The Freedom of Being Nobody - Ram Dass

[Music] to the extent that i am anything at all we could consider me as a separate entity a set of predisposing characteristics a program that is manifesting by taking a human birth at this time i have taken a birth into a body and that body has with it a personality i've taken a breath into a personality and that personality is in a body and i am going through a set of experiences which is called living life and these experiences have a certain function these experiences if used consciously and intentionally by me are vehicles through which

i can awaken to who i am in truth let me take you through an example i often use just another little metaphorical image an analogy imagine for example that you have next to your eyes a little control switch and you look at another human being on channel one and what you see when you look at the other human being is a physical body man woman old young fat thin pretty handsome ugly interesting if you're a scientist you might call them mesomorphs ectomorphs and endomorphs okay it's a matrix of individual differences on physical plane it's the

plane of standing on the corner watching all the girls go by it's that reality now let's just say you're looking at another person and you flick your television receiver one channel now you look at another person and what you see is their psychology oh you're a manic depressive oh you're a happy person i wish i was happy like you people in psychotherapy live on this channel usually they're totally preoccupied with their own depressions elations fears anxieties loneliness hopes etc and that's reality that's the real you and the physical body is merely the carrier of that

well let's flip it again flip it again and you look at another person and if you are so trained to be able to see on this channel you would say oh i know who you are you're a libra i can tell because of the you're a sagittarius on this channel on channel 3 there's only 12 beings in the universe and various permutations of them you are now seeing what could be known as the astral identity of an individual you're seeing another plane of reality they're seeing another way of looking at individual differences these are three

ways of looking at individual differences three matrices if you will but now you flip the dial once more starts to get interesting now if you flip the dial and look into another person's eyes you flip the dial inside your own being and look into another person's eyes what you see is another being looking back at you inside an astral configuration a personality in a body you in there i'm in here how did you get into that one and you see what the christians call soul you see another soul see another being just like you no

different just like you just another being and that you see that all the individual differences are all of the stuff in which this being is encased now you could almost be comfortable with that one but we unfortunately must flick the dial a few more times i mean i must take you the whole journey you flick the next dial and what you see when you look into someone else's eyes is you see yourself looking at yourself looking at yourself because on that plane there is only one of it it is one awareness that is in a

multiplicity of forms and finally if you allow me to flick the dial just once more if you haven't given up completely yet you flip the dial once more and you disappear and i disappear and the dial disappears and we're dealing with what the buddhists call void or in the new testament before the word that is before the vibratory uniqueness or why god is not able to be spelled in the hebrew religion it's unspeakable unknowable unseeable unconceivable inconceivable okay now of all of these channels on the television set who are you which one do you want

to settle for you want to be middle aged how about that one i mean i'm middle aged i guess i'm middle age i have a 47 year old body it's like i have also a 1974 dodge van but you say to me who are you and i don't say i'm a dodge van why do i choose to identify with this well if i don't pick body should i pick personality i'm somebody on the path that's a good one to be i'm a curious person i'm curious about the future that's a good one i'm a responsible

person well i'm kind of wild i'm lazy i'm working on myself these are all different psychological takes of who one is each plane each turn of the dial has a different statement of your identity and each one is getting into a more and more profound place now when we come back to who am i which channel are you talking about if we start from the top and go on down into the grosser planes i am the void who manifests as the one who becomes the many who has a unique set of factors to work out

through a unique astral psychological and physical body that's what i'm doing on earth i have taken a body to do certain work and when i finish that work i will drop that body we are dealing here with the issues of karma and reincarnation now in the west after the councils of trent constantinople and nicaea anywhere from about 200 to 500 a.d these ideas were roughly thrown out of christianity because they didn't make the church a workable situation because when you had reincarnation and karma every human being became their own priest because it was between you

and god and for the church to keep its own control and see its function as keeping people morally living properly it had to get rid of those concepts have i taken birth before i have no experiential knowledge of that but from where i'm sitting undoubtedly thousands and thousands and thousands of times will i take birth again undoubtedly thousands and thousands and thousands of times i have to tax your brain with one more difficult concept as long as we were dealing with your body [Music] with your personality with your astral identity or with your soul we

were dealing in time time passes things change the minute we got up into the higher plane than that in the one there is no time anymore time is relative now we're dealing with the place where when you know yourself as that you just are you are going nowhere and you are coming from nowhere the zen master says you're going and coming is nowhere but where you are now if you can start to sense i mean you don't have to believe what i'm saying just because it's the way the universe looks to me but if you

could empathize just enough to appreciate how it would be to be looking at the world from this point of view if you imagine what it's like to see your life as so functional to your awakening and your death equally so that the whole business becomes merely a process of growth and awakening and opening and deepening and clearing and shifting channels and there is no problem about transition there's no holding on out of fear it's just opening you