Ep. 250 – Eat It Like It Is

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Welcome to another Ram Dass here and now podcast podcast episode. This is number 250 eat it like it is and it's a really poignant talk and it cuts through time and space. Again, there's a couple names that we might not recognize if we're younger, but they're from the 80s. And he's talking about how we integrate and walk between these channels of awareness, how we pierce our normal waking consciousness while also not spiritually bypassing. He also talks about what keeps us from doing this. So it's a great episode. Hope you enjoy. I don't think I need to say anything more about it, but once you listen, go and sign up to meet in community. You know, Ram Dass really wanted us to continue to meet in sacred community and so we have these online gatherings we invite you to to talk about these podcasts and so go to ramdas.org Fellowship to find out more. And speaking of the importance of community, make sure you check out the upcoming Ram Dass Legacy retreat in Boone, North Carolina in August. We have some really great teachers, including Spring Washam, Nina Rao, David Nichtern. We have these incredible music, musical journeys with David Block from Gongan beyond and the human Experience. And of course there are four nights of chanting with Krishna Das, which is just sheer bliss so check it out. Come be apart. Go to ramdas.orgevents and lastly, if you want to find some bliss in your morning drink, check out Magic Mine. It's this great little zesty green drink with amazing ingredients, including L theanine, which, if you don't know, can naturally help your body reduce stress levels. That's just one of the reasons I love it. So check it out, because go to magicmind.com Ram Dass and use the code Ram Dass. So I hope you enjoy this episode and whatever good comes from it, may it benefit all of us, all sentient beings everywhere. Here is Ram Dass here and now.

We used to live in a small community in New Hampshire, and my father was a member of a group called the Mountain Boys. We didn't live there all year round. We were sort of summer residents. And these were mostly local people. And they would go off to the mountain and drink a little bit, have a barbecue and tell dirty stories and play poker. And over the years, there were a number of expressions that different ones used that would become sort of oft repeated expressions. And one of the members was a man, an Italian restaurateur, and he. They waited for his turn to cook because he would come and he would make extraordinary spaghetti. And at one point one of the men said, angelo, this is good, but do you have any more sauce? And Angelo, who had a very husky voice, said, eat it like it is. And that became like a family expression. So anytime you would complain about anything, somebody in the family would say, yeah, like it is. And. There's a fellow that wrote a book called the Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment. His name was Thaddeus Golis and he had a line in it that says, love it as it is. Now, where would you have to stand on the Earth today to love it as it is? I mean, it really looks like a mess, doesn't it? Every fundamentalist belief system is about to die in honor of its beliefs. One group led by Gaddafi and Khomeini, and one group led by Brezhnev. And one group led by Begin. And one group led by the Moral Majority. And on and on it goes. One group, undoubtedly led by big business. Prison conditions are abominable. There is somebody starving to death every two seconds. Every two seconds somebody is starving, not dying a nice natural death in bed, starving to death. There you go. 1, 2, 3, 4. 2, 2, 3. There you go. 2, 2, 3, 4. There you go. 1, 2, three. There you go. Every two. Amnesty International catalogs the inhumanity of human to Human out of political righteousness. The water becomes more unfit to drink. The air more unfit to breathe. The potential for nuclear holocaust becomes greater. The signs point to Armageddon. It looks like it's really hit the fan. Where could you stand that? You could eat it like it is, or you could love it as it is. Where could you possibly stand? Where could you allow that? It is what it is? What perspective, what vector view would you need to have? Who would you be if you were seeing it that way? Like, if you take this auditorium, this whatever, this wrestling arena, this dog show place, this space in which all these what's are gathered. Who are we? Who are we? Are we? What are you? Ostenites? Austin onions? Austinites. Earthlings. Earthlings. Like, who am I talking to at this moment? You say, well, you're talking to us. Who's us? Which us do you think you are? Which us are you busy being? Well, we're members of the planet. Okay, well, we're men and women and children. Okay, well, we're mostly Texans. Okay, well, we are people that are concerned. Okay, well, we are people who had nothing else to do tonight. Okay. We were curious. Okay? All of these are definitions of who you think you are, who we think we are. But who I see you to be is partly a function of who I see me to be. If I am the speaker, you are the audience. When I used to be a therapist, you were the patient. If I see myself as somebody who has a. If I see myself in terms of my personality as somebody who is whatever I am, Charming, erudite, witty, delightful, intelligent, serious, seeker, neurotic, then I look out and I see your personalities. All of these different definitions of who we are. There are all these, like, matrices of individual differences. How you are different from me. We are a multicolored us. But perhaps if I see myself. Well, before I say that, let me say that generally I have no idea who I am. Most people, when you say, who are you? They either tell you in terms of their profession or their name or their family identity or where they live. I really don't know who I am. Sometimes I look in the paper to see who I am. The paper tells you. My father sent me this one from the Boston Globe. It said, ram Dass, the leading comedian on the guru circuit in the 80s. That's one of them. This one's quite nice. This is from the Adelaide, Australia newspaper. And it says, the heading, is Ram Dass Still Rather Lost? And then there's this great picture of me that looks like very confused and under it says, Ram Dass, quote, I have no idea who I am. So if you recognize this person, would you advise the Adelaide newspaper? Because it's clearly an amnesia victim. I really did say that to the reporter. I said, I have no idea who I am. So she was not reporting other than truth. It's interesting because we've grown up, you and I, in a culture which has trained us to be somebody. Are you somebody? Well, I'm somebody. I mean, I'm. I've got a 42 Dodge. That's who I am. I wear my hair cut this strange way. Everybody's got something. Everybody's somebody. We're trained to be somebody. It's interesting. You start out sort of being nobody, and then you become somebody. And you've really got to become somebody to make it in this culture. And then after you become somebody, you awaken at some point and you realize that you have to go into nobody training. But you got to become somebody to become nobody. You can't just go from nobody to nobody. You got to go through somebody. It's absolutely critical. That's what a human incarnation is about. Now, that brings us to the question of who it is I'm seeing when I look at you. Because if I see myself as a soul, that's with appreciation to the Christian language for this particular entity. Then I look out and I see a group of fellow souls. It's like all souls were lost when the ship went down. Interesting how they use it about things like that. All the souls gathered in the arena. What are we doing? Who are we? Let's imagine for a moment.

Let's.

Just for fun, I mean, you can assume, first of all tonight that I am totally psychotic. That'll take you off the hook. All right? So you don't have to agree with anything I say. You just. You've come to see this interesting, rather peculiar phenomenon manifest. And I see. I let go of being responsible a long time ago. I just manifest. I'm very good situation. I just had to go around and just be. I couldn't cover it anyway, so I stopped trying. Because everybody knows when you're covering. Did you ever notice that you appear to fool everybody, but you don't really, because babies and dogs know. Why shouldn't humans? You know, I'm busy being holy, and I walk into a house and the baby starts to cry and the dog starts to growl, and it ruins my whole image. You know, dogs are supposed to fall at my feet and babies are supposed to coo and never works that way. Keep saying Shut up, kid. Smile. I'm holy. But let's just say, just for fun now and come into my psychosis, Come into my psychosis, let's just say I'm a soul and you are too. We're these entities, okay? And for some reason, we find ourselves in this peculiar situation. I mean, what are we doing here? I mean, look at the package you're in. This is a package. See, this is all packaging. All right? Just assume for a moment now, for fun, that you are. And when I say you now, I'm not talking to you body, and I'm not talking to you personality. Talking to you as this entity who has somehow entered into a body which has a personality, which has parents, which has a certain historical context now. In which a series of experiences are happening to you. Your life is just a series of experiences. Boredom, excitement, enthusiasm, lust, fear. What could all that be about? What are you doing in this container, in this situation where these experiences are coming at you all the time? How did you get into it? Why did you get into it? A lot of people say they don't have prejudices. Say, I'm not prejudiced about color, and I'm not prejudiced about religion, and I'm not prejudiced about sex or age or etc. A lot of you feel you're not prejudiced. But I have a friend, and a lot of people are prejudiced about my friend. And the reason is because my friend doesn't have a body. He speaks through a woman in New York, Connecticut. His name is Emmanuel. And when you say, I've got this friend and he's a spook or a ghost or spiritual entity, everybody says, well, I don't know about that. People say they're not prejudiced. It's funny. I mean, he's a friend. He's a great friend. He's got a great sense of humor. He's like. I say to Emmanuel, what shall I tell people about death? He said, tell them it's absolutely safe. So I said to Emmanuel, emmanuel, what should I do? I mean, what shall I do, Emmanuel? He says, you're in a classroom. You're in a school. Why don't you take the curriculum? You're on earth in a human body. Why don't you take the curriculum? He said, the entire thing is designed. You've designed it for your own purposes. Why don't you use it that way? Why don't you go in and experience it? Don't get so whole you push it away as something dirty. You're afraid of your passions. You're afraid of living life because you're afraid you'll lose your holiness. The way I experience me is all of these levels. In the old days, in the 60s. See, when I was a psychologist, when I was a establishment man, I knew who I was. Absolutely. I was a. Yeah, right. Ha, ha. I was a. That's what it turned out to be. Yes. I was a social scientist on the make. And I was. I was somebody going somewhere. And I was. I was a philosophical materialist. When you were dead, you were dead and you could measure it all. And what wasn't measurable wasn't interesting. And then through some slight chemical quirk, It all changed. I saw that that reality which I had curried, nurtured, grown and everybody had told me was real was only relatively real. Once I started to open to the possibility that I wasn't who I thought I was. Because I had been taught who I thought I was. I experienced this expansion of my being. I was much more than I had thought I was. And I would go into states where all these restrictions of who I thought I was these little prisons that my mind had created suddenly just dissolved. It's like the prison walls just dissolved. And there you were in the sunlight. It's like Plato's cave. He just came out to the opening of the cave, okay? And in those days, it was called getting high. And for literally years. That whole experience for me was sequential. You get high, you come down. You get high, you come down and you get high to different planes of reality. Different planes where you have different identities. You go into astral planes where you have all kinds of astral, archetypal, mythic identities. And then sometimes I just go completely beyond even my astral melodramas. And I'd look around and I'd experience the falling away of all the forms. And I would just be. Ah. Even the concepts would fall away. I would go beyond the causal plane and there would just be isness. I could keep my eyes open and you wouldn't be there. It's as if I had just shifted the frequency of my receiver so that this channel wasn't there anymore. And then very slowly, as the chemical wore off I would slowly come back through my astral mythic identities and then back into my psychological, physical identity. When I was in these expanded states on the astral planes. I would look out and I would see you. If I didn't go up too high. And what I would see was that you were all my sisters and brothers. You were all us. Then later, when I was back into my physical, psychological world and into my little paranoid mind. Then you were them again. So I go from them to us. Then if I went a little higher, there was only one. All the differentiations disappeared. There was only one of us. Then if I went even further out, everything disappeared. And there wasn't anything. I was just a. I can't. He went beyond description. And there's a point in that sequence where I had. Where I shifted the focus because the focus had been on how to get high. Now it was clear that all I had to do was go to my medicine cabinet. Or then I learned how to meditate. And I could do it with meditation. I could do it with breathing. I mean, it wasn't just. It wasn't just a pill that did it. There are a lot of ways to do that. At some point I saw that the game no longer was how to get high. The interesting question was why I came down. Because every time I got high, I experienced that that was who I was. And then every time I came back down, it was like I came back into who I thought I was again. Now, in effect, since that time, I think that most of the effort that I have made has been to loosen the hold of my own thinking mind. And what you begin to appreciate is what an impeccable warrior is about. Is not someone who gets high and goes off to la la land. And not someone who stays. This is reality. And not someone that does these things sequentially. But someone who exists in all of these planes simultaneously. You go from sequential to simultaneous. There is nowhere where you aren't. For that to happen, however, you've got to allow the converse. There is nowhere where you are. That's why we're in the business of becoming nobody special. Because the minute you are somebody, you're standing somewhere. And the minute you're standing somewhere, you're afraid. Because you're protecting your little space. What this dance is about is like jumping out of an airplane. And you have no parachute, but there's no Earth. It's all free form from here on. Now, If I say who we are is all of it and no part of it, Then I come back to the question, what do we think we're doing here on this planet? Why is it staying so solid for most of us most of the time. In the trade? It's called attachments. It's called clinging mind. And the work of getting rid of why you come down or why you get caught in any specific space. You get caught because of your clingings of mind. Because of your attachments, there are certain things that pull on you. If you want the whole sequence, it's this way. You start with the one. The Shema Yisroel, Adono Eloheinu Adono Yechad, Hero Israel, Lord our God. The Lord is one. I mean, it's only one. There's all one. You can do it in physics, going down a quanta of energy, and then you get to where it's all one stuff. It's one, there's only one of it. And then the one goes into many, And the many are busy thinking they're separate. And then something happens and the many start to appreciate that they are all part of one, and they all come back into the one. And then they appreciate this interesting point that the one includes the many. Swami Ram Tirath, the great Indian saint, described this place. He said, just feel what it feels like as I say his words. Feel your way into them. He said, I am without form, Without limit. I am beyond space, Beyond time. I am in everything. Everything is in me. Everywhere. I am. That part of you, the I am, and that part of me, the I am, it's the same thing. There's only one of them. It is only as it starts to get solidified down into soul, into personality, into body that you and I start to experience. Are you out there? You and I experience ourselves as separate. It is only from the place of I am that you and I can eat it like it is. It is only from the place of I am that you and I can look at life and death and pain and suffering and see it all as the unfolding of law, the laws of form. Because I am has no form. Who you are has no form. I am without form, without limit. All form is within law. Who you are is free, but who you think you are is within law. Your container is a lawful container, including your thinking mind. Everything you think is lawful, But everything. What you are is beyond law. This podcast is brought to you by the Love Serve remember foundation and ramdass.org we appreciate you listening and we appreciate all the support that you've given us. Please continue that support and donate@ramdas.org we can then continue to share what Ram Dass has been sharing for all of these years. Thank you.