Good evening. Can you hear me back? Can you hear me in the back? Okay. So we gather again and again to reassure ourselves about who we are and how it is, perhaps who we aren’t and how it is. Because we get so caught in thinking where somebody is doing something, going somewhere, or there’s something to do. I don’t think I’m going to begin this lecture tonight. I know just let go because I just looked at you all as you came in and you’re me and I’m just going to talk to myself. So if you don’t know what I’m talking about, just listen with your heart. It’s okay. The words are completely confusing. Just assume I’m totally insane. I guess we have an evolve to the point where we really can spend the whole evening just being silent together in a lecture. It’s interesting that in the silence is really the answer to the mystery. The words just keep your minds quiet, our minds quiet, so that our hearts can hear each other. Because we’re really here to acknowledge and honor our hearts. Not necessarily our emotional, romantic heart, not necessarily our anatomical heart. But since in the heart mind you and I were so well trained, we were so well socialized to be somebody. Our parents told us who we were. Our schools told us who we were. The culture told us who we were. He just asked the question, who am I? Every answer you give is really a lie. Because it’s a concept. It’s a limiting condition. It’s a prison. I’m Richard. I’m a man. I’m 65 years old. I’m an Aries. I’m a secret after truth. I’m a lusty, greedy, doubting, agitated person. I’m depressed. I’m happy. I’m overwhelmed by it all. I’m responsible. I’m laid back. I’m confused. I’m hurt. I’m suffering. I’m out for fun. I am the spirit. I’m God. I am the one. I am. Every one of them is relatively real. It’s sort of real. But it isn’t all real. And who you are is at least all of those. Do you ever notice how many eyes there are each day for you? There’s the eye that wakes up. The eye that needs to go to the bathroom. There’s the hungry eye. There’s all the different eyes you go through each day. Thousands and thousands of little images of yourself. And one hardly knows another. I can be walking down the street so holy, so connected to the spirit, and I see somebody that arouses my prurient interest, as called. And suddenly I am Mr. Horning. And my whole mind has dropped. And all my love of us has turned into objects. And under those conditions I’ll use anything. Wouldn’t you like to come up and see my holy picture? I’m Ram Dass. Let me help you. And who I was a moment ago is horrified by this person. This person would screw that one of the walls to get what it wants. We are all thousands of these beings. And they’re a loose confederations that we call our ego. And they all sort of are organized around a structure. You say that’s me. That’s me in all my manifest. Oh. It’s a dinner joke. We learn all these self-images. They’re concepts we have about ourselves. And they are so fascinating to us. And they are so efficient at getting us through the world, this world, this planet. That we don’t hear the whisper of the other parts of our being. They kind of get lost in the shuffle of efficiency. Of keeping it together on this plane. And everybody gets really crowded. They all know those zip codes. They have a job. They get their act together. They get their laundry done. The oil changed. But your taxes, you keep it together. But have you ever noticed that even when you’re doing it extremely well, you feel a little trapped? You feel a little bit like you’re being had by the universe? It’s interesting. People work to realize the fantasies of the culture. If you get educated, get a degree, get a good job, have a family, get a home, get insurance, have a car that works, you get it all. You’re going to be happy. But have you noticed how you get sucked into, this is great, but it’s only I. It’s like this hot tub, this squeal in the sounds, this hot tub is magnificent. But wouldn’t it be better with some perfume oil? Let’s have some insight. Wine would be great in the tub. Music would add. And you just keep adding one thing after a partner. Now we’re getting closer. And you have moments when you say, this is it, this is enough. I’ve got it. And then it goes through your hands like a slish. And a moment later, well what do we do now? So it’s, let’s go to dinner. Wow, that’s good. Let’s get an ice cream cone. You’re eating the ice cream cone. Want to go to the movies? You’re going to the movies. Let’s get a piece of pizza. Let’s get that late television show. Let’s make love. I’m exhausted. Let’s go to sleep. And you start all over again the next day. And it’s always that, have you ever noticed it? I mean, am I alone in this? It’s that constant like the mind is always living just, if only, if only, as soon as, if, then. And how often do you just sit here and say, this is enough? I mean, you even may come here tonight to try to collect wisdom. Everything you need to know you already know. I don’t know anything you don’t know. I just say it well. You’ll notice, I’ll say something you go like that. Well, how did you know? If you knew what you didn’t know. If you know, you go like that. You knew what you need to come here for. So the model in your head that you’re collecting something is keeping you from being here. Because you’re someone going somewhere. And I hate to tell you, but there’s nowhere to go. This is it. This is it. If this isn’t it, there isn’t any. Everything you did in your entire life was preparation for this moment. This is it. You say, I can’t afford to stop. I mean, I have commitments. I have responsibilities. I have contracts. I have a job. I have, that doesn’t matter. You can do all that. You can either do it from being thinking you’re going somewhere or having arrived and then you do what you do. I have nowhere to go. And then this just happens. It’s interesting. Like, you’re hard at beating. You’re not making it hard to beat, beat, damn it, beat. You got to keep my eye on it. Beat, watch it, beat, beat. I’d like to talk to you, but I got to keep it beating. Beat, beat, beat. Make sure my intestines are working. Keep moving the stuff down through. Beat, move, beat. Better breathe. Breathing in, breathing out. Breathing in. You see? That’s all going on. And you’re listening to me. You don’t spend hardly any time doing that. Many of you drive cars and you can be sitting, driving a huge metal monster at precipitous speeds while listening to the radio, thinking about where you’re going, perhaps making love, looking out the rear window for a policeman, smoking, whatever you smoke. It all can be happening and you’re just driving along and you’re not busy driving at all. This tremendously complex thing you’re doing with centrifugal and centripetal forces, rates of acceleration, I mean, it’s a physics problem that would cover pages. You’re not even thinking about it. It’s all in what’s called base brain. It’s interesting when all life gets that way. What do you do? What do we do with the rest of the time? It’s even further out than that because there’s no time. Everything to view within time is all passing show. It’s all corrupting and falling apart anyway. Christ said, lay not on your treasures where moth and rust are corrupt. That includes your body and your personality and your friends and your loved ones. Everything’s changing. Everything’s dissolving. It’s all going. It could make you nervous. If you identified with it, if you think you are a form of any kind, even a thought, unfortunately, it’s all going to change. I mean, you are at this moment dying. You may not have realized it, but everybody in here is decaying. It’s built into the system. You can eat as much wheatgrass as you want and you will still decay and die. Just like the trees dropped their leaves, it’s built into the system. If you identify with your Volvo sooner or later, even a Volvo. Oh, no, not a Volvo. Even a Volvo. It will go. It can’t go. It’s my Volvo. It’s my body. This is your life. It’s my life. It’s going. Do you remember the poem, Ozymandias? Somebody’s walking out in the desert and they see a stone sticking out of the sand. And there’s an inscription on the stone and they decipher it and it says, I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works, he mighty and despair. Nothing more remains. That’s it. That’s it. If you are busy thinking you are somebody going somewhere, doing something that’s going to amount to something, suffer. Simple as that. Buddha pointed out in his second noble truth, the cause of suffering is the clinging of mind. If your mind clings to anything, that clinginess, you are clinging to something and you’re trying to hold it and it’s changing right out from unto you. You get what you want, you try to hold on to it. You have what you don’t want, you try to get rid of it. The clinging, the attachment, the aversion, all of them create the suffering. I used to try to figure out who I was and then I realized that that was a question that led me back into the void. That every answer I gave wasn’t really the truth. It’s as if who we know ourselves to be is like the tip of an iceberg and there’s this vast quality of our being beneath it. As you touch that part of you that is not knowable by your intellect, it is not knowable as an object because it’s subject. It’s I am. It’s is. It’s I. Ron Teertha, a beautiful poet, speaks to this. He says, I am without form, without limit. I am beyond space, beyond time. I am in everything. Everything is in me. I am the bliss of the universe. Everywhere I am. Just for a moment imagine that that’s true. And you can use the thing I work with, this little channel selector. You look at me and you see a 55 year old well preserved, rather nice looking channel. You see a pleasant seeker of the truth in a teaching role. On the second plane you see everybody’s socio-psycho dynamics. There’s a mother. There’s a professor. There’s a student. There’s a manic depressant. There’s a depressed person. There’s a hopeful person. That’s the plane when you’re in therapy. That’s the real one. Those two planes of reality are where 99% of the world’s population lives almost all the time. When my father used to say to me during the 60s, Richard come down to reality. He meant that. Get a job. Economics. Physical, psychological realm. Flip it again. I look out in the audience so you look up here. You see an arius. I look. I see a Sagittarius, a Leo. Another matrix of individual differences. These are all relatively real. I can tell you are different from you on the physical plane. You’re a man. You’re a woman. I can tell you are different from you on the psychosocial plane. Your roles, your social identity. I can tell the difference between your astral planes when your sun is rising, your moon etc. But now flip it once more. And when I look at you or I look at you or I look at you or you look at me, if you look into my eyes, I look up. What you see is another being just like you except that I’m packaged differently. That’s why the Christians talk about the eyes being the windows of the soul. It’s as if you meet an awareness, an entity that just happens to be traveling in this particular space suit on this planet at this moment. See when you came here you got all suited up for the trip. It includes your body and your personality. That’s your suit. It isn’t who you are. It’s your suit you’re wearing. It’s part of who you are but it’s not all of them. Are you in there? I’m in here. How did you get into that one? You have this extraordinary feeling like you’re meeting another being just like you but in an entirely different universe because of their packaging. Because how people see them, how they see others through their eyes, through their habits of thought, all of that stuff which is the packaging. And they think they’re the package. And everybody goes around with these huge mind nets. They walk down the street, this is who I am, this is who I am, this is who I am. And we enter into conspiracies. I’ll make believe you are who you think you are if you’ll make believe I am who I think I am. And we don’t want to upset the apple cart. Nobody asks for truth. We just ask for security. And we are constantly picking up cues as to who everybody thinks they are and we constantly occurring each other. Oh, if you turn the dial once more and we look at each other, I’m looking at myself, looking at myself, looking at myself. Because there’s only one of us in drag. We just appear to be many. This is the play of the one. This is God as creativity. You are the creation. Who you think you are is the creation. Who you really are is the creator. And you have a choice whether to identify with being the creator or the creation. As long as you identify with the creation you’re being had, you’re just an unfolding set of laws. No big deal. I am free will. Forget it. You’re not being free will. Who you think you are doesn’t have to be free will. Who you really are has all the free will in the universe. You are free as a creator. To accept the fact you created yourself not you, your personality didn’t create it. That’s the creation. Okay. Is this too heavy or can you hear what I’m trying to say? Anybody here? Okay. I can get this. I can’t. I have this spooky friend. His name is Emmanuel. He doesn’t have a body. He speaks through a woman named Pat Rutter-Gas. I have learned over the years that everybody that doesn’t have a body isn’t wise. Just because we don’t have a body, we can’t not have bodies. We get a feeling that anybody that doesn’t have a body must know. But there are a lot of well-meaning slobs on this level who die and they want to do good. But they don’t know what they knew before because it’s just continuity of awareness. So they say buy United States steel and they lost in the stock market on earth. They’ll lose in heaven. The voice came to me. I had a vision buy United States steel and they lose their shirt. If you were frightened of the apocalypse on earth, you’ll probably be on a plane. Will you frighten of it in heaven? Watch out. The world’s coming to an end. I heard the world’s coming to an end. Well, Emmanuel is very light and playful. You gotta trust non-embodied beings, disembodied beings with your heart. You can’t know them with your mind. Because your mind says what the hell is no such thing as a disembodied being. Pat Rutter-Gas just gets offended. She doesn’t even know she’s talking to herself. Poor thing. See, I don’t care whether it’s her schizophrenia or somebody else who called Emmanuel because I just want the truth. I want the stuff. And I’ll decide with my heart whether it’s valid. I don’t care where it comes from. But Emmanuel is so light. I mean, when I said to Emmanuel, I’m in the dying business. I work with people dying. What should I tell people? He said, Ram Dass, tell him that it’s absolutely safe. You hear that? He said death is like taking off a tight shoe. Who wouldn’t trust somebody like that? And he says to me, you have a choice, Ram Dass, of being the victim or being the creator. As long as you identify with who you think you are, with the form, with the dance, with the unfolding of forms, you are part of the lawful nature of karma, the Tao, yin and yang, positive and negative, dark and light, good and evil. You’re part of all the world of dualism. He said, which you took birth from before to get lost in that and then to awaken. That’s part of the creative act of the one. And by the way, the one is only a concept of one when you’re looking at it from two. From within one, it’s zero. There’s no one where one comes from. Because the one has no manifestation. It’s just imminent or it’s unmanifest, hurts. And then it comes into form to play. This is all play. Remember Herman Hess’s Journey to the East, I think. And Leo, the servant, turns out to be the wise man. He meets H.H. many years later. Henry Haller. Henry Haller is a bitter old man because he left the journey to the East. And he says to Leo, you don’t mean to say life’s just a game. But all this is just play. But Leo says that’s exactly what I mean. An exquisitely beautiful game. Not game, play, irrelevant, haha. But a game, a beautiful set of the unfolding of law. When you play Monopoly, you don’t think you’re the iron of a symbol. But when you play life, you think you’re the body. Very bizarre. I’m moving down the street. I’m moving from boardwalk to ball to cabinet. I said to Emmanuel, what’s my work on Earth, Emmanuel? What am I doing here? I gotta tell you that ever since the 60s, when Tim Leary turned me on, that Irish rascal. And he showed me that I wasn’t who I thought I was. Rather dramatically. Because I have spent so many years being neurotically miserable, being who I thought I was, as a Jewish, upwardly mobile achiever, with all my sexual mischievous business. And analysis hadn’t helped. And I had depression. So that this plane, these physical, psychological planes, weren’t exactly, you know, they weren’t a bundle of fun for me. And so once I tasted that I wasn’t that stuff, and I experienced this feeling of I’m home, it’s okay, I’m free. I am. I got catapulted out of who I thought I was. And I began to understand what the meaning of getting high was. I had gotten high. And boy, did I want to stay high. But as some of you may have noticed, where there is high, there is low, you go up and you come down. A little like a yo-yo. It took me a long time, years, to realize that the game wasn’t to get high, the game was to become free. I kept wondering what brought me down all the time. I finally knew how to get high, that wasn’t a question. I think everybody figured out how to get high. A lot of people didn’t do it with chemicals, they could do it with sex, with surfing, with skiing, with running. Once you knew that it was possible and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones told you that was high. You didn’t listen to the mystics, but these were the current mystics, Bob Dylan. Then suddenly you saw it everywhere. It had been happening all the time, but you treated it like you were insane before. My God, I was out of my mind. Hopefully. There is an interesting line in the mystic literature that says there is nowhere to stand. There is nowhere to stand. At first you stand in what you learned yourself to be and you look up in heaven. These cathedrals are all designed so you can look up to God, look up to the Spirit. Then you transform yourself in one way or another so that you go from here to there. Then you are there looking down on here. Yes. That’s how it all is. There are planes here where you look out and all you see is the perfection of the unfolding of the law. That’s all you see. It absolutely is all full, full of law. You are filled with awe by the incredible... You know it a little, what does he mean? You know it in psychology, well that doesn’t have very much law. We know yet it all has law but we don’t know it. But you know it in physics, genetics, astronomy, the way the planets move. You allow that the planets are all moving lawfully but you don’t think of yourself as part of that lawful structure. But then you see that everything that is in form is in law and you look at it and you see it all. And at that moment you look out and you say, it’s all unfolding perfectly. It’s a strange place to be in. It’s not human. It’s a place you’re looking at it from here and you see it’s all perfect. And if somebody falls down in front of you you say, perfect, it’s karma. It’s just karma. It’s a cold place. It’s like a cold blue place. You’re looking down. Then you come back down and you come into your human heart and you look at the suffering around you. And it hurts so bad. I mean there’s suffering and when you go to reach for that one there’s suffering. But what about that suffering? And what about that one? I mean there are the obvious sufferings of starvation, of violence, of torture. There are the subtle sufferings of neurosis. The sufferings of yearnings that are unfulfilled. Everywhere you look at forms you will see the quality that a form in prisons and there’s suffering. As a human and your heart hurts so bad. You come up here and you say, it’s all perfect. You come down here and you say, oh my god it stinks. It’s getting worse. We’re doing ourselves in ecologically. We’re doing with a bomb over here. We’re polluting the air, the water. There’s more violence. There’s more terrorism. There’s more economic uncertainty. There’s more discrepancy between the heves and the have nots. It’s getting worse. Go up. Perfect. All unfolding just as it should be. Including the suffering. If you stand in either one of those, you’re standing somewhere. And there’s nowhere to stand. That is relatively real and so is that one. You are both the one. You are an awareness. You are an astral entity. You’re a psychological entity. You’re a physical entity. You’re a set of biochemical electrical patterns. You are an illusion. That’s all equally real. How do you live with all that? Do you do it sequentially? Now I’m my body. Now I’m spirit. I got high. I came down. That’s what you do first. Up, down. I said to Immanuel, what’s my work on earth? Immanuel said, you’re in a school. Why don’t you try taking the curriculum? Why don’t you try being human? I’d never thought of it. I was so busy trying to get high. Trying to become spiritual. And push my humanity away. And it began to dawn on me. That freedom was going to come through form, not in spite of it. That incarnation isn’t an error. That we are not in the wrong place at this moment. That we are exactly where you are supposed to be at this moment. You may think it’s an error. Because it’s too hard for you as a human being to handle what’s happening. It’s interesting because if you push away your humanity to get up there, you’re standing on tiptoe. You are not balanced because you’re pushing something away. It’s a clinging of mind. If you get so immersed in your humanity that you forget your divinity, you’re clinging to your humanity. clinging of mind, and you end up being trapped in righteousness. That’s a heavy one. That’s called the golden chain. It’s golden, but it’s still a chain. Righteousness. Christ said, I am in the world, but not of the world. The way of freedom lies through form, not in spite of form. If you try being unrenunciate, I mean most of the people that are celibate are just horny celibates, because they’re pushing away something. You don’t have to push yourself away to be free, because you are. All of it is okay. You are it. The mind, see, you’re all of it, and you decide, as part of your creative act, I’ll go into separateness, so that this is all creativity, so I can know myself through many forms. If you go in, and in order to go into form, there’s got to be positive, negative, dark light, all that stuff, otherwise there’s no form. And there’s resistance and darkness and all that stuff. That’s the stuff you play with. And you go in, and it’s real. And then at some point in the journey, somewhere down the reincarnational road of illusion and dreams, you start to say, wow, it isn’t like I thought it was. And you start to come up for air. It’s so tasty that you want to push away. And you come up, and you come up, and then you feel you’re being caught in something, and you look at what you’re caught in, and you’re caught in the rejection of one of the parts of your own creation. And finally, you have to not only accept, but appreciate fully your incarnation. Appreciate it all. Depression, what do you know? Ah, there’s depression. That’s different than I’m depressed. Now the psychologist says, watch out, don’t dissociate. Don’t push it away. Oh, I’m beyond all this. That’s phony. You’re not beyond it, you’re in it, and yet you’re not in it. This is where the mind bottles because of the paradoxes of it all. Are you form or are you formless? Both. Are you free or are you lawful determinism? Both. Is it perfect or does it stay? Both. Is there something to do and nothing to do? Both. Can you stretch enough to be in form and not in form at the same time? All the methods, the spiritual methods, whether it’s Pakti or Gyan or Dhyan or meditation or Tantra or Karma Yoga, or all the different forms of yoga, all the different forms of meditation, all the different techniques of Tai Chi, all of these things are designed to extricate you from the attachments of mind, to let you come up for air to the other part of your being. Every method for it to work is a trap. You get trapped in the method. So you’re meditating to quiet your mind and you become a meditator. Are you free? No, not free, but I’m a meditator. And there are people who have been meditators for 40 years. And they got trapped by their method. Because if a method is words that solve, it’s self-destruct. This will self-destruct in five seconds. You use it and you come out the other end. And you’re beyond method. Most of my audience for years I was saying, Get high, let go, relax, come on up and dance, come on out and play. Hey, come on out and play and they’d all be having their noses pressed against the window. I can’t, my mother said I can’t, it’s too late. And I’m out there bouncing my ball, come on out and play. And then I saw all these people out in Lala Land. And I said, come on, get your act together, learn your zip code, get a job. Because you see they were standing here, then they were standing there, and then they had to come back. You got to come back to complete the circle. From here you see there’s all unfolding perfectly, and there’s nothing to do. And as you look at that perfection, that perfection includes your humanity and your yearning, and your feelings of heart, of compassion. That’s all part of what you see is the perfection. And then you come back and you are comfortable being human because it’s all right to be human. It’s a very far outland. You meet people constantly, and they are busy thinking they are who they are. And you have a moral responsibility not to awaken them. You try to and they’ll probably kill you anyway. Like Plato’s Cave, where everybody was looking at the shadows on the walls of the cave. And that was, they’d been shamed for so long in the cave that they assumed that was reality. And then one man escaped from the cave, and he went out into the sunshine, and he came back and he said, hey everybody, this is all illusion, this isn’t the way it is. And they stoned him to death. You walk into a bank, you walk up to the teller, you look and you see the Divine Mother. If you start to get weird, she’ll push the button. She’s the teller, don’t screw around. I am a teller. I know you, you’re the Divine Mother in drag. You’re just appearing to the teller. I see through the veil. And young man, I’ve never been so insulted in my life. You learn to keep your own confidence. Because you look out and you just see all these souls going through all these journeys, they’re taking so seriously. They all think it’s so real. I mean, will Ram Dasss give a good lecture? Won’t he? Will I achieve fame? Will I help people? How poignant he is. How poignant he is. I mean, I’m just a render Ram Dasss the way I see it. You wind me up and out comes Dharma. I’m just sitting here. I’m sitting inside just enjoying the evening. All this is happening. This is what’s known as a happening. In fact, it’s all a happening. You’re either around for the enjoyment of that happening or you’re busy happening. I can’t enjoy it. I’m busy happening. People are afraid if they don’t take them so seriously, it’ll all fall apart. The funny thing is that when you don’t, it’s like the statement, truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing. Well, the other one, quiet as his master’s the deed. Well, here’s the best one, I think. Out of emptiness arises compassion. See, you think compassion comes out of that emotional and caring and pity and empathy and all that stuff. You’re afraid to let it go for fear you won’t be human. And then you start to empty your mind and empty your mind. A couple of years ago, a year and a half ago, I went to Rangoon Burma for some meditation in a monastery. Because I realized that what I was trapped in was my own mind. And how do you get out of your own mind? You can’t stop it. Any thought comes along and says, think me, I’m real. And if you try to extricate yourself from that one, that one’s got you. It’s all like sticky, sticky stuff. And that’s why in the West we started to think COVID though we’re going to some. You better think you are your thought. But once you understand that as the way it is, then you start to look for disciplines to get you out of it. So I found a really simple no-nonsense discipline. It was in Buddhism that I’m a Jewish Christian Hindu, but I’ll take anything that’ll work. So I went to Burma. There were 800 Burmese and five of us Westerns. Some of you may know some of my fellow students, Joseph Goldstein, Sean Salzberg. We’d start every morning at 3 a.m. and meditate until 11 p.m. You had a meal at 5 a.m., a meal at 11.30 a.m. all the rest of the time you took only water. The meditation consisted of following the rising and falling of the muscle in your abdomen that moves with each breath. Rising, falling, rising, falling, rising. Falling, falling, falling. Three in the morning until 11 at night, seven days a week, four hours of sleep, two meals. You look at nobody, you talk to nobody. Once a day, except once a day you see your teacher for five minutes. You walk in and you say, I wish to report on my meditation. He looks up and he says, yes. And you say, I was following the rising and falling of my breath. I brought my awareness to the rising. I noted it as a rising. I brought my awareness to the falling. I noted it as a falling. The rising has a quality of buoyancy, of coolness. The falling had density, contraction. After about two minutes I became aware of the sound of a bird. I noted it as listening. Did you notice the bird on a rising or a falling breath? I didn’t notice. Please try to do better. Did you awaken this morning on a rising or a falling breath? I didn’t notice. Be more alert. You’re dismissed. Day after day. And your mind, every time you start to follow your breath, like the center of flower, your mind goes, whoop. I mean, I was able to have seven hours of sexual fantasy. Uninterrupted. There was nobody to talk to. And every now and then I think I’m supposed to be in my mom’s calling my breath, I’ll screw that. I just look all the way and say, I can sit there like this. If anybody looked into my cell they’d say, boy, isn’t he, he’s really doing it. But after a week or two you’ve run out of that too. I mean, you begin to see the slimy nature of your own mind. So incredible how devious you are. You start to follow your breath and then you say, oh, I’m doing pretty good, I’m following my breath. See, there’s a thought, I just took you. Yeah, all right, I’m doing pretty good, fine. A few more weeks and I’ll be in line. Bring your awareness back to the rising and falling. And there’s no way to hide because one of the things you do when you report in is you say, in the last 24 hours I have done sitting meditation for 11 hours and walking meditation for so many hours. And you can’t lie because you took a vow of truth. So that you can’t go into the bathroom and have, you know, some free time. Because you got to make it up for during sleeping hours. Because if you do less than the full thing, you just raise an eyebrow. And this is what you hired him for. He’s not doing this for you, you’re a volunteer, you went there. You may hate him, but that’s just another thought. And finally, finally, at first the rising and falling is like some kind of prison. And your mind keeps wanting to go there and there and there. And then something slips and you realize the mind is the breath is who I am. All the rest of this stuff is just thoughts that are grabbing me. And you start to quiet into the breath until pretty soon all the thoughts are like little teeny buds around the light. They’re all out here at the periphery. You can see each one saying, think me, think me, I’m real, think me. You’re back hurts, you’re hungry, you should be going home. You know, stuff like that, it’s all around. And it doesn’t matter because you’re just rising, falling, rising. And then you’re still, I am following rising, I am falling, falling. It’s just another thought. Keep going in, the only thought you’re left with is rising and falling. The only thing is the movement, right? Up, up, up, until that’s all there is and you aren’t. Because the whole set of balls you’ve been juggling of who I am has just lost its power to control you and all there is is the breath. And that is the beginning of the journey from that traditional point of view. Because then your mind has become so concentrated, it becomes like a laser beam. And it starts to penetrate into the universe. And you start to see because your awareness gets out of time and you start to see things in a very different way. For example, you’ll see something coming at you, which is just light and dark and whatever you’re seeing. And then you watch, you’ve experienced your mind going out and conceptualizing and saying, hand, see at this moment if I hold this up you see hand. You almost can’t be innocent enough to see what you saw as a baby before you learned the term hand. And you return to that place where you can see your mind grabs the universe and keep making something out of it. And you come back to the part where it’s all possible again because your mind hasn’t narrowed all the possibilities. And the penetration goes deeper and deeper into you see the changing nature of everything. And you see that everything is in solid. It’s just a lot of changing stuff. And you directly experience it. Buddha said, don’t just study it, think about it. Do it, experience it. Interesting thing happened. I was sitting in there, I’ve been there two months and I was getting really subtle. As you can imagine. I mean I no longer cared about anything. And a telegram arrived. All the first month I was dreaming that a telegram would arrive and I could escape. By the second month I didn’t even want the telegram to come and then it came. And it reported that my stepmother had cancer and she’s been under those surgeries. My father is very old. My stepmother was considerably younger. She was taking care of my father. I got the telegram and immediately I thought I’ve got to go home. I took the telegram to my teacher. I shoved it to him. He said, I would recommend you not go. He said you’re at a very subtle stage of your development now. If you really want to relieve the suffering of others, you have to relieve your own suffering first. Somebody that’s caught in quicksand cannot free another. She’ll be taken care of. If you go now to try to take care of her suffering out of your feelings you’re having now, you will not be able to free her or anybody else really. You’re getting really close. Why don’t you stay on and continue to work? You can hear what he’s saying. I can hear it. I heard it perfectly and I said to him, I’ve got to go home. We both saw the poignancy of my predicament. In addition to being a seeker after truth, I am also a Jewish middle class boy with a family that needs him. It’s my karma and I couldn’t deny it. I went from sitting in the monastery in the cell for 17 hours a day alone for months. Within three days of flying, I was in the intensive care ward with doctors and nurses and machines and good. My mind was so quiet that a doctor would come in the room and we thought he was a doctor. I just see another awareness rising, rising, falling. Very slowly, the intensive care ward, all the nurses and doctors started to get so soft. They just started to hang around. They were so happy doing it. I thought, whatever I’m bringing back, it’s certainly catchy. I had had an experience, this is a funny one. I had had an experience many years before. It was my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary. My mother was already sick with cancer and this was going to be perhaps their last anniversary. It was on January 1st, their wedding. They got married New Year’s Day. The night before, Kim and I and Ralph Mepster and a group of us had had a New Year’s Eve gathering around the fire with very large doses of LSD. I had timed it a little wrong because the family gathering was a brunch the next day. There was no night, of course. We were all just maced with love by the fire. In the morning, when I looked in the mirror, I wasn’t there. I went to shave and there was no face. I thought, I think I’m in trouble. I didn’t want to scare myself, so I closed my eyes and I shaved like this. I knew I’d scare myself. Then I got in the car to drive to my brother and the steering wheel kept turning into a snake. All the people spoke foreign languages. You can tell by looking at their mouths that I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t even know who my brother was, but I said, don’t scare yourself. You know where you’re going. Just do it. I got to my brother’s house and I went in the house and they were my grandmother and my parents and my nieces and nephews. They all looked very simile. They all looked like monkeys and my grandmother was up in a tree scratching herself. All the different members of the family were just sitting around looking all alike. They all looked exactly the same. We sat down at brunch and I was wearing sunglasses. They all would say, with new year’s eve, the night before, you’re hungover. Of course, yes, I’m hungover. Don’t talk too loud. They didn’t know I was drunk. I don’t know about other Jewish families, but in our family, love is expressed in a very bizarre way. This is kind of cutting the sarkis. So I was sitting up to my brother and he looked over at me. I was a psychologist at Harvard and he said, well, how’s the nut business? And I saw an arrow come out of his mouth and come across the table. And I psychically reached up and I took the arrow and I put it down next to my spoon. And I said to him, gee, Bill, your kids are looking beautiful these days. They’re really growing wonderfully. I sent this heart out of my mouth and it went across. And I saw a look of confusion on his face. And then he said, well, you certainly are your wisdom. You don’t seem to be growing anymore here. Another arrow came out of his mouth. I took the arrow, I put it down next to the other one. I said, Bill, you and Helen are looking younger all the time. It’s just incredible. You really look successful and wonderful. It’s a good looking suit, heart growing across. Confusion. That afternoon, I can’t tell you what happened because of course I was drunk, but in the afternoon, all the family were sitting around in chairs, huddling, holding each other. The kids were on the laps. Everybody was quiet and content. We got out on the street. Nobody could get in their cars to go away. I thought, well, it all looks beautiful to me, but how would I know? Because you know how I am. What stayed on them? So I’ll wait and listen. And the next day, there were all these people calling and saying, isn’t our family beautiful? Wasn’t that an extraordinary day? Wasn’t that unusual? And I realized that the minute I was open and self-safe enough to be loving in the presence of the world just the way it was, it was all free to change. I was no longer in a reactive reaction, in reacting to it. I was responding to it instead of reacting to it. Can you hear that one? Yes, no? Yes. And the same in the intensive care work. So I started to take care of my stepmother, take care of my father. Now, I could have had the model of if I hadn’t, if it weren’t for them, I’d be getting enlightened. A lot of people come up to me and say, if I didn’t have children, I could meditate. They’re saying exactly that. But I had learned my lesson and I realized that it was through my karma that I would become free, not in spite of it. And so I started to take care of my stepmother and be with my father and help my father. And I watched the way in which my mind, just as I was following the breath, getting my father up, he gets on the walker, walking into the bathroom. Lift, push, place, lift, push, place. Toileting, wiping. I watched my mind each day that I wake him up and take him to the bathroom. I’d be on a different trip. I’d be on the young man serving his father trip. I’d be on the taking care of this old man trip. I’d be on the, I’m going to help my father’s spiritually awakened trip. I’d be on the humor trip full of jokes. Each day I watched my mind grab and become somebody doing something. But the quietness inside kept making me let go and let go and let go until there was just good morning blood pressure, sitting up, walking, toileting, bathing, dressing. We were just right here. He was quiet. He was here all the time. He was letting me go through all my nonsense. He was just right here and slowly I got here just in the moment, in the movement, brushing his bridge. Not thinking I’m brushing his bridge. Not thinking aren’t I good to be brushing his bridge. And I began to see that it was a perfect upaya. It was a perfect spiritual practice. It was as good as breathing in and breathing out. Brushing bridge back and forth. Now giving bridge back. And each thing became perfect in what it was. And I started to get so quiet and go into bliss and rapture. No bliss, rapture. Brushing bridge. Brushing bridge. It gets so clean and simple and present. And I was in ecstasy and my brother Billy said to me, Gee, Rich, it’s really good of you to be taken to your dad. Meaning he didn’t want to do it. See, I milled this for what I could. I said, well, Bill, somebody’s got to do it. You think I was going to tell him that I was in ecstasy? I mean, what kind of a fantasy is that? He’s 50 years old. He’s living at home taking care of his father. Poor guy. Poor guy. That was what was on the plane in front of me. People say, I want to help the suffering. So I’m going to go to India. And they leave a scene that is such a mess to go relieve suffering. Suffering’s right in front of you. And as compassion arises out of emptiness, the quieter you get, the quieter I got in the Paul, the more it felt, I looked out and I felt the nature of the way it was all related. And I was much more in the space where your suffering is my suffering because if my hand is on the fire, the other hand will pull it out. This hand doesn’t say thank you because it’s all one being. It’s interesting we go up and we say we’re all one. We’re all sisters and brothers. And then we come down and say, but it’s my television set. And you’ll learn how to keep those together. They say in Islam, trust in God but tie your camel. Gandhi said, beautiful quote. I’ll read it to you. He said, God demands nothing less than complete self surrender as the price for the only freedom, real freedom that is worth having. And when a person thus loses, I’ll use her, herself, she immediately finds herself in the service of all that lives. It becomes her delight and recreation. She is a new person, never wary of spending herself in the service of God’s creation. It’s interesting that as you extricate yourself from identification with your own, I want, I need, I need my space. Am I getting enough? What’s in it for me? I’m growing old, all that stuff. And you’re quiet. The whole universe is what you are part of. And then the suffering, you just move towards relieving. You become an instrument of it. You’re not even busy doing it anymore because that’s just another thought. It’s as if you have turned into a compassionate heart, the compassionate heart of the Christ. Not the romantic heart, not the pitting heart, not the emphasizing heart, the heart. That’s not for whom the bell tolls. You and I have a spontaneous generosity of heart. We have the entire source within us and that source is safe and it loves and it reaches out and you say, your heart goes out to you. The intellect in the service of our separateness says, watch out, don’t give away the storm to the heart. And your intellect is constantly holding you back. Your heart is constantly doing this. When you realize who you are, that you are free, that you’re safe, what can anybody do to you? That’s what Christ said, what can you do to me? Shame me, go ahead. Think you got me? Oh, you think it’s my body? Go ahead, nail me up. You think you got me? That isn’t who I am either. I mean, he made a statement that was very bizarre. It was very far out. He said, look, I am not my body and I’m not my personality and you can’t get me. And you can see the meaning of that. The minute you bought what he did and said that’s true, that that was a true act. The minute that opens your faith in the possibility that you are who you think you are, you are immediately free from suffering. Because from then on, all the suffering becomes a clue to you of where you’re holding and a clue to help you with your work. See, when you want to get high, you want to stay away from suffering. You want to go into a cave and get high by yourself. People bring me down. I’m not going to New York. It brings me down. Hate cities. They bring me down. I can be high in the country. I can be high with you, but he brings me down. Casper Wynberg really brings me down. But as long as you’re high pushes away anything, you are not free and you’re frightened. Because the city will bring you down. Casper will get you. And then you get to the point where you realize that anything that brings you down is your problem. It’s a clue to your work in itself. When somebody is a complete stinker, if you get caught in their stinkerness, it’s your problem. And instead of constantly saying, you know, I love you, but I’d love you better if you didn’t, if you put your smelly socks on the happer. That’s like looking at oak trees and pine trees. And you’re great, but it would be better in pine if you were an oak. Funny, with humans, we’re constantly judging each other. Finally, you understand that the stuff that turns you off in the world is your model in your head. And you can finally somebody rips you off. Okay, you’ll be better tying your camel the next time. But if you get angry and judgemental of that person, their mind caught you. You want to get to the point where they’re all doing what they’re doing. You allow people to incarnate the way they incarnate. You don’t sit around judging them. You just appreciate them. And if something gets you some suffering, like you get cancer or AIDS and you’re suffering, I work with AIDS patients. Somebody’s young, they’re full of life, they’re full of, and suddenly they’ve got AIDS, and they’re facing death and sickness and sores and pain and... It’s very seductive. It’s hard not to get caught in the drama. How do we help another human being? By not reinforcing the drama. In order not to reinforce the drama, you can’t have the identity with your own drama. If I sit down with somebody with AIDS and I think I’m helping them, forget it. They’re now somebody that needs to be helped. When actually you hear, I’m here, you have an interesting incarnation this time. It includes AIDS. And it’s extraordinary that when your mind is quiet enough and you’re present enough, somebody else can get loose from their suffering. If they’re ready, you have no moral right to take away their suffering. If the Jewish mother wants to sit in the dark, that’s her choice. But you can become an environment so spacious that anybody can get free around you that’s ready. That’s why you work on yourself. That’s what help you offer. You work on yourself through everything in your life, and when something catches you, it’s a good chance to work on yourself. When somebody gets you angry, it’s just the guru and drag who’s come to show you your stash of clinging of mind. Okay, that’s a clue. I’m supposed to stop. When babies cry, I was told.