Each evening, when I’m going to come out to speak, I invariably think of the line from the Tao Te Ching that says, “He who speaks does not know, and he who knows does not speak,” and I see the absolutely bizarre humor of my predicament, and I realize that I have to be both of those. I have to be that part in me that is not speaking but knows, and the part of me that’s speaking that doesn’t really know. And hopefully they’re connected. And if you are open to the possibility, let the words merely quiet your minds, and let’s meet on the other level, where we meet in the silence between the words. Because we come together to speak about the unspeakable, because the rational analytic mind, the intellect, only knows objects. It only knows what it can think about. And what we come together to talk about are really matters of the heart that are known subjectively, not objectively. And they are always hidden from the eyes of the thinking mind. And yet I’m in the word business, so that we just have to take the words very lightly.

There’s a very great mystic poet, Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī. He said, “I am a sculptor, a molder of form. In every moment I shape an idol. But then, in front of you, I melt them down. I can rouse a hundred forms and mix them with spirit, but when I look into your face, I want to throw them into the fire.” The “you” in this case being the beloved, for that higher part of ourselves. That our minds keep creating realities: we keep creating models of ourselves, we keep creating expectations about the world. We create these forms of clay, and we try to breathe life into them. But the minute you look directly into the eyes, the forms all seem to dissolve before your eyes and you’re left speechless—or heartful, whichever way you’d like to look at that.

Now I, like most of you, when I was born, went into what could be called somebody training. That is: my parents were somebody, and they set out to make me somebody as well. And it’s called the development of ego structure. And I developed a somebody-ness. I knew who I was—or who I thought I was—and developed a set of models, thought forms, that defined who I thought I was, and who I thought everybody else was, and how I thought it all was. And I worked very hard at that. And I became so much somebody that everybody came up to me and said, “You’re really somebody!” And you know, because you keep looking into the eyes of people who, the more somebody somebody is, the more you look into their eyes to find out if you’re really somebody, see? So when I would look into the most somebody’s eyes and I’d say, “Am I somebody?” And they’d say, “You’re really somebody.”

Now, the predicament with somebody-ness was that it had been developed from outside in. I was trained to think of myself a certain way through my parents, my education, my culture, and to get reassurance from the minds of other human beings that I was doing it right. The problem was that inside it didn’t feel good. It was as if I was wearing a piece of clothing that didn’t fit right, and that I was trying to make myself make it fit. So I would scrunch my body so that it would fit perfectly, so that I could be the somebody everybody wanted me to be. And I would be in pain and people would come up and say, “What a lovely suit with beautiful material!”

So I decided that if everybody—and everybody would say, “You’re really somebody, you must be very happy.” So I decided if they all thought I must be very happy, and I wasn’t very happy, that I must therefore be sick. Seems like a reasonable conclusion. So I went to a psychiatrist. And for a small pittance he offered to teach me how to wear his suit, which was equally uncomfortable in a different way, but it was even more somebody than the suit I had been wearing. It was like a double somebody then. So I put it on. And once I was wearing his suit—because he was a Freudian—I no longer saw people, I merely saw like psychosexual stages of development. I saw late anal-retentives and early oral incorporatives, and so on. And I think at that point I would have settled for that kind of discomfort, assuming that everybody else was as uncomfortable as I was, or else that I was so pathological, so neurotic, that there wasn’t any chance that I was going to be happy, and I might as well just live it out as best I could and reap all the rewards society showered on me for being somebody.

So that when the moment came when I took off the suit—when I, if you will, transcended ego or broke out of myself; which happened (in my case) chemically—I had a series of awakenings at that moment. One was that all the clues I had had in myself that I was sick, those weren’t correct. I hadn’t interpreted those correctly. They were merely telling me that I was not being true to my deepest self. And when I broke out, I suddenly felt at home, comfortable. I felt peaceful. I felt compassionate. I felt connected to the world around me. These were feelings that I had never expected that I would feel in this life, because I always felt alienated, self-conscious, and slightly separate, Because as long as you’re in your thinking mind exclusively, since your mind takes an object, you’re always one thought away from where life is. You’re always thinking about it. So you’re always just one thought away. It’s the sense of alienation that comes from thinking about life rather than being life.

Well, two hours later, when the chemical wore off, I then went back into the suit—much to my chagrin—and spent, then, the next many years attempting to get rid of the suit—chemically and through all kinds of spiritual practices in India, Japan, et cetera. And there were moments when I would be in a temple in India, where I had been doing long fasts, where I had been doing meditative practices, where I had been doing a lot of chanting. I would find myself in these altered states of consciousness that William James talked about that are available to everybody—although, as he pointed out, most people never meet them. But then he said, “Apply the requisite stimulus, and there they are in their completeness.” And I found that, through these various techniques, I could come into these altered states of consciousness. And I would look out at the world and I would see we are all sisters and brothers. Or even, if I went a little further into another altered state, I’d see there’s only one of us: there’s only one awareness that keeps manifesting in all these different forms. And I would get so clear and so peaceful and so loving and so present, I felt like a combination of the pure mind of the Buddha and the heart of the Christ. I was really out there. And my eyes, light was pouring out of my eyes, and I was full of what’s called a shakti, and I was just zzzzzz.

And I’d then come back to the United States and I would go to visit my family, and my father would say just some simple thing like, “Do you have a job?” And I would come crashing down. And I would say, “Going home brings me down.” That was the expression that was used those days: “brings me down.” And I began to have a whole list of things that brought me down. Cities brought me down, earning a living brought me down, politics brought me down. And I suddenly became aware that I was wearing another kind of a suit. It was: “I’m wonderfully high. Don’t get near me!” Now it was that kind of thing of: I’m very spiritual, just stay away. Because I’ve got to keep my high, or keep my altered state, or keep that spiritual connection.

Something felt wrong about it, but I couldn’t quite figure out what that was. And it took me a number of years, because everybody around me and most of the spiritual practices of the world were designed to help you escape from the trap of dualism, to help you escape from your own separateness into which you took birth, so that you could put your awareness out of identification with your own separateness—whether by prayer, by meditation, by fasting, by any of the number, pilgrimages, whatever the techniques were. They were designed to help extricate you from identification exclusively with your separateness. And what I saw was that my body was—I mean, if I look at this foot, for example, this is a 55, 56-year-old decaying foot. It’s like an old tree trunk that you might meet out in the woods. And it’s decaying according to the laws of nature. It seems to be doing beautifully. It’s rather aesthetically exquisite as a decaying foot. If I look at my hand, I see that there’s now veins, and there’s wrinkles, and bone, and it’s really getting to look like my father’s old hand now. He’s 89. I can feel me growing into my father’s old hand.

Now, if I thought that was my hand, I would freak, see? But I see it’s just a part of nature. It’s just a phenomenon. The identification. I mean, I have these spots on my head, and I don’t know whether here, but in the United States they sell something called Porcelana, which is something you put on which makes the spots disappear. And the advertising says: “They call these aging spots. I call them ugly.” But I noticed that, as my spiritual work progressed and I identified less and less exclusively with my body, I could say, “They call them ugly. I call them aging spots.” That they were just beautiful phenomena of nature; that I was no longer so (what you might call) ego-involved or invested in. And I saw that most of the practices were designed to—I mean, my body was decaying gently and sweetly, but it was still decaying. And certainly investing in this was like, as Christ said, laying up your treasures where moth and rust doth corrupt. There’s no doubt about it, this was.

And then my personality. I mean, that—I had basically quite a neurotic personality. And it’s interesting to note in reflection that, in all the years that I was a professor of psychology at Harvard and Stanford, in all the years that I was in analysis, all the drugs I’ve taken, all the yoga I’ve studied, all the spiritual teachers I’ve sat at the feet of, all the meditation I’ve done, I don’t think I have gotten rid of one of my neuroses. Not one! However, what has changed is that, before, they were these huge big things that were very frightening, and they took me over. All my sexual perversities and fears and insecurities would take me over. And now they’re sort of like little shmoos, or they’re little beings. They’re sort of little friendly beings, and I invite them in for tea. And they’re still around. They’re all there. “Oh, hello there, sexual perversity! Come on in and have tea.” Instead of getting so caught in them, instead of taking myself so seriously, instead of taking my personality so seriously. And I don’t shove it under the rug. I acknowledge it. It just doesn’t have the power over me that it had, because there is another part of my identity that has been cultivated in this course of time.

But at any rate, during that time, those early years, since my body was certainly not a long-term good investment from an investor’s point of view, and since my personality had so much neurosis in it, what I wanted to do—as many people did—was just to get rid of it all as fast as possible, and go to heaven or live in la-la land, or wherever you want to call that. And I wanted to live in peace and non-embodied bliss. And I wanted to push these away. And so, for a long time, I tried the path of renunciation, which is: if you sort of deny it all long enough, it’ll go away. Now, that is a path for some people, because “out of sight, out of mind.” For me, it just led me to what is known as the horny celibate syndrome. I think that’s sort of the…. I was busy. It’s like somebody that has given up cigarettes, you know: “I haven’t smoked in three years, two months, and twenty-two minutes.” They may die of not smoking, you know, because they’re so busy not smoking.

Finally, I realized that I had been going in partly the wrong direction. True—our initial job of incarnates is to awaken out of the illusion that we are an identity with the incarnation. It’s true. And to, if you will, awaken out of that. But that turns out to be only half the journey. And the other half—I’ve talked some about this last year when I was here in Bristol; a lot of this is review. I just wanted to bring all of us together for those of you that are new for the first time. I was helped a lot by a friend of mine by the name of Emmanuel. Emmanuel is a disembodied being who speaks through a woman named Pat Rodegast. Now, in America—I don’t know whether here, but in America; I guess you’ve had it for many years—but disembodied beings are in vogue in America. They either have descended on America, or America is more hysterically receptive to them, or you’re much more sophisticated about all these things. I do know that. But I’m embarrassed, but it’s all new to us. Whatever it is, everybody has one these days. And what I have to caution, I don’t have to caution you, but I do have to caution audiences in the United States that all disembodied beings aren’t wise. That there are a lot of beings who were really doing very poorly on this plane, and then they die, and then they decide to send messages back. And they have no more wisdom because they don’t have a body than they had when they had a body, and so they tell you to buy canned tuna and move to the islands or something, and you must take it very lightly and trust your intuitive heart. You just can’t believe every disembodied being and hand them your ear.

But this one, Emmanuel, I like because he agrees with me. And he’s very charming, he’s very light. When I asked him, Emmanuel, for example—I work with the dying—and I say, “What should I tell people about dying?” And he said, “Ram Dass, tell people that dying is absolutely safe.” Which is just a wonderful one liner, I think. He said, “It’s like taking off a tight shoe.” So who would not trust somebody with a lightness like that? So I asked Emmanuel, “What am I doing here on Earth? Who made this error and why am I here?” And he said, “Ram Dass, you’re in school. Why don’t you try taking the curriculum? Why don’t you try being human?” You see, I never thought of that, you understand, because I was busy trying to be divine. And I thought that if somehow I did it all perfectly enough, I fasted long enough, I prayed hard enough, that sort of error of my humanity would disappear and I would be divine. And what he said was: your freedom lies through your humanity, not in spite of it. And I began to hear all of the lines in the mystic traditions. For example, the line, “There is nowhere to stand.” It says the object of all of this work of life, of incarnation, isn’t to get high, it’s to be free. And to be free means you don’t stand anywhere. It means you don’t stand in heaven and look at Earth, and you don’t stand at Earth and look at Heaven. You don’t stand anywhere. Or conversely, you stand everywhere. And your awareness is extricated from any time, space, locus—whether it’s on the physical or astral or causal plane, whatever plane.

Once I understood that, that my journey was not to just push away my body and my personality and even my astral identity—my Aries-ness, or my mythic or archetypal identities; those are all part of my individual differences. Because all the body, the personality, the astrology, these are all the archetypal things of Jung, for example. These are all matrices of individual differences by which we can differentiate one of us from another. And we get so fascinated with individual differences. We don’t focus on the ground because we are so fascinated with the figure. The ground is the way we are not different, the way in which we are all the same. For example, if I look at you—this is the last of the review from last year—if I look at you, and we look at one level, if you look at me, you see a body; a 56-year-old attractive gentleman. If you shift to my personality, you see a pleasant-looking chap, a mild manic depressive. If you look at another level, you see an Aries. If you look at another level and we look into one another’s eyes, it’s very much like those beings, the people who went to the Moon, and they wore those spacesuits, and they had little windows in them. It’s like you come up and you look in the window and you say, “Are you in there? I’m in here. How did you get into that one?” See, when you look at another person through their eyes—that’s why the eyes are called the windows of the soul—you see through the veil of all the individual differences, and you see another entity in there just like you, just looking back at you. And you see the entity is packaged differently, and because it’s packaged differently, it’s living in an entirely different universe than you are—or in a relatively different universe. Now, if you go one step further in your altered state of consciousness, you look, and there’s only one of it looking at itself looking at itself. There’s only one awareness that is playing by being in these many forms, and you’re only appearing to be an audience, and I’m only appearing to be a speaker, and we’re talking to itself. And to keep the Buddhists happy: if you change once more, it all disappears—which is the same, only the other side.

Now, once you start to cultivate these planes, realizing you can’t stand anywhere, once I had found my way out, then I had to find my way back in. And I had to say, “How will I live my life in such a way to integrate all these planes of reality?” How do you live your life? For example: you look out at the world and you say we’re all one at one plane of consciousness. Now, you’re not just intellectually saying it. If you’ve really altered your consciousness, you experience the oneness of all things. But then you come back into your separateness and you say, “But it’s my television set.” Or you say, as Sufi Islam, “Trust in Allah, but tie your camel.” See? It’s the simultaneous planes. It’s planes of reality in which it appears to be paradoxical in the way in which you live. So part of what I then saw my work to be was to keep working to deepen my connection to the one, to emptiness, to the formless, to the unitive states, to the non-dualistic component, and also function within the world, but as Christ said, be in the world but not of the world. So you’re simultaneously doing them all at once.

Now, as you develop that quietness inside of that, there’s no way to go, there’s nobody to go there. Nothing to do, nothing to achieve. Once you see that all of the forms of dualistic experiencing, of collecting experiences, is all just relatively real, it loosens the power of all those things over you. They don’t compel you as much. And at first, when that starts to happen, you get a little anxious. Because it feels like the richness of life is dying for you. And you’re beginning to experience this statement “Lest ye die, you cannot be reborn.” You begin to feel death around you. You feel the emptiness of things that previously were extremely pleasant to you. And it’s a little disconcerting. And some people that are on this journey would like to say, “Stop. I think I’d like to go back. I think I would like to milk it for a little more. I’d like to have just a little more of the pleasure, of the rushes, of the romantic drama.” Because as long as you identify with your separateness, you are involved, for example, in romantic love. Do you love me? How much do you love me? Do you love me enough? Will you always love me? I mean, it’s infinitely milkable for drama, for emotional Sturm und Drang. I mean, it’s just so thick with stuff.

But once it starts to die because you come into a space behind it—it’s what St. John talks about in The Dark Night of the Soul, when you have died to the world and you have not yet been fully born into divinity. And then the answer, finally: you become what—there’s a writer, Castaneda, who has written some books. Don Juan is the guru in that, the curandero. They’re written about Mexico, Mexican mystic traditions. And Don Juan teaches about being an impeccable warrior. And he says, “You learn to live with controlled folly. You huff and you puff, and you make believe it matters, even though you know that it doesn’t.” And that’s the one that’s very uncomfortable to most people. Because all the time they grew up, they were told it did matter, and suddenly it doesn’t matter, and they are embarrassed and ashamed and frightened by the implications of that.

I was in Hawaiʻi recently, and I started to talk at a lecture. I try to keep myself from getting too far out because—well, I’ll show you. I started to talk about what’s called the cosmic giggle: the kind of humor of the whole predicament of humanity. And I was trying to relate the cosmic giggle to suffering—which is an interesting challenge, because suffering seems so real and heavy, and how do you giggle about that? And the next day, the headline in the newspaper over the article about me said, “Ex-drug guru says life a cosmic giggle.” And I could see the mind of the reporter or the headline writer. There was no way I could do that without seeming to profane the sacred, the sacred of the personality, which takes drama as terribly real. And to stand behind it and see that this isn’t that, and see it all—see it all just as it is, without judgment, without clinging, without aversion, without pulling or pushing, just be with it just the way it is—it takes a certain deadness. And it’s not deadness in the sense of you’re not experiencing the things. All of them are being experienced. It’s just that they are in a context in which they just become phenomena arising, existing, and passing away.

And what I saw was: my work at that point was to learn how to live my life impeccably, honor my incarnation perfectly, so that I could be free through form, not in spite of form. Most of us think we’re only free when we break out of forms. But as long as you’re in an incarnation, there is no way out of form. You are in form. So the question is: can you be free in form? For a lot of us we thought freedom was being able to not work, for example. Freedom had to do with external freedom. It had to do with political systems, it had to do with economics, it had to do with how you spent your time. But if you are around affluent people at all, you begin to see that that kind of freedom is not free; that those people are as trapped in their minds as people who have very considerable economic hardships. And that when we’re talking about real freedom, we’re talking about the freedom of awareness from identification with thought. That’s the deepest kind of freedom. The Buddha talks of it. And so the exercise becomes: how do you live in form? How do you live your life and do everything you do every day without getting lost in it, so that you are in it but not of it? So that there is all the feelings and emotions and the play, but it has the quality of play. Or—like Hermann Hesse talks about it—as a game, or a dance. He talked about in the world of Shiva. The dance of life. The play or the dance. And how do you live your life in such a way that it’s dance, or play, or a sweet light, rather than it’s all so heavy and serious, and I’m so important, and whether I live or die is very relevant?

So at first you take on little things that you can sort of keep your consciousness in. For example, I go into meditation for periods of time, and I get very quiet inside, and then I come out into the world. And something comes along, and it doesn’t grab me. It comes at me and I see it. Like people’s projections are interesting. When your mind is quiet, you see the way other minds project. Like when I lecture, which I do quite frequently, I usually stand out front and say hello to people and welcome people. And since I’m like, from my point of view, I’m like a rent-a-Ram-Dass. I don’t have a great sense of being somebody important. I’m just a form. I’m just here. So I can feel people’s projections. And I become very almost chameleon-like, and I become what they project, what they expect, since it doesn’t matter to me. So somebody comes up and says, “Ram Dass!” And I say, “Yes.” It’s like you can feel, you respond, you just become it, because it doesn’t matter. You’re sitting behind it. You’re right here.

And often you look into somebody’s eyes, and even as we are going through these little projective dances, we are recognizing one another behind the dance. And it’s so sweet when that happens. It is so incredibly sweet to go in to the bank teller to cash a check, and—who do you see? It’s interesting. If you see a bank teller, if you’re a check cashier, you see a bank teller. If you’re resting in your being, and you’re just a being who happens to be cashing a check, you meet a being who happens to be a bank teller. Now, he or she may think they are a bank teller, and you have no moral right or even opportunity to say, “Come on, you know you’re not a bank teller!” Because their finger goes for the little button that calls for help. Walk in and you say, “Oh, divine mother!” See? And button! You’re about to be erased. Error in the system. I have learned well not to do that. You don’t say everything you see.

But your mind and your awareness becomes an environment where, if somebody else would like to come up for air, there’s nothing in you that will keep them stuck. That’s the secret of it. Not that you force them to come up, but you create an environment where you’re not caught in any play, and you’re seeing bank teller, man, woman, helper, server of humanity, fellow soul who took birth and happens to be a bank teller. You see God in drag, God at play. You see it’s all empty. It’s all true. It’s all relatively real; all of it is relatively real. And you’re sitting with all of it simultaneously, and you’re just cashing the check, and then they are who they need to be.

And it’s quite extraordinary that, as you get less and less caught in your roles that you are fulfilling—many of them every day—you learn how to play them impeccably and yet always remain quiet inside. Quite equanimous and quite present and quite clear. And you are amazed at how many people are right there, waiting for you to be there for them that way, and how surprising it is what packages they come in. Because often you would expect that in that package you will not find a conscious being; you’ll find somebody who’s very asleep into their role. And it’s quite a surprise to find them right there. Like your child, for example. Because people, when they have children, get busy being parents, and they really take their being itself as parents seriously. And for you to see behind that veil and see that your child is just another being just like you, just happens to be a little one. And that you have on this plane a function—you have a biological function, a social function—but don’t get lost in it. Stay in the consciousness right behind it also; but fulfill it. That doesn’t mean you say, “Oh come on, you’re not my kid.” Because as you allow more and more planes of reality, it’s like baklava. It’s just so many planes, so many levels of stuff. It’s so thick. It’s so rich. Moment itself is enough.

Now, there is another quality. I’ve spent twenty-five years, as I said, trying very hard to be divine and to be spiritual and to grow. About a year ago I met an old colleague of mine from Harvard. And after about fifteen minutes he said, “You know, Dick, you haven’t changed a bit.” Because in the eyes of the beholder each person sees their own projective systems. There is a statement also in the Tao that says, “Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.” That when you desire something, you see only the outward container. You see only the projections of your desire. If you’re very hungry, you only see what’s edible. A line one of my teachers used once: “When a pickpocket meets a saint, he sees only his pockets.” It’s that situation where you only see the projections of your own desires as to what will fulfill or frustrate them.

So it is only as you quiet your mind so that you are quite extricated from identification with your own desires. It doesn’t mean the desires aren’t there. It doesn’t mean my neuroses aren’t there. It’s all there. It is just that you are no longer identified with them. Your awareness, you—when I talk about you, I mean your awareness—your awareness has come out of it, so that it’s in it but not of it. It honors it, it experiences it, acknowledges it, but it isn’t lost in identification. For example, when I was identified with my body, I was busy not going bald. That was very important to me. And I had a long piece of hair that I used to wear like this, and I always knew which way the wind blew. I always was like this. And now it’s of really quite no consequence, and I don’t expect the more enlightened I get, the more hair I’ll grow. It will still be there and I will still be bald. But it’s style now, instead of a thing, a problem. Instead of a problem, it’s stylistic. My neuroses are my style now. Instead of problems. It just changes; just that little flicker of change.

But one of the things that has changed in me—and this is something that it would have been hard to tell my colleague about from Harvard—is that I have begun to fall in love with the universe. And it’s hard to talk about that. Let me read to you two poems. This first one is by a Buddhist monk named Thích Nhất Hạnh. Very beautiful monk. I won’t read the whole thing.

I am a frog swimming happily

In the clear water of a pond.

I am also the grass-snake who,

Approaching in silence, feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,

My legs as thin as bamboo sticks.

I am also the merchant of arms,

Selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,

Refugee on a small boat,

Who throws herself into the ocean

After being raped by a sea pirate.

I am also the pirate,

My heart not yet capable

Of seeing and loving.

My joy is like Spring, so warm

It makes flowers bloom in all walks of life.

My pain is like a river of tears,

So full it fills up all the four oceans.

Please call me by my correct names,

So that I can hear at the same time all my cries and my laughs,

So that I can see that my joy and pain are but one.

Please call me by my correct names,

So that I can become awake,

So the door of my heart be left open

The door of compassion.

All my names. The quality of love has no boundaries. There is no “other” in love. There is “us” at one level, and at the deeper level there is only “I.” We are merged in love. Call me by my true names.

The other quote is still in dualism, but it’s on the edge. It’s a quote from the poet Kabir:

Since the day when I met with my Lord, there has been no end to the sport of our love.

I see with eyes open and smile, and behold His beauty everywhere:

I utter His Name, and whatever I see, it reminds me of Him; whatever I do, it becomes His worship.

Wherever I go, I move round Him,

All I achieve is His service:

When I lie down, I lie prostrate at His feet.

Whether I rise or sit down, I can never forget Him; for the rhythm of His music beats in my ears.

Now, in the states of awareness where you see there is one, there are no boundaries, there are no separatenesses. And then, as that one starts to come into form as separate, you look at the separate forms it has taken with a quality of awe and wonder—when you’re looking from there. When you’re looking from the point between what’s called the form and the formless, right at the edge, and you look down at form or out at form or up at form—I don’t know, there’s no direction; you look at form—you see the absolute awful beauty of form. And you see, as Plato talks about it, the law: the law that you appreciate, as what you call God oftentimes, is just all form in law. It’s all lawfully related. It’s called the Tao in Chinese: the way of things. It’s the way in which all forms are related to all other forms. And you look and you see: it’s perfect. You can look in physics or chemistry or astronomy or astrology or psychology or music or—wherever you look, you begin to see that forms are related all to all other forms, all in lawful ways. It gets interesting when you get down to quarks and things like that, but everything above that looks pretty lawful.

And there is an interesting term. When you look at the way in which those things are all lawfully related, you say: it’s perfect. My guru in India used to say to me, “Ram Dass, don’t you see it’s all perfect?” I’d say: “Perfect? Perfect? What about Bangladesh? What about Africa? What about tyranny? What about violence? What about greed?” “Don’t you see it’s all perfect?” Can’t you step back for a moment from your humanity to see the way of things? Can’t you see the way it’s all lawfully unfolding? The question is: have you the courage to see what you’re seeing? Or does it seem to take away your humanity? Because when you look and you say it’s all perfect, the problem is it’s so impersonal. Somebody falls down in front of you and you say: karma. See, there’s no warmth to it. But if you come down into your human heart the pain is unbearable, because there is so much suffering everywhere. And you look and there’s rape, and there’s child molestation, and there’s ecological insensitivity, and there’s tyranny, and there’s terrorism, and there’s—which one is it first, starving the homeless? Who is it? Where does your heart go first? And what most people do is: they close their heart down, and they armor it to protect it from the immense amount of suffering. They armor it with their mind, with thoughts, with a web or a net or a veil of thought that armors the heart, so that they don’t get hurt and overwhelmed by the immensity of the suffering. Because you know how, when your child hurts, you give anything. And the quality of the heart is: the heart has no boundaries. “My heart goes out to you” is the expression. The heart will give. The heart doesn’t know boundaries. The mind knows the boundaries. The heart says, “Here take my automobile, take my apartment, take anything.” The mind’s saying, “Now wait a minute. Be reasonable.” And there is an interesting dialogue that goes on within us.

And so this armoring protects not only our hearts from the amount of suffering outside, but it protects our separateness from our heart, which would give away our separateness. It would give away everything. Give away everything. And so the interesting question is: how do you keep your heart open in hell? And what does it mean to be in love with the world? And what does it mean in action? What do you do? The answer lies, again, in the statement—at least the answer that I have found thus far—that there’s nowhere to stand. That if you stand only in your humanity, it’s unbearable. If you stand in the area of perfection, it’s impersonal. If you get them both going at once, it is the root of what I understand true compassion to be a life about. It is something where, unlike Job, which questions God at some point, you do what you do because your human heart hurts, and you want to do what you can to relieve the suffering of the people you love. And at the same moment, there’s not a flicker in you as to: it is all as it must be. That’s what’s called faith, I guess, from one level, until it is what you are. I mean, I don’t have to have faith that I can make a fist. I do, but I’m just making the fist. At the level that that becomes real—in the sense of you have grokked it, or you’ve become it, or you’re one with it, that sense of oneness and perfection of form—at that point, there is no flicker.

I work with AIDS patients now. I do a lot of work with AIDS patients. And a fellow calls me and he just found he has AIDS. And he was a law student, and all of his plans have now gone awry, and his whole life has changed, and he’s frightened. And my human heart cries with him. And so he hears there’s a fellow human heart that’s empathizing with him. At the same moment, there’s another part of me that’s just looking at the universe as it is and saying, “Yes, and this too. And this too.” He has a new curriculum now. This is heavy work for his soul. He’s going to do new work in terms of awakening.

Because when you look at individuals from the level of soul or awareness or spiritual entity-ness, you see the entire earth plane—and all the personality, and all the physical things, and the death and sickness and illness, and all of it—you see it all as the curriculum of the soul. When you look at it from the personality point of view, it’s horrible, and it seems so unfair, and suffering seems so cruel. And for you to hear the term “suffering is grace,” not that you would ask for it, but that when it comes your way, you work with it. You work with it as part of your spiritual journey of awakening. Because the only reason anybody suffers is because of the clinging of their mind. Starvation is just a certain set of pangs. The fact that you suffer when you starve is because of the mind’s identification with the separateness. When Ramana Maharshi, the great saint in India, was dying and his devotees were crying, “Bhagawan, Bhagawan, don’t leave us, don’t leave us!” He said, “Don’t be silly, where could I go? I’m just dropping my body. It’s no big deal.” When you have that level of awareness, then the whole meaning of suffering changes. And all suffering is showing you is where your mind is still clinging.

I was giving a lecture recently in Des Moines, Iowa, in the United States, and I came into the hall and people were saying, “Ram Dass, Ram Dass,” and I was, “Yes, yes,” and I was being very… I mean, I am that. I’m a nice person, and I was being nice-person-ish, and humble, and all those things you’re supposed to be. And I walked into the hall, and I’ve always asked at my lectures for one of these microphones so that I can sit cross-legged and bring the microphone up. Because if it’s a straight microphone, you spend the evening leaning like that. So I walked into the auditorium, and there was a straight microphone. And I was smiling. “Hello. Hello.” And I suddenly looked—“What’s that?” And the woman who was managing the hall said, “Well, that’s the only microphone we had.” I said, “Well, I ordered it in advance.” I suddenly saw that I got caught. I saw that it got me. And I broke out laughing. Because what I saw was that my guru had come in drag as a microphone to say, “I’ll get you this time, you phony holy, you.” And so when you want to be high, everything that brings you down becomes a nuisance. When you want to be free, everything that brings you down is showing you the place where you’re bringable-downable.—if you’ll pardon the crudity of language. It’ll show you where you’re holding. And you begin to hate it and love it at the same moment. You begin to hate it and love it at the same moment.

So as you see formless come into form, the beauty of it and the awesome nature, you just love form so much, all of it, just the way it is. And you look at somebody, even somebody who is really rather unpleasant, and you see the unfolding of the law of their unpleasantness. And you may not like their actions, but you still understand the absolute beauty of the nature of the law unfolding for that person. And you experience such love for them. You can’t… you don’t… I find myself confused. And the reason I’m confused, often, is because when I grew up, I grew up in the presence of what you might call conditional love. That is: there were people around me who wanted things. I mean, if it was only that my parents wanted me to be a good son or a good boy. Whatever it was, somebody wanted something. And the minute somebody wants something, they are in the subtlest way a conditional lover. Because they close down a little bit when you are not being what it is they want or what they need. And you get a feeling of that—it gets a little cold when you’re a certain way, and it’s a little warmer in the environment when you’re another way. And so you learn how to be a certain way. That’s the way we get trained emotionally. Well, I grew up assuming that everybody wanted something from me, subtle though it might be, and I learned how to be what other people wanted me to be, as I told you before.

When I went to India and met my guru, my spiritual teacher, he showed me—it was like meeting somebody that was so self-contained, if you will, was so free of that need, that he didn’t really care what I was. I’ll give you a few stories that I told before, but they show you what that relationship was like. One of them is an old familiar one to some of you. I had a Volkswagen microbus, and there were maybe eleven or twelve of us in the bus one day. We were going to visit a little temple some miles away from my guru, because he said we couldn’t come until the afternoon. On the way back, the bus was only running on three cylinders, and it wouldn’t go up a hill because so many people were in it. So I said, “Would everybody get out and help push for a steep hill?” Everybody got out but two women who were in the back, talking, and they heard me but they ignored me. And so we pushed up the hill with the women in it, and I was thinking, “They should have gotten out and pushed. They really could have gotten out and pushed.” But I didn’t say anything because I’m a gentleman. But I was, inside, I was kind of seething. And we got back to the temple where my guru was, and we walked in, and my guru was yelling as we walked in the door. Yelling across the courtyard, “Ram Dass is angry, Ram Dass is angry.” Everybody said, “No, he’s been very, very nice,” and he said, “No, he’s angry because the women wouldn’t get out and push.” So there was one example.

Now then, one I think I wrote about in Be Here Now, back in 1968, after I had been in India for several months and fasting and doing yoga, I looked like a yogi. I really did. I had long beard and jeta, and I had beads, and I was wearing a dress and barefoot, and I had light pouring out of my eyes, and light coming out of my forehead—it was before I fell. And I had been not allowed out of the temple for four months, and then I had to go to Delhi to get my visa extended. And so I went to New Delhi, walking through the streets barefoot, and I was just floating through the streets. I was so far out that I went into a stationary store to buy some envelopes, and they wouldn’t take my money because I was too holy. And that’s pretty holy in India, you know! So it came time for lunch, and I went to a vegetarian restaurant which was suitable to my role. I sat in a booth, so the wall was here, and people were here. And because I had so much light and I was so extraordinary looking in my whole being, I was a westerner at the booth, and people were watching me very intently. And so I ordered an appropriate thali of suitable foods for a yogi. And you eat in a certain way when you’re a yogi. You eat sort of as if you don’t want it, but you’ll force yourself to do it. And I was doing quite well. I mean, they were clearly impressed, and I was impressed. We were all impressed. And dessert came, and it was some… something with two English biscuits in it, and they were cream-filled biscuits, and they were not yogi food. And they knew it, and I knew it, and it was the kind of thing a yogi would just go like that to. But inside me was this fat Jewish adolescent; that he wanted those biscuits, there was no doubt about it. So in magic, when you do magic, you make people look at one hand, and then you do something with the other hand. So I looked holy this way, and I moved the dessert over this way, and then I did something there, and I slowly edged the biscuits in my mouth. So I didn’t lose any points with these people. And that night I got on the bus, and I went back to the mountains—eight hours back on the night bus—and got there, and I brought some fruit to my guru, and I kneeled down in front. I had done my visa, and I came back to him. And I kneeled down, and I put my head down, and he grabbed the back of my hair, and he pulled me out, and he looked at me and he said, “How did you like the biscuits?”

So one day I was sitting up in front of him, and it started to dawn on me that he really did know what was in my mind. You know, I was a little slow in learning this, because he had been doing this. And then he was sitting there talking to other people right in front of me, he was right on this table right here. And I thought, “Well if he knows those—oh, he knows that! And if he knows that, he knows—oh!” And it’s like: try not to think “hippopotamus,” you know? It was suddenly all the things that you would not want anybody to ever know were my mind> It was full of those things, the things that you don’t even want to have yourself know you’re thinking, you know? And I got all red, and I couldn’t look at him, and when I finally looked through my fingers at him, he was looking at me right down close, and he was looking at me with such total love. And at that moment I thought, “What grace if I ever could be that kind of a person that could love people just the way they are!”

Because what happened at that moment was: something clicked in me in which I began to allow myself to be; just allow myself to be. There had been a little hook in there that never—it was always: “I’ll be okay. I’ll be holy when I get rid of those things.” And suddenly it’s: “I am what I am, and it’s okay.” And that desire that that happened is: I can feel it beginning to happen. I can feel myself beginning to appreciate other human beings instead of judging them. The judging always comes from your own sense of separateness. And you’re always judging people as better, worse, taller, shorter, fatter, thinner, richer—something. All kinds of continuum all the time. It comes with the mind. The other quality is one of just appreciating the exquisiteness of all these forms manifesting, and the law unfolding, and the intent of the spirit to awaken out of its separateness into the totality, and just appreciating the magnificence of the forms.

The difficulty and the confusion for me lay in the fact that I, because of the way I was brought up, I felt a starvation or a hunger to be in love with another person. And I felt that when I was in love, when I experienced it, I immediately wanted to possess the beloved. It’s a very common thing, as some of you may notice, that you’re going along and suddenly a stimulus is presented which releases, it separates the armoring of your heart, and you experience, you say, “I am in love.” What you then add is, “I am in love with you.” Now, you are the method. Put it another way: “You are the stimulus which releases the mechanism in me which allows me to be in love.” But I identify the state of love with my method of getting there. So I say, “I am in love with you,” and the minute I say “I am in love with you,” then, because it feels so good to be in love, I want, “Where are you going to be Tuesday evening?” And “Where are you going to be Friday evening?” And “Where are you going to be the rest of my life?” Because you are my connection to the place in myself where I am love, and I can’t get there without you, and I feel closed off if I don’t have that being to be in love with.

But now imagine that, in the course of your spiritual practices, of your awakening, of this natural evolution of awakening, the mind starts to quiet. And as the mind quiets, the veils get a little more flimsy, they get a little more transparent, and you start to flick in and out of being in your heart more and more. It’s not cut off from you as much. And you look at somebody, and you feel you are in love with them. And then what your old habits say: “I am feeling this feeling I must possess.” So you say, “Would you like to nest with me?” And you go and you prepare a nest together. You get twigs and leaves and drapes and curtains. You make a nice nest. You’re all cuddly together. And then after a while you say, “I have to go down to the store to get some yogurt and beer.” And you’re at the checkout counter, and you look into the eyes of the person at the checkout counter, and it happens again.

Now, we have a society that has certain moral codes about that. Are you considering a menage à trois? Well, what do you do at that point? Do you deny the feeling? Do you collect another one? If you leave this one, and the other one is in the nest when you got back, you won’t have either of them. And what are you going to do from then on? Are you never going to look at another person? What happens if it happens again? You’re going to start a community? See?

What requires—and I realized, because I started to do this. And then I saw what has to happen is: I have to get rid of these old habits of collecting the beloved. I have to be able to appreciate the beloved without collecting it, because I realize I’m not going to run out of lovers. I’m not talking about lovers in the physical sense. I’m talking about lovers in the sharing the same space with another being—which is actually beyond the physical place. And it’s very strange to me still to walk down the street and look at somebody, and our eyes meet, and at that moment the flickering occurs just almost like that. They go from “What do you want?” And then, when you don’t want anything, some of them flick again, and suddenly there you are. Just took a moment, and you’re there in love together. And what are you going to do about it? Should we have coffee? Let me have your number in case I run out later. Or finally you just let go, and you just allow yourself to see the beloved more and more in everyone you look at.

As you cultivate these planes of consciousness where you see the beloved, where you’re no longer so identified with your own desires and needs that you can only see the projection of your desires and needs, so that you see the beloved, your action automatically changes. Because how do you act towards somebody you love? You act in a way that you don’t want them to suffer. And, in fact, taking away their suffering becomes joyful work for you. It’s like Mother Teresa, who picks up the lepers in the streets of Calcutta, and she sees them as Christ in his distressing disguises. This is her beloved she’s doing this for. And it’s interesting how—there’s a line from Gandhi. He said:

God demands nothing less than complete self-surrender as the price for the only real freedom that is worth having. When a person thus loses him- or herself, he or she immediately finds himself in the service of all that lives. It becomes his delight and recreation. He or she is a new person, never wary of spending himself in the service of God’s creation.

It’s interesting that, at that point, the work you do to relieve suffering in the world becomes a form of making love, or a form of being in love with another being. And there are two levels of that. One is where you see the beloved as a separate entity from yourself, and the next level out is where the suffering is your suffering, and you’re relieving the suffering just in the same way as you might pull your other hand out of the fire. And when somebody says, “Thank you,” that almost feels as if they are making you distant; more distant than you are. Because you weren’t a “Thank you” away. You were inside that person. There is a quality of your behavior that changes as you cultivate these planes of awareness in yourself—that can be called spiritual or altered states of consciousness—and as you integrate them into your life, you begin to become not only appreciative of the universe around you, including your own human heart and its pain, and you live with the paradox of “Suffering is grace,” and at the same moment, from a human point of view, “Suffering hurts, and I’ll do what I can to relieve it.” You learn.

The same moment, you begin to become responsive rather than reactive. That is, when you’re lost in your mind, somebody does something and there’s a habit that reacts. The minute there is awareness or equanimity, a stimulus comes at you, and it goes into the totality, into emptiness, and out of the Gestalt—or the total situation—an appropriate response occurs. Not reactive just to that stimulus, but responsive to the total situation.

Let me read you one story. I’m getting near a break, so those of you that have had more than enough. This is a story told—this is in my most recent book How Can I Help? that I did with Paul Gorman. It’s an extraordinarily good book. This is a story told to me by a friend who was a master of aikido:

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 laborer’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 laborer 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.

I was young then, some twenty years ago, and in pretty good shape. I’d been putting in a solid eight hours of aikido training nearly every day for the past three 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 had 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 hard. I even went so far as to cross the street to avoid the pinball punks who lounged around the train stations. 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. “Ah-ha!” 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. “All right,” 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 it. “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 seventies, this tiny gentleman sitting there, immaculate in his kimono. He took no notice of me, but 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. “Come here and talk with me.” 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 moves so much as a millimeter, I 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.” Flecks 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 take our little bottle of sake, and we go out in the garden, and we sit on our bench, and we watch to see how our persimmon tree is doing. My grandfather planted that persimmon tree, and we’ve been very concerned about it after the ice storms we had last winter. But, you know, it’s done better than you could expect when you consider the poor nature of the soil. Do you know we go out with our sake 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. Now it was my turn, standing there in my well-scrubbed youthful innocence, my “make this world safe for democracy” righteousness. I suddenly felt dirtier than he was.

Then 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 problem. 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 love. I had just seen aikido in combat.

What is our journey on Earth about? In the most profound sense that I can grasp, it is the journey of awakening in which all of our life experiences are the grist for the mill of our awakening. And the awakening occurs as the mind becomes quiet, as awareness no longer is pulled by each thought. And as the thoughts less grab the awareness, the veil thins around the heart, and one experiences that quality. The heart is the—not the emotional heart and not the physiologic heart, but the heart that the Chinese call the xīn-xīn or the “heart-mind;” that deepest part of one’s being—that suddenly becomes available. One begins to rest in it. And one comes to appreciate not only other people, but oneself, and appreciate the beautiful poignancy of our journey on Earth. And then we can start to take all of the unfolding experiences, and use them all to work on ourselves. And the work we do on ourselves becomes our gift to everybody else. Because the clearer you are, the more your heart is open; the quieter you are, the more you become an environment through which other people can become free. Because less and less do you need anything from them, and you are more just present with them as we are. You’re present with the moment.

As that quieting occurs, you are less caught in the models in your mind that have expectations about the future, that have clingings to your past, and you are more open to the fullness of this moment. This moment doesn’t deny the past or the future. But if you watch the way your mind works when you’re identified with the thoughts, even as you’re having your supper, you’re planning for your dessert. Even as you’re having your dessert, you’re planning for your evening. Even as you’re having your evening, you’re worrying about tomorrow. Even as you’re doing one act, you’re already in the next act. To pull your awareness back from your time-binding nature of mind allows you to be fully here. To be fully here, am I happy? Yes, I’m happy. I’m happy because it’s spring. I’m happy because people are having babies that are bringing joy into their lives. I’m happy because flowers are blooming. I’m happy for a myriad reasons. Am I sad? Yes, I am sad. Because every 45 seconds, a child is dying needlessly from hunger. I’m sad because there is so much inhumanity among humans—to each other and to other species. I’m sad because there is so much fear. In this moment I am both happy and sad. As long as you try to stay in the world of polarities—happy/sad, dark/light, positive/negative, good/evil—you cannot experience the richness of the moment. The richness of the moment is the one that lies just behind the two.