Transcription
Good evening. I know some of you have only seen my, or heard my words; you've never seen the body. And, uh, might be somewhat of a shock to you to find out it comes out of a body; you thought it came out of a tape recorder. Well, here we are again and again and again and again. Some of us here have been checking in with each other since the late 60s. And for some people here, this is our first time in the physical bodies to be together. But yet there is something incredibly familiar about all this. And it's sometimes hard to figure out how it could be so familiar when it is not really, uh, we don't know each other particularly in our, in this incarnational history. And I, I suspect that the books and the tapes and you and I are familiar to one another because we talk to a place in ourselves where we are, where we are alike rather than different.
There is so much emphasis in the culture on how we're different from one another, how we're special. And that really the rest of it, the way in which we're not special, in which there is a common—whatever you want to call it, Humanity, Divinity, whatever it is—gets a little lost in the shuffle. And when we speak to that place in ourselves, it is, it's a place that very, uh, often doesn't get exercised very much. It's a place where we feel at home together; feels familiar and warm and comfortable, like an old slipper. I experience it as a place of the heart and less so a place of the Mind. It feels to me like our minds are so much the instruments of our separateness that we think our way into little boxes. It is said that the intellectual who is proud of his intellect is like the prisoner who's proud of his cell. Now, in no way do I want to negate intellect or put it down; it has a beautiful place in this rhythm scheme of things. But it is really, it does us a disservice when it takes over our lives. It's like having a robot that starts to run you. And often what it does is it veils our hearts. Our hearts have this incredibly soft, warm, that experience. My heart goes out to you; my heart, I feel the full, my heart when I, when I feel your suffering; my heart hurts. The heart is such an emerging instrument; it is so much something that brings us together. Through the heart, the heart goes out when you fall in love; you open to the universe. There's a kind of emerging, a, a, a flowing together quality. The mind is always afraid the heart's going to give away the store; the heart's always saying, "Take the keys, take the house, take, take what you need; here, here's some more."
I remember meeting a Tibetan llama once, uh, fellow named Gaya Wangyal in New Jersey—that's a place in the Himalayas—it's a, a, and um, he was in the industrial wastelands of New Jersey, in a, not in the beautiful sections of New Jersey, but really out among all the, um, industrial sites. And he had a little kind of plastic stucco house. And I came to see him, and he was this beautiful llama, just beautiful. And he was so open and so sweet and so loving. And they were so poor, and they were building a little Temple there. And I had, I was on the way to, from one of our big houses to another big house; we were moving to Millbrook, New York. And we had a trunk; I had a Land Rover with a trailer full of furniture. And I thought, "We're so rich, and they're so poor," and my heart was so open. I opened the back of the trailer and I said, "Can you use this? How about this?" And everything we said yes, until the trailer was empty. And it was old; it was lamps and rugs. And in fact, my bedroom rug became the temple rug, which was strange because what I had done on that rug. And every time I went into that Temple, I thought, "You know..." And I gave it all away. And then I just loved him so much, and they were so poor that I took my checkbook and I wrote out a check for roughly everything in my account and I handed it to, and I drove away. And my mind said, "Are you out of your mind?" Which is exactly what I was; see, I was out of my mind; I was in my heart. For change, our hearts have a hard time staying open though, because there's all, not just one llama in Freehold, New Jersey—I mean in each of our lives we come across so much suffering. And you couldn't, could you keep your heart open all the time? You give away everything, and then you'd be suffering too. See, I'm in a funny predicament, and I must share it with you. I don't know quite how to do it, but see if I can express it to you.
Most of the spiritual blessings I started to receive, other than the ones, the great ones I received from my parents and from my life experiences, but one of the turning points in my life was meeting my spiritual teacher in India. It's hard to describe what he did to me or for me, other than, well, let's see if I can, let me give you a little feeling for it, um, okay, a quick story, um, that I've told many times. I'm in my Volkswagen microbus in India, old secondhand bus, and there are maybe, uh, 12, 13 friends in it with me. And, um, we have gone to a little Temple to make a pilgrimage because my teacher said he wouldn't see us until the afternoon. Guru, on the way back, the Volkswagen won't go up the hill because it's only running on three cylinders; it's got too many people in it. So I say, "Everybody get out and push." So everybody gets out but two women who were sitting in the back, and they're talking, and they ignore me. So I'm getting a little bugged with them; we're pushing up the hill with these two women talking in the back. I'm thinking myself, "They should have gotten out and pushed; this isn't very kind," but I don't say anything because I'm a gentleman. And we get back in the car and we go back to the temple, and we go into the temple, and my Guru is sitting across the temple. And as we're walking towards him, he's yelling at us, "Ramas is angry! Ramas is angry!" Everybody says, "No, he's been very nice." "No, Ramas is angry; the women wouldn't get out and push!" Now he kept doing that to me. I mean, once I went to Delhi when I, they first let me out of the temple after I went there in '67, and I went to Delhi to get my Visa extent. And by then I was a real Yogi; I had a long beard and long hair, and I was wearing a dress, and I had beads, and I was very holy. And, uh, I had been fasting, and light was pouring out of my head, and it was, I was really out there. Yeah, I mean, I was a spiritual materialist delight. And, um, I got hungry in Delhi and I decided to go to a vegetarian restaurant. And I went in there to eat what was proper for yogis. And Indians treat yogis with great respect, and so they were very respectful of me, especially a Westerner doing this. And they gave me a table, nice table, and they brought special Foods; they were all proning to me, you know, because they were very honored that a yogi was had the money to come into the restaurant in the first place. So at the end they served me, um, sherbet with two little cookies in it. And I knew the cookies weren't Yogi food; I just knew they were English biscuits with sugar. And so, but I really wanted them, and I was afraid they'd be looking at me, you know, they were watching to see what the Western Yogi did. So I sort of ate them like, you know, I sort of like, I was looking over there and I eat them, you know, and I, and then I got back in the bus and went the eight hours back to the temple. And when I came in to see my Guru, the first thing he said to me was, "How did you like the biscuits?" Now he kept doing that until, and it, I mean, I just thought, "Ha ha, isn't he wonderful, and he's got all these powers." And then one day I was sitting in front of him, and these images came to mind, and I suddenly realized that he knew everything in my head. "Oh my God, if he knows that, then he know," oh, and if he knows that, and it's suddenly all the things you go into the bathroom and close the door to think, he knew. And I couldn't even look at him; I was so embarrassed. It was like you've just been undone; you've just been, you've been filed. And when I finally got the guts to just look at him out of the corner of my eye, he was looking at me with such love. And I don't think I had ever felt that I could be loved being fully who I was, because I never met anybody that didn't want something from me; maybe they just wanted me to be good or to not bug them or whatever, but to meet somebody who didn't want anything from me and who could love me just as I was. So in a way it opened my heart a great deal. Well, that was part of the teachings, and he just, uh, touched my heart and guided me with my heart into Spirit, into deeper and deeper spirit. Now he was known in a certain stage; he had, I don't know much about his earlier days; I don't know whether he had gurus or anything about it really, because it's all kind of strange. But for a period of time he had, nobody knew what his name exactly was; he's just this kind of wandering guy. And he was known for a while as Cracked Pot Baba. And he was somebody who wandered around either naked or with a loin cloth in and out of the Jungle. And he'd find a broken pot on the ground, 'cause pots are made out of the earth; they're on a wheel; they make them, and then they bake them in the Sun. And then when they break you throw them away, and they go back into the Earth. So he'd take a piece of cracked pot and he'd wear it in his head in the Sun. And then when he got hungry he'd beg with it, and that's what he had; that was it; that was his, his stuff; he had a cracked pot. Well, just the other day MasterCard sent me my new MasterCard, and it's gold. And here I am; I'm in training, you see. My teacher, who I would like nothing better than to be, he had a cracked pot, and I have a gold MasterCard. See, I'm trying to put it all together; I mean, I'm, I'm not giving you a conclusion; I'm just giving you an interesting perplexity. To me, the other day I spoke in somewhere, and, um, I speak every other night, so, um, and it was somewhere, and after, at the end of the lecture somebody walked up; he was a man; he looked, um, he looked a little bit like what you might call a street person. He was in his 50s; he had baggy trousers on, and, um, uh, looked unshaven, and, um, and he walked up to me after the lecture in a very friendly and familiar sense. He said, "You know," he said, "you're doing fine, but you know it would really help if you gave away your credit cards." And then he walked away. Who was he? What am I to do about that?
Gandhi was pulling out of a railway station on a train, and a reporter rushed up to him and said, "Mahatma, give us a message to take back to our people." And Gandhi just had time to scribble on a paper bag, and he tore it off and he handed it out the window, and it said, "My life is my message." Now, I, um, I have had, as most of you have had, experiences where you have had a, a, a direct sense of the unity of all things. You've had a sense of, uh, the, the, the family, the nature of the family of humanity, the family of species, of all species. And you've looked, there are places in your Consciousness that you have touched where you have looked and you have seen that we are all sisters and brothers; we're all one family. And when you feel that, you feel this incredible openness and love that the heart knows. The heart doesn't make discriminations of "you're this and you're that"; it just sees; it sees family everywhere it looks. But my mind, when I'm in my mind, my mind discriminates between me and them, or us if you want to talk about my biological family, and them, or us, my particular community of family, and them. And what I will do for, for us is different than what I do for them. I have a hard time with that because it's as if the way I am on one plane negates what I know from another plane. In Islam they say, "Trust in Allah, but tie your camel." It's like we're all one, but it's my television set now.
You are in the good guy mailing list, just like I am. And you know each day, each week, there's all those letters you get on one list, and you're, you're had it. And then what is it? Each week you sit with your checkbook; some of you, some of us, me, I sit with my checkbook. And is it going to be the, what's it going to be this week? Is it going to be the people that are starving in Africa? Is it going to be the blind in Nepal? Is it going to be the battered women? Is it going to be the abused children? Is it going to be the seals who are being killed for their coats? Is it going to be the, the woods that are being destroyed by acid rain? Is it going to be the fight against the Klux Klan? Is it going to be who's suffering the most? Is it probably I'll get a letter from Donald Reagan soon? You never know; I mean, probably be, "Help my friend Don Reagan," it'll be signed by Ed me, you know, H. Because there is a lot of suffering; there's an awful lot of suffering. Let alone walking down the street or driving through and seeing homeless people and seeing hungry people and seeing people that are the objects of violence, and looking at the evening news and reading the newspaper of rapes and murders and paranoia and ripoffs and ugliness and harshness. And sometimes the world seems a very inhospitable place for Humanity. And the mind says, "Well, what I have to do is protect me, my stash, myself." And so you, you know that money buys privacy, and so you have a little box that you live in and a little box you drive in, and you lock the doors of the Box you're in all the time, and you fill the box with your stuff. It's my stuff.
The other night I was, um, in Richmond, Virginia, and I had to take a little plane to get to Richmond from Baltimore. And I use carry-on luggage because, uh, it's like playing Russian roulette when you use the baggage claim system. So, um, I was carrying on my bags, but they wouldn't let me take it on this little plane, and they took it away from me and they put it in the, in the hold of the plane. And then they gave me a conflicting instruction, and I went to the wrong place to find my bag. And by the time I realized it wasn't going to be there, the plane had taken off with my bags. And, uh, they called ahead, and the plane landed, and they couldn't find my bags. So I found myself in the hotel that night with no bags; just me in the hotel room. Now I started to list in my mind what I, what was in the bags that I no longer had. Now I didn't have my notes, so I wouldn't know what to say. I didn't have my clothes, so I would be looking somewhat disreputable; I only had the clothes on my back. I didn't have my, uh, heater to make tea that I had found specially; I didn't have my air plug; I didn't have my shaving equipment; I didn't have my gout pills; that was going to be a problem; I'd probably have gout within a week. One by one I started to see all the things that I thought I needed to have; my little box of stuff that I carried with me like a turtle over my back down these long, long, infinitely long car; it is at the airport like a pack animal carrying my stuff. "This is my stuff; sorry, I'll carry my stuff; thank you; don't worry; it's all right; it's just my stuff." And I realized that the only thing, finally, I missed—I mean, I could replace all of it; I could call my doctor and get some more gout pills—but what I was missing was my address book and my calendar. Well, the address book, a lot of friends would go back into the void, but that happens anyway; I mean, the ones you see, you see, and the ones you don't, you'll remember fondly. But the calendar was interesting because that was the future; I had just lost the future. Okay, it's one thing to lose the past; it's another thing to lose the future. I mean, I wouldn't know what to do next; how do I know what I'm supposed to do? I trusted that calendar; it tells me what to do every day; I don't have any copies of it. May 1st, I'm supposed to be in Italy, but I don't remember where; how do I do that? Do I go to Italy and wait? I mean, I don't know what to do. So at first I felt this incredulous anxiety of, "I'm being, going to be irresponsible; now I've just blown it; I'm bad; I've lost my identities; my cards of identity; I won't know who I am; what I'm supposed to do." I have my wallet and my credit card, so I can buy it all over again. But there's a great, uh, story in, uh, the Seattle newspaper; it showed a guy behind bars, and, um, it said, "This man was found with a, a dispatch case which was full of identities; um, the police have ascertained he's none of the identities that are in the dispatch case, but they can't figure out who he is." And he said to them, "You're the ones that arrested me; it's your problem to find out who I am; I know who I am." And the sergeant said he has boggled the system, 'cause he's not somebody. The other one I like is the Nasrudin; Nasrudin was the Sufi rascal. And, uh, Nasrudin went into a bank; he was always very disreputable looking; he went into a bank to cash a check. And he handed the check to the teller; the check looked all right; the teller studied it, but Nasrudin didn't. Finally the teller said, "Well, the check looks all right, sir, but can you identify yourself?" As Ruden reaches into his pocket and he pulls out a mirror and he said, "Yep, that's me."
Well, in that particular hotel room in Richmond, I was getting close to being Cracked Pot Baba. I was thinking, "Why do I need all this stuff to be a, a renunciate in America? Do I need my Volvo, you know, and my sweaters and all that?" I was trying to figure out what the extent I could keep my heart open to the suffering of the world and give away things and go simply and live simply like other people live simply. And how much was the fear going to cause me to build my little box of stuff and protect my stuff? I collected for years, stuff, stuff you never throw away; important memorabilia; you probably don't do it, but you know, old pictures, things you're not wearing anymore, but you might someday want to wear later; you know, the wide ties, they may come back into style; you never know. Or old socks where one is sort of missing, but another one may turn up like it, you know, that kind of things you'd never deare part with; autographed, this isn't that. And I had boxes of them, but I didn't have a home, so I had these boxes, maybe 15 boxes of them, old psychedelia things like that. And I would, um, I, I would walk through life as a renunciate with a Federal Express truck following me, you know, carrying, carrying my life, and I keep moving. I had a rent warehouse space, and I never opened the boxes; that was funny. It was as if I figured I needed them for later when I ran out of life, you know, I mean, "My Life Is So Exciting; I don't have time to open those boxes and live out, oh, remember Agatha; I mean, I don't have time for that; this is too rich; this is enough." But apparently somewhere in my mind is the thought, "You're going to run..."
Out of this, and you're going to be so happy you have that. Well, I realized the folly of it because this was getting richer and richer all the time, and it was getting so bizarre because I could sit in an empty room on a mat, and it was enough. In fact, it got cluttered when you put anything else in the room, room. And there I was, sitting in an empty room with a storehouse full of boxes for later. So I decided to burn them, which is quite a leap. And uh, I had a fire. First of all, I decided to throw it away before I decided to burn it. So I took it, and I threw it in the trash. And then, in the middle of the night, I thought, "Oh, I threw away that letter. Oh, I'll never see it again. Oh, I don't want to throw that one away." And I was out there going through, in the middle of the night, these bags. So I decided I should burn it, so I would have—I could not look backward. So I had a fire, and my friends were all helping me burn things, and I'd look at each thing and say goodbye to it and then burn it. And then one WRA escal brought me all my pictures of my Guru. He said, "Ready to throw these in?" I said, "No, not those." And I saw that there were—I saw I still needed those. I said, "And I saw what my limits were of what I was ready to throw away and what I still needed." So I'm down to about—I'm down about five boxes now. Maybe I've gotten rid of 10 boxes. A long way from cracked pot Baba, still having a history, still being somebody carrying my something around with me, not quite ready to stand naked before the universe and say, "Here I am. Whatever will happen will happen." A little frightened still, a little bit where my mind has a place to grab and say, "See, it could be bad. You'll be old and lonely. You watch out. Take care of yourself. Protect. Now insurance."
I was playing uh, frisbee in Marin County. I'm just randomly associating tonight. I hope this isn't upsetting to you. Uh, I've been giving—um, I just finished 24 lectures of this 28th series before Christmas, and then I do another 32 after Christmas. And uh, um, the lectures start to get—certain things work all the time, and pretty soon I'm going through a routine every night, and they're beautiful and charming and delightful, and everybody loves me, and I love everybody, but it's not the living edge. And I get greedy to be with you in the living edge. So tonight I'm risking a little more, and not because you can listen to all that other stuff on tapes. I was in Marin County. This is an old story. I was playing frisbee, actually. I was naked. CU in California, you do those kind of things. And I had rolled in clay—we had found a clay bank and rolled in it. And if this is too horrible, you don't have to visualize it, all right? You can just—just forget that part of the story. I was seeing this old jerk rolled in, you know, naked with clay all over his face and body, running in the sunshine, you know, belly hanging out. Oh, great image! But I was happy, and I was playing frisbee, and the sun was dazzling, shining on the ocean like it was yesterday. Here, beautiful day. I love the ocean. And I was about to throw the frisbee, and through my mind went the inscription over Gandhi's tomb, which is, "Think of the poorest person you've ever seen and ask whether your next act will be of any use." That's the interesting issue of growing up in an affluent culture. Do you throw the frisbee? Can you look in the eyes of the poorest person and still throw the frisbee? If you give up throwing frisbees because it's all too serious, are you fully honoring your unique part in the drama of the universe? Does the drama include frisbees, or is that too frivolous? How do you decide? What rule book do you use? Well, frisbees are out, but a nice evening at the Opera is acceptable once a year. I mean, is there a rule book? I give away 10% because the IRS says I can. Who sets the rules? Who sets the rules about how much your heart can be open? Who sets the rules about who's us and who's them and how much you give and how much you hold? Who sets those rules? Who sets the rules about how much fun you can have for how serious you are?
Um, I've been trying to listen to—hear—I realized that the only way I'm going to know how to act at any moment is learning how to trust my intuitive—what's called the heart mind—the intuitive heart mind, not the intellect, but the intuitive heart. Because this is not a rational thing. You can't rationally decide, because there's just—it's too complex a situation for your mind to figure it out. And the people that try to figure it out end up so in their minds and so cut off from the world by making every decision from inside their box outward. They're always in their mind, and the quality of being in your mind is you're always thinking about everything, so you're always one thought away from where the action is. So there's some way you have to just come back into a kind of a—an intuitive trust, and it's not very rational. And if somebody—if you try to explain to somebody why you do this or why you don't do that, you couldn't do it. You just have to say, "I just intuit that it's appropriate. I feel in the way of things, in the harmony of things." And that's not a—that's not reasonable. It's not how serious people—how they guide their lives. They make rational choices: What's good for my career, good for you, good for all of us optimally. See, um, uh, for a long time—for about 25 years now—I have been trying very hard to become holy. Um, I've really done—I mean, some of you know my life story, and you know that I have really been working at it. I mean, some of you have been sharing the work. We've been really huffing and puffing. We have really—we like the little train that could. "I know I can. I know I can. I know I can. I know I can," you know. And we've been absolutely determined to get enlightened. And um, I used to count how soon it would be. I remember in the 60s, Tim Leary and I had a chart on the wall of how soon everybody would get enlightened. It involved putting acid in the water system, but I mean, it was going to be soon, you know. And that turned out to be a little naive. And um, uh, but I began to see that there were real enlightened beings, like my spiritual teacher, and I was on a path, and I read the books, and the book showed maps, and if you followed the paths you'd get there. And there was a going, and there was a path, and there was a pilgrim, and there was somewhere to go, and I was going, and I did every—all the things—just—well, I didn't do them all, but I was doing them really, you know. I'd go to meditations where they'd beat me with sticks, and I'd say, "Boy, this is good. I mean, I'm really getting there," you know. And I would—I'd get very high. Oh, would I get high! I mean, light would come out and in, and I'd see auras, and it would all be, "Oo boy, I feel I'm very close."
Spiritual materialism is an interesting one. It's very seductive, you know. Uh, you go to meditate, and you're like—some of the meditations I do, Southern Buddhist Meditation, just following the rising and falling of the muscle in your abdomen. I went to Rangoon two years ago, and I just sat in a cell for two months meditating from 3:00 in the morning till 11:00 at night on the muscle rising and falling in my abdomen. You have two meals a day, and you don't see anybody but the teacher for five minutes. You don't talk to anybody. You don't read any books. You don't write anything. Well, I cheated. I had one book of 100 poems of Kabir to give me my heart hit and a picture of my Guru. These were cheating. You don't bring them into a monastery. And I had two—one PB bags of M&M's. This is my—and every day I would allow myself to read one poem, look at the picture for five minutes, and have two M&Ms out of each bag. Okay, two with peanuts and two without peanuts. Okay. [Laughter] [Applause] And the job is to—is to bring—is—see, you realize that you're creating all the suffering with your own mind because your mind keeps creating—out of the stuff of the universe—it keeps creating these models of reality in which you're usually losing, you know. I mean, it's always just not quite right. Did you have notice that? It's always just a little off, you know. And it's your mind that creates it. I mean, you're handed everything, and you say, "Well, it's wonderful, if only—" See, that one—it's the mind. So the game is to loosen the hold of all these structures in your mind that keep telling you how miserable you are, you know, and how horrible it all is and how much fear you should have, and—and just quiet down. And you learn—and one of the ways to quiet is to follow your—take any object and stick with it. And every time—time your mind wanders, you bring it back very gently. Don't get violent. Just gently. So you're following your breath. Rising, falling, rising, falling, rising, falling, rising, falling. Then the thought comes, "It'll never work." See, now that's a thought. Now what you're used to doing is when thoughts come, you treat them as real, because each thought says, "Hey, I'm the real thing." And when you say, "It'll never work," you're supposed to get up and say, "You're right, it'll never work," and you go to the teacher, say, "Thank you very much, but I'm leaving Rangoon," you know. But you learn it's just another thought. So you say, "Thanks, fella. Be comfortable. Blessings," and you go back to rising, falling, rising, falling. "My knee hurts." It's another one. It's a real pain. I mean, I can't just treat that like a thought, you know. The knee won't fall off. Don't worry. You're just going to meditate for another 40 minutes. Then you can move the knee. Just let it hurt. Come on, just go back to your breath. May—you made a deal. You'll stick with your breath, all right? Rising, falling, rising and falling. "You think it's time for lunch yet?" See how all those little things grab you. And then, "I'm really tired. I don't think I can meditate anymore." That's a good one. The one that really gets you is, "Rising, falling, rising, F—I think something's happening." That's the one. Yes, "I think something's happening. I just felt a thing in my spine, and there's a light, and wow! Let me—I better tell somebody." I—you—that's great. It's great. You go to the teacher and you say—uh—and it's a very formal method. You bow and you say, "I wish to report on my meditations. I have been following the rising and falling of my breath," which he knows since he told you to do it all day. And but you say it, and you say, "I note rising as rising. I note falling as falling. Rising has a quality," and then you describe the quality of—um, floating. The falling has a quality of thickness. "I want to report on a session at 6:00 p.m. last night. After two minutes, I became aware of the sound of a bird. I noted it as listening." Teacher says, "Did you hear the bird on the rising or the falling breath?" "I didn't notice." "Please do better then." As you're leaving, "Did you awaken this morning on a rising breath or a falling breath?" "I didn't notice." "You'll do better." So you start from the minute you wake up, just rising, falling, and you do it until finally there is just bre—it's quite extraordinary what happens. I won't go into it because that's the advanced course, but you know—but at any rate, the spiritual materialism would get me all the time. I'd go to the teacher and I'd say, "I'm feeling such peace. Thank you so much for sharing this method. I feel the peace I've always wanted to feel. I finally feel what it was. I'm happy. Thank you." And he'd say, "That's very fine. Now go back and follow your breath." You don't get caught in any of the experiences along the way. But I kept trying to be holy, and I followed the methods, and I did get lots of experiences, and I got really high a lot of the time, and I thought everybody wanted me to be high, so I really worked to stay high for everybody else. Because I come to give a lecture and I try to be very high, and everybody would go out and say, "Boy, he makes me high." I'd say, "See?" And then I go back to my hotel room. See, it would be like a balloon that deflates, and I'd still have to deal with my depressions and my horniness and my anger and all that stuff. And the way I was getting high was sort of treating what I had grown up as—as this physical, psychological being—as somehow some kind of grotesque joke or error somebody had made, and that if I was who I should be, I would be divine, and that this was really not who I really was, and my greed and anger and lust and all those things were clearly failures, and that if I was good in pushing all that away, I would become holy. This was the model I was working on. So if lust is going to catch me in seeing people as objects, I better not have lust. So I started to become what's known as a horny celibate. See, you don't think about sex, so you're busy not thinking about sex. It's not exactly freedom, but it's—I didn't think—it's like giving up smoking. I haven't smoked in four years, two months, 32 days, and one hour. You're busy not smoking. You'll do in your lungs with that much not smoking. And I kept pushing away my humanity in order to embrace my divinity. And along the way, I got—got a lot of clues that maybe I was on the wrong path, but I couldn't hear it because I was getting a lot of support from my fellow renunciates. CU they were giving up everything, and look at my Guru—only had a cracked pot. But see, he wasn't giving up a credit card to have a cracked pot. All he had was a cracked pot. That's all he seemed to want was a cracked pot. Like Raman Maharshi, the great Indian saint. He said, "I didn't eat." They said I was fasting. I kept trying to go into the subtler and subtler PLS—the planes where it was close to the edge of form and formless. One night I was at a Benedictine Monastery with Alan Watts, who was an old rascally friend of mine, and we had been partaking of the altar wine, and um, it was about 2:00 in the morning in his room, and um, he said, "Dick, you know your problem is you always know you'll get truth at a moment like that." He said, "Your problem is you're too attached to emptiness." And I looked at Alan—there he was—he had had many wives, he had many children, lots of alimony, he had to write a book a year just to keep his head above water. And I said, "Alan, it's maybe you're too attached to form," you know. I mean, I—I kind of parried it cutely, you know. CU I didn't want to hear what he said. And I'd read the Holy Tracks. "To be attached to enlightenment is to go astray," says the third Chinese patriarch.
Then I met um, a friend of mine named Emanuel. Um, Emanuel doesn't have a body. It's amazing how many people say they're liberal, and they're liberal. I mean, your friend could be weird, but when you tell them that your friend doesn't have a body, even the liberals sometimes—well, "I don't know about that," you know. It's very funny. I mean, why should you have prejudice whether somebody has a body or not? He's a nice guy—or well, he's not a guy, he's a nice whatever he is, you know. He's a—some people are so odd—by beings that don't—not have bodies—you know—that they assume everything a disembodied being says is true, which is absurd because disembodied beings are not necessarily any higher than we are. They just don't have bodies 'cause they're in between, or they're in someplace else where they don't need this kind of a gross body, or you can't see them 'cause you're not looking with the right lenses or whatever. I mean, you can imagine somebody that was really kind of losing it on this plane, and they die, and then they figure they'll do good, so they send back messages like, "Buy United States Steel," you know. And the tone of it—and all the way it comes through—I heard him say, "Buy United States Steel," and yes—and you go buy steel, and you lose because they lost in the market on Earth—Earth, and they'll losing the market in heaven, you know. It's not—so you can't just trust disembodied beings. You got to listen with your heart. There are a lot of heavy—good and evily disembodied beings that are o and H—move here, and it's all going to end, and all that. But Emanuel is really light. I like him. He's quite playful. The reason I like him is because he agrees with me basically. And I said to Emanuel, "Emanuel, you work with dying—with people that are dying. What should I tell people about dying, man? You must know. You've obviously done it." He said, "Ram Dass, tell people that dying is absolutely safe. That's the best one-liner I think I've ever heard, actually." You—he said, "It's like taking off a tight shoe." So I trust Emanuel, you know. I mean, I trust him enough to ask him questions. And I said, "Emanuel, uh, what am I doing on Earth? What—what is this about? Who made this error? What happened? What am I doing here? Am I going to get enlightened? What's it about?" And he said, "Ram Dass, you're in a school. Why don't you try taking the curriculum? Why don't you try being human?" See, I hadn't thought about that strategy, see, because I was trying to be divine because I thought that was what you were supposed to do. I was getting high, and he was saying, "Your humanity isn't an error. It's the curriculum. You took an incarnation in order to learn something. Why don't you try learning it?" And you don't learn it by pushing it away. You don't learn what's in a book by pushing it away. You learn by opening it and reading it. Your humanity isn't an error. It's your part. It's what you do in life. So try being human. And in fact, it turns out that the incarnation is quite perfect. I said, "Well, who thinks it's perfect? Who designed this? Whose idea of a joke is this?" And Emanuel said, "It's yours." Now when he says "yours," he's not talking to me, Richard, personality. He's talking to a fellow being like him who created an incarnation—a form of incarnation—in order to go through a curriculum, in order to learn something, in order to awaken—with the whole idea of a birth as a vehicle for having a series of experiences to awaken out of that I—attachment and identification with stuff—with body, with personality, with thoughts, with stuff—and that in effect is what we're doing here. Our curriculum is to awaken. And as long as we are asleep in our stuff, in our separateness, in our little locked boxes of house, body, personality—whichever one you lock yourself into—concepts—as long as you're locked in, you suffer because you're alienated, you're cut off from the juice, from where it's all happening. You're always one thought away. But how do you use your curriculum? What does it mean to have a curriculum? Well, I figured instead of trying to push away my humanity, why don't I go into it instead—instead of away from it—for change. I'll try being human. I'll tell you this is just this funny little side—side that came to my mind. All those years I was trying to be holy—for years I've been trying to be holy and change and become full of light and—and—and just benevolent and all those wonderful things—and I met this fellow who was a colleague of mine at Harvard a few years ago, and he said to me, after a few minutes, he says, "You know, Dick, you haven't changed a [Laughter] bit." H—it's where he was looking from. But then I noticed that of recent years the most letters I get are not letters saying, "Thank you for your div—" They say, "It's so wonderful you're so human." Is that funny—to be rewarded for being human—all the time I was trying to be divine?
And all those letters, at first I'd say, "Well, little do they know," you know. Then I began to think they're complimenting me, that maybe the way that, after all, you and I are in incarnations, dreamlike though they may be, and that maybe the way in which we would be free—not high, but free—is we would be free through our forms, not in spite of them. Because as much as you push away something, it's got you; it's like it's sticky, sticky stuff. Just like when you grab for something. For years I wanted an MG. I mean, I just wanted an MG. I'd see them and my head would go, "I got an MG!" Now I've tried giving it away [Laughter] twice. Every attachment, every grabbing has got you, and every time you're pushing something away…
I used to be very high, you see, but I—the way I could stay high was if I was around high people or if I was alone, you know, in the nature. And I'd say, "Can't go there; it brings me down." Like the city brings me down; got to stay in the country. Some of you might have had that experience. I would, um, I'd go home to visit the folks, and I'd come home as a combination of the Buddha and the Christ, the heart of Christ and, um, Abraham and Isaac. I mean, I was really out there. And I'd walk in and my father would say, "Got a job?" And I would boom, and I'd say, "I can't go home; it brings me down." See, they don't understand me; they bring me down, see. And I got so weird that I couldn't do—I mean, I was like distorted, you know. "I can't go there; it brings me down. Can't go there; it brings me down. No, can't see you; it brings me down. Can't do my taxes; they bring me down." Can't—that is not free. You may be high, but you're not free.
And I began to realize the game wasn't to get high; the game was to be free, and free in form, not in spite of form. Free meaning, as they say in the spiritual lingo, you don't hang on anywhere. There's nowhere to stand. If you're standing in your body and looking up at Divinity, you're standing somewhere. If you're standing in Divinity and looking down at your body, you're standing somewhere. You can't stand anywhere, which means you stand everywhere. There's nowhere to stand at all. You both are and you aren't. You're informed and you're not informed. That's the truth of our being; that's closer to the truth than any other one that I can think of about us.
So after all those years of cultivating—through meditation, through devotional practices, through drugs, through my Guru, through all that, that whole idea of the higher PLS of my awareness—now I had to turn around and cultivate the human things that I had been pushing away all those years in order to get free. Since as the ones I was pushing away were clues to me of where my mind was stuck, where I was grabbing. So I start to listen to hear how to be human. It's not easy to be in the world, as Christ said, "In the world but not of the world," to be fully human and at the same moment fully Divine, because that's who we are. We are right at the cusp of all this stuff. We're not Angels because we're got this all this kind of gross matter we're involved in, but we're not animals because we've got this other level of awareness. We have this creative tension of our Divinity and our humanity. And a full mench, a full fully re-awakened being is all of this stuff all at once.
So you listen to hear how to play it. You give it away; you hold on. What do you do? What do you do all day? Well, as you quiet down to listen—and you're not listening, you're just quieting—it says, "The truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing." You can just listen; you just become a listener. You're listening; you're tuning. It's like tuning yourself. You're listening to hear who it is you turn out to be or what it is you're supposed to do. You don't even have a ball game in mind; you're just listening. And you begin to notice that there are a lot of factors that are unique to you. You're born in a certain time; you're born in a certain place; you're born of certain parents; you're born with certain economics; you're born with certain intellect; you're born with a certain kind of mind; you're born with certain physical limits and capabilities and potentials; you're born with the bomb; you're born with the way the universe is; you're born with all of it, all of it, all of it. Assuming the minute you break the set that somehow it's all wrong and flip it around—this is absolutely the way it's supposed to be. This is the optimum birth. I am supposed to be right at this place at this moment, including that and that and that and that. The bomb isn't an error; nothing's an error. It's all just where it's supposed to be. Let me listen to hear it fully and be in it fully, because in it fully I will be free.
So I listen. What I hear, for example, is I'm a member of a family. I was busy pushing that away—"Family brings me down." I'm a member of a community; I'm a member of an ecosystem; I'm a member of a nation-state. How can I be—can I take a passport, travel around the world, I enjoy all the Privileges of this Society—my too holy to vote? Well, Saints don't vote. Why not? It's a representative democracy. I'm part of an ecosystem; don't I have something to say about acid rain? Don't I have something to say about nuclear proliferation? Isn't that my part in the dance? I have a sexual identity; I was born into a religion. What does all that mean? How do I listen to it? How can I hear my way into each thing so that I will be free through the form? Because as you do a form impeccably, you begin to be free within it.
Example: family. I hear—I noticed that my father is old now. In the—in our culture we've done a funny thing, as you know, about age. We treat age sort of as a failing, somehow you weren't good enough to stay young, and we segregate old people, or old people segregate themselves, and they try to stay young. And we have disrupted the whole balance of what's the extended family in large part, so that old people don't have young people with them, and young people never get a chance to be around old people. And a lot of people are cut off from each other just by our sense of what Freedom was about. So I look at my father—he has money. Okay, you got money, take care of yourself; you're old, you can have help, you can have what you need. He's got my stepmother, but I see he's old and he's getting frail, and it would be nice if I were around. And I'm the unmarried one in the family. No, I'm Ramdas, and I'm busy doing good, but I am also the unmarried one in the family, and I could live at home. There you—I could do that. So I go home now. It turns out that for this period of time now there's a wonderful guy, uh, helping out, and he really loves Dad, and they don't even want me around most of the time, but, um, in those days I would take care of Dad every day. And in the mornings it involved a regimen that was about 2 hours: waking Dad, getting his feet over the side of the bed, head, getting him up on the walker, walking with him into the bathroom, toilet, taking off the pajamas, brushing teeth, helping him brush his teeth, helping him into the shower, soaping him, washing, drying him, sitting him down, putting on his clothes, um, combing his hair, putting—getting him up on the walker, walking with him into the kitchen, making food, setting in front of him, helping him eat. He eats by himself, but just providing it, giving him his pills, giving him his insulin shot, walking with them back into the room. It's just a routine, and with somebody that's frail, they're most comfortable if it's a sort of regular routine. He's very quiet now; he's had few minor strokes, and so he's very quiet, very content, very peaceful man, much nicer than he used to be.
So I do this every morning. Now, after a while, see, uh, you got to understand I'm busy, um, learning how to be impeccable, okay? So I'm helping Dad. After a while, I noticed that every day I've got a different trip in my head about what I think I'm doing. So I start to keep a diary. I noticed that one day when I come up to help Dad, I'm busy being the dutiful good son and all that morning I'm being the good son, and this is Dad. See, I'm in my mind—"Hi, Dad, let's go," and I'm just really a good son, and I'm just feeling myself being a good son, and we go through it all as good son and dear old dad. The next day I've got something else in my mind, and I noticed that what I put in my diary that day is that the general tone of my mind was longsuffering—"Uh, Dad, could you walk a little faster?" The whole thing is I'm being put upon. "I—I'll do it all right; I'll do it," you know, because it's a good thing to do, and he takes care of his father. But the next day I noticed in my diary what I've written is that I was busy being a spiritual being helping my father through the transition—"Dad, you have to understand about age." The fourth day my diary reports that the place I was in in my head was that I was busy studying what went into my father and what came out of him, which is a thing you do when you get older; you want to make sure not more goes in than comes out, and I was looking at my father as a set of ambulatory variables. Now you got to understand that through all this my father, who was very patient—he's been living with Rum Dum for years, you know—he's just—he's just walking on the walker, sitting on the toilet, showering, dressing, walking, eating, sitting. But I'm—I'm your son; I'm a spiritual teacher; I'm a scientist; I'm a—I'm helping you, Dad; I'm—and I begin to realize after several weeks of this that I'm never with Dad; I'm always in my mind. I've always got a melodrama I'm milking. I'm sure none of you do this, but I've got to—I've got to constantly create a scenario to explain what's happening. I mean, I can't walk down the street and just look; I got to say, "Tree," you know, like it's a tree. I don't have to reassure it, you know, on myself; it's a tree. But my mind won't stop, you know; it keeps creating structures that to explain what's happening, and always I'm one thought away, and Dad is just right here; he's just walking, sitting, showering, walking, eating, sitting. I go off to Rangoon to sit and sit, breathe, breathe, breathe, but back here I'm not just—and every—in Rangoon if I'd have a thought, I'm sitting in meditation, I'd say, "That's a thought; go back to your breath." But somehow back at home with Dad it gives license for my mind to create drama after drama after drama. And after a while I see in the diary that I'm just creating the stuff, and it's cutting me off from the world, and I sooner or later going to burn out 'cause I'm going to run out of scenario. I'll run the scenario through—"This is boring," which is just another scenario. "I'm bored," right? Is it—how does it feel? Boring? Think there's any end? No, no end. So I'm going to just be doing this, and it's boring, and nothing ever happens—really horrible, huh? Yeah, terrible; it's really boring. How does it feel? Well, it's kind of—it's thick and boring; it's that thing; it's that place; it's just another creation of mind. Milk it. Gee, I've been bored all week; it's raining; it's been raining, and I'm bored. I—and our minds are so strong that most of the time we project outward and we suck everybody else in to our scenario. And what we do is we enter into these conspiracies with each other—"I'll make believe you are who you think you are if you will make believe I am who I think I am." My father doesn't care; I mean, he's 88; he doesn't care; he just wants to walk, sit, shower, eat, sit, you know. He's waiting for me; he's like the Buddha; he's just looking benevolently waiting for me to finish my trips. Had enough tripping? No, I'm going to do something; I'm going to be funny today, okay?
We wait. Finally, even I, as stupid and dense as I am, see my own predicament—that this is the opportunity with my father. Like in Rangoon when you sit—when you get tired of sitting and following your breath, you do a walking meditation in your cell, which means you stand up and you know you bring your awareness to your feet so you can get a little exercise, and you notice lift, push, place; lift, push, place; lift, push—when you get really subtle, you notice intention to lift, lift; intention to move, move; intention to place, place. It gets very subtle. But so here I am, and I suddenly realize I'm walking behind my—my father; he's just doing lift, push, place, see? And I'm busy helping dear old Dad, you know. I'm—my mind is—I'm not with that; I'm not—there's my opportunity. So I started do it with Dad—where lift, push, place, see? And then I'm just buttering toast and I'm wiping and washing and lifting and smiling, and I'm just in the moment instead of all the models in my head. I just started do the thing; I just come into the moment. And suddenly Dad and I are together; we met in the brushing of the tooth; we met in the hand on the skin. As long as I was in my mind with models of what I was doing, I was not with him; I was in my mind. The minute I came into the moment, we were together, and suddenly our hearts were present, and we were both being fed by the moment. There was this lightness and this delight. I could tell because as I putting on his socks he was patting me on the back. Put him into bed and kiss him good night, and he says good night, and he doesn't quite remember my name; he—I mean, he knows me, but he doesn't remember my name—"Good night, kiddo." Oh, so sweet. And we were—we're just—so I started to get absolutely in ecstasy doing this every day because it was where—it was like being in Rangoon; I mean, it was right there; it was just full—this was what it was about. And suddenly my life was rich in the moment; it wasn't with models of—"Is this what I'm going to do with the rest of my life? Take care of my father?" That's all models in my head. This was on my plate, and this was what I was doing, and it was enough.
So my brother Bill said to me—"Gee," he's a lawyer, he said, in Long Island, he said, "Gee, Rich, really great, you're taking care of Dad," which means he doesn't want to do it. So I milk it; I say, "Well, Bill, somebody's got to do it. You—I'm going to tell him that it's the most exciting thing I do, that I pay to do it, that I'm going to get—I'm going to get to God on it." He'll want to do it. And you begin to do that with your life; you take the stuff, the—the schmata, the stuff you—"I'm not going to have any dealings with this; I'm going to get holy." I mean, women actually come up to me and they say, "I'd really like to do spiritual work, but I have the kids." Imagine a thing like that—your kids are your vehicle and not your error; that's your route through. I mean, I work with people with cancer, with AIDS, and you can get caught—those are so dramatic. I mean, there are certain dramas that really suck everybody in, like dying is one of the heaviest dramas going in town. I was with a woman—she was a Quaker—and I work with dying, you see, and I mean, my heart hurts when people suffer, but also there's another part of me that sees that it's the unfolding of the storyline, and that behind it—here we all are, and nothing's happening, and nobody's going anywhere. Ramana Maharshi, the Great Indian Saint, was dying, and they—his devotees said, "Don't leave us; don't leave us," they were crying, and he said—he looked confused—he said, "Don't be silly; where could I go? I'm just selling the Ford; it's no big deal, you know. I'm just dropping the bun." So I was with this woman, this lovely Quaker lady, she, uh, in Boston, Jean Yans, and she was close to death, and they called—she called—had me come over, and she said, "Ramas, I've had enough; I've finished; I'd like to die; I'd like you to help me to die." Now I don't have a rule book of what I do with dying people. People come and say, "Would you train me to work with dying?" They want a certificate that says they're a professional D or something, you know. I mean, there's no certificates; you go in naked, and you are—my life is my message; whatever I've done you can have. So I don't know what to say to Jean when she says that, so I empty—the only way I know is to listen to hear what it is I said. So I listened, and what I said was, "What's your rush? I mean, you haven't lost your sight yet; are you hearing? There's more things you could do with this life; there's wonderful lessons. What's your rush?" She said, "Well, Ramas, I'm so bored." So I emptied for a while, and I said, "Well, Jean, I guess you're bored because you're busy dying all day. I mean, couldn't you die like 10 minutes an hour? Do you have to die all day? I mean, it's—it's far out about dying, you know. You're going along and you got—usually you're driving and you drive, you cook, you got all these roles, and then suddenly you're dying, and everybody—she's dying, dying, dying, dying, and you don't—you can't come up for air. It's one scenario, and any one scenario is boring. You got to let go lightly of your own dramas, including dying, see. As long as you identify with your body, you really take dying seriously. But when you see body as your vehicle—through which—it's like your space suit for being on this planet—you can't take my space suit, but you don't need it; it's heavy; you don't need it. I need it. You start to let go lightly. Let go lightly; hold on tightly; let go lightly. You honor it; you take care of it; and as it drops, it drops. It's natural that it drops. By the way, you might have noticed that everybody dies; isn't that far out? You might have—you might have not wanted to notice that, but it is true.
Like when I was, uh, in the early days, I was busy being my body, and during those days I was busy not going bald, for example, and I had a long piece of hair; I wore it wrapped like that, and—and in the wind I look like Rodin's The Thinker, you know, like this all the time. Then I was my personality for a while; I decided I wasn't my body; I was my personality, and I was my role. So I was a therapist, and I took it very seriously; in fact, I was a Freudian, so I didn't see other people; I just saw psychosexual stages of development; I saw early phallic and late anal. A therapist—you were a potential patient even if you weren't an actual patient. Yeah, parties were full of potential patients. Then I became my myth, see? I was bigger than life; I was my archetype; I was like whatever that one was—I don't know—Searcher of the Holy Grail, the bringer of relief to the suffering. And I milk that for a long time. Every one of them gets boring; it's not enough; you keep cramping yourself into something that isn't enough, and it feels terrible. Finally, I know—I've told this story so many times that most of you know it better than I do, but it's such an apt image of that feeling. It's about, uh, the suit—a fellow in a Middle Eastern European, mid—Middle European country makes a little money, and he wants to have a nice suit made, and he goes to the best tailor in town, named Zumbach, and he gets a suit made of good material, and he puts on the suit; he has it fitted, and he goes in for the fitting, puts it on; he says, "Zumbach, I don't mean to complain, but this sleeve is about 2 inches longer than this sleeve." Zumbach is—is affronted; there's nothing wrong with…
His suit. St. is standing. You stand like this. It fits perfect. So the guy is standing like this, and he looks in the window, in the mirror, and there's all this material bunched up back here. And he said, "Zumach, uh, my wife hates it when there's all that material. Would you take that out?" Zumach said, "There's nothing wrong with a suit. It's the way you're standing. If you stand like that, it fits perfect." So, fin. He has the suit fitting absolutely perfectly, and he leaves. He gets on a bus in his new suit, and a man comes up to him and says, "What a beautiful suit. I bet Zumbach the tailor made that suit." And he said, "How did you know?" He said, "Because only somebody as skilled as Zumbach could fit somebody so perfectly who is as crippled as you are."
"And how do you—"
"As long as you cram yourself into any model at all, it's a Zumbach suit. I'm a man. That's—that's only part of who you are."
"No, I'm a man."
"You watch people get lost in any definition, and they always look like they're in a Zumbach suit. I was—I—TR—my parents and my schools all helped me become somebody I thought I was, and I knew who I was. I was who I thought I was, except it felt terrible. But everybody told me I had won. They said, 'You're a success. Aren't you always so proud of you?' But it felt terrible inside. I figured I must be sick if they're all telling me I won; it feels terrible. This suit must be the right suit; I'm just wrong."
So I went to a therapist. He was wearing another model of Zumbach suit, see? And he said, "I'll—I'll convert your suit so it'll be like my suit, see? Which I bought, see?" So I bought a new suit. So now I was twisted in a new way. So you can imagine that once I threw off the suit, I didn't want to go back into it at all. And I've been learning how to be in the world, but not of the world; to be in form without getting identified with the forms; to play them, as Don Juan says in the Castaneda books, to huff and puff and make believe it's all real without getting lost in it. It's called controlled folly. You play life lightly, like at this moment I am the chairman of the board of a foundation, believe it or not. Would you trust your—I mean, it's a real foundation; it's got real money; it gives it away; it does good acts in—in many places, like in Nepal, for example. So I go over as the representative of this foundation's Nepal. We're building hospitals; we've got Land Rovers; we've—I mean, it's a real thing with offices, and we're like the Red Cross, you know, and we do stuff, and I'm the chairman, and I wear a blue blazer and a tie, and I land in the airplane, and I'm the chairman of the board, you know. And you know how chairmen of the boards look; you see them in ads all the time, you know. They're—they always look very responsive, like you trust yourself with them, you know, see? And I look that way, see? I mean, I'm not flaky. I uh—
And so I meet the minister of health, and he's meeting the chairman of the board, see? And we're two huge things in this room together. He's the minister of health, and I'm the chairman of the board, and we each have our entourages; they walk behind us, you know, and we "How do you do," and we sit down and have lunch, and we each have an agenda, see? What I want from him and what he wants from me, and it's all very serious, and I'm not going to tell them there are no adults present. I mean, I'm going to—you know, I'm really doing it like I'm supposed to do. I was told I'm chairman of the board; I'll be chairman of the board, okay? But I look in his eye, and you know what I see? I don't see the minister of health. I see somebody looking back at me. "Are you in there? Far out. What are you doing in there?" It's like my guru in drag who just came to put me on, you know. I mean, it's, "Are you really in there? I thought you were the minister of health." "No, I'm just playing." It's like Monopoly, and you begin to think everybody's thimbles and top hats, you know. "You're the minister of health, and I'm the chairman of the board. Well, let's play." What do you say? Okay. So we play minister of health and chairman of the board, and we both see through it, and we both play it impeccably, and we argue and disagree, and we do all that, and we call our lieutenants, and they write notes, and we make decisions, and we shake hands, and all the time we're in love, and as we get done, we're in love more and more. We hug, and we—it's just so far out. And I go away, and everybody says, "Well, that was really—you got him to give away a lot of things," and—and he probably—his people say the same thing because we loved each other. We figured out how to make it work. It's like we met—we were in the world but not of the world, and we met not of the world. But now you can't assume that everybody, when you look in their eyes, it's going to be there, see?
So you go into the bank, for example, to cash a check, see? And you look, and there's the Divine Mother standing behind the counter. But I learned in the 60s, you don't say everything you know, you see, see? You—"Hello, Divine Mother. You in there?" You know, she'll push the button. I mean, she's—"We've got a bad one here." And if you assume that everybody that gets caught in their storyline, in their melodrama, in this scenario is suffering, how do you help somebody out if you see that they're caught and they're not asking? It's interesting. Do you have a moral responsibility not to awaken somebody that wants to sleep? And it's hard with people you love. "You're suffering, damn it, wake up! Let me take you out of your suffering!" Finally, what you understand is you keep working on yourself to stay light, to stay in your roles but not of them; to fulfill your part—son, father, lover, voter, walker, driver. And so I keep finding how to be in the role impeccably. When you are in the roles impeccably, everybody can see what they need to see. If they need you in the role, they got you in the role. But if they would like to come up for air out of their roles, there's nothing in your head that's going to keep them locked in it. Like, "You're my child." It's really—"You're my child." "You're not my child." "You are also my child." You're a fellow being, and it happens that in the way it all fell out, you ended up this time being a child, and I ended up being an adult, and we're related, and it's my job to take care of you. Let's play our roles, but let's not get lost in them. "I love you as much, child. My human heart loves you as my human child. The other part of me knows that this is just parts we're playing as we pass through." Now I don't say to a child, "Come on, you're not my kid." However, I'm right here if the child wants to come up for air. And you begin—and that's the interesting thing about the whole issue of helping people. If you're busy being a helper, everybody you meet needs help, and the act of helping separates people. When I'm taking care of Dad, if I'm busy in my mind taking care of Dad, I'm pushing him away all the time. The minute I'm just going through life as a being—"What—what are we doing? What's—you—what will you and I do?" "Well, I'll be chairman." "Well, I'll be the minister of health." "Well, I'm somebody that's homeless." "Well, I'm somebody that's got money or food." Well, here—and we just keep doing the stuff of life, playing our parts in it. Here—here—moving the energies here and there, but not getting lost in the drama of—"I'm an energy mover." Just—I'm here; you here; here we are. Nothing to do; nothing to do forever. What are you rushing for? "I'm hungry." "You're hungry? Jesus, some food here. Take it." Or—"I need more from you." "Sorry, I can't do more." Can you keep your heart open when you say no to somebody? Kabir, the poet, says, "Do what you do with another person, but never put them out of your heart." There are ways to keep your heart open in hell. There are ways that your compassion can be so rich and full that everybody you meet gets fed by your being, whether or not you're able to do anything for their immediate suffering. I go and I sit with people who have AIDS, who are frightened, or who are dying, or some way, or who have some terrible problem—whose child got murdered or something. I can't bring the child back. I can't stop the AIDS. I'm not an MD. I don't know any of that stuff. All I can do is offer my being and be with them, and be with them in such a way that they feel that I, as a human being, am hearing their pain as a human being, but at the same moment I am not getting lost in the drama of it, and the other part of me is appreciating the play of it—the life and death and the sequences and the perfection of the learning and the perfection of the unfolding and the beauty of the laws of the universe—and that person has the chance to also experience that. And sometimes when we're sitting together, all the heaviness is there, and all—all the lightness, and we help each other by helping each other get untrapped from the scenarios that are the cause of the suffering. It isn't the AIDS that is the cause of the suffering; it's the model in the head about the AIDS that's the cause of the suffering. It isn't pain that is the cause of the suffering; it's the resistances that are the result of mind that caused the suffering. Each moment is what it is—even the moments of dying, even the moments of pain—it just is. Ah, ah, ah, ah. It's that balancing of humanity and divinity. The human heart is always going to hurt about the suffering of yourself or others. To deny that human heart is to be off balance. But to deny your higher wisdom that knows that it is the play of form, that it's the unfolding of curriculum, that it is all the learning experience, that it is the spirit finding awakening through form, and to see the perfection of it, including dying, living, sickness, suffering, and to see the way in which suffering is grace—and down here in the human heart, suffering stinks—and to be able to handle those two things simultaneously—that creative tension—wow. Then you're really alive in the moment; then you're really fully present with it all, all the time. "Are you happy?" "Yeah." "Are you sad?" "Yeah." "Are you frightened?" "Yeah." "Are you secure?" "Yeah." You begin to see that all emotions are present all the time. Everybody's your family; everybody's suffering is your suffering, and still it's all right. You're—you're the Earth Mother reaching out to embrace everybody, and at the same moment you're giggling, and it's that lightness and that peacefulness and that sweetness and that embracing that's where hearts meet—the deeper heart, the spiritual hearts meet, and everybody gets fed. If you are in any relationship that you don't come out of it with this at least—the energy you went in—and in fact more, probably more—if you—if you're using up, you must be doing it from the wrong place in your head. And the game isn't to change somebody else. They are essence who they are, even if they're a stinker; they're an essence stinker. It's funny. You look at trees, and you see an elm, an oak, and a pine, and you don't say the elm should be an oak. But you look at humans—"Why aren't you more like your father?" You end up not being so busy trying to change everything all the time. If something gets you—ah—it's showing you your stash of clinging of mind. I came into a lecture the other night, and I like this kind of a microphone, and I came into the lecture, and I was all sweetness and light—"Ah, here comes Ram Dass. Oh, hello. Can I hug you?" "Oh, yes." And I'm so full of love and sweetness. I walk into the hall, and I look, and there's an upright microphone. I said, "What's that?" They said, "Well, it's the microphone; it's the only one we could get." "Well, that won't do." And suddenly I turned into this ugly—and I'm manipulating people—"We've got to get another one," and I then break up—I mean, it's like my guru just came as a microphone to get me caught again—caught again—"You phony holy"—and you get so that when somebody gets your goat, or somebody comes on, or somebody gets angry or something, you love it because when you're clear, you pass through people's projections through you like Chinese food; they just go right through you. You just take them—notice them—see if they fit—then run them through—quick hit—and then it's gone. But the minute one gets you—a projection—and you—you start to go in the Zumbach suit—"Ah, got me again. Wow. Thank you," because I want to be free. I don't want to insulate myself and be high. So let it come on. Let me look at the earth and the universe; let me look at my fears and my boredom and all of it. I'm going to embrace it all, and I'm going to be free in the midst of life, not in spite of it.