This is a quote from a chapter called Naturally Liberating Whatever You Meet. On the one hand, when you regard disturbing emotions as emptiness, your practice turns into taking emptiness as the path and not the disturbing emotions. Thus, your practice doesn’t become the short path. On the other hand, if you indulge in the disturbing emotions, thinking they are something concrete, it’s like eating a poisonous plant and is the cause which binds you to samsara. Any disturbing emotion that may arise is wisdom. The moment you relax to your natural mind, look directly into it, don’t deliberately reject it regarded as a fault, indulge in it concretely or regarded as a virtue. The more I live my life tuning to dharma, attempt to live life dharmically, live my life and see it becoming more dharmic. Certain words come through very strongly like the word balance and the word patience. I see myself going through life in which phenomena appear and some of them captivate me immensely and my awareness goes into a thought relationship to that particular phenomenon. And at that moment, I lose some balance. I lose the spacious ground in which that phenomena exists. And then sometimes I keep letting go of thoughts, letting go of thoughts, letting go of thoughts until there is just awareness. Resting in that, you lose the world. And we’ve talked about the fire, which fire is purified and which fire is burned. At different moments, one fire that would burn at one moment later will purify. It depends on how ego involved or how invested you are in the particular phenomenon as it arises. But I experienced my life as a dance of balancing. Of cultivating the qualities of spaciousness, of equanimity, of peace, of happiness. But I noticed that there were certain stages in my development and they’re still going on. And it’s left over and away from my renunciate models where I haven’t yet fully re-entered into the passions of life because I’m afraid of them. Because I’m afraid they will captivate my consciousness and take me away from my balance too much. And I realize you shouldn’t be afraid of anything. I agree. But I am afraid. And what I see myself doing, that’s one of those fires. I see myself getting closer and closer to the edge of my fear of coming back into some passionate joy about something in the world. Something I would have been afraid to do for fear of losing my quiet spaciousness. And realizing that now my quiet spaciousness is still present. That it’s still empty, clear, quiet. Like yesterday, and this is a beautiful exercise for me, I was doing interviews. And I’m doing one interview about every six or seven minutes. Now many people who come for an interview prepare, they spend time thinking, what will they say? And they get it down to the kernel of the essence of the neurosis or the kernel of the essence of the drama, the pain, confusion. And they hand me the kernel with all of its juice. And it’s our kernel, it’s our juice, it’s our stuff. And it’s my stuff as well as their stuff. I mean, it’s just us, kids hearing. I watch because my job in that position, and my job in life, but that position demands it, is that I keep that balance perfectly. That at that moment, if I don’t open my heart to the fullness of what that individual’s pain or essence problem is, what they experience is that I’m not hearing them. That I don’t understand that they’re alone inside their predicament. Because I kept separate. I didn’t allow my empathy, the passions that my empathy would engage. I didn’t allow it to occur. So I open myself, and sometimes my heart breaks because a person’s predicament is a heartbreaker. But then the other part of me is constantly coming back into the sky that you’re going, the meditation we’re going to do later, into that just awareness, just that presence that looks at the emotional states, works for them, doesn’t push them, doesn’t pull them, doesn’t grab them. And that part of me becomes a mirror for the other person, for them to see the way in which they’re caught. In other words, the two bits of information that my presence there is offering is one, the empathy, we’re all in this together. And the other is, but we don’t need to be caught. This is two bits of information. And I realize now more and more that what we offer each other is human beings. We offer each other an environment. And that exercise is keeping me in the environment of that balance. So that I’m an environment where if that other person wants to come out and play from the pain and the suffering, here I am. And if they’re in the pain and suffering, here I am. But there’s nothing in me that’s keeping them stuck in the pain and suffering. And there’s nothing in me demanding they come out. And that’s the interesting one. It’s the interesting one about morality regarding other human beings’ consciousness. Tim and I wrote an article back in 1963 for the Harvard Review called The Politics of Consciousness. And we were arguing that each individual should have a right to do with their consciousness as they choose. And that’s what a free system should allow. It’s amazing how we don’t do that in our society. But now I can see it. I see it particularly, for example, in the way in working with people that are approaching death. Because there is such a desire in somebody that is on a path of Dharma to have that other person die your death. Die the death you think they should die for them to be liberated. And to me, I’ve learned over the years is it doesn’t work. Because when you push against somebody, even the subtlest model in your head, they should be different than they are. Awakens in them at a very unconscious level, pushing back. A resistance, a subtle paranoia. And I have noticed in my human relationships that as I want less and less from each individual, there is much less paranoia in them at a deep level. And they are much more available immediately. And the interesting thing is what does it mean to be a safe space for another human being? A safe space means you don’t have an agenda. But we have this tendency to have a model because we’re trying to justify the way we’re living our lives. So to me that word balance is a really key issue. I mean there are so many little balances we work with. The balance between the kind of intuitive heart and the thinking mind. Justine was saying as you get too much thinking, the energy goes up and there’s a whole contraction in the system around thinking. And there’s a tendency in the spiritual journey to denigrate thinking, to denigrate intellect, to denigrate analytic mind. And I think that we as Westerners coming out of our history of having the intellect be the highest power that we have. And now as we’re shifting the balance, it is important that we don’t throw out the baby with a bath. And I think we are inclined to learn how to integrate these two things so that we can honor and delight in the beauty of the intellect without being trapped by it. As they say, the ego or the analytic mind is a beautiful servant and it’s a lousy master. And you can sense as you look at the world conditions how the best of intellect, the best of the Henry Kissinger’s, don’t solve our problems ultimately. Because our problems require a different level of wisdom and we have worshiped knowledge rather than wisdom. And wisdom has ended a very deep compassion. Maharaji said, see everyone as God. The reason I’m saying all this is because you and I spend a huge amount of time in interpersonal relations. And the question I ask you, since you and I aren’t going to monasteries to live our lives, since that’s one of the things we do so much, wouldn’t it be nice to make it a yoga, to make your human relationships your yoga, to make your human relationships the vehicle for becoming free rather than the vehicle to stay entrapped? And what is required is a shift in the way in which one looks at relationships, what they’re about, what their function is. We have come out of a psychological morass. Freud and all of the personality people took us down a road. It’s hard to appreciate how deep in it we are, how deep in the doodoo of personality, how real it is. Because I mean you all think you have needs that must be met. You all think you have personality identities that must be honored. And even as I say that, I can feel you get tight, defending your right to have those things. Isn’t that true? I can feel it in myself too. You know, I have a right to be angry. Damn right I do. We’ll wait, you know, there’s no rush. When you finish that trip we’ll still be here. Because awareness isn’t in time. It’s just here. You want to enjoy your neurosis, enjoy. Enjoy, have more. Have another helping. Really climb in. We have gotten so thick in it and so you’re either getting into it through abuse of this or that, or you spend the rest of your life to getting out of it, which is all giving it that plane of reality, so much juice. And you look at your relationships from the point of view of your separateness. How will you fulfill my needs? I’ll be who you need me to be if you’ll be who I need you to be. Now that kind of symbiosis is that’s all fine if you don’t get trapped in it. But if you get trapped in it, it’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare rooted in your sense of separateness. It’s like feeding the illusion of the separateness, which is the root cause of the pain. So if the game is to be happy, the question is whether fulfilling your needs makes you happy. And whether fulfilling your needs makes you any happier than not fulfilling your needs. It’s an interesting one. It does for the moment, there’s no doubt about it. But if you notice that when you live on the realm of needs, the minute one is done, another one appears. You have a hierarchy of needs. So like a motivational hierarchy. I need food. Now I need ice cream. Now I need television. Now I need a cold drink. Now I need some popcorn. Now I need to go to bed. Now I need a napkin. If you notice that you just go from one need to another, and each one is, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, it’s extraordinary. It’s extraordinary. Now these are all going on all the time. We all have needs and desires. We all have all this stuff. But just like I’m not going around being a bald man, I am bald, relatively speaking. To those of you that don’t have eyes to see. But my consciousness is not full of baldness. It’s an all-so-ran. Sure. In my hierarchy of desires, if I have the power, yogic powers that Patanjali talks about, I’ll create a beautiful head of hair for myself as a whim. I just, I did it on the astral plane so those of you that can see know. And if you see the way in which people get encrusted in their personalities, you can look at somebody and the way they stand, the way they dress, the muscles of their face, the redundancy is staggering of a person saying, this is who I am. This is who they’re basically saying, this is who I think I am. This is who I think I am. This is who I think I am. So you see helpless people going down. This is who I think I am. This is who I think I am. Then you see bankers, this is who I think I am. This is who I think I am. You see car salesmen, this is who I think I am. This is who I am. Just laid back hippies, hey man, this is who I think I am. Hey baby, this is who I am. And everybody gives you a little matrix. They’re walking down the street with it out of the Doctor Strange comics, these huge mind nets and the net goes out and it catches you and you immediately go into the, I’ll make believe you are who you think you are. If you’ll make believe I am who I think I am. So you don’t even look to see who it is. You don’t see God as your only friend. You don’t see that could be God and drag. You see who they think they are and you respond to it. And so everybody is going into the personality realm, making it real and then interacting and then looking at each other and when you think your personality is real that’s all you see when you look at other people. You don’t see that other planes of consciousness. I like the image of the man in a row boat rowing through the fog and he hits another boat and he screams at the other boat and why don’t you look where you’re going and the fog clears for a moment and there’s nobody in the other boat. It was just floating and you left with, because at that moment the plane of consciousness shifted. There was nobody there. Well, imagine there isn’t anybody anywhere. There’s only one of us. There’s just awareness. There’s nobody. Who do you talk to? Can you and I enter into a dialogue knowing neither of us are real? Can we have needs without really thinking of them as who we are, where we’re living? It seems to me that we come together through roles, through personality structures, through all these things. These are the vehicles through which we meet. These are the vehicles. The identification with the vehicle becomes a tremendous track and part of the yoga of relationship is to meet through the vehicle of all that stuff but recognize that through the process of relationship, my relationship with you, let’s find our way out of being trapped by that together. You help me and I’ll help you so that we can be in the roles in a kind of celebratory, free, playful way. Take everything you’re doing in your life and instead of characterizing it now as need and pain and problem to be solved, like I used to be with Tim Leary and the world would be falling apart, believe me. All the cars out in the parking lot would all be broken. These were new cars we had bought. The furnace would have exploded. We were in debt, everything. I’d say, Timothy, we have a problem. Say, how many times do I have to tell you, Richard, we don’t have a problem, we need a plan. It was just like a little flip of consciousness. I’ve had a series of friends who have helped me escape from my own mind again and again. It’s a great blessing to have them through humor. I remember driving across the country with a friend once and we were driving along and I was busy being neurotic, getting somewhere and checking the oil and getting to the Gorgia. We’d pass a store that would, the Grand Union supermarket and he’d say, Grand Union. I’m looking on the map to find out where we’re going to have lunch. He’s busy with Grand Union. But it would sink into my consciousness as if from a distance. It would slowly filter its way in until, oh shit. Fly United. Merge. I need to do them all dead end. Just constantly flipping, flipping consciousness. I’m just playing with all of this stuff so you just to think about relationship as yoga. My history of being a therapist and having clients was that during that time my psychodynamics were such that I was so not resting in my being but in a feeling of inadequacy, psychodynamic inadequacy that was fulfilled through proving myself through the world and in other people’s eyes, something that I’m sure somebody here understands. When I finally got to be a therapist, I really needed to be a therapist and I needed my patients to be patient. They were called patients in those days. And I needed to be curing them. I didn’t need to cure them because then they’d leave me and then I’d have to go find another one. So I needed them to be being cured and be deeply appreciative of how I was curing them. But I needed them to stay a patient. I mean I was going to sit at the side of the desk with a knee hole and I had the clipboard. I mean you just think of this pathology now in terms of where we’ve come in the years since then. This was 30 years ago. But I realize now when I look at my dynamics, how punitive I was of somebody who came to me who was strong, who didn’t really need me in that way, who wanted to be free. I mean I say kiddingly but it’s not so funny that if I in those days met who I am today, who came into his office, I would hospitalize him. Who I am now would be such a threat to who I was then. So I invite you to examine the way in which your identity with your roles and your personality dynamics are creating a very rigid system with other people and whether or not you are using the relationships in a way to get free from that. First of all do you realize you’re entrapped in them? I wrote a chapter in How Can I Help Called Helper’s Prison. The way in which you get into helping because it makes you feel righteous, it relieves suffering, it’s all good things. So you get into I’m a helper and I realized as I examined the dynamics of my own helping and the helping of the people around me, how disempowering this was to everybody else around them. How it needed helpless people to help. And I was seeing how you could give something to somebody in one way where you’re identified with the giver which forces them to be the receiver or you could give somebody to someone and yet not be caught in giving and receiving but just be in shared awareness. It’s like when I give these beads from my right hand to my left hand, the right hand didn’t get caught in giving and the left hand didn’t get caught in receiving. There was no giver, there was no receiver and yet there was a giver and receiver. That’s the key. There was no giver and receiver and yet there was a giver and receiver. How do you play the roles? How do you have the needs without being trapped in them? And the first part of it is as Gergiev said to realize you’re in prison, to realize you are trapped. Not really but you are thinking you’re trapped. And what that appreciation does is it changes the way in which you look at your life experiences. I remember with, I’ve talked about this many times but I was with Emmanuel. I said to Emmanuel, what am I doing on earth? Who made this terrible error? I mean what am I doing on this plane? This is nonsense. These are all these rascals and brigands and thoughtful people and lustful people. I don’t belong here. I’m much too pure for this. And he said, Ram Dass, you’re in school, why don’t you try taking the curriculum? That fascinated me. That was a nice way of putting it. It’s the same thing about the issue of coming into your passion. Or as Alan Watts once said to me, Richard, you’re too attached to emptiness. I mean I was pushing away the form too much. And the form becomes the curriculum. The form is the projection of the mind, which forms you see. That’s your karma writ large. And the issue of extricating oneself from those clingings, not to be not in them, but to be in them and not in them. Now you have the possibility of being with other people who are not trapped, who are always in that spacious awareness. You saw two of them on television last night. Ramana Maharshi’s beautiful example. Just very, always so simple and present and loving. That blend of compassion and emptiness. That’s a way those come together. Let me just tell you one little story. I was in Madras, I believe. And I met a man who was in his 50s, I guess. And he had grown up as a small child around Ramana Maharshi. He used to sit on his knee and all that. And then he grew up and he became an army officer. And now he was sort of retired or something like that. And he said one day he said an English gentleman came to the ashram. He said this English gentleman was the head of a large set of businesses. And one of his, he was from England, but one of his set of businesses was in Madras. And the businessman was having trouble sleeping and he was very agitated and very upset. And the manager of his Madras store said, a business said, you should meet this saint at Arunachala, Tiruvannamalai. And so the Englishman agreed and he flew over to India in a flying boat, as the story was told, whatever that means. I guess a sea plane. And he came to Madras and his manager took him to see Ramana Maharshi. And he was going to stay there for several weeks. And he came into the hall and the hall was silent. Everybody was sitting there and he sat down and nothing happened. Right now this is a very successful businessman. And he started to get more and more agitated. And it was about 15 minutes before he could stand it any longer. And he stood up and he was like, I’m leaving here. This is silly. I can’t spend my time this way. And Ramana Maharshi, who very rarely talked, said to him, sir, before you leave, would you do me one favor? And Ramana Maharshi said, yes. Would you be kind enough to write a note to your wife? What a bizarre request. All right, if that’s what you want. They brought him paper and a pen and he wrote, Dear Hilda, I didn’t find what I wanted here. I’ll be back on Tuesday. Did you water the plants? And has Dharis gone to the dentist? Signed Henry. And he finished the note and Ramana Maharshi held out the hand. And the note was going to, Ramana Maharshi folded it and he put it up under his buttock, which was naked. And he said, would you be kind enough just to stay with me for five more minutes? And I said, all right. And they sat there for five minutes. Then Ramana Maharshi got up and he started to shuffle out of the room. And as he passed the man, he handed him the paper back. And then he went out of the room and the man said, like, what kind of crap is this? What am I doing? I’ve come here. This guy’s mad and insane. And he looks down at the paper and it’s on a different piece of paper. And he opens it up and it says, Dear Harry, I’m sorry you didn’t find what you wanted in India. I have wanted the plants. Dars has gone to the dentist. I would write a longer letter, but the tall man with the turban who brought your note is insisting I answer very quickly. Signed Hilda. Now those are cheating. Those are those are miracle stories. They’re really not anything at all, but it’s just fun to hear a story like that. Just to realize the game is played on many levels. Shirdi Sai Baba, not such a Sai Baba, but Shirdi, the old Baba. He said, I give, he was a miracle Baba. He said, I give people what they want so they’ll want what I give. Because you realize that freedom has nothing really what to do with miracles at all. Miracles are just reminding you that it’s not the way you think it is. And that frees you a little bit to be able to wonder how is it? When you wonder how is it, you’re hooked. So you enter into a relationship with another person if you’re lucky. Could be a friend, it could be a partner, it could be a fellow employee, it could be somebody you meet once a month or once a week to study with or something like that. When you enter in with the contract, let us help each other awaken. Let us help each other remember together. Let’s use our relationship to remind ourselves that we’re stuck, that we don’t have to be stuck, that we are already free, we’re just busy being stuck. And these are very, very precious relationships and they are very rare. I wish there were more of them, I wish we all had them all the time, but they are rare. And a lot of people who say they’d like to enter into that don’t, really want to. They just want to be somebody who wants to want to enter into it. And that’s most of us. Because you come to the point where you are so familiar holding on to who you think you are, your psychodynamics, that you take even the fancy contract to awaken and use it in the service of your psycho-dynamics. I’m helping you awaken for God’s sake. You’re trapped. And I’m free and I know I’m free because I see how trapped you are. Damn it. I love it, oh boy. I see more neuro- yeah, well. I think when you’re working with another person in becoming free or being free together, because the becoming is another hype, it implies that you’ve got to go a certain distance, like people say, you’ve been at this for 30 years, what hope is there for me? I’m only new. Ramana Maharshi is a good example, wasn’t he? Was he 17 years old? He hadn’t read any of this stuff. He didn’t go to Dharma talks, he didn’t meditate, he didn’t do anything. He just lay down at his uncle’s study and got enlightened. Oh, he realized he was enlightened. That’s a good model, it’s a good reminder that there’s no time involved in the process. So that each moment in a relationship is the moment for us to be just here together, dancing through the form. It’s like the form of lecturer and listener. Can you hear without getting caught in listening? Can I speak without getting caught in speaking? Can you and I be together through this dance of talking and listening? Does this talking and listening separate me from you because you’re them? Or am I in the world of us sharing this... ...not together? And is it bringing the us closer together? I really see and I’ve seen that as I’m resting in being more deeply, like I have all these little aids, mechanisms, things like these techniques to remind me, they’re all traps, they’re all traps, all methods of traps. I mean meditation is a trap, you don’t want to end up a meditator, you want to end up free. Judaism is a trap, this is a hard one. Those that are Jews, you don’t want to end up a Jew, you want to end up free. Boy, I was just in Israel and I tried saying things like that. This is... Sure, then you delight in all the forms, you delight in your sexual identity, in your religious identity, in your social and economic identities, in your political identities, and all of your family identities, but you’re not trapped in them. But I work with this little five-line phrase. Prolong not the past. Invite not the future. Don’t alter your innate wakefulness. Don’t fear appearances. There’s nothing more than that. Don’t prolong the past. Don’t invite the future. Don’t alter innate wakefulness. Don’t fear appearances. There’s nothing more than that. Now, when I’m sitting in interviews and somebody tells me a particularly difficult emotion, emotionally engaging story, I can feel my fear of appearances arising. Because I can feel my emotional body going out and I feel my awareness going into that emotional... And at that moment, don’t prolong the past. Don’t invite the future. Don’t alter your innate wakefulness. Don’t fear appearances. There’s nothing more than that. And immediately there’s a writing mechanism that I come back. It’s a balance. And in relationships, there is a balance. You don’t ignore the personality stuff because it’s still real to people. You fulfill it in the way you can without getting lost in it. It is up to the most conscious person in a relationship to create this space where the relationship can grow. And I’d be with Maharaja, and I’d be very serious about something. And he’d just giggle. And what I’m left with over the years are things like the giggle. I’m left with Maharaja going like that. I have that over my toilet. Because Maharaja was for me that mirroring process, and yet he was passionately alive. He was chiding and throwing things and screaming at people and laughing and holding and doing all that stuff. And at the same moment it was just like a vast mountain of emptiness. We were all busy with our personality. Who can get his foot to massage it? Who can get closest? Who will he give a name to? Who will he love the most? There was a guy who I knew from the States and he was kind of unbalanced at the time because he had had a bad love affair. So I told him to come to India and he came to India. Every time he tried to get near Maharaji, Maharaji pushed him away and I got really upset with Maharaji because this guy really needed something. So I brought him into the room and I’d sort of aim Maharaji at him. You know, I threw this kind of thing. And Maharaji would ignore him completely and I would get more and more furious with Maharaji. And then at one moment Maharaji turned and attended to him and within a week that guy had moved into the top slot in the whole temple. And he was going into the room when I couldn’t and I was hating that guy, absolutely detesting him. It was absolutely extraordinary. Because Maharaji saw where my mind was caught. I mean, he wasn’t, I’m just projecting this. He was just a silly old man. But I experienced him as seeing where I was caught and he didn’t think, I think I’ll show Ramadha as a lesson. Because each person in the room always thought the action was directed at them. Everybody in the room, that was the far apart. And I’m sure he didn’t say, well now for him I’ll do this and then for him I’ll do this, but if I move my hand this way he’ll get it. And he just did it. To me this is the best teaching story that I have found to date. As I always say, if you’ve heard it before think of how many times I’ve heard it. The train clanked and rattled through the suburbs of Tokyo on a drowsy spring afternoon. Our car was comparatively empty, a few housewives with their kids in tow, some old folks going shopping. I gazed absently at the drab houses and dusty hedgerows. At one station the doors opened and suddenly the afternoon quiet was shattered by a man bellowing violent incomprehensible curses. The man staggered into our car. He wore labor’s clothing and he was big, drunk and dirty. Screaming he swung at a woman holding a baby. The blow sent her spinning into the laps of an elderly couple. It was a miracle that the baby was unharmed. Terrified the couple jumped up and scrambled towards the other end of the car. The labor aimed a kick at the retreating back of the old woman but missed as she scuttled to safety. This so enraged the drunk that he grabbed the metal pole in the center of the car and tried to wrench it out of its stanchion. I could see that one of his hands was cut and bleeding. The train lurched ahead. The passengers frozen with fear. I stood up. This story is being told by Terry Dobbson who was an Aikido, a Westerner who spent many years in Japan studying Aikido. He has since died and I read this in a memorial. So this is him speaking. I was young then some 20 years ago and in pretty good shape. I had been putting in a solid 8 hours of Aikido training nearly every day for the past 3 years. I liked to throw and grapple. I thought I was tough. The trouble was my martial skill was untested in actual combat. As students of Aikido we were not allowed to fight. Aikido, my teacher, said again and again is the art of reconciliation. Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate people you’re already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict not how to start it. I listened to his words. I tried so hard. I even went so far as to cross the street to avoid the chimpar, the pinball punks who lounged around the train stations. My forbearance exalted me. You hear that one? My forbearance exalted me. I felt both tough and holy. In my heart however, I wanted an absolutely legitimate opportunity. Whereby I might save the innocent by destroying the guilty. This is it. I said to myself as I got to my feet, people are in danger. If I don’t do something fast somebody will probably get hurt. Seeing me stand up the drunk recognized the chance to focus his rage. Aha! he roared. A foreigner, you need a lesson in Japanese manners. I held on lightly to the commuter strap overhead and gave him a slow look of disgust and dismissal. I planned to take this turkey apart but he had to make the first move. I wanted him mad so I pursed my lips and blew him an insolent kiss. Alright he hollered. You’re gonna get a lesson. He gathered himself for a rush at me. A fraction of a second before he could move someone shouted, hey! It was ear splitting. I remember the strangely joyous, lilting quality of it. As though you and a friend had been searching diligently for something and he had suddenly stumbled upon, hey! I wheeled to my left, the drunk spun to his right. We both stared down at a little old Japanese man. He must have been well into his 70s, this tiny gentleman sitting there immaculate in his kimono. He took no notice of me but he beamed delightedly at the laborer as though he had a most important, most welcome secret to share. Come here the old man said in an easy vernacular, beckoning to the drunk. Come here and talk with me. He waved his hand lightly. The big man followed as if on a string. He planted his feet belligerently in front of the old gentleman and roared above the clacking wheels. Why the hell should I talk to you? The drunk now had his back to me. If his elbow moved so much as a millimeter, I’d drop him in his socks. The old man continued to beam at the laborer. What you been drinking? He asked his eyes sparkling with interest. I’ve been drinking sake, the laborer bellowed back and it’s none of your business. Flex of spittle spattered the old man. Oh that’s wonderful the old man said. Absolutely wonderful. You see I love sake too. Every night me and my wife, she’s 76 you know, we warm up a little bottle of sake and we take it out into our garden and we sit on our old wooden bench. We watch the sun go down and we look to see how our persimmon tree is doing. My great grandfather planted that tree and we worry about whether it will recover from the ice storms we had last winter. But you know our tree has done better than I expected, especially when you consider the poor quality of the soil. We take our sake and we go out to enjoy the evening, even when it rains. He looked up at the laborer, his eyes twinkling. As he struggled to follow the old man’s conversation, the drunk’s face began to soften. His fists slowly unclenched. Yeah, he said. I love persimmons too. His voice trailed off. Yes said the old man smiling and I’m sure you have a wonderful wife. No replied the laborer. My wife died. Very gently swaying with emotion of the train, the big man began to sob. I don’t got no wife. I don’t got no home. I don’t got no job. I’m so ashamed of myself. Tears rolled down his cheeks. A spasm of despair rippled through his body. And there I was standing in my well scrubbed youthful innocence. My make this world safe the democracy righteousness. I suddenly felt dirtier than he was. The train arrived at my stop as the doors opened. I heard the old man cluck sympathetically. My, my he said, that is a difficult predicament indeed. Sit down here and tell me about it. I turned my head for one last look. The laborer was sprawled on the seat, his head in the old man’s lap. The old man was softly stroking the filthy matted hair. As the train pulled away, I sat down on a bench. What I had wanted to do with muscle had been accomplished with kind words. I had just seen Aikido tried in combat and the essence of it was love. Now it’s unlikely if you were to get into the thought processes of that old Japanese man that he said to himself, this is a terrible situation. I better do something. I will yell, hey joyously. Doesn’t that seem unlikely to you? I mean, that may have gone on, but it seems unlikely to me. So where did it come from? Where could that hey have come from? Hey! I mean, we are all living on the subway car all the time. There’s always violence around us. There’s always threat. There’s always anger. There’s always violent, all this stuff. Tremendous fear everywhere. Lots of fear. Always around us. How could that old man have had a joyous hey? Where could that have come from? That’s Maharaj’s giggle. It’s the place that is with it all. I mean, he didn’t ignore the situation. He entered into the dance of it. He brought in a whole new harmony, a whole new dimension. It was as if the out of balance-ness of the scene, the way in which everybody was caught in the drama and there was no spaciousness, elicited from him a process that brought the whole thing back into another balance. He upleveled the scene, I could say, because he was the uplevel. The hey just came out of the total gestalt of the moment. It was not an analytically arrived at solution. It was who he was. He didn’t lose his appreciation of the beauty of humanity because of the fear, the violence, the stuff. Interesting, isn’t it? How many of us contract all the time around the fear, around the violence, around? It’s interesting that this kind of stuff we do when we come together and we study and we work and we meditate and we sing and we do all this and we do it over years and you can feel those of you that have been doing this together for years, how we are changing. We are slowly, slowly, slowly, and there’s no time again so it could happen from person to person in a moment, but you can feel the process going on of lightening up, of not taking the personality so seriously, of not taking the dramas of life, not getting so trapped in them, not pulling back but not being trapped. Passionate involvement and emptiness. A joy that doesn’t deny what is in the world and isn’t trapped by it. You and I are in the process and the reason I used the word patience earlier was that you go from planning when you get enlightened. If I work hard at this retreat and if I go to the three-month at Barry and then if I read by next June, I can probably put out my shingle as an enlightened being. Forget it, baby. There’s no time in it and it’s all process. It doesn’t end. It’s just a continuous process. Continuous process. I mean Maharajee kept a diary and every day in the diary, I mean can you imagine a realized being keeping a diary? What he suppose he thought was significant that he wrote down every day, two pages he wrote every day and he had books of it. I mean book after book. There were stacks of these books. Every day, two pages. He wrote all the critical events that happened during the day. If you open the page it says Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram. Just two pages of Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram every day. And when he was about to die, he gave it to Siddhi Mahad, this incredible woman. He said, would you keep my diary from here on it? It was called his diary. He was just... He was... bringing it all back into its source all the time. It was sourced all the time. And he was still doing practices. But it wasn’t practices out of need, it was practices out of celebration. He was just celebrating it all. I remember when I first met him, I thought he had a nervous tic. He kept going like this all the time. You know, and you think, what a nervous person he is. Then you realize he was using his hand as a beads. Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram. And then just this one other little story. I could tell in my inner gut who he was. And I knew who I was. Hear the tone? I was. And I knew who he was. And I wanted what he had. So I’d have it too. And the problem was he kept distracting me all the time. You know, he’d come and he’d talk to me about America. Who gave a damn about America? I wanted to get enlightened, you know. And I saw that more talking about America didn’t get me anywhere. So one day I determined not to be sucked in. And I was brought out to the temple with this Indian man. And there was just this Indian man and me and Maharaj. It was late in the day. It was sunset. So the Indian man and I came up to Maharaj’s tucket and we sat down in front of him. And I decided I had been reading Patanjali’s Ashtangi Yoga. So I brought my awareness to my third eye, my Ajna. And I sat there. I went into meditation. Like, damn it, you give me what I want. And he said, I’m disgusting. And he started to ask questions and I ignored him. I just sat like this. I wasn’t going to have any bullshit. He wasn’t going to con me this time. I wanted it now. At which point he leaned over on his elbow and he started to snore. And when he snored, my body absolutely exploded. I mean, it was Kundalini city in there. My head started to shake like this and my whole body was shaking like this. And I thought, I really experienced that I was about to break my neck. It was so violent. And at that, and I was getting frightened. And at that point he sat up and the whole thing stopped. And he said to the guy, ask Ram Dass how much money Steven makes. I mean, what he’s basically saying, when you’re ready, you’ll get it. Stop being greedy, be patient, don’t rush. Get over that trip. Relax. It’s okay. It’s okay. Because ultimately, it’s so ordinary that all the little increments in energy you don’t even notice. It’s not like I’ve got all this power. It’s just like, I’m not going to be able to do anything. It’s just like that little Japanese man isn’t noticing that he is doing that for that reason. He’s just, that’s the manifestation, like the tree or the river. So I encourage you to look at your relationships as vehicles for awakening. Now there are two kinds. One is where you’ve got somebody in it that wants to awaken with you. And the other is where they don’t. And those are just two different kinds of yoga for you. One is with satsang, and one is without it. But the interesting thing about the one without it is that’s in your own head. They’re satsang, they just don’t know it yet. And you’re not demanding they be satsang. You’re just looking through the veil of their mind’s denial of who they are to be with who they are. But you can only do that when you’re resting in it. Because it takes one to see one. So you’re constantly working on yourself just coming back into that balance into that equilibrium. And then looking and seeing everybody else here in the same space with us. We’re all here together. We’re all in this awareness. And then you see people dipping down getting caught into their needs, desires, fears, personality. And losing the balance. And you’re just sitting here saying, ah, losing the balance. Ah, so, hey! Ah, ooh! So relationship is a vehicle. Patience. See, realizing there’s nobody in the other robot. There’s nobody in the other robot. And the excitement of being with another human being. And you’ve been lost in your drama for thousands of incarnations together. And then you start to come up for air together. What an incredible joy to be with another human being and be free. And the far out thing is it takes exactly one moment. I would watch. I’d stand behind Maharaji and they’d say, like, the army had Hanuman as their Ish-to-Dev, their divine form. So Hanuman is on all the army flags in India. And the army trucks would be coming from the Nepalese front, the China border rather. And they would come by the little temple up in the Himalayas. And the trucks would all stop and everybody would come into the temple because it was a Hanuman temple to Pranam. And Maharaji was there so they’d all line up to Pranam and then they’d be given food and then they’d go back. They were always fed at the temple. And Maharaji would be sitting there and people, these army guys would be coming along, touching his feet, rushing off, touching his feet, rushing up. And he’d be talking to people and he’d just have a foot out there and they’d be touching his foot and rushing away, touching his foot and rushing away. Every now and then he’d turn to somebody and he’d say, your mother needs to hear from you. Let me go back to talking. And the guy would, I was standing behind him and I’d watch the guy go like this and then he’d go on. And then I’d watch, most of the people came by and you saw the denseness of them being in honoring the guru. That was they were in a definite role game. Deep in, honoring the guru, get food, go. I mean, they weren’t doing it to get the food by the way. I mean, this is a very pure situation. It’s far to find that in the army. You know. But every now and then one would come and touch and look up and you would see something happen at that moment. You just see something happen. And you knew that that whole person’s life something was going to be different from them. And it only took that long. I realized that what Maharaja, his business with me, took that long. All the rest of it was collecting more out of my fear that something hadn’t happened. Just far out. And I would say that for most of you that has happened. You’re already hooked. It’s already over. You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t. That’s what’s so bizarre about unless you just came in by error or you know, like so. But you’re more or less stubborn as to how quickly you will give up. You know. Damn it, my personality is real. I need love. I’m lonely. Good. Is it fun? How do you do? I’m dick. She wasn’t there for me when I really needed her. Oh, God. I was there for you many times before that. Boy, oh boy, you watch it. It’s like, hey, hey everybody. Wow. Wow. Dig this one. Look at this. This is really thick. Will they ever get out of it? No, I don’t think so. That’s what as the world turns makes all its money on. Is your life stories. I mean, it’s all of stuff we’re all in right up to our eyeballs all the time. Does anybody want to get free? Hey. Hey. Hey. On the way to the gorge. Hey. Hey. Hey. So relationships are a stinker of a yoga. Because just like institutions, they are an institution because it’s so easy to go to sleep into them. I won’t bug your ego if you don’t bug mine. You know. You don’t understand. I’m trying to get enlightened, but I really need this now. I like that one. Oh, well. But you put one more really in so I’ll know you really, really needed it. Well, you can’t have it. Now what? Oh, well, I’m going home to mother. Great. Lots of luck. Well, wait, I’ll be here. I’m getting outrageous. I’m going to stop quickly. I mean, I finally, I tried being impatient with myself about all this crap, but and everybody else, but it didn’t help. I mean, I’m left with just one word. How poignant. How poignant I am. I mean, I just how poignant I am. Oh boy. I can find myself in a place of such righteousness and such self pity and so tight. I have somebody who lives in the house that I live in and he’s a complete slob. And when I come home from a trip, he knows how I like a clean house and I come in and you got to walk through the litter up to your knees. And I feel I have a right to have a clean house. He cared for me. He would have cleaned the house and I sit in my room and I’m busy being damn it, I don’t know if I can go on. He should have cleaned the house and here I come home and I’ve been working and I’ve come home and there’s no clean house and there’s no yeah, poor baby and I’m just so full of it. And then somewhere in the outer consciousness comes hey, hey, you know, hey. Hey, do you really want to live it out at that level? Do you really? I mean I’ve controlled my life so much for many years that I was always in the right and I always had control of my scene and I was always miserable. Isn’t that interesting? I was always miserable because I was stuck inside my mind boxes. If you feel yourself contracted and examined how much you are just sticking inside your little mind box of thought and right and control and mastery and needs and misdemeanor don’t have desires, you know, needs of course not. I mean this sometimes is when a Ben and Jerry cookie dough ice cream is at absolute necessity. And I go to the store and I go to the freezing compartment and it’s gone. See what Maharaja did? I go, now the question is whether I will now drive from store to store in search call Ben, have him ship it in or be somebody who didn’t get cookie dough ice cream that night. I am just as happy as if I had the cookie dough and a lot thinner. I can feel my veins my blood vessels tanking me. You must see how you get a desire and you get lost in it. And how quickly you get lost into it. And the thing is it’s so rushy and trippy. God we gotta have cookie dough. I mean I remember in the old, you know, those days you know that need for cookie dough ice cream, well they didn’t have it then, but the need for chocolate chip you each have your own. One of the bits of wisdom I’m passing on is not to take yourself so seriously. To take it all lighter. To take it all a little bit more with hey. You know, hey. Wavy gravy are a clown who’s on the board of SAVA. Has always told us if you don’t have a sense of humor it just isn’t funny. And he has a little bit of a and he has the serious glasses, the Groucho Marx glasses on the puja table. And if anybody at the board meeting when we’re talking about death, destruction, violence, blindness, malnutrition of children uses the word serious. They have to put on the serious glasses. So we won’t take ourselves too seriously. Because taking something serious doesn’t make it go away any faster. In fact, it keeps making it a little bit worse. When you think of all the things the Japanese man might have done look at how cleanly he cut across into another realm. By the hey, persimmon tree. He didn’t start with, oh you poor man, you must be having a terrible time being drunk. He didn’t reward that. He went out and then came back in. And there’s a great quote from D.H. Lawrence that talks about when you come at relating to people from the freedom, from the spacious, from the deepest self, you don’t do violence to one another and you don’t destroy each other’s individuality. But trying to impose unity upon diverse people at the more superficial level from outside in. Like I’m a Jew there for a long time, he was a Protestant. Versus, here we are beings, you want to be a Protestant I’ll be a Jew, what do you say? That’s a different level. At the more superficial level, whether by love, coercion, or group process is to do violence. And I really, I’ve heard that a lot. I’ve heard that a lot. I heard it at a social action retreat that we had. When it turned into chaos, when the minority groups decided they weren’t going to be pushed around by some white honkeys at a meditation retreat and they had a revolution and they threw us out of power. We had designed this wonderful retreat for burned out social activists. We forgot they were activists. And for a day there was this incredible chaos, absolute chaos. I mean everybody had meetings and was not talking to everybody else and being right and you know, and then, I mean there were so many subgroups it was you didn’t know which one to go to you go to the men’s one from the east coast, or you know, everybody had an axe to grind and then we had a kind of a fishbowl where all the people that were oppressed went into the center of one group at a time like people of color were oppressed first because they had been oppressed longest and they, well they went in it, we won’t say that because that will start something else. They went in and they’d be oppressed and we’d all listen and then women went in and they were oppressed and we’d all listen and then gays and lesbians went in and they were all, we all listened everybody was oppressed and we listened then white men went in and they were oppressed by being oppressors that was oppressive and we all listened and it was interesting that after we had all been through that and we’d all heard each other so that we were sharing an awareness of our oppression we’d all felt listened to we could all start to be together in a way that was collaborative but the day before that thing happened when we didn’t know how to get out of it, I and my infinite wisdom got up and said, what is this all about we’re all one and they said, don’t give us that bullshit and you can see that three days later they would say, you know we’re all one but how we had to arrive at it and I just like this particular story a shepherd was grazing his sheep when a passerby said that’s a fine flock of sheep you have could I ask you something about them of course said the shepherd said the man, how much would you say your sheep walk each day which ones the white ones or the black ones the white ones well the white ones walk about four miles a day and the black ones the black ones too how much grass would you say they eat each day which ones the white ones or the black ones the white ones well the white ones eat about four pounds of grass each day and the black ones the black ones too how much wool would you say they give each year or which ones are you referring to the white ones or the black ones well I’d say the white ones give some six pounds of wool each year at a during time and the black ones the black ones too the passerby was intrigued may I ask you why you have this strange habit of dividing your sheep into white and black each time you answer one of my questions well said the shepherd that’s only natural the white ones are mine you see ah and the black ones they’re mine too