Ep. 260 – Point At the Moon: American Psychological Association Address, Part 2

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever feel like everyone has their love life together except for you? The truth is that most people are figuring it out as they go along, whether they're married, dating or single. No matter where you are on the path of love, therapy can help you find your way and see more clearly where you want to be. A little work in therapy can lead to a lot of Progress. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served more than 6 million people globally. Plus, they do the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. Sign up and get 10% off@betterhelp.com that's better. H E L P.com Ramdass.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Progress pricing coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. You and I met here today in a way that our hearts touched. You can't convert what I said into any simple psychological stuff right away, but you and I are meeting in a way that we know we are touching something that is real for both of us. We may not be able to say what it is that's just happening to us, but we know it's happening. We can point at the moon a little bit.

Welcome, everyone, to another Ram Dass here and now episode. This is number 260, altered states American psychological association address part two. So I'm Jackie Dobrinska. I am your host for this brief introduction. And each one of you that are tuning in, you are this web of people from around the world who are inspired by these perennial teachings of Ram Dass. And so we're really grateful that you tune in and that we can keep doing this and that you can keep doing this. So this talk is a continuation, obviously. It's part two from 259, which came out two weeks ago, and it was given to, as I said earlier, the American Psychological association, and it was done in Montreal, Canada, on September 3, 1980. So several years after he left Harvard and that whole world of experiments. So he's talking to a room full of scientists. And so by doing this, he's really breaking things down. So, yes, as always, he's bringing up these mystical insights, but he's weaving it together with these scientific principles. So he's bringing, like, the chakra system and talking about different kinds of therapy that match each of those planes of consciousness. And so it's really touching on everything from Taoist teachings to contemporary physics. And as he does that, he might be touching on subjects. He is touching on subjects that many of us know and love. But because of the room, he's breaking it down with more precision and clarity in a way that you may never heard before. It feels like a real gem, this lecture. But as always, he leaves us with a little richer perspective on how we perceive both ourselves and this world. And so, you know, it's the planes of consciousness he's inviting us to. To not live in one and not even move between them, but to truly embody all of them simultaneously. And the question is, what does this mean to live on multiple planes at the same time? And how does this affect our experience of interconnectedness? He also, as he normally does, he delves into what it means to be involved with social action. And he's emphasizing how we move from a. A sense of separateness to unity. But as we do that, as we move into unity, it doesn't mean we deny our individual unique experiences. We recognize that we have these different ways that we've experienced this world, and it's not an either or, it's a both, and one does not negate the other. And he also invites us to ponder the nature of free will versus determination. And it reminds me of one of my favorite lyrics when I was in high school by Van Halen. It just seemed like truth, and it was the line, I believe in fate and destination, but so much of that lies in our own hands. And the question is, does it? And in this lecture, Ram Dass gives us some food for thought around that and maybe challenges us to rethink our notions of freedom and responsibility. So there's so much in here I hope you enjoy. As always, this lecture is this profound exploration of consciousness and existence and just the very fabric of how we hold our reality. So sit back and enjoy this timeless wisdom of Ram Dass. And as you settle in, you might want to sip on a little something. And if you don't have it already, you might want to consider getting some magic mind, which is this. Really. It's my morning drink now. It's this zesty little shot that includes nootropics and adaptogens and Bacopa being one of them. Matcha and I pour it into 8 ounces of water, and it's just like my favorite thing to wake up to. It gives Me a whole bunch of energy, puts me into flow states and doesn't give me those coffee jitters. So if you want your magic mind, go over to magicmind.com ramdas and use the code RAM DASS to get 50% off your subscription if you do that in the next 10 days. And as always, we are incredibly grateful for the support of this community because without you and without our wonderful partners like Magic Mind, we would not be able to do this. We could not bring you these amazing episodes, continuing to find content of Ram Dass and bring it to you in a consistent way with great sound. And if you appreciate this and you tune in regularly, please consider donating. Do more than consider it. Let's donate. You can go to ramdas.org donate and every contribution helps us keep doing this. And another way to do that, another way to support these episodes and coming out is to join Patreon. That way you get it ad free. You can dive directly into the content. And if you want to skip these intros, you're welcome to do that as well. So for that you go to patreon.com ramdaspodcast so again, that's patreon.com ramdaspodcast and lastly, man, we hope that these episodes inspire you and not just inspire you to listen, but inspire you to act. And we host these gatherings in lots of different ways. And the ones that I host online, a lot of people say they listen to the podcast, you know, once, twice, three times, and then they come and they discuss them and something else clicks. So you can go to an online group. We have a lot of affinity groups. We have about 200 local groups that meet around the world. So find out about any one of those@ramdass.org Fellowship. Find a gathering for you that is part of Ram Dass legacy. And as always, we hope you are well nourished by this episode and these teachings. And whatever good may come from them, may it ripple out into your life and benefit all beings everywhere. We dedicate this podcast as a practice to all beings. And so here is Ram Dass here and now. Namaste and blessings.

So what you are facing as you start to play with these planes of consciousness, these planes of reality, is that you are dealing with paradoxes that you must incorporate into your being. Because to be an impeccable warrior means that you are going to start to live simultaneously on many planes of reality, not go back and forth from one to the other. And there becomes the stinker in social action. Because for me to go into the plane of reality, where I see that we are all one, and then come back into my separateness as an American where I am part of 6% of the population, using 40% of the natural resources and dealing with the fact that somebody is blind in India for want of an operation that costs $5 and that I'm going to use my next $5 to go to the movies. If it was my father, I wouldn't, because he's part of my phenomenological self. If it is my cousin, that isn't. But somehow that person in India is them when I'm here. But when I'm one, it's us. And the interesting question is, when you bring it all together, how do you live on this plane? As if we are all us. That's what you start to do. As an impeccable warrior. Your game is clean across levels of reality. Now, some of the issues that come up are the ones that are in the title. Take Free will and determinism on this plane. You chose to come into this room to hear this lecture. I'm over not making this. Very naive. You philosophers understand, not by choice, but because I'm naive. You come in here because you chose to come in here. And that was the experience of free will. And on this plane of reality, you have free will. If you go back one step further out up into or two steps back into what's called the causal plane of reality, you see the lawfulness of the universe. And you know, even as psychologists on this plane that your decision making doesn't come out of the void. It does ultimately, but it doesn't immediately it comes out of previous experiences. Well, it comes out of everything else in the universe because everything in the universe is lawfully interrelated to everything else. And the smallest leaf falling affects everything else. And you begin to experience what's called the dao, or the natural law of things. And every system of studies of the students of the law, like, for example, students of the Torah or any of the kind of deep, intricate laws of the universe go back and back and back and get to the place where the planes of reality go back until they get to the edge where form and formless start to mingle with one another. And I know Ron Vallee is going to talk about this tomorrow in a much more sophisticated way, but let me just read this statement from physics, which is getting close to this game. The atom, the fundamental building block of matter, originally conceived as a discrete bit of matter, has passed through a stage of dissolution, finally suffering decomposition into elementary particles. These in turn, fell under the spell of the principle of complementarity, not permitting to say whether they are waves or particles. As it stands now, matter does not matter anymore. It is dissolved into a web of abstract relations and is no longer material. Reality may now be regarded as the actualizing appearance of observational relations, with visible reality merely an isolated phenomenon. So that all of our models of the universe, which we counted on science to protect the solidity of thingness, including ourselves, physics sold us down the river back into the void and said, in fact, there are not things on which all of this is based, and there are not things built on things. There is nothing built on nothing that appears as something. And that is the sophistication that now dovetails in with what mystics have been saying and writing for thousands of years and the beautiful, exquisite moment when the games are beginning to come together and suddenly I can talk to physicists and we can hear one another afresh. So that to look at a limited cause and effect relationship and yet recognize that everything in the universe is related, where are you going to get a factor analytic program to cover that one? And you're also facing that as long as you do your research based on one plane of reality. For example, we studied the effects of parent behavior on children's personalities in Freud's psychosexual stages and how parents punish their kids in relation to. All right, the best you get in personality research. I don't know what they're doing these days, but 15 years ago, the best we were getting is a correlation of about 50. That's accounting. It's better than chance. We got something. But it's accounting for about 25% of the variability. Right. That leaves quite a bit of room, doesn't it? 75% of the variability, which we can say is poor methodology that would allow for reincarnation and karma. I just wanted to make sure there was space left. I mean, if there wasn't any space, I didn't want to bother with this stuff. But it turned out that in current research, there's plenty of space left for all of these other theories, for bringing other planes of measurement and reality and conception into our work. What happened in 75 was that and on from there was that I began to see that. And I don't mean 75 specifically, but somewhere in that area that I was missing a boat about honoring what a human incarnation was about. I was pushing away. I was throwing out the baby with a bath. I was so enamored of Eastern traditions. And the Eastern systems tend to be Appropriate for cultures in which personality, ego is role, basically role identity. And they are reasonably very structured societies with a focus on transcendence and in which the concept, the basic concept of life is the wheel in which nothing's really going anywhere. We in the west have a much more existential ego. We have a sense of linearity, of we're going somewhere, that culture is evolving, so on, and we have developed the power of our intellect to control and master nature, while in the east, it's been much more surrender into the flow of things. And it turns out, as I finally stand back far enough that each of them has a tremendous amount to offer and that maybe you and I are at the cusp of an amalgam of those things and that I am one of the players in what's called the team that Carl Jung talks about as gnostic intermediaries, people who are bringing cultures together through their own blood. He said it drove Wilhelm, Richard Wilhelm insane to try to do that. Who wrote the. Translated the I Ching from Chinese, but maybe I'll have better luck. I began to see that it was possible to have your cake and eat it too, in a sense that you could function using your ego as a functional working device without getting. Without being ego attached. You could use the ego without necessarily identifying with it. And you could remain in the spaciousness that surrounds without being dissociative and pushing away. And what I was beginning to experience is that I had to notice that I was pushing away the physical plane and I had to go back into it. And one of my teachers, who is not on this physical plane, who speaks to me through a medium, I mean, I'll really let you show you how nutty it all is. He said to me, he said a wonderful thing. He said, you humans are so stuck in your dualistic mind. I mean, who else could say that but a dolphin? You know, it's a great line, you humans. I mean, there's no. Very few people ever talk to you from outside the human realm. And he said, you are afraid. He said, you came to the earth to come to school and why don't you take your curriculum instead of trying to. To skip school all the time? And I realized that there was function in my humanity and function in the experiences that were being presented to me. And that I had to, what Buddha said, honor the preciousness of my human birth. And I have been exploring what that means since in the past five years in terms of what it means to be my father's son, what it means to be an American, a Jew, A, a member of an ecosystem, a member of the planet, a sexual being, an intellectual being, and so on. How do you use all these things and how do you honor them and participate in them? At the same moment as the Bhagavad Gita, which is my basic teaching text for me, says, do what you do, but do not be identified with being the actor. A and B, be not attached to the fruits of your action. There is speaking happening. I am right here. The speaking is having an effect on you. The effect on you is your karma, not mine. It's only mine if I buy it. If I am attached to the fruits of the actions, I am merely doing what I can do as impeccably as I can do it. What effect it has is what effect it has. These are rules of the game that lend themselves to psychological systems very, very easily, by the way, if you can just start to hear them from that other framework. I'm not going to speak about methods for changing consciousness. That's a whole other domain. I will talk just a moment about systems that exist in other cultures that are applicable, that are usable by psychology. For example, the chakra system in energy systems, which is known as working with Kundalini. If you consider the. And now that acupuncture and a number of systems are coming in which are working with much more subtle energy systems that aren't immediately measurable by physiological measuring devices. And by the way, to say it baldly, as far as I am concerned, the way in which we know in the universe is not limited to thinking. It is not limited to our senses. It is not limited to our physiological neurophysiological brain processes. Laterality notwithstanding, it is a much more exquisite game than that. And what scientists did was they pounced on laterality as the explanation for all meditation, for everything. Biofeedback doesn't get at the essence of what the game is about. Laterality theories do not get at it. This is all still looking for the watch under the street lamp as far as I'm concerned. I just wanted to get it out front so save trouble later on. Now, in the chakra systems, if you want to see parallels that are interesting, you can see that the first chakra, which is located between the genitals and the anus, sort of up in the nerve, right up in. Up there. You could understand within Darwinian theory of evolution and people fighting with each other for survival, because that's the survival mechanism. This is oversimplified and analogs, but let's work with them. You up to the second one, which is called, interestingly enough, Svadistana, meaning her favorite resort. Speaking of the snake, the serpent comes up and stops there because it's such a nice, like the Riviera. And that's. That's the sexual sensual chakra. And that's where Freud was. He spent all his time there with guilt. And guilt is as much part of it as joy. I mean, it's just, you know, it's the opposite coin. It's the polarity that's just as attached. And he built a whole system of reality out of that. Right? And he interpreted everything else in terms of second chakra, which upset other of his colleagues, like Adler, who was busy with the third chakra, which was concerned with power. And he built his whole trip on power. Jung, on the other hand, got into the fourth chakra with the collective unconscious and with the sense of brotherhood or humanity. And his reality was a fourth chakra reality. And just like standing on the corner watching all the girls go by personality, these are different ways of cutting the pie. Each of these chakras has an entirely different reality connected with it. And when you run through your own chakras, you will see that you are very. It's a Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde kind of phenomenon. You have very different people. I love you. I love you until I'm turned on by you and then screw you. I want you know. It's the difference between love and lust. Love is fourth chakra. Lust is second chakra. Lust has objects. The first, second and third chakra have only objects in them. Other people are objects to be manipulated. And most of the power domain that we call politics is seeing other people as objects to be manipulated to give your ego structure, your intellectual structure, more and more power. The fourth chakra is the beginning, which is the heart Chakra is the beginning of where compassion lies. It is the recognition that other people exist as us. The fifth chakra, which is in the throat, is the turning inward into towards the one. The sixth chakra is the higher wisdom or the understanding of the more profound laws. And the seventh chakra is the merging back into the One. And there are beings that live on all of these chakras. The seventh is only one. Of course, such a system is a useful system for psychologists to reflect upon in reconsidering Western psychology. Such a system as the Abhidhamma of the Sudhimagga, which somebody like Dan Goleman has written a book about, integrating the. The psychology of Southern Buddhism into Western psychology. Those psychologies are so sophisticated, we haven't even begun to touch the edge of that kind of sophistication of analysis of mind, content of thought, content of states of mind. I'm going to take time to read something very I think that's a very beautiful thing. It's just about two pages long. It's an article that appeared in a book called Mortal Lessons by Seltzer. And while I have lots more I could talk about, I want to just read this and then I'll give you a summary, sort of. On the bulletin board in the front hall of the hospital where I work, there appeared an announcement. Yeshi Dondon, it read. We'll make rounds at 6 o' clock on the morning of June 10th. The particulars were then given, followed by a notation. Yeshe Dandon is personal physician to the Dalai Lama. I am not so leathery a skeptic that I would knowingly ignore an emissary of the gods. Not only might such sang froid be inimical to one's earthly well being, it could take care of eternity as well. Thus, on the morning of June 10, I joined the clutch of white coats waiting in the small conference room adjacent to the ward selected for the rounds. The air in the room is heavy with ill concealed dubiety and suspicion of bamboozlement. At precisely six o' clock he materializes, a short, golden barrely man dressed in a sleeveless robe of saffron and maroon. His scalp is shaven. The only visible hair is a scanty black line above each hooded eye. He bows in greeting while his young interpreter makes the introduction. Yeshi Danan, we are told, will examine a patient selected by a member of the staff. The diagnosis is as unknown to Yeshi Dandon as it is to us. The examination of the patient will take place in our presence, after which we will reconvene in the conference room where Yeshi Danden will discuss the case. We are further informed that for the past two hours Yeshi Dandon has purified himself by bathing, fasting and prayer. I, having breakfasted well, performed only the most desultory of ablutions, and given no thought at all to my soul, glance furtively at my fellows. Suddenly we seem a soiled, uncouth lot. The patient has been awakened early and told that she is to be examined by a foreign doctor and had been asked to produce a fresh specimen of urine. So when we enter her room, the woman shows no surprise. She has long ago taken on that mixture of compliance and resignation that is the face of chronic illness. This was to be about another in an endless series of tests and examinations. Yet she, stunned and steps to the bedside while the rest stand apart, watching. For a long time he gazes at the woman, favoring no part of her body with his eyes, but seeming to fix his glance at a place just above her supine form. Eyes too, study her, and no physical sign nor obvious symptoms gives a clue to the nature of her disease. At last he takes her hand, raising it in both of his own. Now he bends over the bed in a kind of crouching stance, his head drawn down into the collar of his robe. His eyes are closed as he feels for her pulse. In a moment he has found the spot, and for the next half hour he remains thus suspended above the patient, like some exotic golden bird with folded wings, holding the pulse of the woman beneath his fingers, cradling her hand in his. All the power of the man seems to have been drawn into this one purpose. It is palpitation of the pulse raised to the state of ritual from the foot of the bed where I stand. It is as though he and the patient have entered a special place of isolation, of a partners about which a vacancy hovers and across which no violation is possible. After a moment the woman rests back upon her pillow. From time to time she raises her head to look at the strange figure above her, then sinks back once more. I cannot see their hands joined in a correspondence that is exclusive, intimate, his fingertips receiving the voice of her sick body through the rhythm and throb she offers at her wrist. All at once I am envious. Not of him, not of Yeshi Dondon for his gift of beauty and holiness, but of her. I want to be held like that touch so receive. And I know that I, who have palpitated a hundred thousand pulses, have not felt a single one. At last Yeshidandan straightens, gently places the woman's hand upon the bed, and steps back. The interpreter produces a small wooden bowl and two sticks. Yeshi Dandon pours a portion of the urine specimen into the bowl and proceeds to whip the liquid with the two sticks. This he does for several minutes, until a foam is raised. Then, bowing above the bowl, he inhales the odor three times. He sets down the bowl and turns to leave. All this while he has not uttered a single word. As he nears the door, the woman raises her head and calls out to him in a voice at once urgent and serene. Thank you, doctor, she says, and touches her other hand with her other hand, the place he had held on her wrist, as though to recapture something that had visited there Yeshidandon turns back for a moment to gaze at her, then steps into the corridor. Rounds are at an end. We are seated once more in the conference room. Yeshi Dandon speaks for the first time in soft Tibetan sounds that I have never heard before. He has barely begun when the young interpreter begins to translate, the two voices continuing in tandem, a bilingual fugue, the one chasing the other. It is like the chanting of monks. He speaks of winds coursing through the body of the woman, currents that break against barriers, eddying. These vortices are in her blood, he says, the last spendings of an imperfect heart between the chambers of her heart. Long, long before she was born, a wind had come and blown open a deep gate that must never be opened. Through it charged the full waters of her river as the mountain stream cascades in the springtime, battering, knocking loose the land and flooding her breath. Thus he speaks and is silent. A professor asks of his colleague, may we now have the diagnosis? The host of the rounds, the man who knows answers. Congenital heart disease. Interventricular septal defect with resultant heart failure. A gateway in the heart, I think, that must not be opened. Through it charge the full waters that flood her breath. So here then is the doctor listening to the sounds of the body to which the rest of us are deaf. He is more than doctor. He is priest. I will just in one moment say very briefly how I experience what I am doing in this universe. And then I would like to give 10 recommendations for psychologists and then end. If you would visualize a clock with the 12 at the top and the 6 on the bottom. Just a regular clock, 12 o' clock being the part in which the universe is unmanifest and out of that manifestation comes form. Now I'm not talking about a clock. So we are still in time. This is the highest point in time for understanding this law that I can get to. And the 1 minute past 12 is the statement. In the beginning was the word. It's the first manifestation. It's the first vibratory rate. It's the first time that formless comes into form. It's the beginning of duality. But there has to be positive and negative and dark and light and all that for form to exist. So the one becomes the two at that moment and that two becomes the multitude of all, all possible things. All of that is the one. It is all consciousness. It is not self conscious. However, it is all totally harmonious until it gets to 1 minute past 12 when it starts to be separate from one another. It is the moment when Adam and Eve get cast out of the Garden of Eden in that particular metaphorical system. And the beginning of self consciousness when God says to Adam, whoever told you you were naked? And that all starts from God starting it by saying, don't eat of that tree, which is the first negation which starts the whole process. Interestingly enough, it's not the eating of the apple, it's the saying don't. It's a nice interpretation. From 12:01 until 6:00', clock, beings evolve through life after life. I just slipped in reincarnation, which is all a master illusion, but so are you, so it's OK. Okay. At 12:01 to 6:00 we reincarnate as separate entities, trying to solidify a power in our own separateness, trying to be returned to the feeling of harmony that we experience in the totality of the oneness, and yet retain our separateness. And that is the epitome of that is the height of Western technology, which assumes you can create heaven on earth with the power that is the highest power that humans are given at that level of separateness before they start to go into another level, which is the power of the prefrontal lobes or the thinking mind and technology being the offshoot of that. And so by 4 o' clock there is incredible power of individuals and societies and cultures, nations in the world. And we can go to the moon and we can do all kinds of magnificent things and we can have better living and standards of life and so on. At 5:59 we come to the recognition slowly. This is not a momentary thing, it's a slow recognition that no matter how good we get at the game, it keeps getting worse, which I think you're beginning to see that man's intellect, that knowledge doesn't solve the problems, something called wisdom does. But we threw that out. We weren't interested. We only wanted knowledge so that our great wise men are people like Henry Kissinger and Herman Kahn. They're not wise people, they're knowledgeable people. And we've substituted our intellect for our wisdom. We've substituted cleverness for simplicity. And what happens at 5:59 is a despair. And that despair is a prerequisite for what happens next. It has to be, and it has to be deep. You have to realize you don't have the cards in your hand to win. Your arrogance has got to be beaten down. And part of what the APA represents is that kind of intellectual arrogance that isn't good enough. And out of that despair comes a recognition, comes an opening when that trauma or that hurt or that crisis. Thousands of times during the time from 1201 to 5:59, we have had times when we have gone out of our mind, when we have transcended. But we have always interpreted them in the way to preserve our power as separate entities. So we said, I went mad. I went out of my mind. Because to recognize these other states of consciousness means to lose your power as a separate individual. It means to recognize that you are part of a totality and to understand that your game is to play your part in it, not to get as much of it as you can. And when I first went to India, I couldn't understand how the sweeper who swept the streets in the town could have such dignity and beauty in his eyes. When I look at the people who run our garbage trucks, who would much rather be in the White House than be sweepers. And the sweeper didn't want to be the king, he wanted to be the sweeper, because he knew something I didn't know. And I met people who were poor but weren't poor, who didn't have money but weren't poor, they weren't psychologically poor. And I learned something from that experience, which I recommend to all of you. At 6:01 comes the recognition. It's called awakening. In the spiritual tradition. It's not enlightenment, it's awakening. It's the recognition that it isn't how you thought it was. And the whole game is up for grabs. Once again, you have opened Pandora's box. You allow it all to happen again. And you start to listen as Yeshi Dondon does. You begin to listen to the universe, as Milarepa does outside the cave. You do what you do, but your stance is that of student, of listener. You don't know. You listen and hear, and what happens, happens. You do what you must do, as you are part in the dance. And from six o' clock on you are extricating yourself from your identification with your separateness. Not, however, as I did initially rejecting it, but merely not getting caught in identification with it. You are learning that there is nowhere to stand, that you are actually in training to be nobody special. Can you imagine what that does to ego psychology? You are in training to be nobody special, not nobody, not to not exist, but to be nobody special, to be very exquisite in your uniqueness, but not to be attached to your individual differences, but to acknowledge them and to give them space and to treat them with dignity and respect and to play impeccably. And the rest of the Story of the individual from then on through incarnations and, and for cultures. Because in the 60s, something happened in this culture where a significant number of people passed the 6 o' clock mark. And the culture hasn't been the same since. What has literally happened in this culture is we have moved in the same way what Einstein did to Newton. We have moved from one kind of concept of reality to another, are much more embracing. When we've moved into the fourth chakra, literally we've begun to move into the fourth chakra. The leading edge of consciousness has started to move into the fourth chakra, into compassion. And that's what the ecological movement's about. It's what a lot of the social political movements that aren't against anybody, they're not realizing the other guys, Ronald Reagan isn't them, he's us. He's just that part of us which is a total jerk. So the game is from. But we are. That's who we are. The game is from the 0 into the 1, into the 2, into the many, back into the 2, into the 1 and back into the 0. And then comes the moment at 11:59 when you realize that you have been at 0 all the time and that the entire sequence of the dance has been merely a sequence of dreams. You know how you dream at night and then you wake up from the dream and you say, oh, what a dream. And then you realize you're still dreaming, you didn't wake up yet. You have a dream within a dream. You ever have that? Well, wait till you wake up from this one. Say, oh my God. And all the time I gee, you seem so real to me. And that is that process from 6 to 11 is learning to listen, to quiet the mind, to open the heart, to learn how to be impeccable across planes of consciousness, to be one with the universe. Which means you end up living more simply, you live more harmoniously, you live with a recognition. I have to live this moment being able. As Gandhi said over his tomb, it says, think of the poorest person you've ever met and ask whether your next act will be of any use to that person. I don't want to turn off that person in order to get my rush, because it's not worth it. Because in order to get the rush, that means denying that person's existence. I have to deny the plane of consciousness in which we are one. And I can't afford that anymore. I want to be a total being. And so my little rush, the game shifts from 1 to 6. It's for pleasure from 6 to 1159, it's for freedom and happiness. Those are entirely different things. Very, very different. Pleasure is of the ego and of the senses. Freedom is of being free in the sense that you are perfectly in your part in the flow of the universe. And you deal with the paradox, just a couple of moments. You deal with the paradox that on this plane where you see the laws of the universe and see it all perfectly lawful, you see that it is all perfect. God is perfect. Job is just missing the point. And at the level of your heart as a human being, you look out and you see it all stinks and it hurts like hell and there's a lot of suffering. And try dealing with that paradox. And you've got to. As a human being, you've got to live where you simultaneously see the perfection and don't close your heart to the horror. You close your heart and you say, oh, it's all perfect. People in Bangladesh, people in Africa starving. It's all perfect. God's plan, all their karma. What a cold, haughty, separate thing. Because it hurts too much, you can't stand it. Open your heart and don't get the perfection and you go under. You'll be wiped out by the horror of it, by the pain, and you finally have to close your heart because you can't stand the suffering. Try the game of both at once. That's the fun of these many levels of consciousness. Learning how to live with paradox, live strength simultaneously with all this. That's what humanity is, what a human being is about. I think. Okay, 10 points. 1. Recognize that individual differences are not essence, but form, form of manifestation. That there is more to us than our individual differences. Thus, motives, cognitive structures and attitudes are not seen as an identity with the individual, but merely as the forms of expression of that individual. In other words, we are not reductionistic to making us into animals. Study other systems, other psychologies from other cultures, and see what they can tell us about, about the human condition. And let's not just keep reiterating what we said 10 years ago and 20 years ago. I went to a lecture yesterday in which the lecturer spent all the time telling what psychologists had been saying for the last 30 years, like the blind reiterating what the blind have been doing to stay blind. I can't believe it. Recognize that there are other ways of knowing other than through the senses and through the intellectual, which might help us deal with some of the phenomena of one trial learning and might allow us to treat creativity as other than neurosis. Einstein said I did not arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind. Put that in our pipe and smoke it. Recognize that aberrant behavior is not necessarily pathological. But possibly they know something we don't. Not always. But in India they make the distinction between what are called masks and neurotics. And that's that grid that those axes on this axis, the personality axis. A person can get caught in an other ego structure that is non adaptive. And we say they're neurotic. But it is also possible that a person, just like I did in the 60s, will find myself on the stage where they all look like fish. And you can say, well, that's aberrant personality. Or you can say he is struggling to integrate new planes of consciousness and see it on a vertical thing. And that's what they call masts in India. And they treat them with respect and love and tenderness and give them the space to work through what they need to work through. We have to make some distinctions. We are putting everybody in the mental hospital, which is as good a place in society as any. But it's probably we can do better than that. We must. We do recognize now that the experimenter is part of the experiment. And thus it behooves us to work upon ourselves as experimental measuring instruments and as part of the experiment proper work on ourselves by not just filling our minds with constructs, but rather in simultaneously learning to empty our minds into quietness. I was told in a lecture yesterday that meditation was a passing fad that would soon leave demanded by the students because of their cultishness and fattishness. I would like to point out that I think that meditation is one of the most profound tools for extricating yourself from identification with your thinking mind. And it turns out that cogito ergo sum isn't correct. I think, therefore I am. You are and you think it's quite different. You are not an identity with your thinking mind. And you can meditate for yourself and find that out. There is a line in the dao that should be over every university library. At least it says the student learns by daily increment. The way is gained by daily loss, loss upon loss, until at last rests. The more you empty, the more you will be yeshidanden than you will hear. And yet at the same moment you can learn and develop your skills and your concepts and your structures, but be not identified or attached to them. Use them functionally, but don't identify with them. The most profound book that I work with in my Life now is a book. It's this whole thing. This is the whole book. It's three or four pages. It's called the Sin Xin Ming, the Teachings of the Third Chinese Patriarch of Zen. And if you would just like the first two lines of it, first four lines, just to show you what kind of work is in store. The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. Enough said. When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. It goes on. But make the slightest distinction and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. It doesn't mean you don't have attitudes, opinions, desires, needs, perceptions. It means you have them, you work with them, you use them, but you can let them go. They aren't who you are. Don't get caught in identifying with your seersucker jacket or your plaid pants or your blue skirt. Cull the mystic and religious literature for viable psychological variables. Keep open to your imagination, which, as Einstein points out, is infinitely more important than your knowledge. Integrate what we are with what we know and don't act as if our humanity is an impediment to our science. You and I met here today in a way that our hearts touched. You can't convert what I said into any simple psychological stuff right away, but you and I are meeting in a way that we know we are touching something that is real for both of us. We may not be able to say what it is that's just happening to us, but we know it's happening. We can point at the moon a little bit. We have to recognize that maybe the greatest wisdom is something that will be only that we can be. But we cannot know. Because ultimate beauty, truth, knowledge, love is not form. All forms are only relatively real and the ultimate reality. You can only be. You cannot remain in dualism to know. As long as you try to know, you know you stay separate. You will always stay one thought away from where the action is. And the game is to be able to be free enough to merge back into it all to your birthright, and then come back into the form of your exquisite, impeccable role as a social scientist or whatever. You and I can go where our science cannot go, but becoming free ourselves. By working on ourselves, we can use our science in a way that will liberate and not entrap our fellow human beings. Thank you very much for your attention. 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 Ramdas has been sharing for all of these years. Thank you.