Sacred in the Everyday - Ram Dass Full Lecture

each evening when I'm going to come out to speak I I in invariably think of the line from the da de Ching that says he who speaks does not know and he who knows does not speak and I see the absolutely bizarre our humor of my predicament and I realize that I have to be both of those I have to be that part in me that is not speaking that knows and the part of me that's speaking that doesn't really know and hopefully they're connected and if you uh are open to the possibility let the

words mely quiet your minds and let's meet on the other level where we meet in the silence between the words because we come together to speak about the Unspeakable because the the rational analytic mind the intellect Only Knows objects it only knows what it can think about and what we come together to talk about are really matters of the heart that are known subjectively not objectively and they are always here hidden from the eyes of of the thinking mind and yet I'm in the word business so that we just have to take the words very

lightly it's a very great Mystic poet aladine roomi he said I am a sculptor A molder of form in every moment I shape an idol but then in front of you I melt them down I can Rouse a 100 forms and mix them with Spirit but I when I look into your face I want to throw them into the fire the you in this case being the Beloved or that higher part of ourselves that our minds keep creating realities we keep creating models of ourselves we keep creating expectations about the world we create these forms

of clay and we try to breathe life into them that the minute you look directly into the eyes of the forms all seem to dissolve before your eyes and you're left speechless or heartful you have a way you'd like to look at that now I like most of you when I was born went into what could be called somebody training that is my parents were somebody and they set out to make me somebody as well and it's called the development of ego structure and I developed a somebody I knew who I was or who I

thought I was I developed a set of models thought forms that defined who I thought I was and who I thought everybody else was and how I thought it all was and I worked very hard at that and I became so much somebody that everybody came up to me and said you're really somebody and uh you know because you keep looking into the eyes of people who the more somebody somebody is the more you look into their eyes to find out if you're really somebody so and I I would look into the most somebody eyes

and they I'd say am I somebody and they'd say You're really somebody now the predicament with somebody was that it had been developed from outside in from I was trained to think of myself a certain way through my parents my education my culture and to get reassurance from the the minds of other human beings things that I was doing it right the problem was that inside it didn't feel good it was as if I was wearing a piece of clothing that didn't fit right and that I was trying to make myself make it fit so

I would scrunch my body so that it would fit perfectly so that I could be the somebody everybody wanted me to be and I would would be in pain and people would come up and say what a lovely suit what beautiful material so I decided that if everybody and everybody would say You're really somebody you must be very happy so I decided if they all thought I must be very happy and I wasn't very happy that I must therefore be sick seems like a reasonable conclusion so I went to a psychiatrist and for a small

pittance um he offered to teach me how to wear his suit which was um equally uncomfortable in a different way but it was even more somebody than the suit I had been wearing it was like a double somebody then so I put it on and once I was wearing his suit cuz he was a Freudian um I no longer saw people I merely saw like psychosexual stages of development I saw late anal retentiveness and I think at that point I would have settled for that uh kind of discomfort assuming that everybody else was as uncomfortable

as I was or else that I was so pathological so neurotic that there wasn't any chance that I was going to be happy and I might as well just live it out as best I could and reap all the rewards Society showered on me for being somebody so that when the moment came when I um took off the suit when I if you will transcended ego or broke out of myself which happened uh in my case chemically uh I was uh I had a series of of um Awakenings at that moment one was that all

the clues I had had in myself that I was sick those weren't correct I hadn't interpreted those correctly they were merely telling me that I was not being true to my deepest self and when I broke out I suddenly felt at home comfortable I felt peaceful I felt compassionate I felt connected to the world around me these were feelings that I had never expected that I would feel in this life because I always felt alienated self-conscious and slightly separate because as long as you're in your thinking mind exclusively since your mind takes an object you're

always one thought away from where life is you're always thinking about it so you're always just one thought away it's that sense of alienation that comes from thinking about life rather than being life well two hours later when the chemical wore off um I then um went back into the sup uh much to my chrin and um spent then the next uh many years attempting to get rid of the sup chemically and spirit through all kinds of spiritual practices in India Japan Etc and um there were moments when I would be in a temple in

India where I had been doing long fasts where I had been doing uh meditative practices where I had been doing a lot of chanting I would find myself in these Altered States Of Consciousness that William James talked about that are available to everybody although as he pointed out most people never meet them but then he said apply the requisite stimulus and there they are in their completeness and uh I found that through these various techniques I could come into these Altered States Of Consciousness and I would look out at the world and I would see

we are all sisters and brothers or even if I went a little further into another altered state I'd see there's only one of us there's only one awareness that keeps manifesting in all these different forms and I would get so clear and so peaceful and so loving and so present I felt like a combination of the the pure mind of the Buddha and the Heart of the Christ I was really out there and my eyes light was pouring out of my eyes and I was full of what's called shaki and I was just and I

I then come back to the United States and I would go to visit my family and um my father would say just some simple thing like do you have a job and um and I would um come crashing down and I would say um um going home brings me down that was the expression that was used in those days brings me down and I began to have a whole list of things that brought me down cities brought me down earning a living brought me down politics brought me down and I suddenly became aware that I

was wearing another kind of a suit it was I'm wonderfully High don't get near me you know it was that kind of thing of uh I'm I'm very spiritual just stay away because I've got to keep my high or keep my altered state or keep that spiritual connection something felt wrong about it but I couldn't quite figure out what that was and it took me a number of years because everybody around me seemed and most of the spiritual practices of the world were designed to help you escape from the trap of dualism to help you

escape from your own separateness into which you took birth so that you could pull your awareness out of identification with your own separateness whether by Prayer by meditation by uh fasting by any of the number pilgrimages whatever the techniques were they were designed to help extricate you from identification exclusively with your separateness and what I saw was that my body was I mean if I look at this foot for example this is a 55 56y old decaying foot it's like an old tree trunk that you might meet out in the woods and it's decaying according

to laws of nature it seems to be doing beautifully it's rather aesthetically Exquisite as a decaying foot if I look at my hand I see that there's now veins and there's wrinkles and Bone and it's really getting to look like my father's old hand now he's 89 and I can feel me growing into my father's old hand now if I thought that was my hand I would freak but but I see it's just a part of nature it's just a phenomenon that the identification I mean I have these spots on my head and I don't

know where they're here but in the United States they sell a something called porcelana which um is something you put on which makes the spots disappear and the advertising says um they call these aging spots I call them ugly but I noticed that as my spiritual work progressed and I identified less and less exclusively with my body I could say they call them ugly I call them aging spots that they were just beautiful phenomena of nature that I was no longer so what you might call ego involved or invested in and I saw that most

of the practices were designed to mean my body was decaying gently and sweetly and but it was still decaying and certainly investing in this was like as Christ said laying up your Treasures where a moth and rust doth corrupt there's no doubt about it this was then my personality I mean that um I had basically a quite a neurotic personality and um it's interesting to note in reflection that in all the years that I was a professor of psychology at Harvard in Stanford in all the years that I was in analysis all the drugs I've

taken all the yoga I've studied all the spiritual teachers I've sat at the feet of all the meditation I've done I don't think I have gotten rid of one of my Neurosis not one however what has changed is that before they were these huge big things that they were very frightening and they took me over all my sexual perversities and fears and insecurities would take me over and now they're sort of like little Schmo or um they're little beings they're sort of little friendly beings and I invite them in fatigue and and they're they're still

around they're all there oh hello there sexual perversity come on have tea instead of getting so caught in them instead of taking myself so seriously instead of taking my personality so seriously and I don't shove it under the rug I acknowledge it it just doesn't have the power over me that it had because there is another part of my identity that has been cultivated in this course of time but at any rate during that time those early years since my body was certainly not a long-term good investment from an Investor's point of view and since

my personality had so much Neurosis in it what I wanted to do as many people did was just to get rid of it all as fast as possible and go to heaven or live in la la land or wherever you want to call that I wanted to live in peace and non-embodied Bliss and I wanted to push these away and so for a long time I tried the path of renunciation which is if you sort of deny it all long enough it'll go away um now that is a path for some people because out of

sight out of mind for me it just U led me to what is known as the horny celibate syndrome I think sort of the um I was busy it's like somebody that has given up cigarettes you know I haven't smoked in 3 years 2 months and 22 minutes it's that they may die of not smoking you know CU it's so they're so busy not smoking finally I realized that I had been going in the uh partly the wrong direction true our initial job of incarnates is to awaken out of the illusion that we are an

identity with the Incarnation it's true and to if you will awaken out of that but that turns out to be only half the journey and the other half I've talked some about this last year when I was here in a lot of this is review I just wanted to bring all of us together for those of you that are new for the first time uh I was helped a lot by a friend of mine uh by the name of Emanuel Emmanuel is a disembodied being who speaks through a woman named Pat wrot a guest Now

in America I don't know whether here but in America I guess you've had it for many years but disembodied beings are in Vogue in America they either have descended on America or America is more hysterically receptive to them or you're much more sophisticated about all these things I do know that so but I'm embarrassed but it's all new to us and um whatever it is everybody has one these days and um uh these and what I have to caution I don't have to caution you but I do have to caution audiences in the United States

that all disembodied beings aren't wise that there are a lot of beings who were really doing very poorly on this plane and then they die and then they decide to send messages back and um they have no more wisdom because they don't have a body than they had when they had a body and so they tell you to buy can tuna and move to the islands or something and you must take it very lightly and trust your intuitive heart you just can't believe every disembodied being and hand them your um but this one Emanuel I

like because he agrees with me and um when I um he's very Charming he's very light uh when I asked him Emanuel for example I work with dying and and I said what shall I tell people about dying and he said ramas tell them tell people that dying is absolutely safe which is a just a wonderful oneliner I think said it's like taking off a tight shoe so who would not trust somebody with lightness like that so I asked Emanuel what am I doing here on Earth who made this error I mean what am I

why am I here and he said ramas he said um you're in school why don't you try taking the curriculum why don't you try being human you see I never thought of that you understand because I was busy trying to be divine and I thought that if somehow I did it all perfectly enough I fasted long enough I prayed hard enough that sort of era of my Humanity would disappear and I would be divine and what he said was your freedom lies through your Humanity not in spite of it and I began to hear all

of the lines in the Mystic traditions for example the line there is nowhere to stand that says the object of all of this work of Life of incarnation isn't to get high it's to be be free and to be free means you don't stand anywhere it means you don't stand in heaven and look at Earth and you don't stand at Earth and look at Heaven you don't stand anywhere or conversely you stand everywhere and your awareness is extricated from any time space Locust whether it's on the physical or astral or causal plane or whatever plane

once I understood that that my Journey was not to just push away my body and my uh personality and even my astral identity my Arness or my Mythic or archetypal identities those are all part of my individual differences because all the the body the personality the astrology these are all the archetypal things of yon these are all matrices of individual differences by which we can differentiate one of us from another and we get so fascinated with individual differences we don't focus on the ground because we are so fascinated with the figure the ground is the

way we are not different the way in which we are all the same if for example if I look at you this is the last of the review from last year if I look at you we look at one level you see if you look at me you see a body 56y old attractive gentleman if you shift to my personality you see a pleasant looking chap a mild manic depressor if you look another level you see an Aries if you look another level and we look into one another's eyes it's very much like those um

beings the men people who went to the Moon and they wore those space suits and they had little windows in them it's like you come up and you look in the window and you say are you in there I'm in here how did you get into that one see when you look at another person through their eyes it's why the eyes are called the windows of the Soul you see through the veil of all the individual differences and you see another entity in there just like you just looking back at you and you see the

entity is packaged differently and because it's packaged differently it's living in an entirely different Universe than you are or in a relatively different Universe than you are now if you go one step further in your altered state of consciousness you look and there's only one of it looking at itself looking at itself there's only one awareness that is playing by being in these many forms and you're only appearing to be an audience and I'm only appearing to be a speaker and we're talking to itself and to keep the Buddhist happy if you change once more

it all disappears which is the same only the other side now once you start to cultivate these planes realizing you can't stand anywhere once I had found my way out then I had to find my way back in and I had to say how will I live my life in such a way to integrate all these planes of reality how do you live your life for example you look out at the world and you say we're all one at one plane of Consciousness now you're not just intellectually saying it if you've really altered your Consciousness

you experience the Oneness of all things but then you come back into your separateness and you say but it's my television set or you say as Sufi in Islam trust in Allah but tie your camel see it's the it's the simultaneous planes it's it's it's planes of reality in which it appears to be paradoxical in the way in which you live so part of what I then saw my work to be was to keep working to deepen my connection to the one to emptiness to the formless to the unitive states to the non-dualistic component and

also function within the world but as Christ said be in the world but not of the world so you're simultaneously doing them all at once which is now as you develop that quietness inside of that there's nowhere to go there's nobody to go there nothing to do nothing to achieve once you see that all of the forms of dualistic experiencing of collecting experiences is all just relatively real it loosens the power of all those things over you they don't compel you as much and at first when that starts to happen you get a little anxious

because it feels like the richness of life is dying for you and you're beginning to experience the statement lest you die you cannot be reborn you begin to feel death around you you feel the emptiness of things that previously were extremely Pleasant to you and it's a little disconcerting and some of people that are on this journey would like to say stop I think I'd like to go back I would think I would like to milk it for a little more I'd like to have just a little more of the pleasure of the rushes of

the romantic drama because as long as you identify with your separateness you are involved for example in romantic love do you love me how much do you love me do you love me enough would you always love me I mean it's in it it's infinitely milk for drama for emotional Sturm on throng I mean it's just so thick with stuff but once it starts to die because you come into a space behind it's what it's what St John talks about in The Dark Night of the Soul when you have died to the world and you

have not yet been fully born into Divinity and then the answer finally you become what there's a writer castona who has written some books uh Don Juan is the uh Guru in that the kurand diro they're written about Mexico Mexican U Mystic traditions and Don one teaches about being an impeccable Warrior and he says it he says you you learn to live with controlled Folly you huff and you puff and you make believe it matters even though you know that it doesn't and that's the one that's very uncomfortable to most people because all the time

they grew up they were told it didn't matter and suddenly it doesn't matter and they are embarrassed and ashamed and frightened by the implications of that I was in Hawaii recently and I started to talk uh at a lecture I I try to keep myself from getting too far out because well I'll show you I started to talk about what's called The Cosmic giggle the cosmic uh the kind of humor of the whole predicament of humanity and um I was trying to relate the cosmic giggle to suffering which is an interesting challenge because suffering seems

so real and heavy and to how do you giggle about that and the next day the headline in the newspaper over the article about me said ex drug Guru says life a cosmic giggle and I could see the mind of the reporter or the headline writer that there was no way I could do that without seeming to profane the sacred the sacred of the personality which takes drama as terribly real and to stand behind it and see that the this is and that and see it all see it all just as it is without judgment

without clinging without aversion without pulling or pushing just be with it just the way it is it takes a certain deadness and it's not deadness in the sense of you're not experiencing the things all of them are being experienced it's just that they are in a context at which they are in which they just become phenomena arising existing and passing away and what I saw was my work at that point was to learn how to live my life impeccably honor my Incarnation perfectly so that I could be free through form not in spite of form

most of us think we're only free when we break out of forms but as long as you're in an Incarnation there is no way out of form you are in form the question is can you be free inform form for a lot of us we thought freedom was being able to not work for example Freedom had to do with external Freedom it had to do with political systems it had to do with economics it had to do with how you spent your time but if you are around affluent people at all you begin to see

that that kind of freedom is not free that those people are as trapped in their minds as people who have very considerable economic hardships and that when we talking about real Freedom we're talking about the freedom of awareness from identification with thought that's the deepest kind of Freedom the Buddha talks and so the ex exercise becomes how do you live in form how do you live your life and do everything you do every day without getting lost in it so that you are in it but not of it so that there is all the feelings

and emotions and the play but it has the quality of play or as like Herman Hessa talks about it as a game or a dance it's it talked about in the world of Shiva the dance of Life the play or the dance and how do you live your life in such a way that it's dance or play or sweet delight rather than it's also so heavy and serious and I'm so important and whether I live or die is very relevant so at first you take on little things that you can sort of keep your Consciousness

in for example I go into meditation for periods of time and I get very quiet inside and then I come out into the world and something comes along and it doesn't grab me I can it comes at me and I see it like people's projections are interesting when your mind is quiet you see the way other Minds project like um when I lecture which I do quite frequently of I usually stand out front and say hello to people and welcome people and and since I'm like from my point of view I'm like a rent ramas

I I um I don't have a great sense of being somebody important I'm just a I'm a a form I'm just here so I can feel people's projections and I become very um almost chameleon like and I become what they project what they expect since it doesn't matter to me so somebody comes up and says Ras and I say yes you see it it's it's like you can feel you you respond you just become it because it's not it doesn't matter you're sitting behind it you're right here and often you look into somebody's eyes and

even as we are going through these little projective dances we are recognizing one another behind the dance and it's so sweet when that happens it is so incredibly sweet to go into the bank teller to cash a to cash a check and who do you see it's interesting if you see a bank tell if you're a c a Check Casher you see a bank teller if you're resting in your being and you're just a being who happens to be cashing a check you meet a being who happens to be a bank teller now he or

she may not be they may think they are a bank teller and your job you have no moral right or even opportunity to say come on you know you're not a bank teller cuz their finger goes for the little button that calls for health walking you say oh Divine mother say button you're about to be erased error error in the system I have learned well not to do that you don't don't say everything you see but your your mind and your awareness becomes an environment where if somebody else would like to come up for air

there's nothing in you that will keep them stuck that's the secret of it not that you force them to come up but you create an environment where you're not caught in any plane you seeing bank teller man woman um helper server of humanity uh fellow Soul who took birth and happens to be a bank teller you see God in drag God at play you see it's all empty it's all true it's all Rel relatively real all of it is relatively real and you're sitting with all of it simultaneously and you're just cashing the check and

then they are who they need to be and it's quite extraordinary that as you get less and less caught in your roles that you are fulfilling many of them every day you learn how to play them impeccably and yet always remain quiet inside quite equanimous and quite present and quite clear and you are amazed at how many people are right there waiting for you to be there for them that way and how surprising it is what packages they come in because often you would expect that in that package you will not find a conscious being

you'll find somebody who's very asleep into their role and it's quite a surprise to find them right there like your child for example it's people when they have children get busy being parents and they really take their be self as parents seriously and for you to see behind that Veil and see that your child is just another being just like you just happens to be a little one and that you have on this plane a a function you have a biological function and a social function but don't get lost in it stay in the Consciousness

right behind it also but fulfill it that doesn't mean you say oh come on you're not my kid let's because as you allow more and more planes of reality it's like baklava it's just so many planes so many levels of stuff it's so thick it's so rich moment itself is enough now there is another quality I I've spent 25 years um as I said trying very hard to be div and to be spiritual and to grow about a year ago I met an old colleague of mine from Harvard and after about 15 minutes he said

you know dick you haven't changed a bit because in the eyes of the beholder each person sees their own projective systems there is a statement also in the Dow that says truth Waits For Eyes unclouded by longing that when you desire something you see only the outward container you see only the projections of your desire if you're very hungry you only see what's edible a line one of my teachers used once when a pick pocket meets a saint he sees only his pockets is that situation where you don't you only see the projections of your

own desires as to what will fulfill or frustrate them so it is only as you quiet your mind so that you are quite extricated from identification with your own desires it doesn't mean the desires aren't there doesn't mean my Neurosis aren't there it's all there it is just that you are no longer identified with them your awareness you when I talk about you I mean your awareness your awareness has come out of it so that it's in it but not of it it honors it it experiences it acknowledges it but it isn't lost in identification

for example when I was identified with my body I was busy not going bald that was very important to me and I had a long piece of hair that I used to wear like this and I always knew which way the wind blew I always like and now it's a really quite no consequence and I don't expect the more enlightened I get the more here I'll grow it will still be there and I will still be bald but now it's just a it's it's style now instead of a thing a problem instead of a problem

it's stylistic my Neurosis are my style now instead of problems just changes just that little flicker of change but one of the things that has changed in me and this is something that it would have been hard to tell my colleague about from Harvard is that I have begun to fall in love with the universe and it's hard to talk about that let me uh read to you two poems this first one is by a Buddhist monk named tipn Han very beautiful monk I won't read the whole thing I am a frog swimming happily in

the clear water of a pond I am also the grass snake who approaching in silence feeds itself on the Frog I am the child in Uganda all skin and bones my legs as thin as bamboo sticks I am also The Merchant of arms selling deadly weapons to Uganda I am the 12-year-old girl Refugee in a small boat who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate I am also the pirate my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving my joy is like spring so warm it makes flowers bloom in all

walks of life my pain is like a river of Tears so full it fills up all the four oceans please call me by my correct names so that I can hear at the same time all my cries and my laughs so that I could see that my Joy and Pain are but one please call me by my correct names so that I could become awake so the door of my heart be left open the door of compassion all my names the quality of love has no bound there's no other in love there is us at

one level and at the deeper level there is only I we are merged in love call me by my true names the other quote is uh still in dualism but it's on the edge it's a quote from the poet Kabir since the day when I met with my Lord there has been no end to the sport of our love I see with eyes open and smile and behold his Beauty everywhere I utter his name and whatever I see it reminds me of him whatever I do it becomes his worship wherever I go I move round

him all I achieve is his service when I lie down I lie prostrate At His Feet whether I rise or sit down I can never forget him for the rhythm of his music beats in my ears now in the states of awareness where you see there is one there are no boundaries there are no separateness and then as that one starts to come into form as separate you look at the separate forms it has taken with a quality of awe and wonder when you're looking from there when you're looking from the point between What's called

the form and the formless right at the edge and you look down at form or out at form or up at form I don't there's no Direction you look at form you see the absolute a awful beauty of form and you see as Plato talks about it the law the law that you appreciate as what you call God oftentimes is just all form in law it's all lawfully related it's called The Da in Chinese the way of things it's the way in which all forms are related to all other forms and you look and you

see it's perfect you can look in physics or chemistry or astronomy or astrology or psychology or music or wherever you look you begin to see that forms are related all to all other forms all in lawful ways gets interesting when you get down to quarks or things like that but everything above that it looks pretty L and there is an interesting term when you look at the way in which those things are all lawfully related you say it's perfect my Guru in India used to say to me ramas don't you see it's all perfect I'd

say perfect perfect what about Bangladesh what about Africa what about tyranny what about violence what about greed he said don't you see it's all perfect can't you step back for a moment from your Humanity to see the way of things can't you see the way it's all lawfully unfolding the question is have you the courage to see what you're seeing or does it seem to take away your Humanity because when you look and you say it's all perfect the problem is it's so impersonal somebody falls down in front of you and you say Karma see

there's no warmth to it but if you come down into your human heart the pain is unbearable because there is so much suffering everywhere and you look and that there's rape and there's child molestation and there's ecological insensitivity and there's tyranny and there's terrorism and there's which one is it first starvation the homeless that who is it where's where does your heart go first and what most people do is they close their heart down and they armor it to protect it from the immense amount of suffering they armor it with their mind with thoughts with

a web or a net or a veil of thought that armors the heart so that they don't get hurt and overwhelmed by the immensity of the suffering because you know how when your child hurts you give anything and the quality of the heart is the heart has no boundaries my heart goes out to you is the expression the heart will give the heart doesn't know boundaries the Mind knows the boundaries the heart says here take my automobile take my apartment take anything the mind saying now wait a minute be reasonable and there is an interesting

dialogue that goes on within us and so this armoring protects not only our hearts from the amount of suffering outside but it protects our separateness from our heart which would give away our separateness it would give away everything give away everything and so the interesting question is how do you keep your heart open in hell and what does it mean to be in love with the world and what does it mean in action what do you do the answer lies again in the statement at least the answer that I have found thus far that there's

nowhere to stand that if you stand only in your Humanity it's unbearable if you stand in the area of perfection it's impersonal if you get them both going at once it is the root of what I understand true compassion to be about it is something where unlike job which questions God at some point you do what you do because your human heart hurts and you want to do what you can to relieve the suffering of the people you love and at the same moment there's not a flicker in you as to it is all as

it must be that's what's called faith I guess from one level until it is what you are I mean I don't have to have faith that I can make a fist I do but I'm just making a fist but the level that that becomes real in the sense sense of you have gred it or you become it or you're one with it that sense of Oneness and Perfection of form at that point there is no um flicker there's no flicker I work with AIDS patients now I do a lot of work with AIDS patients and

a fellow calls me and he just found he has AIDS and he was a law student and all of his plans have now gone arai and his whole life has changed and he's frightened and my heart my human heart cries with him and so he hears there's a fellow human heart that's empathizing with him at the same moment there's another part of me that's just looking at the universe as it is and saying yes and this too and this too he has a new curriculum now this is heavy work for his soul he's going to

do new work in terms of Awakening because when you look at individuals from the level of Soul or awareness or spiritual eness you see the entire Earth plane and all the personality and all the physical things and the death and sickness and illness and all of it you see it all as the curriculum of the Soul when you look at it from the personality point of view it's horrible and that seems so unfair and suffering seems so cruel and for you to hear the term suffering is Grace not that you would ask for it but

that when it comes your way you work with it you work with it as part of your spiritual journey of Awakening because the only reason anybody suffers is because of the clinging of their mind starvation is just a certain set of pangs the fact that you suffer when you starve is because of the mind's identification with the separateness when ramano Mahari the great Saint in India was dying and his devotees were crying bwan Bagan don't leave us don't leave us he said don't be silly where could I go I'm just dropping my body it's no

big deal when you have that level of awareness then the whole meaning of suffering changes and all suffering is showing you is where your mind is still clinging I was giving a lecture recently in De Mo Iowa in the United States and I came into the hall and people saying ramas ramas and I was yes yes and I was being very I mean I am that I'm like I'm a nice person and I was being nice person is and humble and all those things you're supposed to be and I walked into the hall and I've

always asked at L lectures for one of these microphones so that I can sit cross-legged and bring the microphone up because if it's a straight microphone you spend the evening leaning like that so I walked into the auditorium and there was a straight microphone and I was smiling hello hello and I suddenly look what's that and the woman who was managing the hall said well that's the only microphone we had I said well I ordered the in advance and I was I suddenly saw my I saw that I got caught I saw that it got

me and I broke out laughing because what I saw was that my Guru had come in drag as a microphone to say I'll get you this time you phony holy you and so when you want to be high everything that brings you down becomes a nuisance when you want to be free everything that brings you down is showing you the place where you're bringable downable if you pardon the crudity of language it'll show you where you're holding and you begin to hate it and love it at the same moment you begin to hate it and

love it at the same moment so as you see formless come into form the beauty of it and the awesome nature you just love forms so much all of it just the way it is and you look at somebody even somebody who is really rather unpleasant and you see their you see the unfolding of the law of their unpleasantness and you may not like their actions but you still understand the absolute beauty of the nature of the law unfolding at that for that person and you experience such love for them you can't you don't I

find myself confused and the reason I'm confused often is because when I grew up I grew up in the presence of what you might call conditional love that is there were people around me who wanted things I mean if it was only that my parents wanted me to be a good son or a good boy whatever it was somebody wanted something and the minute somebody wants something they are in the subtlest way a conditional lover because they they close down a little bit when you're not being what it is they want or what they need

and you get a feeling of that it gets a little cold when you're a certain way and it's a little warmer in the environment when you're another way and so you learn how to be a certain way it's the way we get trained emotionally well I grew up assuming that everybody wanted something from me subtle low it might be and and I learned how to be what other people wanted me to be as I told you before when I went to India and met my Guru my spiritual teacher he showed me that I it was

like meeting somebody that was so uh self-contained if you will or so free of that need that he didn't really care what I was I'll give you a few stories that I've told before but they show you the this what that relationship was like one of them it's an old familiar one to some of you um I had a Volkswagen micrus and there were maybe uh 11 or 12 of us in the bus one day we were going to visit a little Temple some miles away from my Guru because he said we couldn't come itly

afternoon on the way back the the the bus was only running on three cylinders and it wouldn't go up a hill because so many people were in it so I said would everybody get out and help push very Steep Hill everybody got out but two women who were in the back talking and they heard me but they ignored me and so we pushed up the hill with the women in it and I was thinking they should have gotten out pushed you know they really could have gotten out and pushed but I didn't say anything because

I'm a gentleman and but I was inside I was kind of seing and we got back to the temple where my Guru was and we walked in and my Guru was yelling as we walked in the door yelling across the courtyard Romas is angry Romas is angry and everybody said no he's been very very nice and they said he said no he's angry because the women wouldn't get out and push okay so there was one example okay now then um one I think I wrote about and be here now um back in 1968 after I'd

been in India for several months and fasting and doing yoga I was um I looked like a yogi I really did I had long beard and Jetta and I had beads and I was wearing a dress and Barefoot and I had light pouring out of my eyes and light coming out of my forehead and I it was before I fell and um and uh I I had been not allowed out of the temple for four months and um then I had to go to Delhi to get my Visa extended and so I went to New

Deli walking through the streets Barefoot and I was just floating you know through the streets I I was so far uh out that I went into a a stationary store to buy some envelopes and they wouldn't take my money because I was too holy and uh that's pretty holy in India you know so so it came time for lunch and I went to a vegetarian restaurant which was suitable to the my role and um I sat in a booth so the wall was here and people were here and because I had so much light and

I was so extraordinary looking in my whole being I was a Wester at the boot and uh people were watching me very intently and so I ordered an appropriate T of you know suitable foods for Yogi and you eat in a certain way when you're a yogi you eat sort of as if you don't want it but you'll force yourself to and uh I was doing quite well I mean they were clearly impressed and I was impressed we were all impressed and and uh dessert came and um it was um some something with with two

uh English biscuits in it and they were cream filled biscuits and they were they were not Yogi food and they knew it and I knew it and you know it's the kind of thing a yogi would just go like that too you know but inside me was this um fat Jewish adolescent that he wanted those biscuits there was no doubt about it so so I um in Magic when you do magic you make people look at one hand and then you do something with the other hand so I I looked holy this way and I

moved the desert over this way and then I um did something there and I slowly edged the biscuits in my mouth so I didn't lose any points with these people and that night I got on the bus and I went back to the mountains 8 hours back on the night bus and uh got there and I brought some fruit to my Guru and I kneel down in front of my I had done my Visa and I came back to him and I kneeled down and I put my head down and he grabbed the back of

my hair and he pulled me up and he looked at me and he said how did you like the biscuits so so one day I was uh sitting up in front of him and I it started to dawn on me that he really did know what was in my mind you know I was a little slow in learning this cuz he he had been doing this and then all he was sitting there talking to other people right in front of me he was right on his table right and I thought well if he knows those

oh he knows that and if he knows that he know oh and it's like try not to think hippopotamus you know it was suddenly all the things that you would not want anybody to ever know were my mind was full of those things the things that you're you don't even want to hear have yourself know you're thinking you know and I was I was I got all red and I couldn't look at him and when I finally looked through my fingers at him he was looking at me right down close and he was looking at

me with such total love and at that moment I thought what Grace if I ever could be that kind of a person that could love people just the way they are because what happened at that moment was something clicked in me in which I began to allow myself to be just allow myself to be and there had been a little hook in there that never it was always I'll be okay I'll be holy when I get rid of those things and suddenly it's I am what I am and it's okay and that desire that that

happened is I can feel it beginning to happen I can feel myself beginning to appreciate other human beings instead of judging them the judging always comes from your own sense of separateness and you're always judging people as better worse taller shorter fatter thinner richer something all kinds of Continuum all the time comes with the mind the other quality is one of just appreciating the exquisiteness of all these forms manifesting and the law unfolding and the intent of the spirit to awaken out of its separateness into the totality and just appreciating the magnificence of the forms

the difficulty and the confusion for me lay in the fact that I because of the way I was brought up I felt a starvation or a hunger to be in love with other another person and I felt that when I was in love when I experienced it I immediately wanted to possess the Beloved it's a very common thing as some of you may notice that you're going along and suddenly a stimulus is presented which releases it separates the armoring of your heart and you experience you say I am in love what you then add is

I am in love with you now you are the method put it another way you are the stimulus which releases the mechanism in me which allows me to be in love but I identify the state of love with my method of getting there so I say I am in love with you and the minute I say I am in love with you then because it feels so good to be in love I want where are you going to be Tuesday evening and where are you going to be Friday evening and where are you going to

be for the rest of my life because you are my connection to the place in myself where I am love and I can't get there without you and I feel closed off if I don't have that being to be in love with but now imagine that in the course of your spiritual practices of your Awakening of this Natural Evolution of Awakening the mind starts to quiet and as the mind quiets the veils get a little more flimsy they get a little more transparent and you start to flick in and out of being in your heart

more and more it's not cut off from you as much and you look at somebody and you feel you are in love with them and then what you your old habits say I am feeling this feeling I must possess so you say would you like to nest with me and you go and you prepare a nest together you get twigs and leaves and drapes and curtains you make a nice Nest you're all cuddly together and then after a while you say I have to go down to the store to get some yogurt and beer and

you're at the checkout counter and you look into the eyes of the person the checkout counter and it happens again now we have a society that has certain moral codes about that you considering a Minaj at well what do you do at that point do you deny the feeling do you collect another one if you leave this one and the other one is in the nest when you got back you won't have either of them and what are you going to do from then on you going to look at another person what happens if it

happens again going to start a community what required and I I realized because I started to do this and then I saw what has to happen is I have to get rid of these old habits of collecting the Beloved I have to be able to appreciate the Beloved without collecting it because I realize I'm not going to run out of lovers not talking about lovers in the in the physical sense I'm talking about lovers in the sharing the same space with another being which is actually beyond the physical place and it's very strange to me

still to walk down the street and look at somebody and our eyes meet and at that moment the flickering occurs Mo just almost like that they go from what do you want and then when you don't want anything some of them flick again and suddenly there you are just took a moment and you're there in love together and what are you going to do about it should we have coffee let me have your number in case I run out later or finally you just let go and you just allow yourself to see the Beloved more

and more in everyone you look at as you cultivate these planes of Consciousness where you see the Beloved where you're no longer so identified with your own desires and needs that you can only see the projection of your desires and needs so that you see the Beloved your action automatically changes because how do you act towards somebody you love you act in a way that you don't want them to suffer and in fact taking away their suffer suffering becomes joyful workf it's like Mother Teresa who picks up the lepers in the streets of Kolkata and

she sees them as Christ in his distressing disguises this is her beloved she's doing this and it's interesting how there's a line from Gandhi he said God demands nothing less than complete selfs surrender as the price for the only real Freedom that is worth having when a person thus loses him or herself he or she immediately finds himself in the service of all that lives it becomes his delight and Recreation he or she is a new person never wary of spending himself self in the service of God's creation it's interesting that at that point the

work you do to relieve suffering in the world becomes a form of making love or a form of being in love with another being and there are two levels of that one is where you see the Beloved as a separate entity from yourself and the next level out is where the suffering is your suffering and you're relieving the suffering just in the same way as you might pull your other hand out of the fire and when somebody says thank you that almost feels as if they are making you distant more distant than you are because

you weren't a thank you away you were inside that person there is a quality of your behavior that changes as you cultivate these planes of awareness in yourself that can be called spiritual or Altered States Of Consciousness and as you integrate them into your life you begin to become not only appreciative of the universe around you including your own human heart and its pain and you live with the Paradox of suffering is Grace and at the same moment from a human point of view suffering hurts and I'll do what I can to relieve it you

learn the same moment you begin to become responsive rather than reactive that is when you are lost in your mind somebody does something and there's a habit that reacts the minute there is awareness or equinity a stimulus comes at you and it goes into the totality into emptiness and out of the gestal or the total situation an appropriate response occurs not reactive just to that stimulus but responsive to the total situation let me read you one story and I'm getting near a break so those of you that have had more than enough you can this

is a story told this is in um my most recent book how can I help that I did with Paul Gorman it's a extraordinarily good book um this is a story told to me by a friend who was a master of iido the train clanked and rattled through the suburbs of Tokyo on a drowsy spring afternoon our car was comparatively empty a few housewives with their kids in toes some old folks going shopping I gazed absently at the drab houses in Dusty hedge RS at one station the doors opened and suddenly the afternoon quiet was

shattered by a man bellowing violent incomprehensible curses the man staggered into our car he wore Labor's clothes and he was big drunk and dirty screaming he swung at a woman holding a baby the blow sent her spinning into the laps of an elderly couple it was a miracle that the baby was unharmed terrified the couple jumped up and scrambled towards the other end of the car the labor aimed a kick at the retreating back of the old woman but missed as she scuttled safety this so enraged the drunk that he grabbed the metal pole in

the center of the car and try to wrench it out of its stanion I could see that one of his hands was cut and bleeding the train lurched ahead the passengers Frozen with fear I stood up I was young then some 20 years ago and in pretty good shape I've been putting in a solid eight hours of iido training nearly every day for the past three years I liked to throw and grapple I thought I was tough the trouble was my Marshall skill was untested in actual combat as students of iido we were not allowed

to fight iido my teacher had said again and again is the art of reconciliation Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe if you try to dominate people you're already defeated we study how to resolve conflict not how to start it I listened to his words I tried hard I even went so far as to cross the Street to avoid the pinball punks who lounged around the train stations my forbearance exalted me I felt both tough and holy in my heart however I wanted an absolutely legitimate opportunity whereby I might

save the innocent by destroying the guilty this is it I said to myself as I got to my feet people are in danger if I don't do something fast somebody will probably get hurt seeing me stand up the drunk recognized the chance to focus his rage aha he roared a foreigner you need a lesson in Japanese manners I held on lightly to the commuter strap overhead and gave him a slow look of disgust and dismissal I planned to take this turkey apart but he had to make the first move I wanted him mad so I

pursed my lips and blew him an insolent kiss all right he hollered you're going to get a lesson he gathered himself for a rush at me a fraction of a second before he could move someone shouted hey it was earsplitting I remember the strangely joyous lilting quality of it as though you and a friend had been searching diligently for something and he had suddenly stumbled upon it hey I wheel to my left the drunk spun to his right we both stared down at a little old Japanese man he must have been well into his 70s

this tiny gentleman sitting there Immaculate in his kimono he took no notice of me but beamed delightedly at the labor as though he had a most important most welcome secret to share come here the old man said an easy vernacular come here and talk with me the big man followed as if on a string he planted his feet belligerently in front of the Old Gentleman and roared above the clacking Wheels why that hell should I talk to you the drunk now had his back to me if his elbow moves so much as a millimeter I

drop him in his socks the old man continued to beam at the laborer what you been drinking he asked his eyes sparkling with interest I've been drinking saki the labor bellowed back and it's none of your business Flex of spittle spattered the old man oh that's wonderful the old man said absolutely wonderful you see I love saki too too every night me and my wife she's 76 you know we take a little bottle of sakei and we go out in the garden and we sit on our bench and we watch to see how our Pimon

tree is doing my grandfather planted that Pimon tree and we've been very concerned about it after the ice storms we had last winter but you know it's done better than you could expect when you consider the poor nature of the soil do you know we go out with our saki even when it rains he looked up at the labor his eyes twinkling as he struggled to follow the old man's conversation the drunk's face began to soften his fists slowly unclenched yeah he said I love P Simmons too his voice trailed off yes said the old

man smiling and I'm sure you have a wonderful wife no replied the laborer my wife died very gently swaying with the motion of the Train the big man began to sob I don't got no wife I don't got no home I don't got no job I'm so ashamed of myself tears rolled down his cheeks a spasm of Despair rippled through his body now it was my turn standing there in my well scrubbed youthful innocence my make this world safe for democracy righteousness I suddenly felt dirtier than he was then the train arrived at my stop

as the doors opened I heard the old man cluck sympathetically my my he said that is a difficult problem sit down here and tell me about it I turned my head for one last look the laborer was sprawled on the seat his head in the old man's lap the old man was softly stroking the filthy matted hair as the train pulled away I sat down on a bench what I had wanted to do with muscle had been accomplished with love I had just seen iido in combat what is our journey on Earth about in a

in the most profound sense that I can grasp it is the Journey of Awakening in which all of our life experiences are the Grist for the mill of our Awakening and The Awakening occurs as the Mind becomes quiet as awareness no longer is pulled by each thought and as the thoughts less grab the awareness the veil thins around the heart and one experiences that quality the heart is the not the emotional heart and not the physiological heart but the heart that the Chinese call the sin sin or the heart mind that deepest part of one's

being that suddenly becomes available one begins to rest in it and one comes to appreciate not only other people but oneself and appreciate the beautiful poignancy of our journey on Earth and then we can start to take all of the um all of the unfolding experiences and use them all to work on ourselves and the work we do in ourselves becomes our gift to everybody else because the clear you are the more Your Heart is Open the quieter you are the more you become an environment through which other people can become free because less and

less do you need anything from them and you are more just present with as it as as we are you're present with the moment as that quieting occurs you are less caught in the models in your mind that have expectations about the future that have clingingsmith even as you're having your supper you're planning for your dessert even as you're having your dessert you're planning for your evening even as you're having your evening you're worrying about tomorrow even as you're doing one act you're already in the next ACT to pull your awareness back from your the

time binding nature of Mind allows you to be fully here to be fully here am I happy yes I'm happy I'm happy because it's spring I'm happy because people are having babies that are bringing joy into their lives I'm happy because flowers are blooming I'm happy for a myriad reason am I sad yes I am sad because every 45 seconds a child is dying needlessly from Hunger I'm sad because there is so much inhumanity among humans to each other and to other species I am sad because there's so much fear in this moment I am

both happy and sad as long as you try to stay in the world of polarities happy sad dark light positive negative good evil you cannot experience the richness of the moment the richness of the moment is the one that lies just behind the two