Transcription
That part of you that is separate, that part of you that is your senses and your thinking mind, is all part of what changes. There is, however, a component—component isn't the right word because it implies something else, and it's all part of the same thing—but there is a plane of reality in which you recognize, or you are, what isn't changing. It's not you; it's just what isn't changing. It's the base from which change all occurs. Resting in that and resting in change, dealing with that balance and tension, that's the art form. That's what all the spiritual things lead you to.
[Music]
Ultimately, welcome everyone to the Romos Here and Now podcast. This is episode 249, Balance and Tension. I'm Jackie de Brinsa, and as always, it is an honor to be here with you, this incredible community, through time and space, honoring the wisdom of this great luminary. Thank you for tuning in.
This episode is a continuation from the last one, 248, and it's a lecture recorded in Edgerton, Massachusetts, in 1992. And, and the first part of this episode just really brought forward to me this lovely poem by Rumi called "A Great Need." And it goes, "Out of a great need, we are all holding hands and climbing. Not loving is a letting go." Listen, the terrain around here is far too dangerous for that. And isn't that the truth, right? We need each other. Uh, we've got to have each other's back. And as we do that, um, it looks different from different planes.
And so, in this episode, Ram Dass is talking about how awareness of these different planes of consciousness can shape our perceptions and experiences. And he reminds us that what appears real on one level may just be a relative truth from another level. And he sort of challenges us to break free from our limitations of mind, encouraging us, as he typically does, to tap into that boundlessness of heart and love and that deep awareness that resides in each of us. And, you know, we all know that is so much easier said than done, but we keep practicing. We keep showing up.
Now, there's this one part in this episode that's very nuanced. Um, he's talking about navigating social justice with grace and authenticity while being on these different planes of consciousness. And this is a really delicate conversation, even more so 30 years later, because it's really easy to blandly overlook the subtleties of this conversation and sort of use these teachings to bypass our own discomfort around the history of dominator culture, or to, we might negate others' lived experience of diversity within the unity. And I know some of you will take me for even bringing it up, suggesting that I'm doing the very thing that he's warning us about. I'm not just letting it go. And maybe that's true. Um, and I know that we live on different planes of consciousness simultaneously. And I also know that most of us, especially in the West, spend 99% of our time on channels one and two, the physical and psychological planes. And from that place, it's important for us to care for each other, to care for our unique histories, and offer consideration. And so, I know that I have incredible privileges in this culture, and I know Ram Dass had even more. And so it's just important to recognize that when we dive into these nuanced, subtle conversations.
But I think you'll hear this too as you listen. The message is this idea again of including the paradox, the both, recognizing and honoring the diversity and real experience of our incarnations, and remembering we are also more than how we know ourselves to be. It's not an either/or; it's a both/and. And he also goes on to remind us that we're all in this together, which is why we become allies to each other, all of us. Um, and, you know, that means doing our inner work as well as our outer work, as well as our outer work. Work. Um, in fact, it's precisely through this inner work that we become better equipped to navigate the complexities of the world. And I say work, but, you know, that's not necessarily the best word. It needs to include lightness and play. I had a mentor, and he used to say, "Hey, this is way too important to take seriously." Which, you know, I think is why many of us show up to these episodes on this podcast, because we love Ram Dass' honesty and his insights, and especially his humor.
So, in just a moment, you'll be treated to this wealth of wisdom straight from Ram Dass, and you're not going to want to miss any of it. But I do want to take just a few seconds, um, to let you know what's happening here in the Love Serve Remember world. And first, I just want to let you know that Papadosio is releasing their second collaboration with Ram Dass. Uh, Friday, it's called "The Antidote for Fear," and it's a combination of Ram Dass' words and musical improv, improvisation. And, uh, as we've learned from so many of these, they're amazing. So it'll be available, or is available, everywhere you stream music.
And earlier today, I got off the first community call for the Ram Dass Reimagined Life and Teaching course. And this first week, we're talking about the space suit, taking off the space suit, the ego roles we all seem to identify, um, ourselves by. And most of us know that this first happened for Ram Dass with an LSD trip. And, um, there's a big conversation going on right now about psychedelics and mental health, but there's also other conversations happening around psychedelics and consciousness and spirituality and science. And so we want to invite you to that conversation. We're starting a new free monthly community conversation, officially called The Explorers Club, AKA Innerlight School. And it already has an amazing lineup of speakers, including Bruce Damer, Stephen LaBerge, the Myth Hoffers, East Forest, and Rob Bell, and others. Um, we're going to kick it off on April 25th with Bruce Damer, who's a researcher at UC Santa Cruz, an associate of, of the NASA Astrobiology Center, and developed a hypothesis around the origins of life that is changing where they place the rovers on Mars. And all of this came out of a psychedelic journey, and he believes that these non-ordinary states, however you achieve them, can be an agent for creative problem-solving, both for ourselves and for what this world needs right now. So to find out about this, as well as our free monthly Soul Pod meetups and Affinity groups, go to Ram Dass.org/fellowship.
And if you want to work with your mind in other ways, accessing those alpha waves that bring in those sweet flow states, then you can find some support with Magic Mind. This incredible little drink that helps you stay focused, energized, and creative throughout the day. It has so many great ingredients and herbs. As an herbalist, I'm stoked about this. It contains Bacopa, which is a nootropic, which is, you could say, like a brain vitamin. Uh, check it out and get up to 50% off your subscription for the next 10 days with the code RAMDASS. Just go to MagicMind.com/Ram Dass.
As always, we give such thanks for the privilege to be here with you. And we dedicate any good that comes from these teachings and these episodes to all beings everywhere. May they ripple out in your lives and throughout the world. So here is Ram Dass, Here and Now. Namaste and blessings.
[Music]
When I sit with a person that is very ill with AIDS-related symptoms and close to leaving her or his body, and that person's dreams are crushed, and often they're ostracized by the family, and it's economically hard, and the social ostracism from the community, all this stuff. There's a part of me in which each time I'm doing that, my heart is breaking for this human being. It's breaking from the levels of pity for the plight of another person. It's also breaking from empathy, from imagining myself being in that same predicament, realizing how horrible it would feel. An opportunistic illness, you don't know what's going to strike next. You just get better from one thing, and another thing hits you. That part of me that is reacting with the breaking heart, that is common to most of the people that are around that person.
I remember once teaching a course with Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, and this nurse said, "I've had cancer for some 15 years, and I have three children, young children. I've had many operations, and I'm a nurse." And she said, "If I, if you came to the hospital to visit me, what would you feel?" And then they met a list on the board, and somebody said, "I'd feel angry at God that a young mother should be this sick. I'd feel..." And they had a whole list of things that came out of pity and empathy. And then she said, "How would you feel if you were me?" She said, "Everybody's so busy reacting to my predicament. Nobody's with me." Can you hear that one? Can you hear that? The person, like when I look at the woman lying there dying of AIDS, I see a person dying of AIDS, and my heart breaks. And then behind it, I see a soul, just like me, an entity, an awareness that is going through a process called dying of AIDS. You in there? I'm in here. What are you doing today? Well, I'm dying of AIDS. What are you doing? Well, I'm helping you. Ah, so here we are now.
Part of that sounds callous, but part of that is incredibly liberating. Because the question is, who's dying of AIDS? And from where I sit, only on a couple of planes of reality is something interesting happening called dying of AIDS. Buddha has this great image, which I, it's probably apocryphal, but it's a great story. It's the image you probably mostly know of somebody saying, "How many times have we been through this?" And he said, "Imagine a mountain 6 miles long, 6 miles wide, 6 miles high." It's actually the length of time it takes a water buffalo to walk, but that, that's translated into miles. He didn't say miles. And he said, "And imagine every hundred years, a bird flies over the mountain with a silk scarf in its mouth and runs the silk scarf across the mountain once." In the length of time it would take the silk scarf to wear away the mountain, that's how long you've been doing this. Just allow it for a second. Just play with it for a second. My life, you know, what life is like? It's not even a blink of an eye. It's a, oh, there goes that one. That goes that one. I was boiled in oil that time. How you...
The Dalai Lama said, "Really be kind to everybody, not only because, you know, because they're nice, but because once they were your mother." That's giving me pause, I'll tell you. I mean, I think he didn't fully appreciate my mother, but at one level, when I come into a room with somebody that is going through some incredibly traumatic experience, one level of me, my heart is breaking, and another level of me is feeling an equanimous awe and appreciation of the way in which it's all unfolding. And I don't even, at that plane, think it's absolutely presumptuous of me to be judging the game. I don't even understand it. It's funny, when there's a mystery, you decide somebody did something wrong because you don't understand it. And suffering is such a mystery.
I've talked about this before, but, uh, when my stepmother was dying a few years back, I was taking care of her. And she and Dad and I had had wonderful times down here in Martha's Vineyard. And, uh, she was a tough New England, um, poker playing, gin drinking, you know, really good, tough gal, strong opinions about everything. And then she was dying of a very painful cancer, and really loved her. I grew to love her deeply. And I would have done what I could to take away the pain. I was giving her all the stuff she needed to get rid of the pain, but still the pain was there. And there was a point where the suffering went on and on. And then at a point, she gave up. She just gave up. She stopped. Not only wasn't she trying to live, which she had given that up before, but she wasn't even pushing against the pain. She just gave up. Which in our culture is a real no-no. Don't give up. Come on, you can do it. She gave up. And because I was there with her, and I was really doing a lot of inner practice and just very spacious, as she gave up, there was a new moment. And the new moment was, it was like, for me, watching an egg break and something new be born. What emerged was a being that was so present and so in the space of love and joy and appreciation and, and, uh, uh, clarity that she hardly knew herself at that moment, because she had never been in touch with that part of herself through most of her adult life. And she and I just went into rapture together. And she stayed in that until she died.
In fact, as she died, it was very far out because she said, as, as I've said before, she said, "Richard, sit me up." And I got her legs over the bed, and she was falling forward. I put a hand on her chest, and she was falling back. I put a hand on her back. Her head was lolling. I put my head against her head. So she was sitting absolutely straight. And she took three breaths, each one the exhalation longer than the inhalation, and she stopped. She left her body. And there are Tibetan manuscripts that describe the way in which certain lamas die, and they sit up straight and they take three breaths and they leave. She came from Dorchester. How did she know that? You know, like, how did she know? What's the sense of I going to India if she knew it all along?
But at that point, I thought to myself, how presumptuous of me to have decided that that suffering was something my heart wanted to take away. Because I loved her as a person, but that suffering broke through something in her that brought forth that thing that might never have come forth in this life otherwise. And I don't say, "Well, next time I'd let her suffer." I said, "I've got to come to terms with the fact that there are two forces in me." One of them that appreciates the awesome nature of the mystery that includes suffering and death, and the other that hurts like hell about it because I'm an individual being empathizing with other individual beings. And there's the, the other part of me, however, is a unity connected with the whole process. And what I'm learning, which is quite extraordinary, is that as I simultaneously live in these other planes of reality more and more, instead of sequentially going in and out of them, getting high, coming down, getting high, coming down, but learning how to live simultaneously—that's what I use the beads for. It's what I use meditation for. It's constantly balancing and creating the tension of living life with passion and at the same moment, the equanimity, the spaciousness, the presence, the loving embrace, and playing with the fact that you're one and you're many, you're formless and you're form, you're unique and you're not, you're somebody and you're nobody. And living with all that simultaneously, that's the art form of being human to me. And to me, that's the space from which you can respond to change in the world and balance the freaking that's happening in you as a separate entity.
When you realize that the jig is up, and the other part of you saying, "Ah, jig is up." It's the story of the woman who gets pregnant by the fisherman, and she doesn't want to admit it's the fisherman. So she says, "It's the monk up in the monastery." So when the baby's born, the townspeople all take, take the baby up to the monastery and they knock on the gate, and the monk comes to the gate, and they say, "It's your baby. You must take responsibility for raising it." And he says, "Ah, so." And he takes the baby and closes the gate. Nine years later, the girl is dying, and she doesn't want to die without confessing. And she confesses, "It wasn't the monk who impregnated her." And they all go up to apologize to the monk for this thing, mistake they made. And they come, they knock, and he comes with the child. And they say, "We're sorry. And it's, you know, if you'd like, we'll take over the raising of the child." And he said, "Ah, so. Sorry. All the ferry tickets are sold for cars for the next three months." Ah, so. Ah, so. Ah, so. A, so.
I mean, look at your own life. How ready are you for an "Ah, so"? You know, "Ah, so" can't afford the house anymore. "Ah, so." It's fun. It's really fun to play with levels of reality. It's really fun. If you stay too much at the level of individual and somebody, it really, it, it's, I find it very finite and boring. It's like living in "As the World Turns" or something like that. It's, you know, it's, it's, you know, will she, won't she? Can I, can I? You know, who cares? You know, people come up and say, "I mean, I don't even care about my life. It's going to be interesting any way it goes." You know, "If you get up and walk out, that'll be interesting. And if you love me, that'll be interesting. And if you're in between, that'll be interesting." What difference does it make? That's your problem, not mine.
I was taking care of Dad after my stepmother died. Then I started working with Dad, or being with him more. And there was this great moment. Dad had gotten, Dad used to be a very active, um, person with strong opinions also, and an achiever and all that. And then, and he didn't, everybody didn't love my father. And, um, but as he got older, he got more and more quiet, until finally, by the time he's about 89, he's just lying there with this kind of smile on his face all the time, sort of like a little, not a, but a smile. And, uh, so one of my relatives comes, this guy, and he never liked Dad. He said, "How you doing, Dad?" Just smiled at him. The guy went outside. And I was talking to him. He says, "Son of a..." "He still won't talk to me." Then my aunt came, who loved my father incredibly, his little sister. "George, how are you?" And he smiled at her. And she said, "Oh my God, what have they done to you? Where have you gone?" He, and I was sitting there just holding hands, just sitting there, just smiling at the world. And they were both miserable, and Dad and I were both happy. So who won? Who won?
How do you keep trying to hold on to something as if it's not going to change, when it's built into the system that it's going to change? How do you meet somebody behind the changing? I gave a lecture on aging in New York recently, and I listed all the things you're going to get. It was great fun. You know, insomnia, high blood pressure, you know, and the whole list. All a list, all a list. Uh, loss of hearing, loss of seeing. Ready? I said, "You know, you're going to spend your whole time pushing against the system. Is that going to make you happy?" In a culture that worships youth, are you going to be miserable because you grow old? It's like this tree is going to drop its leaves. Oh, my God.
The Japanese monk that's dying, and they say, "You haven't written your death poem." And he says, "Oh, I haven't written my death poem." And he picks up a brush and he calligraphies, and he dies. And the poem says, "Birth is thus, death is thus. Verse or no verse, what's the fuss?" A certain kind of lightness about it all.
That part of you that is separate, that part of you that is your senses and your thinking mind, is all part of what changes. There is, however, a component—component isn't the right word because it implies something else, and it's all part of the same thing—but there is a plane of reality in which you recognize, or you are, what isn't changing. It's not you; it's just what isn't changing. It's, it's the base from which change all occurs. Resting in that and resting in change, dealing with that balance and tension, that's the art form. That's what all the spiritual things lead you to.
Ultimately, the spiritual practices and the religions are taking people who got completely lost in their separateness and helping them to awaken to these other planes of reality, which are called spiritual, or whatever you want to call it, God, or everything, astral, causal, lokas, mansions in the Hebrew tradition, whatever you want to call it. But the end result isn't to leave and go somewhere else. The end result is to honor the human incarnation by coming, recognizing these other planes, and then integrating them in. So you, what you call, spiritualize life. You bring the unity in along with the diversity. That I can be with somebody who is different than me, and I can acknowledge the diversity and at the same moment recognize the unity.
But to do that, for us to get to that point, is a tricky social problem. Is this too much? Or I can, I can go a few more minutes. Are you still here? Okay. Um, like, we, we had this, uh, Sati and Insight Meditation Society and St. John the Divine, and I think WBI, we all got together to sponsor this, uh, retreat for social activists, spiritual retreat for social activists, because social activists burn out all the time. You know, you try to take on a project like, like nuclear waste or something, and it's, you know, it's going to go on and on, and it's big, and there's so much ignorance and so much reactivity and so on, and you just kind of get tired in the whole thing. And so we were suggesting maybe there was a place you could stand that would allow you to be continually nourished by what you're doing instead of starved by it.
So we designed this retreat where there'd be meditation practice, and there'd be Spirit Dharma talks, and then there'd be small groups and all that. But it was for political activists, and they're political activists, after all. And so there was a contingent of Latino, Chicano, and African-Americans who got together, and they overthrew us about the second day in the retreat. They said, "We're not going to have any white honkies telling us how to run a retreat. That's the story of our lives." I mean, we were, they said, "You should have taken us, gathered us in the planning of the thing." They were absolutely right. But I tried my spiritual uplevel. I said, "Look, why are you making this us them? We're all one." They said, "Don't give me that crap."
That's an interesting question. And the clue of how to deal with that was given to me when I was doing a, um, television interview of a very beautiful man named Zalman Schachter, a rabbi. And I said to Zalman, "The first question I asked Zalman, 'If you were an Israeli, what would you say to a Palestinian?'" To which Zalman replied, "Oy, oy, that's a problem." And then he said, "You know," he said, "before we can be together, we have to be able to grieve with one another, with one another, to grieve with one another." And that kind of, I heard that inside, deep inside myself. And so we all sat around talking, figuring out what to do. And what happened was like a beautiful description, a way, a manifestation of what Zalman had said. Because at this retreat, which is a five-day retreat, we ended up having what was called, um, a fishbowl, in which we all sat around the outside, and then inside went people of different groups that were oppressed. There were people of color, there were women, there were gays and lesbians. And these were different groups at different times. But all the people of color would get in the center, and they talked to each other about what life was like being oppressed because of their color. And the rest of us would listen. And then each group got in, and the white men got in there too. They had their moment, because there's oppression in also being the oppressor. And after that had gone on for about two days, we found at the end that we, as a group, had bonded together as a family of shared, of humanity, shared humanity, appreciating our various unique predicaments, and through that appreciation, finding the common quality of our humanity from which we could bond and act and be strong. But it took that process.
The predicament is that if you don't have both planes going, you just get into the grieving process, and it doesn't go anywhere. It just keeps feeding on itself, the self-pity, the so on. I mean, there are people that are going to be abused children with Bradshaw all the way through. I mean, I think it's good to bring it out, to acknowledge it, to feel your way through it, and then to let go of it. I don't think any definition of yourself is interesting enough. Why do you keep locking yourself in with the definition? "How do you do?" "I'm a lawyer." "But you're in bed." "My dear, I'm still a lawyer." You know, even woman, man, all of these, they're, they're trippy. They're too trippy. They're all worth going into, honoring, finding your part in it, honoring meaning filling it with neither aversion or attraction, just being in it, just being here in it, and then letting go of the limit of defining yourself in that term.
I would suggest that it is possible to live with your compassionate heart open, which appreciates that it's all us. It's even all me. The levels of working to relieve other people's suffering. I remember with Dad, when I was taking care of Dad, the first thing I did taking care of Dad, I thought, "I'll take care of Dad." People said, "Aren't you great taking care of your father?" And I'd say, "Well, somebody has to do it." You know, "I'll milk it because it's, it's certainly milk." I mean, you know, "He really took care of his father. Wasn't that what a, what a guy? What a, what a guy?" He, then the next level, I, I burn that one out after a while, you know, you can only milk them for so long, you get bored, you know, you need new plots. So I tried the new one. "This is my karma yoga, Dad. You're my karma yoga. Let's take a shower. I'm going to take you. I'm going to go through taking care of you." That was an interesting trip that lasted for a good while. That got boring after a while, too. Finally, I was just taking care of Dad. We were just hanging out. One of us, one of us cleaned it up. It didn't really matter who was doing what anymore. It was just a process. We were just being together in the process of life. And we weren't, I wasn't self-consciously defining it any longer. It was just a part of what you do, like you, you brush your teeth, or you get up, or when you're hungry, you eat, or you, whatever. And at that moment, I felt a very deep resonance and a harmony in what it really meant to be honoring my father, honoring. And it was no big trip. I wasn't, "Thank you," or anything, because when an act is coming out of that level of compassion, I wasn't doing it for Dad. We were both, this, the phenomena within the space of, there's a father, there's a son, there's these things being done, and there we are. And being in that space, who's giving what to whom? It's like if your hand is in cot in the thing, and your other hand pulls it out, this hand doesn't turn to this and say, "Thanks," because they're both part of you. Well, that's the way it starts to be in the stuff in compassion. I mean, that's the fun of the SA Foundation, learning how to do this stuff on big scales, in blindness and poverty and third world and all this, without getting into, "Aren't we doing good?" Or without getting into milking it for righteousness, or trying to get off on it, but just realizing that as you recognize you're part of everything, who suffering is it anyway? It's not their suffering, it's not our suffering, it's the suffering. And your compassionate heart isn't my compassionate heart, it's the compassionate heart. And the action is all happening at the level of action. And behind it all, the statement, "One does nothing, and nothing is left undone."
When you are able to simultaneously live on those planes of consciousness and handle that tension and that balance, then your every act towards other human beings brings to bear with it equanimity, spaciousness, and joy. It's interesting, you're standing in the checkout counter, and it's long, and you're tired, and somebody up there that's going through their pocketbook to find the pennies, and it's a whole thing, and you're sitting there doing your growl and your, "How inconsiderate!" See? And then I'm holding my beads, and suddenly a mantra goes through my mind, and my consciousness flips, and I see the absurdity of my predicament. I mean, this is the way it is. It's interesting, you out in the woods, you know, and you see pine trees and you say, "Ah, pine." Then you see a garral tree and you say, "Ah, garral tree." But the minute you get around humans, it's not, "Ah, slowpoke." See? "Ah, essence of slowpoke. Wow, I haven't seen that in a long time. It's damn slowpoke." You know, it's far out. Just the shift to being an appreciator of life. It's just a flick of consciousness. It's not a big deal. You don't have to sign up for anything. You know, it's just a flick of consciousness. I train myself. So every time I find myself judging, I flick into appreciation. I just train. Why? Ah, you know. I mean, I, I have this situation where my heart closes around certain people, and I realize it's because I'm afraid, or I judge, because judge is related to fear, it's power, it's all that stuff. And so I've been working with it. I really have been working with it. And I've told you about what I've done in the past. I like, for a long time, I had a lot of trouble with Casper Weinberger, who was a Secretary of Defense that I really just didn't like. I mean, he wasn't an evil person, he was just wrong, you know. And so I couldn't open my heart to him. You know, I tried, and I couldn't. So I took his picture and I put it on my puja table. So that in the morning, I'd light my incense and candles. "Good morning, Christ. Good morning, Maharaji. Good morning, Mary and Anand, my Ma." And then, "Hello, Casper." And I, I'd realize how far I had to go yet, because all Casper was, I mean, that's my guru in drag. My guru is, is at Central Casting costume place, and he says, "I'll put on my Casper Weinberger mask, and that'll get him. He'll think it's real." See? And I can't. I mean, if I met Casper Weinberger, I'd go, "You know, hello." What, what is that going to liberate him? That's going to reinforce his entrapment in Casper. It's like, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, when they said, "Are you angry with the Chinese?" He says, "No, that isn't, that isn't practical." And it isn't. I mean, it's not going to make the Chinese open up more. You, and you can oppose somebody. Because Kabir, the poet, had the great line, "Do what you do with another person, but never put them out of your heart." It doesn't mean you're a squash. It does, as my mother would say, "Don't be a squash." It doesn't mean you let people walk all over you, and you don't stand up for actions. Some actions stink and they hurt people. And when you see them, you want to stop them. And you often are an actor to stop it, because it's the part you play in the drama. The question is, where is your heart in that process? Do you close your heart when you say no to somebody? And that's a key issue. If you look at the way you deal with people, when you say yes, and you do give them what they want, you'll notice how open your heart is, because you feel safe and loved. And the minute you say no, watch how you constrict a little bit. And practice watching that, and get to the point where you can go inside, and you can see the nature is the laws of the universe in which, in this drama, my part is to say no. I'm saying no to your actions. I'm not saying no to you. It's like Gandhi said, "The British must leave India, but they must leave as friends." And he was looking behind the veil. He was meeting people on two levels at once. He was available. And this is what we ultimately offer each other. It isn't that we don't oppose each other. It doesn't that we don't meet in all these different social roles with each other. It's that we work on our minds and hearts to create environments where other people are not trapped in a role or a definition, where we can meet as full human beings, where we can meet within the play and the dance of it all. Like you play tennis. You go out to the tennis court to compete, but the funny thing is, you both collaborated to get on the tennis court. So you're collaborating, and you're competing. And that's called good sportsmanship. When you forget it, when you're just collaborative and not competitive, you give away the game. That's not right. When you're just competitive and not collaborative, you end up really a bad sport when you lose, or arrogant when you win. And there are all these ways in which we learn to work with two levels at once. But there are other levels too, than just cooperation and competition. There's interdependence, and there's unity, and there's emptiness, and those are all equally true. And as you and I learn how to live simultaneously, we then become the instruments in a changing world to bring to that situation the kind of, hey, the kind of equanimity, the kind of presence, the kind of joy, the kind of allowing for the mystery that allows us to be an instrument in the situation that relieves and brings about a harmonious situation and relieves suffering. And what you and I offer each other is ourselves as an environment. You don't have any moral right to force another person's consciousness to do this or that. You can legislate about their actions, but their consciousness is theirs. But you can create an environment where another person can come out and play, if they want to. So that when I go around somebody that's dying, if they want to be busy dying, that's up to them. I have no moral right to take away their drama. But I'm right here in case they'd like to wink. I'm right here in case they want to play at more than one level. And what you experience is that when you're not caught in the drama, no matter how thick it is, and dying is very thick, one, that's the heaviest one going, and when you can not get caught in it and still be there, not get, you don't avoid getting caught by closing your heart and defending. You can't do that. That's cold. The person doesn't feel anybody's there for them. You got to keep your heart open, and it hurts, and you're right there, and you're in love with the person. And at the same moment, there is the joy and the equanimity of the universe unfolding in its own beautiful way. I mean, cancer cells aren't evil. They're just being little cancer cells. That's what cancer cells do. Oh my goodness, my goodness. I mean, this is, this is a real moment. When your life becomes a statement that either exacerbates the predicament, you are either the problem or you're the solution, I guess, or you're a little of both. But you work on yourself. I mean, I work on myself in order to become clearer. I do it because I realize I'm part of the web of it all. C.S. Lewis said, "You don't see the center, 'cause it's all center." Where you are is the center of the game. It's all going out from you. There's something that just changes where you become part of the dance of the healing of the whole system. Don't, and you don't end up being so hardened yourself for all the ways you're still in mass denial. I mean, my stepmother, as she was dying, she gave me her car as an act of love. It happens to be a car that pollutes the atmosphere. What am I to do? What am I to do? Probably I'll turn it into a planter or something sooner or later. Aging, decay, dying. Rilke, who's one of my favorite poets, he said, "Love and death are the great gifts that are passed on to us that most of us leave unopened." Instead of worrying, "Am I getting enough love? Do you love me? Do I love you? How much do you love me? Are you sure you love me? Will you love me later? I don't feel loved. How come?" There is one other level of the game, and that is to keep quieting down until you enter the space in the universe where you are love, and out of that comes abundance, not deprivation. And instead of going around like a dry sponge trying to be moistened by the outside world, you go around just watering everything you see. And you can practice. You can look at somebody in the supermarket and look at them with love. Just look at them and realize you and they are in the stew together. And look at how they're dealing with it. Look at what they've gone through. Look at the lines in their face. Look at it all. Appreciate it. Appreciate us. Us. Us. Us. Enter into the space of love with other human beings, not "I love you," not possessive, not collecting. I went from years of, "Nobody loves me. Do you love me enough? How much will you love me?" And then, as a result of all the spiritual practices, I started to realize that I loved people without needing them to love me back. I started to love people, and I, but I had the model that I needed love so bad that when I felt this feeling towards somebody, I wanted to collect them. So I lived in communes, you know, because one isn't enough. You look, and there's somebody else you love. Let's live together. Then I saw that it's politically just very complicated. So I realized that I couldn't live with all my lovers. So I got to the point where I'd meet one, and I'd fall into this place of love, and I'd say, "Let's have coffee or herb tea or whatever." And then I'd take their phone number, just in case later all the lovers I had already had collected should leave. And then I realized I was still working on a deprivation model. Why should I assume that I'm going to run out of lovers? Since the next person I meet's another one, it's all just God in drag. And so I started to be able to get down the street and look at somebody and be so in love with them, I couldn't bear it, and not even wink, not even say hi, or "Are you feeling what I'm feeling?" You know, I'll just, I'm going to end with one of my, my oldest and dearest stories. It's an old chestnut, and then we'll take a break, and then those of you that are gluttons for punishment can come back, and we'll do questions and answers, and turn up the lights and hang out together for a while. Long. This is great stuff. I mean, for me, I love it. I don't know what you're doing here, but I, I may be psychotic, but you paid to hear me. Let's look at that.
But this is, this is, this is one of my, this is a vintage story. Came back from India in '68 or '69. I was so high. I mean, I'd been fasting and doing breathing stuff and being a yogi, and I was so, my guru was, oh God, I had light pouring out of my head, and I was living on all these different planes, but sequentially, you know, I get high and come down, high. And I was working at it. I was living in a little cabin, cooking my own idli, and washing in a pail, and stay trying to keep my high from India. And so, uh, I had this old, um, car, this 1938 limousine, Buick limousine, weighed 6,000 pounds. It was a real tank, like. And I had opened up the trunk, so I made it into a camper in the back seat. And I was going across to California to teach at Esalen. It's going to be a two-week trip across the country. And I was on the New York Thruway. This was the first day. And I was cruising along. I had one leg under me and the other on the accelerator, and I was using the names of God. I was just remembering the names of God, you know, just keeping the, and I just kept enough consciousness on this plane to keep the car on the road, you know, and to be reasonable, because you can't forget your zip code. It's, you got to keep your levels together. And so I'm singing to Krishna, who is one of the forms of the Unnamable, uh, who is, um, often characterized as the, the lover, the God as lover with the Beloved. And I'm just, I'm just feeling in love with Krishna because, and I'm saying, "Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Krishna is blue, and he plays the flute. It's a blue boy, usually." And, and all the milkmaids go gaga over him, and it's, um, and it's all about God. It's not, okay? So, um, on moonlit nights in the Yamuna River, he manifests. There are 17,000. He plays his flute, and all the milkmaids leave their everything and go to the river, and there he manifests himself in 17,000 forms and makes love to each of them in the way that they most would like. There's a whole sect in India of men who dress as women in relation to Krishna because Krishna in that sect is the, is it's a Yab-Yum type force thing. So I'm thinking about Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, this blue Krishna. And I suddenly become aware there's a flashing blue light in my mirror, my rearview mirror. Now, so three-quarters of me is with Krishna. That part says, "He's come." And the other quarter says, "It's a New York State Trooper, and I should stop." So I pull the car over and stop. And up to the window comes this being, and he says, "May I see your license and registration?" Now, what I see is the Beloved. I mean, this, I mean, how would God come? I mean, came as a carpenter once. I mean, why not as a State Trooper? What have you got something against God coming as a State Trooper? So, "Sure, you can have my license and registration. I, God, take anything you want." You know? Now, I'm not saying that because I lived through the '60s. I know what you can't say. So you don't tell everybody everything. But so I say, "Of course, officer." And I had in my license and registration, but I'm just looking at him with such love, see? So he walks around the car, and he goes, and he calls home, or whatever it is you do, and he comes back, and he said, "Well," he said, "you were going too slow." And he said, "If you're, if you're going..."
[Applause]
"...well, better if you drove on the ancillary roads." And I said, "Thank you so much." And I'm, I'm just, you know, I'll do anything just to keep him there because I know it's Krishna. I mean, he can make believe he's a State Trooper, but that's his business, you know? So now he's used up his material, but the thing is, he doesn't want to leave, see? Because how often is a State Trooper loved that deeply? I mean, it's, I mean, I'm not coming on to him. It's not that love. It's just like, yeah, you know, like, "Whoo!" You know, I'm just looking in his eyes like, and he doesn't want to leave, but there's very few routines you can do, you know, within the game plan. So he says, "Great car you got here." See, that gives us a whole new thing. See, and I can get out of the car, and we can spit and kick the tires and hit the fenders and say, "They don't make them like they used to," and talk about straight eights and slant sixes and old cars we've had. And we work that really for a long time, and I'm just, you know, I don't care. We could be talking about, you know, the sewer system in Russia for all I care. I'm just, "Yeah." And finally he's run out of that, and there's nowhere he can go now. He's either got to blow his cover and admit he's Krishna, you know.
[Applause]
But instead, he says, "Well, be gone with you." Which that's not quite State Trooper talk, but we'll give him one arrow without, you know. So I get into the car, and I'm just driving away. He's moved back to his cruiser, and I look in the mirror, and he's waving me. I think, "Now, wait a minute. State Troopers don't wave." So that's to me an example of living on more than one level simultaneously. And I do it most of the time. And people come up and say, and I say, "Really?" And they don't know what I'm seeing. I mean, I'm hearing them say it, but behind it, I'm just looking into your eyes. You here? I'm here. Far out. How's your drama doing? Oh, you don't understand. Really? Oh. And you're hurting, and you're joyful, and you're everything. And this other part of you is just at play, at play, at play in the fields of the Lord. At play. It's God at play. You can decide to be the plaything or the player. The plaything is who you think you are, and who you think you are thinks it makes choices, and it's coming and going and doing all this stuff. Behind it all is the player.
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