Ep. 281 – Across the Decades: Ram Dass on Love and the Path of the Heart

In a world that feels more divided than ever, where do we turn for refuge? Join us this summer, August 14th 18th, at the RAM Dass Legacy Summer Mountain Retreat, a sacred gathering at the Art of Living Retreat center in the breathtaking Blue Ridge Mountains. Together, we'll explore the theme intimacy with all things. Learning to deepen our connection with ourselves, each other, and the world around us. Experience four nights of electrifying kirtan with Krishna Das, wisdom from Ram Dass and teachings From Acharya Shunya, Dr. Robert Thurman, East Forest, Nina Rao, and more. This is more than a retreat. It's a homecoming. A space to breathe, to heal, and to awaken to the vast love that connects us all. Registration is now open. Visit ramdass.org boone to reserve your spot today.

Finally, what you become, or in the process you become, you become an environment, a vibratory rate. Your life is your message. You dwell in love. And everybody that meets you just by your presence has an opportunity to come into love. That's all. You don't lay a trip. You don't proselytize. You don't prove. You give people plenty of space. I won't lay a trip on you. I am what I am. If you don't come on, you're right there. A child will hear it. The hardest person will hear it.

Welcome to Ram Dass Here and Now podcast. I'm Jackie Debrinska, your host, and you are the Ram Dass community. This is another special episode. It's profound, but it's also a little hard to introduce because it is about the complex topic called love. From the moment we're born, we're inundated with messages about what love is and what it isn't. Often we're told it comes from outside of ourselves, that it can be given as sort of a reward system. We learn that it's transactional, um, and unconsciously, we learn how we need to mold ourselves in order to get it. Then, as we grow up and grow into romance, we're often turned.

We're.

We're often told that we need to learn to love ourselves so that others might. But what a strange message, right? Like how often have we been caught by self judgment or self hate and remained entirely lovable unless by others? Some of us learn that intimacy is really scary and so we deflect it, maybe even using spiritual phrases like don't get attached, baby. Or we learn to rest our own self esteem on how much we give to others or how others are reflecting us. And so we try to Control them so that we feel okay. And regardless of what you learned about love, most of us grew up in a culture where love was kind of manipulated either by religion or family or advertising, where we subtly or not so subtly get taught that we're kind of unlovable unless we act right or look right or buy the right thing or achieve the right goals. But what if. What if I think of this all of the time? What if we had simply been reflected as love from the beginning by others who also knew that they were loved? So years ago, I was a minister and the main founder, Howard Hanger, would perform this baptism that would leave the entire community in tears. And so he would hold up this little baby, this precious, sweet little baby, and he would say these words. He would say, we're here to celebrate you. Here to celebrate the once in a lifetime miracle of you. Here to celebrate that never ever, anywhere, anytime, any place, will there ever be another miracle like you. We're here to welcome you into this world, to thank God for you, to bless you and get you going in this life. And then he would ask first the parents, then the family, and then the whole community to make a vow to this child. And I'll just tell you the first part. He would say, will you endeavor in every way by what you do and what you say to enable this child to know that he, she, they, is a precious child of God and brings God great pleasure just by being alive? And he would go on from there with these vows. And it wasn't like we were just blessing this baby. There was this moment where it was like everybody would remember who they really were. They would get past all of the learnings and remember that blessed, whole loving and loved place in themselves. So I hope that's what we get from this. You know, I don't know. I don't know Ram Dass's relationship history or his wounds or healings. But I do know that love, it's not something we figure out in our heads. I know that we've been trying to dissect it forever, but I think maybe it lives just beyond the edges of theory, which I think at the end of this episode, you see Ram Dass living into it in that way. And I cannot in any way speak to love with any kind of authority. For me, it brings up lots of questions and memories and grief and confusion and joy. And so if you want to have conversations about love, please join the upcoming Soul Pod community gathering where we will talk about this episode. Go to ramdas.org Fellowship and I don't know. Maybe there's two things going on at once, right? Like there's this line from John Craigie that says there ain't no meal big enough that won't leave you hungry tomorrow. And maybe love is like that from this dualistic plane. We need to continue to give it and receive it every single day. And on another plane we just are it. Okay, so let's jump in. It's through the ages. So the first clip is from 1969. It's the early years of Ram Dass and he's still integrating the parts of him that was a psychologist. And then this wild opening from India and Neem Karoli Baba and lsd. The culture was grappling with the end of the Summer of Love and the violence of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement or the reaction to the Civil rights movement. Psychology was still mostly concerned with dysfunction, but there was talk that was beginning around peak experiences and the centrality of love to human flourishing. So this clip brings in that early alchemy when love stopped being personal and started to become a portal. As Rumi wrote, close your eyes, fall in love, stay there.

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Stress from the workplace can be overwhelming. This summer we encourage everyone to to take some time and focus on wellness. A holiday is great, but it isn't a long term solution to stress. Therapy can help you navigate whatever challenges the workday might bring. It's a great way to learn healthy coping skills, alter negative behaviors and much more. With the convenience of joining therapy sessions at the click of a button, BetterHelp fits seamlessly into busy lives. Plus you can switch therapists at any time. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Unwind from work with BetterHelp, our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com ramdas that's BetterHelp. H E L P.com ramdas.

I'd like.

To.

Explore that equation further. That energy is equal to consciousness and add to that identity further. Is equal to love, is equal to truth, is equal to beauty. And point out that at the top of the pyramid all these things come together and become one. So that the highest music is the music is the inner music and the highest artist is the artist who becomes but the pure vehicle for the statement. And the highest lover is the person who is love. It's strange to be able to say to somebody, I love you more than I have ever loved anybody before. And yet I am totally indifferent to whether I ever see you again. Because the world of interpersonal love ceases to be enough. I first learned this from Meher Baba, who is the personification of pure love. And I learned it in with lsd. I had taken lsd and it was after Meher Baba had written and said I could take it three more times. So I took it the first time and there happened to be a book of Meher Bhava's called Listen to Humanity. And there was a full face portrait of Meher Baba looking directly out. And I picked up the book and it was right at the very high moment in the session. And I immediately was in another place. And where I was was in the Greek hills. And it was a warm sunny day and the flowers were in the fields and it was quite beautiful. And I was walking over the hills and I had my little rucksack on my back. And as I came in over the hill, a little old man came the other way. And we met on this path. And he looked at me and I looked at him. And the sheer joy of the beauty of the day when you meet somebody in those conditions. We acknowledged each other's presence, like loving, open. And I looked into his eyes for but the brief second it takes to pass somebody. And I saw something in his eyes which stopped me. That timeless moment when my thoughts did all those things in a timeless moment and just as we're passing and I looked and I thought, what is this look I'm seeing in his eyes? Is it a look of compassion? I've seen compassion before. It's a look of wisdom. I've seen old men that are wise before. This is some look I've never seen before. What could this look be? As I reflected upon it in that timeless moment, I suddenly was aware that what I was seeing was somebody looking at me saying, I am entirely fulfilled, entirely fulfilled for eternity. To just look into your eyes, it's enough. This is complete love and I am here forever. And nobody had ever looked at me that way before. I mean, people look at you like, let's groom together for a while or I will love you for now.

But for eternity.

A totally content, fulfilled person. And I said to this little man on the mountains in the Greek hills, Greek mountains. I'm sorry, I don't know myself well enough to commit myself to look at you, fraternity. But for the moment, I'd love to look at you. And we looked at each other. And sometime later, which was sometime later when I started to come into another state of consciousness. I suddenly realized I was looking at a book. And I got completely freaked. And in my agitation, I shoved the book and the book turns so that now the picture of the book was faced this way, and it was aimed directly at a bottle of Squirt. And he was looking at the bottle of Squirt with I love you eternally. I could look at you forever and my ego was shattered. I mean, it's one thing to look at me eternally. It's quite another thing to look at a bottle of Squirt. And I brought him back to me and I looked at him and I said, I wonder what it must be to be behind those eyes, what it would be like. And I got in behind his eyes and I looked out and I couldn't look at anything. Because at that moment my head was still too full of time and space and interpersonal things. And to love somebody eternally meant a commitment in time and space that I could not make. I couldn't understand that the eternal moment is the eternal moment right here and now, forever. And that he could look at the bottle of Squirt and me and the next thing. And it's all that same place, because you are being that state of love. I now conceive of the fact that falling in love means, like falling into a bathtub of love. That as long as you think of love as a verb, you think of it as something taking an object. When we are in love, it is. We are in a state of being. Love is, and we are in it. And his words are, love has to spring spontaneously from within. And it is in no way amenable to any form of inner or outer force. Love and coercion can never go together. But though love cannot be forced on anyone, it can be awakened in him through love itself. Love is essentially self communicative. Those who do not have it catch it from those who have it. True love is unconquerable and irresistible. And it goes on gathering power and spreading itself until eventually it transforms everyone whom it touches.

By 1979, Ram Dass had been teaching in the west for nearly a decade. Be Here now had spread wide and far. And he was still straddling these two worlds, Western psychology and Eastern devotion, and trying to answer deeply human questions, including how do we make love a spiritual path without bypassing the messiness of it? So in our culture, attachment theory was reshaping how we understood love. They were showing that our very early bonds shaped our adult intimacy. And at the same time, this self help movement was booming. It was offering a lot of advice. It was looking at our brokenness, and hopefully it was offering some wisdom as well. The beloved bell hooks soon wrote that famous quote, love is an action, not simply a feeling. And for many of us, many seekers, love was beginning to mean something far more complex than just romance. And in this next clip, you can hear Ram Dass weave these mechanics of falling in love with the mystical quality of being love. He's showing us a new kind of map, one that doesn't just involve the romantic beloved, but the inner beloved as well.

I was a psychologist as a professor of psychology at one time at Harvard, and I studied a great deal about imprinting behavior in animals. And, you know, probably most of you know by now that there are certain patterns that if you show them to a baby gosling, it'll approach and open its mouth. And if you show it the pattern a different way, it'll run away and hide. And it's built into the mechanism. It's instinctively built in. Well, you and I, in our incarnations in our bodies here on Earth, we are complex packages of mechanisms of this nature, very subtle mechanisms, chemical, biochemical, psychological, the way we were. And now and then we meet somebody and we, quote, fall in love. Another way of saying that within this framework I was just mentioning is that.

That person.

Is the key stimulus. That person is the. Is the key that allows you to touch the place in yourself where you are love. When you say I fell in love with her or with him, it means she or he is my connection to the place in myself where I am love. And when I am in love, the whole world looks different because love is a flick plane of consciousness so that your beloved becomes your vehicle for tuning, for shifting channels. Do you hear what I'm saying? So when two people, and if you want to make it sound, if you want to run the crudity of it through, it's just like a junkie with a connection. And you get hooked on your connection and you're very worried about what's going to happen to your connection. You want to make sure where they are and that you've got their telephone number. And it's the same way you feel towards somebody you're in love with. You want to possess them. And one of the things that strangles love relationships is that possessive quality of wanting to possess your connection because you don't know how to get to that place by yourself. And that's your vehicle for getting there. And when two people are in love with each other, they are both connections to Help each other get into the place of love, and then they meet here in love. Now what happens is that through spiritual practices, through tuning, through quieting the mind and opening the heart, through just tuning and tuning and tuning, you start to dwell, be able to flick through, practice your consciousness and your heart until you come into the space of love. And then an interesting thing happens. And if you watch some of the social phenomena that have occurred in the recent years, you'll see that this is an interesting one. That as that happens, you start to experience love towards more and more people and you learn how to live in a world of lovers. Now we come back to something that you and I also share besides just the fact that we are spiritual, sharing a spiritual journey in life. And that is that for us, because you are connected with Christ and I also with Christ and also with my guru and also with other forms. Our paths are devotional in nature, and that means our paths are through our hearts. And there are a variety of ways in which the heart path works in Hinduism. They spell them out. There is the relationship between mother and child, for example, between Mary and Jesus. There is the relationship of friends, like between John and Jesus. There is the relationship of disciple to master. There is the relationship of servant to master. There is the relationship of father and child. There is the relationship of lover and beloved. Now, ultimately, you will find that because of your unique set of patternings, one of those forms will feel most attractive to you. Devotionally. You will explore them all, but they. One of them will feel most attractive. But as you get further into it, what I find is that all those ways become my way. And that I get so that everywhere I look, I see my beloved. I don't see the form as a historical form or as a special form. It's as if this is all God. And every one of you is my guru, come in drag to catch me. You're coming to say, I'm going to. I'll catch you. You'll think I'm somebody else. You won't see that I'm God too. The quality of my guru was that he was nobody special, just another being. There was nobody there. There was just every time you looked, you just fell in love. And my path is very simple and it's your path. My path is the path of service and of love. Service because there's nothing else I can do. And love because it is such an absolutely royal road through. It's so much easier than the way of Gyan, the way of knowledge, because all you have to do is love. Maharaj kept saying to me, you don't have to change anybody. You just have to love them. When you go around changing people, you forgot perfection. Finally, what you become, or in the process, you become, you become an environment, a vibratory rate. Your life is your message. You dwell in love. And everybody that meets you just by your presence has an opportunity to come into love. That's all. You don't lay a trip. You don't proselytize. You don't prove. You give people plenty of space. I won't lay a trip on you. I am what I am. If you don't come on, you're right there. A child will hear it. The hardest person will hear it. I teach in prisons and I go in and I'm met with paranoia. And all I have to be is straight. And just remember, this is my beloved. I don't have to remember. I just have to look. I have to look beyond the mind projections that they're sending out. They're sending out. This is who I am. I'm a mean. Watch it. You better watch it. I know who you are. You know, that's their mind.

That and their mind net is right there.

And right beyond the net is the beloved. Now, it gets scary when you really understand that you're in love with the universe. Because love is love. It's got all of it connected with it. It's very open, it's very flowing. It's very. Doesn't do well with rules. Doesn't do well with rules. I remember once I was in an ashram in India, and I was the head of the ashram. Said to me, ram Dass, get up and dance, as I was known, because I would ecstatically dance. But ecstatically dance in command is a whole other matter. But I got up because he was the head of the ashram and he was a very fine man, and he's here in Oakland, Swami Muktananda. And I got up and I started to dance. And I got more and more ecstatic. And in my ecstasy, I crossed over the line in the middle of the hall between the men's part and the women's part. Because ecstasy, I mean, ecstasy is ecstasy, you know? And immediately he stopped the music and everything, and the whole thing was over. Because ecstasy has no place in an ashram. And that's one of your predicaments, that when you really fall in love, it just opens and opens and opens and you just don't know where to hold on anymore. And then you've got to have A lot of trust. A lot of faith. A lot of faith.

So it's 1986, and Ram Dass is hosting retreats all around the country and world. And it's not just about the teachings. It's about creating a container where hearts can soften. He's not just a voice of wisdom. He's, dare I say, a midwife for emotional safety. It's a moment in Western psychology where we're beginning to reckon with emotional wounding. Alice Miller's drama of a gifted child has just made waves. And therapists were sort of naming how childhood conditioning created templates of fear and scarcity and grasping when it came to love. So Ram Dass isn't only talking about trauma. He's inviting us to see how easily we can confuse the object of love with the source of love and how we can quickly slip into fear. I've read about that, at least. So the poet David White once wrote, the act of love is to let the other person be who they are. The work of love is to keep opening to that truth. So this next clip opens a mirror. Where are we still trying to hold love and what might happen if we simply rested in it?

The quality of this workshop is very.

Very special.

I think many of you are feeling that it's in a way deeper, in a soft, sweet, emotional way, than previous workshops we may have done together. And it feels like we are getting closer to a place of the trusting heart together. And it feels very much like a family gathered. I think everybody's feeling it. I don't have to say it. I don't have to get your assurance that that's true, because I can sense it deeply. For some of you who live in the world in which you keep your heart very guarded, when you come into a safe place where there is satsang or sangha, and you open this way and you feel these feelings, for some of you, it generates some anxiety, some vulnerability, and for others, it's very intense in the sense that you. You're open to people in a way that you haven't been used to, and you bring to bear a lot of models you have about what you're feeling. And the way I've talked about this in my lectures, which I'm sure many of you familiar with this, is that you and I have grown up in a world in which we were trained through, whether we like it or not, conditional love. Because there was a lot of pressure on parents to socialize, children and the parent does use just their own feelings of adequacy and all as a parent is the way they affect the child's development. And so there is this bit of a little emotional. We talked about how you say no without withdrawing love. Well, as a big one there about people, us having grown up, where parents, being very human, have pain when they say no and they pull back a little bit. And that pull back is a little bit withdrawal. And we all go through this feeling of not feeling quite safe about love. And when we feel it, there is a tremendously strong tendency to want to hold it and to grasp it and to collect it. And that grasping is coming out of a whole history of fear and lack of faith, if you will, and of deprivation. It's like working on a deprivation model that when you meet somebody and you look into their eyes or you look into their hearts and something releases in you and you experience this feeling of love. You assume that you are in love with this person. And you might say, I love you. And what I love you means is I love you specifically. And what follows from that? If I love you and you love me, well, why are we apart? Why shouldn't we be together all the time? So why don't we create a nest? Now, if you look at it in the sense that in the usual way of I fell in love with this.

Person.

There'S another way of seeing that, which is this person is a mechanism, is a stimulus, is something in the world that was just right in a key sense to release us into the place in ourselves where we are love. And we say, as a result, I am in love with you. Means another way of saying it is you turn me on to the place in myself where I am love, where I can't get to without you. Now we're talking about you being my connection to that place in myself where I am love, where I can't get without you. And then I want to hold on to my connection, just as any good junkie would like to do. You want to know where they are every day. You want to make sure they're not serving too many other people.

It'll question your.

I mean, you can hear the whole metaphor. Just works right down the line. You want to possess that person. Now, the predicament is that in a lot of relationships, that particular what's in imprinting theory, instinctual theory is called key imprinting, key mechanism, key stimulus that released that place in you where you are. Love may not work later on because it changes. It may have been passion, it may have been a certain set of qualities, and then it changes later. It's at the same level that a baby duck, when it sees the profile of a mother duck going by. And if you cut it out of paper and move it across, the baby duck will open its mouth. It's just a mechanism built into the whole process. And each one of us has a unique thing that releases that quality in us. Some of us may never meet it in a lifetime, and some of us do. Well, now, when you feel that feeling inside yourself, as I say, and it's released through another person, you want to be with that. Where are you going to be on Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday and all the time? Because it feels so good to be in love. It feels so good to be in love. But now what is happening and what we're talking about and what we're experiencing here is we're beginning to recognize as we open to that part of ourself that is not defined and boundaried by our personality and by our bodies and just opening, expanding our awareness through meditation, through chanting, through being safe, through all that thing, we are beginning to just naturally open to the place in ourselves which is this place of love. Now, it's all interesting because you get so that you don't need a person to release it.

But you are in.

This space and you start to look around and it's almost like whoever happens to catch your eye first, you experience that feeling in relation to that person. And because you have been in a deprivation model so long, you have these very strong habits of wanting to collect that person. It's a very natural thing. I mean, if you just recognize how the process works. So the way I talk about it in my lectures is you meet somebody, you fall in love, you say, let's nest. You build a nest. You're all cuddly, and you say, I'm going down to the market to get some tofu and whatever. And you're tofu and salami to include everybody. And you're at the checkout counter and. And you look into the eyes of the person at the checkout counter and it happens again. See, because it's in you. You see, it's not being released now by any special thing. It's in you. So everywhere you look, you see it. So you look and you say you feel it. You've never been in love with anybody as much as you are with this person at the checkout counter. And you say to them, have you considered a menage a trois? Well, now, recognizing that the problem is that it's inside you. It's not out there. You're now about to face some new problems, as you understand, not only about the menage a trois, but how are you going to walk out on the street anymore? You better wear those glasses. But reflecting inward because. Because you're going to be an atomite. I mean, you're going to start to have these community of lovers. How many can you handle? I mean, it's a political, economic problem in no time whatsoever. And it creates tremendous social, emotional, political problems because you just become the great lover. And everybody starts to feel like that. And it's true. You are. You are in love. You are in love. And you start to realize you're going to be in love with everybody more and more now. What are you going to do about it? What finally is required is that you give up the deprivation model. The model that says, I'm going to run out of it. So I got to collect it. The idea there's not going to be more of it. Because that deprivation model is what does you in. It's an old habit of mind. And you get. So I remember going through these stages myself where I felt it and oh, my God, I just wanted a whole hold. And then I felt it again and I wanted to hold and I kept holding until I was like holding one a day. And it was a little too complicated for me. My life, I mean, it's so many lovers all at once. And then I realized I had to shift gears. And I shifted gears just enough so that when I'd meet somebody, since I still had this very overlearned deprivation model in me, and I'd look at somebody in the eyes and I'd expect that feeling. I'd say, do you feel what I'm feeling?

No.

Let's have a cup of coffee together. Let me take your name and number just in case I run out of the others, you know, I mean, it's like, I don't have time for you now, but let me collect you for later, you know? And then it graduated to still another level where I got to the point where I could walk down the street and you'd look at somebody and you'd feel this incredible love go back and forth between you, which used to in the old days, say, oh, we're soulmates. I mean, that kind of intensity. And you look at the person and your eyes might widen and like, you there, I'm there.

Wow.

But you didn't even collect the name any longer. You just went on. And then you get to the point which you can hardly believe you've arrived at, where you walk down the street. And you look at people and you love them as you've never loved them before. You just love them so much. And there's nothing to do whatsoever, not even open your eyes, a spark or do anything, because everything you do starts a karmic chain. You might smile or love, but you're just being that way because you love. It's like you're with your beloved all the time. And you change from the deprivation model to the model. There's an abundance of it. Almost all psychology is based on the fact there's not enough love. What the world needs now is love, sweet love. Well, the fact is that we are finding out a secret about that because we are transforming ourselves into the place where you are that quality. Now you've got to develop the habits that are appropriate to it. Just understand that it's something happening inside yourself and that you have a right to it. It's your natural heritage, and that ultimately you will live in it. And you're going to have to learn how to be with your beloved all the time, everywhere you look. And it's an extremely interesting, transformative experience in life and the way in which you learn how not to keep creating crisis out of that phenomenon.

By the 1990s, Ram Dass had lived through every decades of devotion, experimentation, grief, growth, and so much more. And his teachings are full of joy and clarity and also a deeper understanding of complexity. At this point, he'd fallen in love, struggled in partnerships, lost dear friends, and was becoming less attached to being a teacher and more content in that beingness. At the same time, the culture was evolving. Psychology was integrating body and spirit. There was the language of the inner child, work, somatic therapy, and understanding. Trauma was more common. And spiritual seekers were learning to speak about boundaries and vulnerability with much more nuance. One of my favorite writers and a dear friend of Ram Dass, Clarissa Pinkala Estes, she wrote this great quote. She said, to love means to stay with. It means to emerge from a fantasy world into the real world and to initiate yourself into the art of intimacy. So the question wasn't just how do I find love, but what do I do with all the love that's inside me? Ram Dass, in this next moment, he reflects on this paradox of love, how it opens us, traps us, teaches us, and ultimately asks us to surrender. He quotes Khalil Gibran. Even as love crowns you, it shall crucify you. And maybe that's what makes it sacred.

This is from the I Ching. The master said, life leads the thoughtful person On a path of many windings. Now the course is checked. Now it runs straight again. Here winged thoughts may pour freely forth in words. But there the heavy burden of knowledge must be shut away in silence. But when two people are at one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze. And when two people understand each other in their inmost hearts, their words are sweet and strong, like the fragrance of orchids. The path of love. The path of the heart. The path of emotion, relationship, dualism, taking you to the essence of love.

Taking.

You from loving to being.

Love.

It is the path of the heart. It, like all paths, is fraught with pitfalls and traps. And most of our emotions either are in the service of our minds.

Or.

Are frightening things that overwhelm us and make us afraid. So we protect ourselves from. So we come through life a little bit like hungry ghosts. We are beings that have huge needs for love. But seemingly, it's like we have some kind of amoeba that doesn't allow us to digest our food. So though we get love, it goes through us, and then we need love all over again. And it's so deep in all of us that we've built a whole reality around it. And we think that's the way it is, that everybody needs love. And that if you don't get it, you are deprived. And that the more of it, the better. And you need it every day from everything. In that sense, it's like an achievement. You see people that are achievers. The minute they achieve something, it becomes irrelevant and their awareness turns to the next achievement. Because they are addicted to the practice, not to the goal. The predicament with loving is the power of the addiction of the practice of loving somebody, of getting so caught in the relationship that you can't ever arrive at the essence of dwelling in love. If you imagine it in this sequence, that you are cut off in your heart from love. So you feel hungry. What that hunger is, is the hunger to come home. It's the hunger to be at peace, to be feeling.

At one.

In the universe where lover and beloved merge. It's the place to feel fulfilled in the moment, to be fully in the moment, closed off. You are like a bee looking for a flower. You're flying around, buzzing, looking. And just as with baby ducks, you can create a silhouette of a mother duck. And with a baby duck, if you run that silhouette by that is the particular key stimulus that will awake the response of following and opening the mouth. And it's called imprinting. And so you can imprint the duck to a silhouette of a mother duck. So there are certain very deep patterns. Whether they're psychologically learned or karmic or astral. In terms of your astrology, whichever level you want. There are set of factors in you that are like a lock waiting for a key to open it. But the key must fit into that lock. It must be a certain pattern or concatenation of factors. Like the fact that I could open to my guru. I am sure had something to do with my relationship to my father. You think, well, a spirit is the spirit, and psychological is psychological. But all of your psychological conditioning prepares you to be attracted to certain methods or certain paths or to certain people. For many people, the energies they're working with at the time they are seeking this love so strongly are second chakra energies, energies of desire, of sexual desire, of desire for union that is relational. And the energy gets into that pattern. And you associate making love as a vehicle to coming into love. So you're going along as a little lock waiting for key. And along comes a shadow of lover goes by. And like a little duckling, you turn and you start a walk after it. It just happened to be the particular part pattern that turned you on, that opened you up, that did it. And you say, I think I'm in love with him or with her. See, that's the key right there. Not, I think I'm in love. I think I'm in love with her or with him. And if you're lucky, your key unlocks her or his lock. And his key unlocks your lock or her key unlocks your lock. So you get into, you love me, I love you. Here we are. And it's incredible because through this dynamic you have opened to the place. It's like the triangle. It's like what Bly talks about. As the two people together are feeding something that they don't even know. It's their feeding the unitive space behind the dualism. They're feeding the quality of love. And when they're together, they touch it. What we're really saying is when you say, I am in love with you, said somewhat blandly, you are the key stimulus that is opening me to the place in myself where I am love. Which I can't get to except through you. So you can imagine if you've been going around like a hungry ghost starving for love. And you suddenly meet somebody. That opens you to this well, this reservoir, this ocean of love, this ocean of feeling at home. And it's all rye bread, you know, you're just so happy. That quality that happens when you open to that. And you did it through meditation or you did it through falling in love, whatever your method was, through acid, whatever you did it through, don't you get addicted to your method? You know if acid did it, you want to know who your connection is, don't you? So if you met a master and the master shared with you a method, and the method worked to tune you to the point place in yourself of awareness of love, you end up loving that method and you love that master. And the minute you do it, you get really drunk on it and very addicted to it. And fanatics in every religion are really calm adepts or addicts because all methods are traps. And yet the bizarre thing about methods is they don't work unless you get trapped. So you can only hope that a method, ultimately, after it traps you, it self destructs and you are left free of method. But you got to go through the method. And the method is scary because it does trap you. And the path of love is where you open to some to that quality. But the method that opened you when you're hungry is usually another person. And then you get very attached or addicted to being in the presence of that other person. And then starts the fear, the fear that that person is going to die or leave you or won't be around. And then you get jealous and possessive and on and on it goes. And you just keep creating a hell realm around the addiction to the vehicle for coming to love. For even as love crowns you, brings you into that space, so shall it crucify you. Even as love is for your growth, so is love for your pruning. Even as love ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, so shall love descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

So this clip is from 2017, which is about 20 years after Ram Dass stroke. So he's slower and he's softer and more stripped down. And this grand teacher that once filled auditoriums with stories, he's now teaching from a wheelchair. And he has aphasia and paralyzation. And there's pauses between the words and just this sort of deepening sense of stillness. At the same time, the culture, it was more attuned to what trauma meant, how it affected our bodies and minds. It was more focused on embodiment and the limits of peak experiences. So it was no longer about escape. It was about presence. And as always, Ram Dass led the way here he talks about including everything. He was in pain all of the time, and he included his pain. He even talks about including our judgments, including the parts of us that forget. Another dear friend of his wrote. Another dear friend of his, Mark Nepo, wrote to love by admitting everything is sacred. And this is who Ram Dass was post stroke. He was loving what is no matter what. So check it out.

I was giving a lecture in a restaurant.

And.

And I was telling the people. I was just loving people, everything. I love you. I love this tent. I love. I love. I love the rug. Well, this rug had spots all over. And my friend who was in the audience and was from New York City and, and he came up and he said, you know, you told me you loved me, but I. And I. I felt that. But this rudd. And he couldn't comprehend loving him and this rug. And he. He sent me from New York a rug, a little tiny rug with spots on it. And he said, these, this could be in the place of a picture of Maharaj. And he signed it your rug. But I think those. We hung it. Spotted rug. And it reminds me of judging is up here. Love is here. And it's not. I don't love you. But, but, but not you. No. I love. I love the universe. I love the universe. I love this moment. In this moment. In this moment. Wow. This moment just is lovable. I don't judge, but if I do judge, I love it. This moment, this moment, this moment. Everything. In this moment, everything. Your bad thoughts.

Your.

All the negative things, all your aches and pains, which I'm really just love it, love it. And that means. It means. Loving means approaching.

Means.

Merging with it. Merging with this moment. Just this moment. Loving is going towards something. If you want the plane of consciousness that is one, you might as well go and go towards everything. When I.

Do.

We love it. Yeah. Love the truck. I went. I was meditating on loving everything. And I looked at the wall. I love the wall. Well, I said, it's God's manifestation. I love it. For that reason, people created it. It's made of cells that are. Each one has God in it. But I couldn't rationalize. I just loved it. I love it. Just this. Just this.

Neem Karoli Baba told Ram Dass to tell the truth. And Ram Dass said, love tells the truth. It's not always the polished truth. It's not necessarily the easy truth. It's the soul's truth, the one that sees through personality and into the essence of who we all are. So over the decades, Ram Dass peeled back all of the layers, layer after layer, from the psychedelic euphoria to the devotional ecstasy, to heartbreak, to silence. And so what remains here, it's not a concept. It's almost like he's a frequency or a field, which maybe that's what love is. Not an object, not a pellet to be exchanged, but a field that we fall out of, fall into. We are. Ram Dass reminds us that coming home to love means loving everything, even the parts of us that forget. And that's why it's hard for me to talk about love, because there are a lot of things I find hard to love. Do you love injustice? Do you love those who inflict pain on others or innocent animals? Father Greg Boyle says something that really hit home. He said, if hurt people, hurt people, then it must be true that cherished people cherish people. And so maybe that's what's ours to do, to cherish ourselves, to cherish each other, and to do our best to live into a world where all beings are cared for. So thanks for listening. May this transition ripple out through your life and into the lives of all who you touch. And may it be a benefit for all beings everywhere. As Ram Dass would say, it's all lovable and it's all grist for the mill. Namaste. Blessings.

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.

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Stress from the workplace can be overwhelming. This summer we encourage everyone to take some time and focus on wellness. A holiday is great, but it isn't a long term solution to stress. Therapy can help you navigate whatever challenges the workday might bring. It's a great way to learn healthy coping skills, alter negative behaviors, and much more. With the convenience of joining therapy sessions at the click of a button, BetterHelp fits seamlessly into busy lives. Plus, you can switch therapists at any time. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Unwind from work with BetterHelp, our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com ramdass that's BetterHelp. H E-L-P.com ramdass.