Ep. 275 – Working With Truth in Relationships

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Hey everyone, this is Ram Dass here. And now a new podcast. And this is Raghu Marcus going to help out a little bit with some intro. This is an amazing talk. It's actually from a Q and A that Ram Dass did in the 80s and interestingly enough he talks a lot about relationships, soulmates, marriage, open relationships, working with truth in relationships. Which is what I want to kind of just give an idea because about in terms of how Ram Dass is pointing to this as being super important ingredient in any relationship. Why it's interesting that this was chosen I'm sure purposeful this talk because we have a new course coming up from Love Serve Remember foundation in Ram Dass. It's a virtual immersion and it starts April 21st and it's really fantastic, I have to say. I mean we've done a lot of courses over the years and of course Ram Dass is always great. All of our friends that join in, Ram Dass is very close teacher friends. Jack Kornfield Krishna Das and so on. Sharon Salzberg. And there's for instance, there's one gentleman named James Finley who I did a podcast with on My Mind Rolling podcast series. And he is a disciple of Thomas Merton, the great Trappist monk who was a close friend of the Dalai Lama is extraordinary. And I just. And there's people that are going to be talking about Frank Ostasesky, who's such an expert in aging and death and dying, of course, Krishna Das, who's going to be talking about teachers and gurus. And we have someone named Susan Eric who has an animal sanctuary, wolf and, and bear, et cetera, near Yellowstone and has the way in which she can weave in these stories about the way that Ram Dass was absolutely transformed when he went and swam in a pool with them. This particular dolphin was named Rosie. It's a great, great piece that's in this course. So I highly urge you to take a look at it. And you go to ramdas.org intimacy so it's from a Dogen quote which was enlightenment is intimacy with all things. And we shortened it to intimacy with all things. Cultivating conscious relationships in daily life. Again, ramdas.org intimacy and we have to just a couple of shout outs here. One is for Reunion, that incredible place where people can gather and connect and grow through these retreats in a private cove in Costa Rica. I mean, just extraordinary. I mean, if you've never been to Costa Rica, by the way, the way that they have just absolutely done this incredible job protecting the forests and the animals and it's just really something Costa Rica. And this place is absolutely gorgeous, just go check it out. Reunionretreats.com and you can also, if anybody's interested in doing retreats, like yoga retreats or something like that, that's available as well. So reunion r e u n I o-n.com you can go to reunionretreats.com and look at what's possible in that area. And then last but not least is Magic Mind. I've been mentioning Magic Mind for quite some time, talking about them, this elixir that you take every day. My whole thing with mind rolling and that podcast is about balance. And this is certainly a substance that can help with that, help with attention, help with stress, help with just the intimacy of being at one with what is around you. It really does. And you can go there and you can get a discount and just go to magicmind.com Ram Dass and put in in caps Ram Dass and you can try it out and I vouch for it. Really, this is a fabulous product. So magic mind and the only thing I want to say, because you know, obviously you're going to listen to this podcast just about truth in relationships. I mean this course is around just how Ram Dass speaks to it when he uses okay, what are the things you can do so that you're not judging and mediating and manipulating in terms of all the relationships that we all have because we're protecting our interests. And so this talk really speaks to that. As I said before, truth is probably the most important thing to. I mean, love first. Ram Dass would say that. But truth, well, that's why Maharaj said to him, love everyone and tell the truth. I mean it's really the vehicle and that's truth is one of the vehicles for deepening spiritual awareness through another human being. There's just a little excerpt from this. So please enjoy this podcast, this talk from Ram Dass and do consider the course that I mentioned intimacy with all things. And yeah, go to Costa Rica and take get into a nice little situation there at reunion and talk about helping get balance and take some magic mind elixir shots with you. I mean, there you go. It's a perfect recipe. Oh yeah. Everybody, I will see you either on Mind rolling or back here on ramdas.org or in the the course has live teachers every day. I mentioned James Finley being one of them. And I'll see you there. Okay, Ram Ra.

Question.

My question is do we have such a thing Do I have such a.

Thing as a soulmate?

And I was just wondering if perhaps.

You could give me a telephone number. There'll be a sign up list for this gentleman outside. The only way you would know a soulmate if you met one was if you were residing in your soul. As long as you're in your personality. It's all a little game. The whole idea of soulmates, which is used a lot in this culture, you know, I want my soulmate. That's a personality speaking. And it takes one to know one, if you will. Right? And what you will feel at times is you'll feel an incredible familiarity with somebody when you meet them. And you will feel that we are connected to each other, even though we haven't known each other in this life. But that's probably true. There's probably only about 500 of us in the world anyway, and we just keep going around again and that we've all known each other many times in many ways. I mean, I have a feeling we that it's said that everybody was everybody's mother and father and child and murderer and murderee and all sorts of things. So you get so that you're surprised when you feel these complex emotions regarding other human beings. I'm not sure I understand the term soul mate other than people have work to do together at times. And then they may come together in many different forms. You may come together with a brother or a sister or a mother or a cousin or an employer employee that have incredible work together. I mean, Judas and Jesus had work to do together. They could have been soul mates in that sense. Yes. And I don't have any phone numbers for you. Who's next? Is there a difference between marriage and just living together? Is there a difference between marriage and just. And we'll forget the word just. Is there a difference between marriage and living together? Well, it really depends on which culture you're living in. For example, in the villages in India, when you get married, it is till death. And if one person dies, the other person lives in mourning for the rest of their life and doesn't remarry. Well, that's not true for the men. It's true for the women, which is a very sexist thing, of course. In fact, in some cultures, the women goes on the funeral pyre for that when the man dies. But there's no divorce. It's not heard of. But that's because the culture isn't focused on personality so much. In California, where I live, it is serial monogamy. That is, you only are married to one person at a time. But you can be married serially. And marriage has come to be a special friendship. See, the difference between these different models are your parents are your given karma. You can't trade them in. You can't turn in your father and get a new one. And then you have friends, friends that are acquired karma. Okay, Those are. Those are people you take on and you work with them. And then if it doesn't work, you can go on to somebody else. Now, where does a marriage fit in between given karma and acquired karma? In some cultures, it's given karma. The minute you make the contract, it's till death do us part. When you say till death do us part, it then has become given karma in the same way that a parent is. It's nothing you can turn in. Now, what marriage has come to be in the west is much more like a special friendship where you take it on and work with it. And then if you both find you're incompatible, you go on to somebody else. From a spiritual point of view, Ideally, you would find a partner who wished to awaken and you wish to awaken. And the two of you would use the relationship in order to awaken. And you would use your raising of children and your lifestyle and your working with your money and all of it as a way of awakening. That would be the ideal. If you end up in a marriage where you got married before you started to awaken, or you got married and then you find that one person doesn't want to awaken and another does, doesn't want to work on himself and another does, then the person that wants to awaken has really a choice. You can see that relationship as given karma and work with it. Or you can say, I really want my marriage to be satsang or sangha. So I will give this one up and try another one. I'll find somebody who wants to work with me. It actually, from a spiritual point of view, you're going to grow both ways. From a psychological point of view, it might be harder being married to somebody that's not the least bit interested in what you're interested in. You go to retreats all by yourself and they don't care, and they don't want to meditate and they want to look at the ball game. But in terms of your work on yourself, that will get you there just as fast as. And what you usually find is when you keep trading in your partners, the next partner you get, you will slowly make the relationship over into what you had last time anyway. I mean, because these are happening on much deeper levels of unconsciousness. I mean, if you're neurotic in London, you'll probably be neurotic in Paris. You know, it's not like suddenly you're going to move or shift people and it's all going to be roses. You'll still have to deal with the stuff of your attachments of mind. So after a while, you don't really care so much who you're with. You just. Just keep doing it. You could say that a marriage contract deepens the commitment to go through the suffering together. The problem is, I think, forget the problem. My sense is that love is the only marriage contract and that people should stay together so long as they want to be together in love. And that to be together with somebody because you signed a paper at one time does not seem to me to be a valid reason to stay together. I don't hear that. Now. And all of the vacillation. When you're living with somebody. Shall we marry? Shouldn't we marry, that's just grist for the mill of spiritual work on oneself about what the issues of commit. Because what does commitment mean? Commitment means, says this is a useful process for us to be working on ourselves through from a spiritual point of view. That's what it's saying. And that doesn't have to be a contract between two people. That is something each person makes a decision to do about their life. I know some of you are upset by that, but that's okay. Question.

This follows what you just said. Can you make a distinction? I know some Tibetan masters who have wives and it would seem as if their relationship with their wife is not particularly conscious. You know, she stays in the kitchen and, you know, in a pretty traditional sense and washes the dishes and they don't talk, though this master is very busy teaching consciousness and would travel all over the world.

She's probably the Buddha.

She's. Yeah, I.

He's just the front man.

Well, exactly. I mean, I think what I'm saying. Ram Dass, is there a distinction the.

Sacrament is the chicken soup. Yeah. Excuse me. Go ahead.

I mean, is there a distinction between a path that is yoga of relationship as a way to God and being a spiritual warrior on the way to God and as part of that, having a conscious, supportive relationship. But that is not the primary focus.

Yeah, I think that most people that are in spiritual work because it's the relationship yoga is such a stinker that the best thing to do is to form a marriage that gives you support and gives you intimacy and all of the things you need and it's comfortable and safe and secure and it's a base camp. And then you do your practices and as you both do your practices, you get clearer and closer together. But the yoga of relationship wasn't the primary yoga. I think you're absolutely right and I think that's a very valid thing to do. I think that's a more intelligent strategy than trying to make the relationship the yoga.

Tell you the truth, because this is a question I've discussed with some people, is I was recently getting married and I ended it because I was saying I really want to go to God and to look in your eyes. And my partner just wanted another gin and tonic. And I sort of ended up. It was quite impossible to do the work, and yet I see that I had probably intended something that wasn't my soul nature to go much too high, that was even higher than I could possibly probably do. And so somehow I sacrificed myself, whereas, you know, I just could have chosen A nice middle of the road with a little bit of personality comfort and coming to retreats as well. I mean, like. I mean, no.

I mean, I think she escaped just in time. Yes, sir.

I mean, I'm putting myself up as a scapegoat. But for many years, I have really tried to live a very rigorous spiritual relationship. And there was always the pain because I would deny myself certain things that I had not, as it were, evolved enough to not need. And, you see, it also begs the question that if one is on the spiritual path, is one necessarily of a different vibrational rate than someone who isn't? Or is that yet another glamour? I mean, because, quote, I'm on the spiritual path, therefore I can't be with so and so because they're not.

I think that I hear your point, and I think most the time that we use the spiritual path concept as a way of giving ourselves some status in our own mind, and it's a little fraudulent. Yeah. And I think that somebody that is really working spiritually in the deepest sense will just use everything in their life. They'll use the gin and tonic. They'll use the. They'll use the not marrying and the marrying, and they just quietly keep using everything they can use as a process. And they don't make a big deal of it. They do it in a way. They do their spiritual practices behind the screen in a way of life, and they just seem like regular people doing it. The whole showbiz part of spirituality is a little showbiz. And finally, you let that go and you're just nothing special.

You know, I agree totally. But also, Ram Dass isn't the, you know, someone who does work on themselves and someone who doesn't. If they get together, there is a kind of difference, you know, for the.

Person, but for the person who is working on themselves, that is very good stuff to work with. That's very good stuff to work with. I mean, it's just a fire. It's a hotter fire. It's a hotter fire.

So if I want to go to God, I really choose my next partner who loves gin and sonic.

No, I wouldn't. I would Try to make it easy for yourself because you could fall. I mean, not fall off, but you could, you know, get into the olives or onions by error. You know, I think that you. What you would do is you would find. You look around and you find somebody who shares your journey as well as you can. But then if you find, after you marry, that you're with somebody who primarily is on the gin and tonic yoga, then you work with that. That's what you work with. That's all I'm suggesting. Because you were attracted to that person in the first place. And the problem is you've got to look for the truth of where you are. A lot of people, for example, say I'm on the spiritual path, when in fact, really what they want to do is have good sex, but they don't want to admit it so that they are attracted to somebody that wants good sex. And then they put them down in order to not identify with what they themselves really want. So at least be straight with yourself. If that's what you want, that's what you want. It's better to be truthful than to be holy. To be phony holy. All right. We have enough trouble with that. And that'll just blow you away. Phony holiness. I mean, it just keeps. You got to go back. Go back to go and start again. And start. Okay, Next.

On the question of more open relationships. I'm not saying committed married relationships. We seem to be limited in our ability to express the impulses that stem from deep within, deep within oneself. Is this inability a limitation inherited through the mores of culture? Or is it a human limitation and thereby meaning we must always be alone with this.

Wait a minute. You got to start this one again. This is a very complex one. Say it. Start again.

I'm not talking about.

You're talking about open marriage.

I'm not talking about marriages, or. I'm talking about relationship with others.

With others. Okay. Yeah, yeah, okay.

We seem limited in our ability to express the impulses that stem from deep within ourselves. Is this limitation inherited through our culture? Or is it a basic human limitation? And if it is, must we always be, as it were, alone with our experience?

I think our inability to express our. To acknowledge our impulse life is primarily a socialization process. It's the process of culture. And I think that it's the way in which we get acculturated so that a society. Society can function. It's because it's. A society has a hard time when there's immediate impulse expression for everybody all the time. It needs a certain amount of delay, of gratification, a certain amount of control, a certain amount of actually suppression, not necessarily repression, but it usually ends up repression. It is certainly possible to work with truth in a relationship to get to the point where more and more you are safe in expressing what your impulses are and your truth of your moment. Truth is one of the vehicles for deepening Spiritual awareness through another human being. And if there is a license for that in the relation, in any relationship with guru, with friend, with lover, with whatever it is, it is an absolutely optimal way of coming into a liquid spiritual relationship with another person. But it's very, very delicate because people are. Feel very vulnerable. They have parts of their mind that are cut off. The idea that's been socialized is if I show this part of me, I would not be acceptable. And the ability to risk that. Finally, you learn how to have your truth available. It doesn't mean you have to force your truth on anybody. But if you find somebody else that is willing to enter into a contract of truth with you, then you can share that and you can get closer and closer to the impulses. Doesn't mean you have to act on the impulses. I mean, I can say I have. The impulses arisen in me that I would like to see. See, you know, you cut into pieces if I felt that, or I'd like to make love with you or something like that. And that might not be socially acceptable or might not fit in with your model of reality. But if I feel safe enough, I can share that truth with you. And as you and I share those truths more and more, then our entrapment in our minds gets less and less. And we are able to allow the awareness to flow back and forth between us because we're both looking from the same place at our human condition together. The impulse, the repression of impulse is what blocks energy and what keeps other people as them rather than us. And the idea is to get to the point where you really live with us, not with them, not with him or with her, but with us. And finally, if you're really doing the yoga part of it with I, there is only an I in many forms. Do you hear that? So truth is one of the exciting vehicles to work with with relationship. And what I've learned is to use my lecture roll to make my truth as available as I possibly could. And what I find is people say to me, thank you for being so truthful. It makes it easier for me to be. Be truthful about myself. Because you've done that. And I think, well, it's a cheap price to offer yourself up for that purpose if that just in itself starts to help other people. Is that dealing with the question? I want to go back one second to the issue of committed relationships. You can enter into a contract with somebody that says, we will not have relationships with other people while we are together. And that will allow for certain Kind of safety and a certain kind of deepening. I think it. I can hear that as a very viable thing. You could equally enter into a relationship which says, we'll have an open marriage and we will work with it. If you. I think the. A contract between human beings should be honored. I think that creates an environment that's safe for inner work. It doesn't matter which contract it is, as long as it's a contract that's on it. And when you want to renegotiate the contract, you say, I want to renegotiate the contract. You don't renegotiate it unilaterally. You don't decide you're not going to fulfill the contract and then go off and do something else on your own. It has to be honorable between people. Those create the conditions for. For more subtle inner work where you can play it. You can go deeper and be safer. More questions from this group? Yeah. Okay. You mentioned earlier something about sexism. And I wondered if you think that men and women have got similar challenges at this time on the planet to awaken through relationships, or if you think that they're different. I think this is a very, very interesting time for women because the history of religious traditions has, for the most part, treated men and women very differently. And. In India, for example, The way a relationship is seen is that the woman has two forces that are very powerful in her. One is that she most easily can get into a transcendent state because of her chemistry. That in her menstrual cycle, she can get out. There are a lot of ways she can get out of her worldliness. But she also has a very powerful earth pull because of the nesting need. So that they see a woman as having these two forces very strong, and they experience the man as having much less of an earth or nesting pull, but tending to get much more caught in the mind and not having the energy to get out. So what they see a marriage is as the wife is the shakti, or energy, which gives the relationship sufficient juice for the man to get out. Then he isn't pulled back so hard, and then he can keep her out. So that they see that as a team venture. He can't get out without her. She can't stay out without him. And that's the way historically, that was understood in the marriage. And it was when you understood that you understood why. In India, most of the stories, the historical stories of the saints, revolved around the men who ended up in caves rather than the women. Because the men, once they got out There, there wasn't any, anything pulling them back to earth as much because they didn't have this dual function in life of reproduction, of taking care of their young. Now that was an excuse for a culture that really didn't give women the opportunity for spiritual practices that were, that should have been available to all human beings. And what we're finding now, and there certainly were plenty of examples taken on to Maima or Mirabai or many, many Teresa or people like that, there have been many, many women who have certainly come as close to enlightenment as men have come in terms of their spiritual work. So now it seems to me that the whole situation has opened up and you're taking cultural traditions that had a sex difference and you're trying to redefine them in a way that gives everybody equal opportunity. The predicament is you can't confuse equal opportunity. You mustn't let that mask the fact that there are differences in biochemistry and there are differences in the function of an incarnation, and there are differences between men and women in why a being takes an incarnation as a woman and as a man. And it's not lesser, it's just different. These are different functions. So that I think what happened in our societies most recently, I can see it in the United States, that when the women's movement started, or feminism, whatever that was called, that women's movement, that women interpreted equality as being equally in the mind as men were. And they in many ways started to reject the qualities of them that were part of the reason for their incarnation. They started to get alienated from their own truth in order to, to have equal opportunity in the business marketplace or something like that. That seemed to me to be an immature level of equality. And as time has gone on, it seems to me that it's maturing a great deal. So that women are beginning to hear that they have a choice. They have freedom to choose, and they have freedom to honor their uniqueness rather than to mask their. Their uniqueness. And so that we can arrive at the way. And in fact, it seems to me that in Europe, men and women have a much deeper intuitive sense of their maleness and femaleness than they do in the United States. In the United States, there seems to be much more of a kind of a superficial macho ness in men and a kind of a hysterical femininity in women that isn't coming from a deep truth of their beings. Now, in terms of spiritual truth, what you notice, it's interesting in the, in the gurus that as the gurus get further out Most of the men start to develop breasts. This is interesting. And the. There is a quality of androgyny in spiritual identity that is not social, but it's at some very deep level at which you are the mother and the father. And that happens to both women and men. I mean, Anandamayma, who was an incredibly delicate and graceful being, was also an incredibly fierce and strong woman. And you could feel that both those forces were acting in her. And Maharaj, my guru, was incredibly tender and also extremely fierce. And I can feel that the qualities that we attribute to women and men often start to merge in beings as they get more evolved spiritually. So I think that men have, in the terms of the religious traditions, they have a more clearly enunciated spiritual path. Women have got to, it seems to me, have started. Have still a time now to be very creative about how they work with these paths in terms of what is true and what isn't true and what is appropriate to take from another tradition and what must be created on its own own. And it's going to take several generations for the maturity of that process to happen where people aren't just reacting against the suppression that happened for so long. Like in India, for example, in the family, the woman is seen as the core and the central part of the family. And by her being a conscious, adharmic mother, mother and a dharmic wife and a dharmic homemaker, she was doing a yoga that brought her closer to God than if the man was being a lousy businessman or even, you know, I mean, it was because people understood individual differences and each person played their part as dharma. We've lost that a little bit in our understanding. But. And that's what I say about the maturity. When we mature, we will understand which of the things we threw over out of a wrong interpretation of equality. And we will begin to honor what is true to each human being's needs to manifest. But I think it's absolutely right. And that's part of why women weren't historically pointed out as the spiritual teachers. Because their role wasn't as a teacher. Their role was as a support system. That was their way. They became saints. They were saints through their supporting, not through the front work. The front work was. I mean, I laugh as an anthropologist when I've studied those cultures where the women kept the family together and they carried the wheat and they did all that. And the men sat in the marketplace exchanging beads, and the men were the important people, and the women were treated like, you know, nothing. And yet they were the root of the whole system. And I could feel in India that the woman is much more the center of the whole social structure and that her spiritual consciousness, because every home in India and the villages I live in has its own puja room. The woman keeps the puja room. The woman does all the services. The woman is concerned with all of these issues, and she becomes the spiritual connection in the situation. And when you look at most of these gurus like Maharaj, most of the people that came to see him were the women. The men came and discussed their crops and things like that. The women came and did aarti and did puja around him all the time. And so I think that women have a very challenging time in the west at this moment to find their way through, to find what they must honor in their beings and what they must demand of the society to be heard.

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