Transcription
[Music] Hi everybody, it's Raghu. I'm back with Bee Here Now Network's own Ram Dass, and the Here and Now podcast with an extraordinary, uh, special edition. And I want to welcome you to the show, Mark Watts, of course, Alan's son.
Welcome, Mark.
Thank you. Thank you for, uh, having me. And, uh, this collaboration's been all kinds of fun so far, and we're only just warming up.
Yeah, yeah. And, uh, just so everybody knows that, um, we got together and we just were thinking, boy, wouldn't it be cool to have a a podcast that included both work from Alan, from talks of Alan's and talks of Ram Dass's? And, and, uh, we had an idea—actually, Mark, you had the idea—given some kind of response to the times we are in that would help in any way. Because both of these beings certainly helped just an extraordinary array of people over a very long period of time. And so we started working on it, and what you guys are going to hear today as a result of that—and I'll just say the title that we've been working with is, uh, *From Separation to Unity: Intuition and Trust*—and this was very much in common with both Alan and Ram Dass, uh, theme-wise. So, uh, we're pretty happy to be able to share this because I I do believe, uh, both of these, as I said, beings have such a, a great, um, connectivity with such—I mean, you were talking 18-year-olds here to, you know, alter-cuckers, so to speak.
So yeah, don't you think they were? And they were great friends themselves. I mean, they spent, uh, many hours together in conversation, uh, particularly up at Druid Heights, um, up on the, uh, the shays lounges, uh, of the 60s—those little aluminum woven brightly colored lawn chairs out under the eucalyptus trees.
And so what we've done is we've, uh, created not exactly the kind of conversation they would have had, but because my father's, uh, presentations tended to be, uh, in front of larger groups of people, uh, they weren't as intimate and personally engaging as the Ram Dass conversations tended to be. But we really looked at the content and particularly the kind of content that people have been noticing and utilizing and coming to us for, uh, in these times. And I would characterize it that in the past we probably had, you know, 20 percent of the people coming to us identify with stress issues and, you know, other things where we were really seeing what we were doing with them in terms of their well-being, and now I think that shot up to probably 60 percent. It's just a very common theme among people—like, this is this is the only thing keeping me sane, or, you know, that effect.
Yeah. Yes, yes. And, uh, thank God we, you know, we have the opportunity to be able to share this material. So this is good work if you can get it, as they say, right? But at the same—isn't it fun—in the—so in *Becoming Nobody*, the film that we put out a year ago of Ram Dass and his central teachings basically about becoming a nobody, and, um, and at some point he tells that little story about he was getting drunk with Alan at the Zen monastery or something, and he turned and said, "Richard, the problem with you is you're too stuck on emptiness," or something like that. Which, by the way, he kind of copied from Fritz Pearls.
Oh yeah, because yeah, there was—Fritz was in a—he was in an encounter group at Esalen with Fritz, and, uh, they were going back and forth. My father gave some eloquent explanation about something, and Fritz goes, "The problem with you, Alan, is you're all words," and, uh, and my father said, "Well, that's fine, you know, words are just as much a part of the nature as anything else, you know, there's not much difference between words and, you know, the basket weaving of of the Finch and the sound of the—"
Way, Alan, you're impossible! [Laughter]
So he borrowed that little, you know, uh, that's so great. Really, it really is. So, um, just I'd love to hear—just for me because I don't think we've ever really—I've gotten—I haven't gotten the download from you on what—because I know you traveled around and you were recording him, particularly in California, I believe.
Yeah. Just give us a couple of anecdotes of what that was like being with your father, uh, 24/7 kind of, right?
Yeah. Well, we did 24/7 before that. We started out—my parents were actually separated, so I was on the East Coast, I was in Pennsylvania, and, uh, when I turned—for when I turned 14, um, he sent me the book, *The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are*, and so I'd known that he was well-known, but I didn't really know why until I read that. And then I called him up and said, "Dad, this is amazing. I, you know, really want to, you know, be part of this." And, uh, so he started flying me to various venues on the East Coast, uh, to Chicago, New York, um, you know, various places where he was speaking, so I would show up and take the recorder off his shoulder and follow him in and set up and record that. So I was starting when I was 15. And, uh, we even appeared on *Camera Three* in New York together, which is great. Yeah. So then when I turned 18, I flew back out to California to rejoin him, and, um, then at, uh, for two years there—a little over two years—I would drive him on his West Coast exploits, um, up and down the coast from all the way from Mexico up to, uh, Cortez Island in Vancouver, although the last part you made by boat, not by by car. And, uh, it was—it was wonderful. Um, we spent time at Esalen, uh, time in Los Angeles, uh, there are various growth centers there, and, um, there was—everywhere we went there were very different kinds of audiences, and I really noticed how different he was based on what the audience was really pulling out of him. And that was for me a delightful experience to see the rapport that developed. And so that, you know, we did that, and then, um, you know, it was getting to me where there were piles and piles of tapes, and, um, you know, he said to me at one point, "Well, should we keep taping? I mean, we've got so many already, what are we gonna do with these?" And so I said, "Well, let me look into this." So I spent the summer of '72 up in the little pilot house—we lived on the Vallejo, which was an old ferry boat, and it had a pilot house at each end, and what they would do is they would run it into port, and then they would just reverse the engines, walk to the other pilot house, and without turning around head back to their previous, uh, departure point. And so my brother had one pilot house, I had the one in the front, and it was a great little room to—Tommy Mats and I had an Agra Swiss tape deck, all these reels, and over the course of the summer listening, listening—they would gradually assimilate into piles. And so when my father got back from his lecture tour, he said, "Well, how's that going?" And I said, "Well, Dad, what I think we have here is college courses. We have one on the psychology of religion, we have one on Taoism, one on Buddhism." And he said, "Fantastic. Let's do this. We'll call it the Electronic University." And we began, and first we had the essential lectures, which were sort of introductory, and then we had the more in-depth, uh, courses. And so that was all, you know, 1972, 73, we did that, and then he passed on in, uh, '74. We put the first ones out, um, series on Buddhism went out on cassette, and, uh, by '75 we were doing it regularly, and this has been going on all these years, obviously. Yeah, we really formatted the courses in the 90s, but basically, yeah.
So what was it—being with this incredible man—what was it like? I mean, you know, it was—yeah, there were so many levels of it—related to actually getting information you could use to maybe become a little bit better of a human being, there was that going on as well as his charismatic notoriety and, uh, everything else. And what about—what kind of dad was he? What kind of dad was he?
As a dad, he was just great. I mean, he had—his stage presence was pretty theatrical in a way. I mean, he had been trained to be a clergyman, and, uh, you know, he was conscious of his performance as a public speaker, um, you know, as long as you're gonna put on a show, put on a good one. And, uh, but, uh, offstage—in his offstage persona, um, he was extremely calm, uh, he's a very just person. So he would look at things around him—we would treat everything very evenly—not necessarily equally, but evenly. And so, as one of seven children, you know, I appreciated what he was doing with all of us. And, um, seven—yeah, seven—and very different, all of us. And it was kind of a problem because he would try and do something with me, and then, you know, somebody else would say, "Well, why—" but he would do something different with them, and they didn't get that even and equal—the same thing. So that was a little bit, um, it was a little bit of a problem, but, um, just generally he was a blast to hang out with. I was reading Hesse and Huxley and, uh, you know, Zimmer and all kinds of, uh, interesting stuff, uh, even before we got back together and, uh, started reading Campbell. And then he would get books to review that he would hand off to me—he said, "I don't have time for this one, read it, tell me what you think," and then he would take another one. And so we had a pretty lively conversation about philosophy, about, uh, biology, about, uh, physics. You know, Frei Job Copro was giving him materials to review, and, uh, you know, Gregory Bateson, Joseph Campbell. And so there were a lot of great ideas that were coming through the mix at that time, and so we had these great conversations, and then we had, uh, specific projects that we worked on, like *The Way of Zen*, his last book, where I actually got to get in and do some of the research and help him with the drawings—that the first chapter on, uh, written Chinese language, uh, there are some charts that we prepared together, and one of them is an idiographic love story. And the background of that is that, uh, he felt that Western languages should have calligraphic equivalence the way that Eastern languages did. And so we created one, and we just tells a little love story. So, you know, stuff like that. Then subsequently we went to Esalen, and he did the same story on a 20-foot long piece of, uh, rice paper, and, uh, with the whole group out by this—
Remainder were you party to Ram Dass and he being together at any moment once?
Um, I would go up to the, uh, every day either he would come down to get the mail or I would take it up. So one day he said, "I've got a guest, you know, would you bring it up?" Got up there, and, uh, they were sitting down on the lawn chairs, and, um, it was, uh, really I could only hear a little bit of the conversation because I didn't want to be, uh, interfering. And then at a certain point, uh, they invited me to come down and sit with them. And, um, so I just sat on a eucalyptus, uh, tree while they stumped—while they, uh, continued to talk. And they were talking about meditation, meditation techniques, and, uh, about, uh, album that my father had done with sound effects. And some of the conversation was on gongs and mantras and, you know, how effective were these devices—were they distraction, were they really helpful? And my father was insisting that they were extremely important to help people focus. And he used to travel around with a Bulgar—there was a—from the bottom of a sawed-off—bottom of an oxygen cylinder, and the thing had to weigh 20 pounds—it was heavier than the tape deck. And so I would show up and have this basket with this thing. Well, he thought it was really important, and that was it. So it was, uh—so if you take an oxygen cylinder and you slice off the very bottom—the top of it becomes an amazing gong, and he had it hung on the rafter of his, uh, little cabin. And actually you can see it—it's in the film *Conversation with Myself*, which you can find on YouTube, and he begins—although you don't see him, you just see the log swing, and it hits this gong, and the quality of the sound was amazing. Well, what he found was the scrap—the leftover—this—the bowl with the flange on it that they cut off to make that was the most amazing bowl—gold—it had this tone that would just ring so clean and true and go forever. And so once he became fast—the same with that—that was going with him on the lecture tour—the lecture service really—
Oh, that's great. Wow! [Laughter]
Yeah. Well, but yeah, that life on the mountain was good. I remember another time I came up and I called him and he was supposed to come down and he hadn't showed up, and I said, "Dad, are you coming or should I bring the mail up?" So, "Come up, you've got to see this, come on up." So I got up there, and he had the rice paper out on the mandala deck, which was pretty good size—weighted down with stones because there was a little breeze—and he was painting, you know, doing the calligraphy out there. And every time he would do a brush stroke, the wood grain from underneath would print through, so it was both the calligraphy stroke and then like a rubbing of wood grain. And he was so excited, and he was trying different pressures and ink mixtures, and and we went—after he was done and hung them all up inside the library, and, uh, he was—I've never seen him happier than that day.
That's amazing. That says it all.
Yeah, yeah. About someone who's really in the moment with creativity. Oh, boy. Oh, that's so great. So yeah, we're we're really happy to, uh, to be able to present this to, uh, everybody and share it because I don't think anything—I know actually nothing like this has ever been done before—between a program that includes Ram Dass and Alan Watts. And, uh, there's so much righteous information in this, um, it's, um, I I I'm pretty happy, Mark. I don't—I I know you've been listening and and, uh, working with, uh, with us on it, so, uh, I think he had a great job.
Yeah, yeah. He really did a beautiful job.
Yeah, yeah. No, I'm really happy. And, um, the other thing is everybody that—when you go to beherenownetwork.com/ramdashereandnow or just hereandnow, you will see the show notes, and we're gonna link up so you can, um, uh, have access to, uh, Alan's catalog and and, uh, be part of whatever offerings happen through alanwatts.com.
Yeah, I said, well, we have—both the .org site is informational and the .com is where you can actually purchase recordings. And, uh, these were taken from, uh, one of his most famous seminars, *The Danger of Consciousness*. The talk that we begin with is *What is Reality?* And then an Esalen session, *Do You Do It or Does It Do You?* And that was the talk—*We as Organism*. And then the last sections are from Buddhist and Taoist meditations, which were, uh, recorded, uh, also at Esalen, but at a different, uh, time.
Yeah, that's great.
Yeah, yeah. So some—so many resources. And then, of course, some of the things that Mark has just mentioned to us—even that little film—you—you know, you just said, "Oh, you can see this in a YouTube film"—we'll give you the link to that—they'll find it—the guys will find it. And, um, thanks for doing this, and, uh, this is, uh, I hope it's a precursor—we can do more stuff together, and, uh, you know, so everybody out there enjoy and, uh, you know, send us your comments—want to hear what you think of this. I mean, here's two very beloved people that, uh, had so much to offer, and the fact that it has remained as such over this span of time is really, uh, quite amazing actually. And, um, and the—you—I wouldn't say it's ubiquitous or synonymous that you hear one name, you're gonna hear the other, but there is a lot of that, you know, where—where there's a basket—the many people—they come into this—the path or just awareness of consciousness and and that there is something, uh, that could be really, uh, profitable for their lives, shall we say, and and it'll be Alan and Ram Dass, uh, certainly you hear them.
Yeah, they're certainly the most, uh, enduring, too, out of that crowd, uh, you know, I mean, they got together back, uh, you know, they started to form in the 50s and the coffee houses and then eventually my father went over to KPFA and, uh, but there was a whole scene there with, uh, you know, readings and Gary Snyder and—yeah, there's a Zen boom, and then there was sort of the 60s explosion following that and, uh, the—
Squad time.
Yeah. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was also in that mix.
Yes, yes. Now he's still with us, believe it—I know.
Yeah, it's incredible. He's incredible.
Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you, Mark, and, uh, everybody, uh, we shall see you next time on, uh, Bee Here Now Network Ram Dass Here and Now. Go to beherenownetwork.com and take advantage of all the wonderful teachers and podcasters and we keep adding, uh, to it, uh, so, um, and share this with people—this is something, you know, everybody has a friend who would want to listen to this podcast. So thanks again, Mark. Thanks for making it happen.
Now the first thing, though, uh, that we have to do is to get our perspectives with some background about the basic ideas which influence our everyday common sense, our fundamental notions about what life is about, ideas of the world which are built into the very nature of the language we use and of our ideas of logic and of what makes sense all together. And these basic ideas I call myth, not using the word myth to mean simply something untrue, but to use the word myth in a more powerful sense. A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world. We have this hostility to the external world because of the superstition, the myth, the absolutely unfounded theory that you yourself exist only inside your skin. Now I want to propose another idea altogether. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlicue way out in space and way out in time. Billions of years ago you were a big bang. Now you're a complicated human being. But so we define ourselves as being only that, and we then—we cut ourselves off and don't feel that we are still the big bang. But you are—depends how you define yourself—you are the big bang, the original force of the universe coming on as whoever you are. See, when I meet you I see not just what you define yourself as—Mr. So-and-so, Miss So-and-so, Mrs. So-and-so—I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that too, but we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it. You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean—the ocean waves and the universe peoples. And as the wave, I wave at you and say, "You—the world is waving at me with you and saying, uh, 'Hi, I'm here.'" But the way we feel and sense our existence being based on a myth that we are made—that we are parts—that we are things—our consciousness has been influenced so that each one of us does not feel that we—we feel we have been hypnotized—literally hypnotized by social convention into feeling and sensing that we exist only inside our skins, that we are not the original bang but just something out on the end of it. And therefore we are scared stiff because my wave is going to disappear and I'm going to die, and that would be awful. You are a fluke, you are a separate event, and you run from the maternity ward to the crematorium, and that's it, baby. Now why does anybody think that way? There's no reason to, because it isn't even scientific; it's just a myth. If there is any such thing at all as intelligence and love and beauty, well, you found it in other people—in other words, it exists in us as human beings. And as I said, if it is there in us, it is symptomatic of the scheme of things. We are symptomatic of the scheme of things as the apples are symptomatic of the apple tree or the rose of the rose bush. When as a scientist you describe the behavior of a living organism—you try to say what a person does—it's the only way in which you can describe what a person is—describe what they do—then you find out that in making this description you cannot confine yourself to what happens inside the skin. So if that is necessary—if, in other words, in order to describe my behavior I have to describe your behavior and the behavior of the environment—it means that we've really got one system of behavior—that what I am involves what you are. I don't know who I am unless I know who you are, and you don't know who you are unless you know who I am. In other words, we are not separate; we and our environment and all of us and each other are interdependent systems. We know who we are in terms of other people. We all lock together, and any good scientist knows that what you call the external world is as much you as your own body. But the problem is, you see, we haven't been taught to feel that way. The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe but only parts of it—only in it—only confronting it—aliens. And we are, I think quite urgently, in need of coming to feel that we are the eternal universe, each one of us, otherwise we're going to go out of our heads. [Music]
Now if we go to each person in this room, every person will have a story about a moment of that recognition—that things aren't the way they seem—that the conceptual model that you and I became conspirators to about what is reality is actually this fragile—fragile veil we put up against the unknown. And if we put it up really out of fear, we make it impermeable—out of fear. What seems to have gotten screwed up is the balance in us—the way I'm experiencing it—that you started out when you were born with this undifferentiated self—there weren't a boundary saying this is me and that's other—that was something you learned. Now the fact that you learned it was necessary, and you learned it, and it had a genetic origin, it had an environmental origin because your parents all thought they were somebody, and they went—took you into somebody training. I mean, that was part of the culture you lived in. We were born to a family that thought they were somebody—I mean, really thought it—not just relatively—"I think I'll play somebody"—they thought they were somebody, and they thought, "I'll train my child to be somebody—that's the best thing I can do for them." And the more special you are, the better somebody you are. So you and I got trained into somebody specialness because this is a culture of somebody's where your identity is with your individuality, not your identity as part of the unity of things. I mean, it's interesting that people are waking up to their interdependence while other cultures always lived with their interdependence. The Native Americans always knew they were interdependent, and we're suddenly—"Wow, we're interdependent—wow, imagine that"—physics is right. You know, the balance that got off was that we started out with this undifferentiated self, and we—so well learned—because we learned it emotionally as well as intellectually—we so well learned our separateness that our separateness veiled over the connection we had to the unity of all things. That was the imbalance because once we awaken—which is what we're talking about here—to realize you're part of everything—that it's all relative reality—that there's a something behind it all—it's all one God, one—whichever way—whatever metaphor you want to use—you're awakening back into the balance and at—
First, when you recognize that there's a unity behind the diversity, the whole awakening metaphor tends to pull you towards pushing away at the diversity and grabbing at the unity, because you've lost it so far and you want to taste it again. Because when you experience the unity, you feel at home in the universe, because you are the universe. How could you be not at home? And you're not vulnerable; you're not afraid of death, because what's—where are you going to go? [Music]
But then you realize somewhere along the way that to just acknowledge the unity, to acknowledge the non-conceptual part of your identity, to acknowledge your divinity—that itself—and to push away your diversity, to push away your incarnation as a separate entity—that's imbalance too. It's imbalanced the other way. And you then begin to see the exquisiteness of the human incarnate, the potential of, as Christ said, being in the world but not of the world; the potential of being fully yourself as a diverse, unique entity and fully everything that you and I have the capacity to live on more than one plane of reality simultaneously.
So one of the things we know is something about the unity that lies behind the diversity. Something we know tells us about the formless that is within or behind—I mean, all those are just metaphors about form and formless, two sides of the same coin, whatever you want to call it. And the predicament is that that part of our identity which is known by our senses and our thinking mind—that is, those parts of our identity that we can objectify, since you sense something and you think about something—those parts have fascinated us so much that they are like loud trumpets that have overwhelmed us, so that we haven't heard what the Quakers call the still, small voice within. Which is that part of ourselves which is not object but which is subject; which is not knowable, it is just be-able. It's like the flashlight which you shine on this and that, and you say, "Oh, it's that. Oh, it's that. Oh, it's that." But the one thing the flashlight can't do is shine on itself, so that you never see that which is seeing. So that part of you that is just the seer, the seer, the wisdom, the source, the subject—you never notice it because it's not noticeable; it's just be-able.
Realizing this, what the journey becomes is one of extricating yourself from your definitions of yourself. You see, it's really, in a way, the same idea as the Hindu idea. When the Christian speaks of God giving the creature freedom of will, the Hindu says, "No, God gets lost in that person and gives up power." And it's—it's really the same thing; it's the—the idea that the all-powerful surrenders power. So that the more you give the power away, what you're really doing is you're othering yourself. Now, the more you other yourself by giving power away, the more of a self you are, because self and other are reciprocal. So you find that people who, through a sadhana, a yoga discipline, have overcome their ego, have transcended the ego, are tremendously strong personalities. You would think, theoretically, they would all be non-entities and to lack entirely what psychologists call ego strength, but actually they're nothing of the kind. They are every one of them unique; they're all quite different from each other, and they are very, very—I would call—strong characters, because the more they have given it up, the more they get it.
Let's put it in another dimension for the moment. Let's suppose we—we're thinking of a relationship that is not just a people—people are very obviously other and independent of one's ego—but give it to everything; say to everything, say to it all. Now it's your turn; let's see what you're going to do. Let it happen. You know, you do this complete let-off of control, and you find you get the sensation that everything else is living you; it lives you; that you've given away control, you see, to everything else. It's a lovely irresponsible state to be in. But then you see, you do the flip; in giving away the control, you got it; you got the kind of control you wanted; that's to say, where you had a loving relationship to the world, but you didn't have to make up your mind what it should do; you let it decide. Now, do you see that's how your bodies work? You don't have to make up your mind what your nerve cells are going to do; you've delegated all that authority. Lao-tzu puts it in this way: "The great Dao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right; it loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them; and when merits are accomplished, it lays no claim to them." The more, therefore, you relinquish power, trust others, the more powerful you become, but in such a way that instead of having to lie awake nights controlling everything, you do it beautifully by trusting the job to everyone else, and they carry it on for you.
This seems a sort of paradox to say this: the principle of unity, of coming to a sense of oneness with the whole of the rest of the universe, is not to try to obtain power over the rest of the universe; that will only disturb it and antagonize it and make it seem less one with you than ever. The way to become one with the universe is to trust it as another, as you would another, and say, "Let's see what you're going to do." But in doing that, you see, in saying that to everything else that you have been taught to think is not you, you are also saying it to yourself, because finally you do not know where your decisions come from; they pop up like hiccups. People have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions; we're always worrying, "Did I think this over long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration?" And if you think it through, you find you never could take enough data into consideration; the data for a decision in any given situation is infinite. So what you do is you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this, and then when the time comes to act, you make a snap judgment. It's amazing how often it works. But warriors are people who think of all the variables beyond their control and what might happen. So then when you make a decision and it works out all right, I think very little of it has much to do with your conscious intent and control, but somehow or other you are able to decide and control things more harmoniously if you delegate authority. That's why very great businessmen are those who can delegate authority, trust others to work for them, because those are people developing businesses on the same basic structure that is fundamental to a living organism: delegation of authority. "It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them." And you see, the more you let go of it and trust it as if it were quite other than you, the more you realize the inseparable identity of self and other. If you try to find the identity of self and other by subjecting other to self—no go. If, on the other hand, you—you find it through giving self—that is, control—over to other and trusting that you may make a mistake, you may make a bad gamble, but in the long run you're acting on a principle which has the backing of evolution. This is the way biological evolution goes on: constant delegation of authority.
Once you have recognized what this game of evolution is about—the evolution of God away from God and back to God—once you understand what you're doing here on earth, the meaning of your every act starts to change, and pretty soon your whole life is designed towards awakening, because you understand that only in your own liberation from your attachments and clingings—not your responsibilities or your incarnation or your love, but from the clinging and grabbing—that only in that freedom lies the cessation of suffering. And it's only when you do as Christ admonished you: to know the Father—not talk about Him, not just pray to Him, but open yourself to become it—only then does the whole thing fall into place, and there's nothing else to do; there isn't any other game in town; there's nothing you can offer me that holds a candle to this process. And in order to go this journey, you finally demand of yourself the discipline of body, heart, and mind: the quiet mind—that's why you meditate; the open heart—that's why you practice devotion; the strong body—that's why you concern yourself with your diet and your way in which you keep your body and maintain it. Because when the spirit of—the spirit of God enters you, you have to be able to withstand the power and the intensity of love, the brightness, the blinding brightness that would wither you were you not prepared. And all of yoga is the preparation to, in truth, become the bride of God. That's what it's about; that's what your births are about; that's what this life is about. And only you know, in your heart, what you have to do, because the spirit speaks through your innermost being; it doesn't speak through some guy up here. I'm speaking; you are hearing; each of you is hearing a different thing that you need to hear. It is not for you to hear what I hear; it is for you to hear what you need to hear. For the simple rules of this game are: listen to your innermost voice, no matter what anybody tells you about how it ought to be. If this sounds like baloney, it's baloney. If it sounds clear and in harmony with your inner being, you tune to it. The minute there's a vibration in me that doesn't feel right—trust your heart; don't trust me; you trust your own inner voice. You may make many errors trusting your inner voice by hearing the wrong voice; there are thousands of voices. Your ego will constantly mask itself as your spirit, saying, "Listen to me; go out and get as much as you can." And you go out, and you suddenly feel it's not quite right. And listen, there's nothing wrong with falling on your face, if you just get up, brush yourself off, and get on with it. If you spend all this time in unworthiness and guilt because of all the stuff you've done that's gone against that inner voice in you—and this isn't man's morality now—you're just making choice after choice to go further away from God. Give up the guilt; give up the unworthiness; give up the self-pity; give up the anger; give up the greed; give up the lust; and every time you meet it again, give it up again. Here, Christ—you take it; that's what He went on the cross for, to take that stuff from you. That's what Kali is there for in the Hindu tradition, to take that stuff from you; that's what the guru is there for, to take it from you. But you got to want to give it up. You get to the point in this game where everything in you that is keeping you from getting home, you say, "Forget it." You're looking at a map, and every side road, no matter how pretty the mountains, if it's not getting you home, it doesn't interest you anymore.
First rule: listen to your inner voice. The second rule: be honest with yourself. The predicament is that you—you listen to your inner voice, and it leads you to a path, and then you outgrow it, and you don't want to admit you've outgrown it, because you made a big investment in it. And you must be willing to stand naked as a newborn child again and again and again and again and again and again. The name of this game is surrender: surrender of who you think you are and where you think it all is, over and over again. Because what you see from a thousand feet is not what you see from two thousand feet, and what you see from three thousand feet—truth and trust, truth and trust. And that trust in your inner voice is based on the faith that there is a divine law which guides you, of which you are part. When you look up, when you say, "God, know me; God, help me; free me; God, help me," that action of raising a hand, of reaching out—that's man's will—is what elicits grace. And grace is all of the beings on other planes or on this plane who are there only specifically to liberate you, but they are not living in time, and there's no rush from where they're sitting, so they're not going to come get you; you've got to initiate the action. Every morning at four, Buddha would look out over all the Buddha fields to see who was ready for enlightenment, who was ready. Christ says, "Where two or more are gathered in My name, there I am." You got to call Me, then I come. That's the grace; the grace is drawn by you, and it's by you saying, "I see my predicament; I want to get out; help me"—not with self-pity, but "I'm ready to be counted; I am ready to stand naked before God; I am ready to come to the Father; I am ready now; I am ready to convert my life." So the whole process is one of awakening: "I am ready; I will lose myself a thousand times into lust, greed, doubt, fear, anxiety, etc., and a thousand and one times I will awaken and get up, and I won't waste time in guilt and shame; I'll just get on with it." That's the secret of the whole game.
So in the Taoist doctrines, there is a principle called Wu, and this means—means none or not—no negation. Way has a combination of meanings; it can mean action, making, but the best translation I have found for it is "forcing." And so Wu is the principle of not forcing in anything that you do. Now we know, when we watch any performance of an artist, be it a dancer or an actor or a musician, we know immediately when the performance is forced, and we say, "It doesn't ring true; it's too artificial; it doesn't seem to be natural." Many people who study the Taoist doctrines think that Wu means "do nothing," in the sense of—they say, "Be lazy; always be passive." It doesn't mean that. There is a time for action. When you study judo, you use muscle only at the right moment, when your opponent is hopelessly overextended and off balance, and you add a little muscle to it, and you throw him across the room, but only then. You never use muscle at the wrong moment. For, as Shakespeare knew perfectly well, "There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at its flood, leads on to fortune." And so Wu is based on knowledge of the tide, the drift of things; "get with it" is the art of sailing rather than the art of rowing. So if you say—now one of the most famous sayings in the Lao-tzu is: "Superior virtue has no intention to be virtuous, and thus is virtuous; inferior virtue cannot let go of virtuosity, and thus is not virtue." So one could also say, "The real way is not intentionally will-we, and so is will-we; but inferior will-we so tries to be Wu that it isn't." In other words, this is saying is not a matter of cultivated passivity or even of cultivated spontaneity. You have to be able to realize that you don't know what you really want to do until you are very quiet and it tells you so. To quote Jesus: "Unless you become again as a child, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." But understand "heaven" in a very literal sense. See, we are in heaven now, because the earth is a spaceship, and heaven is space. That's what is important. Most of us don't know this, but do you know you are much more space than you are anything else? Space, which nobody can define, nobody can imagine, appears to be nothing, is the foundation of the universe. But you have to become again as a child to see that. So we get a funny feeling, because everybody knows what it's all about, only they won't admit it. Being brought up is being taught not to admit it—that you know very well what's going on—but in order to find out once more as an adult, you have to be coming in as a child. So what does that involve? Means, ladies and gentlemen, would you please check your ideas and opinions at the door? First of all, all your philosophical and religious views, all your logic. Because I say "check it at the door" advisedly, because you can pick it up again when you go out. If you feel unsafe without it, I'm not trying to argue you out of your opinions and views; I'm merely suggesting that, for the sake of an experiment, you temporarily suspend and view what is as if you didn't even know how to talk. Red is not red; blue is not blue; hard is not hard; soft is not soft; male is not male; female is not female; there is just this jazz. It will not be possible to compel yourselves into this way of looking at things, because what Buddhists call habit energy is going on on on on. And as I talk to you, you will find yourselves thinking in a compulsive and habitual way: "This is red; this is green; this is something; this is nothing; this is solid; this is space." All right, but treat those thoughts that are going on in your head in exactly the same way as if they were like shapes in the spray as the sea breaks on the rocks—that's all they are. Now please don't get agitated that this is an anti-intellectual point of view, that this is undermining the value of logic and reason. We will bring all that back later when we need it, but just for the time being, let's simplify. Close your eyes; listen. What is—what do you really and truly honestly hear? Don't name it; just as if it were music. Can you hear the past? Can you hear the future? Can you hear the listener? Where do the sounds come from? Ears alone? Please look, Mama, no hands; let them tell you the truth. Really listen; dig that sound. [Music]
Now, in the course of the years, I've developed a lot of very strange friends, and one of them is a being named Immanuel. And Immanuel is interesting because Immanuel doesn't have a body; he's a—um—a being on another plane, and he speaks through a woman named Pat Rodegast. And Immanuel had a good teaching. Let me read you one of the things he said to me. He said, "You're here because you chose to be here, because this is a learning place. Each lifetime is a wonderful opportunity to expand your consciousness and to move closer, ever closer, to your oneness with God. This happens in very small stages: first oneness with self, oneness with your human community, then oneness with God. Cannot be done in one blinding flash; it would be too incomprehensible, too confusing. So be patient. When we choose to come back, we construct an embryo to hold within us the areas of distortion that we need to work on. Then we choose our infinite environment to act as a catalyst to bring out these areas. So you were where you needed to be as a very small child. So accept the distortions in you, because when you accept them, you can transform them. That's what life is about: you're here to find these areas of imperfection, to understand them, to love them, and to educate them into reality, which is truth, light, love. If, in the transitional period, you find things in yourself that are not perfect, don't blame yourself; celebrate."
So, in effect, what Immanuel said to me—when I said to Immanuel, "What work do I have to do now?"—he said, "Randos, you're in a school; why don't you try taking the curriculum? Since you took a human birth, you're so busy being holy, why don't you try being human?" Funny; I never thought of that. Isn't that far out? Because somehow being human was less than perfect, even though I intellectually knew that form is no other than formless, and formless is no other than form, and I knew that the manifestation was God made manifest; everything was perfect out there except me. But original sin was gonna have a last stronghold right here. So I said, "Okay, Immanuel, here I go." I decided to just go and be human. Now I'd already figured this out, really. I remember being drunk with Alan Watts in a Benedictine monastery one night—if you can handle that image—and uh, Alan said, "You know, trouble with you, Dick, you know you're gonna get real truth at a moment like that"—it's like three in the morning—this is—"you're too attached to emptiness." So with Alan and Immanuel looking over my shoulder, I had already figured out that as long as I pushed anything in the universe away, I wasn't going to be free, and I saw that the game wasn't getting high; the game was being free, and that free included the highs and the lows; free included it all; all and everything is good. You have said, "Not this is all God," except that you just can't get stuck in those—those places. It's not good enough. A lovely line of Manly Hall: "He who knows not that the prince of darkness is but the other face of the king of light knows not Me," says God. And if you're going to aim towards one, you can't get stuck along the way, too. Immanuel said, "If you want to be free, you're going to have to embrace original sin; you're going to have to incorporate the darkness into your light." On the way, you'd develop a thing called the witness, like Ouspensky in *In Search of the Miraculous*, describing becoming self-remembering. Ouspensky is walking down the street; Ouspensky is turning left; it was Ouspensky; and then Ouspensky saw his tobacconist, and he remembered he needed tobacco. And two days later he remembered he was doing the experiment: "Oh, I need tobacco." That was the end of the experiment; that's witnessing. And you can do that up to a certain point, but then the witness is just another part of your ego, really; it's just part looking at the other part. And finally you witness the witness, and that's the kind of a meditative technique: you turn in on yourself, and you—behind all that—there's just a place—you can't call it a place; it's just a—like sky—it just develops this kind of a context, a frame of reference of is-ness. It doesn't have any quality to it; you can't say it's happy or sad or watchful or—it's not looking, but it's seeing; it just is. It's the Tao; it's the Way; it's the Wu. And what happened now, when I was open to my personality stuff, really open to it, I was no longer holding on to that space, but it was still there; it was there in a different way, though. It wasn't there to push away the pain; it was there along with the pain. Something that is still really coming out more clearly to me was that the movement from knowing the world through conceptual structures and knowing it another way—which we could use the Western word we often use—is intuitively. I have felt that the problems that we kept creating with our rational minds were only going to be solved by our intuitive connection to the universe, and I kept looking for intuitive training to connect with that deeper and deeper part of my being that just knows; it's not one that knows; it knows; it just knows; it knows because it is; it is. And when I was in that intuitive domain, everything in the universe is subject. When I'm in my analytic, conceptual mind, the universe is object; I'm always one thought away from where the action is. So that I could see that my thinking mind was a—it reinforced my sense of separateness, and I didn't want to get rid of my thinking mind, but I wanted to have it around like, "Hey, you, I need you." I wanted to change the thinking mind from a master into a servant, so that I didn't have to think all the time, because I had always thought all the time, because I was paid for thinking all the time, and it got very complicated for me, because as life gets as real as it is, it's very hard to rationally think through everything; it's awfully complicated. So I have been sort of really opening to my intuitive way of doing things, so I just respond much more whimsically, without any reason for doing it particularly. "Sure, I'll do that; no, I won't do that; why? I don't know; well, shouldn't you? No. If you can stand that original confrontation—you mean you're not being rational? No; you mean you trust? But don't you know what you're full of? Yeah, but behind that I know. But you know you know? No. And you still trust? Yes. I don't know." I mean, you recognize this dialogue; it's a dialogue you have with yourself, actually, and it gets extraordinarily exciting when you say, "Well, here we go; I'm going intuition." But the problem that I ran into for some years was that the doorway to the intuition is through the human heart, and I was trying to leap into cosmic…
Love without dealing with emotionality, because emotionality was a little too human for me. And what I experienced was that I had used pushing away my humanity to embrace my divinity. Then I wanted to be intuitive, but the intuition, the impeccable warrior intuitive action, has to come from a blending of humanity and divinity. And until I could accept my humanity fully, my intuitions weren't going to be fully in harmony with the way of things.
I began to feel that what my freedom was going to lie in was the creative tension of being able to see simultaneously the perfection and also to experience the pain; to see that there was nothing to do and to work as hard as I could to relieve suffering; to see it was all a dream and still live within the reality of it. That creative tension, and I felt that the place that I had to work finally, and I have to work, and I am working, is to get the fullness of the human heart.
There's an image of a Buddha statue with a tiny smile at the end edge of the lips, and it's known as the smile of unbearable compassion. It's a way in which you can open to how it all is—the horrible beauty of it all—and you can bear it, not by deadening yourself, but by balancing; by balancing. And what I'm experiencing is that as the faith has gotten deeper—not the beliefs, because beliefs aren't going to keep you warm in a cold night—the faith, the connection to that which you are at the deepest level, to the universe, to the oneness of all things—as that faith gets deeper and deeper, so you can dramatically, much more freely, throw yourself into life.
As long as the faith flickers, you've got to be very tentative about the way you go into life, because you're always afraid you're going to lose your connection to the spirit. But when that faith is really strong, you can say, "Here I come! Wow, it's a big one! It's a big one! It's a big one!" Embracing humanity—not embracing humanity—embracing my [Music] humanity.
Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe. And what that requires is that we shut up; that is to say, that we become interiorly silent and cease from the interminable chatter that goes on inside our skulls. Because you see, most of us think compulsively all the time; that is to say, we talk to ourselves. I remember when I was a boy, we had a common saying: "Talking to yourself is the first sign of madness." Now obviously, if I talk all the time, I don't hear what anyone else has to say. And so, in exactly the same way, if I think all the time, that is to say, if I talk to myself all the time, I don't have anything to think about except thoughts, and therefore I'm living entirely in the world of symbols, and I'm never in relationship with reality. All right, now that's the first basic reason for meditation.
But there is another sense, and this is going to be a little bit more difficult to understand, why we could say that meditation doesn't have a reason or doesn't have a purpose. And in this respect, it's unlike almost all other things that we do, except perhaps making music and dancing. Because when we make music, we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music—to get to the end of the piece—then obviously the fastest players would be the best. And so likewise, when we are dancing, we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor, as we would be if we were taking a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point. When we play music, the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. And therefore, if you meditate for an ulterior motive—that is to say, to improve your mind, to improve your character, to be more efficient in life—you've got your eye on the future, and you are not meditating. Because the future is a concept; it doesn't exist. As the proverb says, "Tomorrow never comes." There is no such thing as tomorrow; there never will be, because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only a present, only an eternal now.
So it's funny then, isn't it, that one meditates for no reason at all, except we could say for the enjoyment of it. And here I would interpose the essential principle that meditation is supposed to be fun. It's not something you do as a grim duty. The trouble with religion, as we know it, is that it is so mixed up with grim duties. We do it because it's good for you; it's a kind of self-punishment. Well, meditation, when correctly done, has nothing to do with all that. It's a kind of digging the present; it's a kind of grooving with the eternal now, and brings us into a state of peace where we can understand that the point of life, the place where it's at, is simply here and now. And so in this way then, if you chanted all [Music] and you can keep that up for quite a long time, and eventually you will find, as you go on chanting, that the words of the chant will simply have become pure sound, and you won't be thinking about it; you won't have any images about the sound going on in your mind; you will simply become completely absorbed in sound. And therefore you will find yourself living in an eternal now in which there is no past and there is no future, and there is no thing called difference between what you are as Noah and what you are as the known, between yourself and the world of nature outside you. It all becomes one doing, one happening. But you see, to go out of your mind at least once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all the time, you are over-rational; in other words, you're like a very rigid bridge which, because it has got no give, no craziness in it, is going to be blown down in the first hurricane. [Music]
See, the game is now to start to respect what's in you and to get over this dependency which brings you here. Actually, I mean, if we if we're very straight about it, the reason you're here is because you don't know you're it yet. Otherwise, what the hell are you doing here? You don't need me; I'm only here to remind you that you're it. If I do my work perfectly, you walk out of here feeling stronger than you walked in. With the breathing exercise, with the following of the breath, with a couple of books of the words of people who've made it, and with the needs of your incarnation in terms of the needs to help beings around you, to alleviate suffering, and to take care of your body and alleviate your own suffering, you have all the ingredients you need to become totally realized. So everything from then on is your own lack of faith, which you can recognize. You can go take a course in meditation because you say, "I just need help; I need some support; I'm not strong enough." But don't cater to that thing; don't get desperate, because it's still compound.
Now at first, what will happen is your meditations will start to give you that quiet space, or your week-long retreat will give you that quiet space, and then you will come back into the world and immediately the stuff will start to happen to you again, and you'll lose the space, and you'll see, "I came down," and you'll see "down" as less close to God than "up"—fallacy. Down and up are all part of the journey. When you go on a road, you will notice the road dips and rises and dips and rises, but the roads are always moving in a certain direction. I think you're beginning to recognize that your depressions, your states—in fact, every state that happens to you all the time—is part of the process. If you will just give it space to be that, rather than saying, "If I only didn't have that, I could go on to God." It's all energy; it's all patterns of energy. There are teachings in every state you have, you see, about your attachment to pain, your attachment to suffering, your clingings. You get to see all of them in vivid, technical now. In fact, the only reason the marketplace brings you down is because of your own desires. If you didn't want anything, as I said before, New York City and a Himalayan cave would be exactly the same place. You are only brought down by your own attachments. And the point is that at first it's nice to get away from the stimuli in the environment that keeps seducing you into involvement at that level. But don't conclude, because you end up being pure and light and light's pouring out of you and everything's so light and you're feeling different, that you're all done. You come back into the marketplace, and after a little while, if you come back and those vibrations are there, and those seeds in you are not cooked—and just because they disappear doesn't mean they're cooked, just means they went underground—they're just seeds that haven't been watered. And you come and you put the water, and the seed that seems like it's been sitting in the ground for years, and then suddenly it takes root and blossoms, and you say, "Oh, I blew it." No, you didn't blow it; that's just a new stage. Now you're coming at it from a new place because you've experienced what "out" is. Now you're back in again, and you begin to play with these processes of getting lost, awakening, forgetting, remembering, forgetting, remember, and that process becomes so exquisite, it's breathtaking.
You see, this again is a matter of the degree of faith. When your faith is too flickery, every time you forget you think you lost it forever, and you're damned and cursed, and you've fallen out of grace, and you've blown it. And then you remember again, and "Oh, you, I'm back! Oh, I never want to leave her!" When your faith gets a little stronger, you know you're hooked; you really can't lose it. And when you forget, you say, "Far out, I forgot again! I'm depressed! Isn't this hell? God, am I depressed? God, I hate God! I hate the spirit! What a bunch of crap that is! What am I doing? I just want to go to the movies; I just want to get drunk and get laid! Out of the hell with all this [ __ ]! This is all nonsense thing!" And you sit there rightly, and it's far out when you see that as part of your sadness. And that's the business of the balance of the feet. See, when your faith is very flickery and you think you can get lost for this entire lifetime and forget the whole thing that brought you here, your weight is primarily on the center of the circle because you're terribly afraid that you're going to be pulled back into the world. But once you have tasted of that peace, you've tasted of the flow of energy, you start to taste a little bit of the bliss, you start to taste a little of the connectedness, you feel the quality of the love, you start to experience the compassion. Once that happens, then the waiting shifts just a bit, and you actually go out almost defiantly to get lost, but you can't. The truth of the matter is, if you look in your own hearts, most of you have not had the faith that you in fact could change, that you could be a being of the spirit. Because many of you had these spiritual experiences of awakening, and you had them through drugs; you had them through something like trauma or emotional upset, or through a connection with somebody, or somebody else's high, or coming to hear somebody, something like that, which gave you the feeling, "They're it! The pill is it! Something's it! But I'm not it." And that's the interesting business that as you start to use methods like the breathing in and breathing out, you get more and more dependent on the stuff in yourself, not in other people, or in books, or in pills, or in certain kinds of experiences.
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