thing.
And what we're really doing is, the practices are taking our conceptual mind and using it
in order to take us beyond our conceptual mind, so that we can then use our conceptual
mind in a delightful way. The ego... You can't function without an ego, here. It's your control
room for your spacesuit that you're wearing in this incarnation. You need it. It's your
software. Your ego is basically your software for functioning on this plane. But you aren't
your software. And in order to appreciate that, you have to extricate yourself from
an identification with the software, with the ego. Not because the ego is bad, because
it's a beautifully articulated, functional technique for playing.
Like I watch people come up to me for the beads. Now I'm in a certain place where I'm
looking at Krishna and Radha. But people come up, and they say good morning, and they're
defining a certain plain of reality. And then I'm just sorta sitting there, and then some
of them don't know quite what to do, because I said, "Hey, there's another plane here."
And others... it's fun, because you look into people's eyes and the rest their face is like
putty. And they come up, "Hi", which is the usual thing we do. And then you're just looking
at them and slowly their smile dissolves. And then sometimes, this interesting thing
happens, you suddenly meet back in behind the smile, "Hey, you in here? Far out. I'm
here, what are you doing here?" It's like we're old beings hanging out, we just met
through the social form. And the interesting thing of having the social forms and being
able to use them and let go of them. Use them and let go of them. Use them and let go of
them. So you don't get trapped in them. You don't get trapped in the projective dance
of each others' projections of each other.
For maybe thirty or forty years, I think until I was about 50, I experienced myself psychologically
as about 13 or 14. And people treated me like an adult, but I was fooling them, because
basically I was this young kid, playing like an adult. And then around 50 I started to
inwardly grow up, I started to feel like an adult. Just as I began to feel like an adult,
then I became a senior citizen. It's a whole new role to fulfill, you know.
Now the question is why you do practices. Because a lot of people, they'll go away from
this, and they'll say, "I ought to meditate." Forget it. Don't. Don't. Go out and *** some
more. Go until you are so nauseated by your own predicament that you yearn to meditate.
Get so hungry for it that you can't wait to just sit down, turn off the television, turn
off the drama and just be quiet for a few minutes. Wait until you really want it. Because
when you start with "I ought to, I should", you end up hating the practice, hating everybody,
hating yourself, then you cheat, then you get guilty... it's a whole thing that you
psychologically do. Forget it.
You came here this weekend, that was an honest thing you did. You are here. What you hear,
you hear, what you don't hear, you don't hear. Don't collect it. Forget it, it'll come around
again. Another lifetime, maybe.
The problem of phony holy is a drag. I'm a master at it, I'll tell you how to be phony
holy, how to get ahead of yourself. Because we in our society think our way into stuff,
rather than slow down enough to let it happen to us in a natural way. "I ought to meditate,
I ought to get educated, I ought to, I ought to." Many people have been living so much
by the culture's defining what you ought to do. I mean, I got to be a Harvard professor
by doing what I ought to do, and even then I was doing what I ought to do to be a good
Harvard professor. And it was only when I took mushrooms, and I connected to something
in my self that was true, it wasn't somebody saying I ought to be this, it was what I am.
It was a certain quality of AM-ness or IS-ness.
And I remember the moment when I was being thrown out of Harvard, when the chairman of
the department and the dean said to me, "We can't save Tim Leary, he's too crazy, but
we'll save you, if you'll just shut up, We'll save you, because you're running a lot of
programs and we need you." They thought they did, they found they didn't, of course. And
so, there was a faculty meeting at which they were discussing the irresponsible nature of
introspective research, which was the way they were getting us, and all of our colleagues
got up and denounced us roundly. And at the end there was silence, and Tim was shocked,
because he thought everybody agreed with him all the time. And I remember feeling the moment,
the moment that the society was telling me how I ought to be in order to something, but
the inner truth was so deep in me, that I was connected to, that I couldn't control
that I stood up, and I said, "I'd like to answer on behalf of our project." And the
chairman looked at me and I looked at him, and that was it, he couldn't save me anymore.
And I remember the moment of choice. I mean, the illusion of choice, by the way, don't
kid yourself. And the interesting experience of realizing how rarely I had trusted that
inner place in myself in my whole life. I mean, you could look at this from a cultural
point of view that he took drugs, and he went psychotic, and then he didn't play the game
of society and he got thrown out of a major social institution. And yes. And there was
a moment when I got thrown out, when they had a big press conference, and all the people
were there, and they were all looking at me like I was this great loser, 'cause I had
taken on Harvard and lost. And what had happened to me inside was so deep and so true that
to deny it would have been impossible for me to go on with my life. And I looked, and
I thought... I mean, I was a psychologist and psychotherapist, and I thought everybody
was looking at me like a loser and I was thinking I'd won. I thought, "This is the definition
of psychosis. They're all crazy." And I was right.
The beauty of a true spiritual journey is that it keeps unfolding from inside yourself.
If you just wait a little longer, you'll see how hungry you are for integrity in your being,
for a certain quietness, for a certain clarity. And the tendency in our society is when there
is dis-ease, to grab another experience in order to reduce the dis-ease.
I remember when I got into Burma, to the cell, I had spent the day in my cell, the first
day of my two months, meditating righteously and getting my sleeping bag right and my food
containers and studying the spider at the window and all the things you do. And then
I realized I had months yet to go. And I was bored, I was really bored. And boredom became
my object of meditation. I looked at boredom. Instead of the identification, "I'm bored",
I thought, "What is boredom? What does it feel like? What is it like? What does it mean
to be bored?" Instead of, "Oh, I'm bored." Most of us, the minute you're bored, you move
to the next thing to avoid it and you're left with that fear or dis-ease about boredom.
It's interesting to make peace with boredom. "Nothing's happening, nothing's ever gonna
happen again, and here we are." And it's fascinating, 'cause when you pull back from a certain level
of experiencing life, experiences, and see they're just more stuff, no matter how fancy
the packaging they have, they're just more stuff, you get to the point of realizing that
when you are in here, you are here, and you're not going anywhere, and nothing's ever gonna
happen. And that's an interesting plane, because you have been living on the plane of rushes
and trips and more trips and more collecting and more collecting.
Is this too weird? Are you hearing it?
The timing of practices is interesting. I mean, I'm put down a lot for being an eclectic
slob, because most traditions say you gotta go deep into a tradition to make it pay off,
and I go as deep as a dilettante can go, before I'm fascinated by the next one. So I'm a Buddhist-Hindu-Christian-Jewish-Muslim-blah.
'Cause I'll take anything that comes along, that gets me to remember, that awakens me.
And at first, it feels very multiphrenic, but after a while, they all seem to be saying
the same thing to you. It's like reading holy books—at first you're really getting new
conceptual structures, and new ideas; and then after a while, you get to feel the redundancy
of them—they're all saying the same thing, over and over again, they're just different
strokes for different folks.
And it's good to have them around, they're like what's called satsang or sangha, meaning
the community of beings on the journey. And it's great at the stage of awakening and establishing
yourself in these deeper planes of awareness about who you are and what your universe is
about to hang out with other people who look at the universe that way. It's extremely useful.
And often, you may not find those people right around you all the time, and therefore, you
may turn to books or pictures or just reading the words of such beings, or reading the lives
of such beings, or the quotes or whatever. And they can do it through humor, they can
do it through stories, they can do it through didactic teaching. And often, I get up in
the morning and I sit up in bed and I might take one book of these little quotes or shlokas
or paragraphs and read one of them, and then just sort of sit with it and let it mish-mash
with my day, sort of look at my day through those eyes.
This weekend is like a smorgasbord, it's a buffet, you get a taste of all these different
methods, practices, metaphysics, ways of doing it, and then you've got to trust your own
intuitive heart as to what you listen to and where you go. Somebody'll come and say, "I
have found the only way." And you say, "I honor you for that - I've gotta listen to
my heart." Trust your heart along the way, that game of learning to trust more and more
strongly the deepest inner message you can hear. So you sit down and you say, "Alright,
I'm going to listen to my inner message," and you suddenly realize there are thousands
of them, and each one is saying, "I'm your real inner message, I am your real truth,
listen to me, kill..."
And you see cultures full of it, I mean, you see ethnic conflicts are people listening
to their inner truths and willing to die for it. You see how entrapping the mind is, how
incredibly entrapping the mind is. People get into a practice, the practice works, they
get addicted to the practice, they try to get everybody else to do the practice because
it works for them, they'll kill because other people won't do the practice. Isn't that far
out. Imagine the Arabs and the Israelis, I mean, they're sisters and brothers, in terms
of the same God, and there they are beating the *** out of each other over their mind
trips, these are mind trips we're playing with.
And we're all part of it, in our subtle way, we are all caught in these conspiracies of
defining reality certain ways, and you realize it takes the individual, it's not gonna be
through the group process, it's gonna be through each individual to extricate the awareness
from the trap of these conceptual maps in order to draw back in order to have the spaciousness
to see the absurdity of the predicament of the traps of mind. I mean, I watch C-SPAN,
and it's like watching Beavis and Butt-Head, as far as I can see, I don't see a helluva
lot of difference, it's really bizarre.
I remember, I was talking and visiting with George Stephanopoulos, and I said, "George,
in the White House, is there anybody that holds the vision or is quiet, is there any
silence, is there any reflectiveness, are there any elders, is there any respect for
the idea that the rational mind can't solve all the problems?" And he said no. I said,
"Is there even the appreciation that it would be useful?" He said no. Now, that's not saying
these aren't good people, by the way, I mean, George sees that predicament, he couldn't
have answered my question unless he saw the predicament, but you've gotta see the amount
of attachment to something that attracts a person into a certain social role, and then
to get that person to fulfill that role without being trapped by it.
See, in the old days, and they weren't so great, either, but in the old days, the Kings
had jesters, and they had fools, and they had wise people around to say, "Hey, you're
getting a little caught in your kingliness, don't you think?" Ain't nobody 'round now.
There used to be at least Will Rogers. Saturday Night Live doesn't do what Will Rogers did.
It's a different level of the game. It's gotta be a certain kind of compassionate satire,
it's gotta be humor that comes out of such love. It can't be humor that comes out of
fear, and our comedies are full of humor that comes out of fear. Fear is what excites the
adrenaline. Just look at the daily news, look what's on it. Love doesn't sell, no matter
how hard you try, it doesn't sell.
People can't slow down enough to taste... Like you folks go out and you see the stars
and it slows you down. And how many times do you even do that? How many times you go
in and turn on the lights, turn on the television, turn on, turn on something. You turn on, you
tune in and you drop out, but what you drop out of is the deeper truth, into a linear
storyline.
Now, if you see the nature of this metaphysics that we're talking about, about ego, and the different levels of self,
ego and soul and awareness or God or whatever, if you see those, and you begin to see what
the nature of your curriculum as a soul is, having taken birth on Earth, is to awaken
out of the karmic illusions that you keep creating, and you draw your awareness back
through whatever practices you use to do that, then you look around, and at first, you're
satisfied to do a practice now and then. But I'll tell you what happens is once the hook
is planted, it is inevitable and irrevocable. You can try to go back to sleep, but you can't
quite fully do it, once you've started to awaken. And finally, what happens is it becomes
your life's work.
And something like... somebody'll come up to me and they'll say, "I'm not doing well
with my partner—we're thinking of divorcing, because my partner isn't growing the way I'm
growing and I want a satsang, I want somebody that is growing with me." And I can see from
where they're saying that, that at a certain stage of their spiritual practice, they could
hear the answer that it doesn't matter, because they would do work on themselves working with
somebody who wasn't awakening, and they do a different kind of work working with somebody
that was helping them awaken. In other words, you have a partner who every time you say,
"I'm doing spiritual practice," they say, "Oh, come on, cut the crap, let's go to the
movies." That's interesting work in terms of a fire of purification for your inner truth.
What I'm suggesting is that after awhile, everything in your life becomes grist for
the mill of awakening. And your priorities change—instead of "Am I happy in this relationship?",
it's "Am I awakening through this relationship? Am I awakening through my work? Am I awakening
through this drive? Am I awakening through the way I'm taking care of my body?" The journey
of awakening starts to dominate the terrain, and there is clearly an inner shift of priority,
and then you start to use your life that way.
The
quieter we get inside, or the more we get established in that Witness or
the soul, as you develop this quiet place inside from which you see the unfolding of
your life story, you begin to understand what I was talking about yesterday about how your
ego identity is made up of your participation in the web, in a kind of horizontal web that
involves your roles and all of your reference groups. They help define your identity.
Like I used to have a motorcycle at one point, and I had a Mercedes, this was when I was
being a young professor, 1958, I think. And when you rode the motorcycle, you put on a
black jacket, and you spit, and you look tough, and when you rode the Mercedes, you put on
a houndstooth jacket, and you put your pipe in your pocket, and you had a cap, and you
looked aloof. I mean, there were certain clear role definitions. And what I used to do is,
just for fun, I'd ride my motorcycle with my houndstooth jacket and my pipe, and I'd
go into the repair place and I'd say, "There's a squeak in there..." And I'd go to the Mercedes
Club of America meeting in my boots and leather jacket. And they'd hate me because I wasn't
playing the game properly.
At one point, at Harvard, the young turks got together and they decided we shouldn't
wear neckties in the faculty club. But there was a rule, and so there was going to be a
confrontation, and they asked me to join, and I had to decide whether neckties in the
faculty club was the particular issue that I wanted to go down fighting for.
And as you're quiet, you listen in and you see that when you push against fulfilling
your roles, there is a lot of energy involved, and when you get lost in them, there's a lot
of energy involved, and there is an art form in learning how to be a participant in the
systems of life and honor it. What does it mean to honor your identity as a member of
an ecosystem, what does it mean to honor your identity as a member of a nation-state, what
does it mean to honor your identity...
Like I was born a Jew and yet, here I'd been a Hindu-Buddhist teacher, and bringing eastern
ideas back to the west—what about my Judaism? Well, in the past five years, I've really
made a study of it. And the Jewish community says, "Ram Dass is returning to the fold."
That's their problem, not mine. Personally, I never left it. Just 'cause I was doing Hindu
practices didn't make me less a Jew. But it was really interesting to see what it meant
to honor that part of my genetic identity. What did it mean, when my father was ill,
for me to reorient my life to live in the basement of that house in an apartment down
there, to make sure he was well taken care of, because I was part of a family? What does
it mean for me to be active in the political community because I'm part of a political
structure? And you realize it keeps expanding outward, when you're part of humanity, and
then you're part of living species, and you're part of sentient beings, etc.
The quieter you are, the more you feel yourself tuning or feeling your way into the unique
nature of your incarnation, and you find yourself, in a harmonious way, at peace with it, rather
than pushing against it or grabbing it. I'm wearing this shirt, but I'm not the shirt,
but I'm wearing it, and it's serving its function, I'm doing it appropriately.
So when people say, "What should I do with my life," the more interesting question is,
"How do I cultivate the quietness of my being so that what I should do with my life will
become all too apparent?" You'll hear exactly. And don't be afraid of making mistakes. The
journey is a constant hearing, as well as you can, the inner voice, making the choice
to take an action, taking the action—the minute you make it, you feel it is dis-harmonious
with some other plane of existence, and you go back inside again. The art form of continually
emptying to hear freshly. Boy, imagine being in a relationship where the two people are
freshly meeting each other all the time, imagine how freeing it would be for you.
I mean, when you think of it, you and I are many, many planes of existence. Like if I
had said to you, when we were gonna do this ritual with the beads, "This is a ritual,
and I want you to enter into it as if you pull back and be your soul, and we're going
through this form in our bodies, but we are soul meeting soul," and then we go through
the ritual together from a different plane, than if we don't say that and come up and
we meet in our personalities.
Now, sometimes I'm in one place, sometimes I'm in another. When I meet somebody, they
say, "Oh, I know ***," or "I know Richard," or "I know Ram Dass," and they peg me into
a model in their minds for their efficiency. "He's who I always thought he was." So if
you came down to breakfast one day and you turn out to be the Divine Mother, but somebody
else thinks of you as somebody who didn't do the garbage last night, you begin to see
how the conspiracy of mind defines reality.
You can use your membership into groups as a spiritual practice by exploring the power
of your boundaries. Because the whole issue of awakening has also the quality of expanding
to embrace more and more of the universe, and you can't embrace it and keep the same
control as a separate entity in relation to it—there has to be a dissolving of a certain
boundary in order to be part of another kind of thing. Like, my work requires me constantly
to be emptying so that I become more of an instrument for some other kind of wisdom or
presence or force—that's true for each of us—and my job is to continually get out
of the way.
And it's interesting, in my business, to use personal stories impersonally. I mean, I use
my personal life 'cause it's anecdotal and it's easy to get to, but it has nothing to
do with me, particularly. I don't take it personally. And it's really interesting, the
soul does not take the ego's trip personally. Like somebody comes up and says, "You're really
a disappointment to me." I figure that's their problem. I may take it and work with it and
look and see in the total warp and woof of things, "Am I a disappointment?" And I either
say, "You know, they got something there, I'll clean up my act," or I'll say, "No, it's
a projection of their mind." If I'm not mindful, I will react initially, "What do you mean
I'm..." or, "Well, I think you are..." or whatever you do. To escape from reactivity
is such an art form, such an art form.
You and I are living in shifts in the meta-structures of the game we're living in that are profound—like
the information age, we haven't even begun to grow into it; our mythology is so much
based on previous-age-consciousness, we just haven't even understood yet. We're just starting
with multinationals. I mean, we're just beginning the dance of understanding what it means when
you have collective consciousness, when you have information moving at the rate it is—we're
still getting overloaded trying to collect it.
You and I are in a situation of very dramatic change, and the interesting question is how
you respond to change—whether it's in your own body, or whether it's in the social structures
you're in. What happens when the family breaks down? What happens when the government isn't
functional? What happens when your IRA is as good as it was, or it doesn't work. It's
interesting to look at whether change is your friend or your enemy, whether you can find
a place in yourself from which you can see phenomena changing without being trapped in
the fear that is generated by being identified with that which changes, that's what the issue
is.
You and I are not only here in terms of the work we're doing on ourselves, we are here
in terms of the role we're playing within the systems of which we are part. Look at
the ways change affects people, that are unconscious—change generates fear, fear generates contraction,
contraction generates prejudice, bigotry, and ultimately, violence, and you can watch
the whole thing happen, and you can see it happen in society after society after society.
And what is the antidote for that is the consciousness that does not respond to change with fear.
That's as close in to the beginning of that sequence as I can get. And I'll tell you the
deepest one is the fear of death.