Ep. 283 – Your Karma Defines Your Dharma

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And what you do is you just start flipping and taking what you're given and start to work with it. In other words, your karma defines your dharma. That means what you got is what you work with. I mean, like, my baldness is my karma. I mean, it's my genetics. It's, you know, it's everything. Now it becomes my dharma. Now I can use it in order to become free of being bald or being not bald or whatever.

Welcome back to another episode of Here and Now with Ram Dass. This is episode 283. Your karma defines your dharma. Always a pleasure to be with all of you as we dive deeper into these perennial wisdoms and teachings by our beloved Ram Dass. So this episode comes from a lecture he gave at the omega Institute in 1992. And Omega was one of those special places where Ram Dass would return again and again. And even today, it's this special place that sort of takes us out of the rush of our daily life. And it's a place where people get together to listen deeply and to question and to open. And so while this talk is 30 years old, it still lands squarely in the heart of this moment, because that time also felt full of uncertainty and longing and change and possibility. So if you're feeling a little chaotic these days or some unraveling or pressure to keep going when things don't seem to make sense, I know you know you're not alone. And here Ram Dass doesn't necessarily give us the answers or the step by step instructions, but he does return to this deeper stream of truth that runs beneath the surface of our lives. Which is your path is what is in front of you. It's the part of the garden you can touch that the only way through is through, that this is the curriculum right now, right here, this time, this place. So if you're feeling tired or overwhelmed or like your practice hasn't been making you more peaceful lately, well, that's part of the path. And hopefully here Ram Dass gives us a little bit of hope and as always, with a lot of humor, humility and clarity. So thank you for tuning in. And just a reminder, if you want to skip these introductions, if you want to go ad free, if you want to support, love, serve, remember, in continuing to bring you these lectures with such great sound quality, such lovely curation, please join Patreon. It's a great way to support the wisdom that comes through every two weeks. Go to patreon.com ram dass podcast so take a breath, feel the ground beneath you, and let's begin. Here is Ram Dass here and now.

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The Kabir quote Friend, tell me what I can do about this world. I hope hold to and keep spinning out. I gave up sewn cloth and wore a robe. But I noticed one day that the cloth was well woven so I bought some burlap But I still throw it elegantly over my left shoulder. I pulled back my sexual longings. Now I discover that I am angry a lot. I gave up rage. Now I notice that I'm greedy. All day I worked hard at dissolving the greedy and now I am proud of myself. Kabir says, listen my friend, there are very few that find the path. And from beautiful poet Rumi just a few lines. If you're a friend of God, fire is your water. You should wish to have a hundred thousand sets of moth wings so you could burn them away. One set a night the moth sees light and goes into the fire. You should see fire and go towards light. Fire is what of God, is world consuming water, world protecting. Somehow each gives the appearance of the other. To these eyes you have now, what looks like water burns. What looks like fire is a great relief to be inside. I want to share with you just a. The understanding of how profound that is. We are in a process where you start out in life so attached to desires for things and worldly states and relations, social things and being part of the web and part of the delight of nature. And then you see how the attachment to the experience of all that is, in a way separating you always. It's putting you into an object relationship with the universe around you. And then the awakening starts in which you realize that there's a shared awareness, there's only one of it behind, or there is. There's just this spaciousness. And you start to push away a lot of the things of the world in order to cultivate these other states of awareness. And then the completion occurs as you come back into it, into the form, as in a celebratory mood in which you delight in family, you delight in nature, you delight in the things of life because they are no longer seen as needed. Or the vehicles for you getting back to God. Because you are living out of the union with God. If you look at the nature of relationship in relation to spiritual practice, you see that at first you start out quite deeply involved in relationship with parents, with siblings, then later and playmates, then later with partners, etc. Bosses, employees, so on. And then you begin to see that unending web of stuff. And you start to cultivate deeper parts of you. And then you come to a place and what we do is we come to a retreat in which we kind of pull back from the complexity of our daily lives in order to cultivate certain qualities in our beings of open heart, of quiet mind, in order to be able to function more effectively in the worlds we live in all the time. That's one stage. Another stage is where the taste of freedom and the taste of joy and spaciousness, even in the midst of all of the suffering. The potential of that is so profound and it's so compelling that it isn't enough just to use seven days in a summer. It isn't enough just to use the time on your meditation cushion. It becomes so compelling that you want to use everything in your life as a vehicle for remembering or for awakening. And you start to involve yourself in using all of it. And so you see relationship as a practice in order to come To a place, in a way, in it, but behind it, behind it and in it. And you start to work with it as method. You start to work with each thing in your life as method, as practice. And as the surrender becomes deeper, the motivation and the way in which you do each thing changes. And I can. And sometimes you just do it. Like when I was taking care of my father, I started out because he needed. My stepmother died and he needed. Or even when she was dying, they needed some support. And I looked around and I was unmarried in the family and I was mobile and I could come and help. And even though there was money for support systems and all that, I just felt. I was, felt, well, this is. This is my karma. This is what is in front for me at this moment. So I went to do it. And at first I went there with a great sense of sort of self sacrifice and righteousness, sort of, you know, aren't I good to be doing this? And people would come up and say, aren't you good to be doing this? And I'd say to them, well, somebody has to do it. Which was a sort of a way of ripping it off for an ego. Ego trip, a little ego rush out of it. And then as the years went by of this process, I got to the point where I was doing it. I'll do it now as a spiritual practice, dad, you're my karma, and I'm going to be dharmic in response. And it was a vehicle then. Dad was my vehicle. And then it kept going on and on. And pretty soon it was just what was happening. It was like breathing. It was just hanging out. It was what we do. And at that moment it had moved to another level yet it had moved to where the surrender was deeper and deeper into just being the actions rather than to doing them. And there was a quality of just dying into the harmony of things. Like Gandhi saying, when you surrendered completely to God, which is the only truth worth having, you find yourself in the service of all that exists. It becomes your joy and recreation and you never tire of it. It's not like you're busy doing good. It's that you are compassionate. And where you begin to taste the possibility of the transformation. And then the daily life you lead becomes the stuff of it. And there's a tendency at early stages in spiritual practice to push against worldly stuff, desire systems and so on. And because it catch catches you so much, and then comes the realization that the only thing that catches you is your own mind, that those out there are just phenomena that you. If there's a billboard that says smoke something or other, or drink something or other, or eat something or other, it's only impactful on you if there's something in you to hook it onto. And the place to look is not to tear down the sign, but to work with the place in yourself that is getting caught. Because when you externalize and say, I've got to get away from that because it's getting in my way of being with God, you're just talking about yourself projected outward. Because ultimately you can be. I mean, I visit with Judith Stanton and we. She has an apartment in New York City and we sit in her apartment and it's like. Like being in a cave in the middle of the Himalayas. And most people say, gee, I'd like to do spiritual practice, but I live in New York City. And I realize you can live in New York City or you can live in New York City. There are many changes now during the early parts of sadhana of spiritual practice. Certainly it's wonderful to have a protected environment and to have satsang, to have other people around who is sharing the journey with you. And that's why we come together like this, to reassure ourselves that we're not alone and that there is real support. And it's great if you can find that, but if you don't find it, you can spend. You can then go into the self pity mode of, I can't poor me, I don't have satsang. And that can be your practice just as much as having it. And what you do is you just start flipping and taking what you're given and start to work with it. In other words, your karma defines your dharma. That means what you got is what you work with. I mean, like, my baldness is my karma. I mean, it's my genetics. It's, you know, it's everything. Now it becomes my dharma. Now I can use it in order to become free of being bald or being not bald or whatever. And so you look at the circumstances of your life, and this is where the Emmanuel work has been so helpful. Because Emmanuel has said very clearly. He said to me, ram Dass, I said to him, what am I doing on earth? Who made this terrible error? I'm much too high for this motley scene. And he said, ram Dass, why don't you try taking the curriculum? Since you're in school, why don't you take the curriculum? In other words, why don't you look at your life not as an error or a mistake. That's keeping you from God, but as the. The curriculum that's been handed to you. Because the only stuff you're in is what has. Is partly programmed by your mind and by your deeper psychic needs in order to take you through certain stuff. Let's look at it that way. Let's start to look at it all as a useful thing rather than an error that's just the slightest flip. And it involves everything. It involves. It involves health and sickness and loss and all of it. All of it. All of it. And that's why when a question was asked to me the other day, question about the 90s or the time or the 60s, or do I miss the 60s? Or was the 60s a high point? And I said, as far as I'm concerned, I like the line, if you like the 60s, you'll love the 90s. And the reason I love the 90s is because there is so much feeling of the edge of chaos and uncertainty. There are so many. I mean, when you had a day of silence yesterday, you saw how chaotic your mind is. And usually you say, well, I know, I'm glad I have a nice support, supportive setting in order to look at my mind. Now look at the world. Is it really a supportive setting for looking at your mind? Because there is so much external instability. There are forces of field that imply that all of our lives will be changed very, very dramatically in the course of our lives and certainly in the course of our children's lives. Changes that will occur in ecology, in economics, in politics. There are tremendously destabilizing forces in the world. Okay? That's the karma you and I are born into. In the greater warp and woof of things way back there behind time, you and I at some psychic DNA soul level said, well, what do you need this next round? Well, I need to be born into a culture that's really falling apart. Well, you can take Rome or Greece. How about the United states in the 1990s? That'll be a good one. Well, you think it's strong enough? Yeah, it's pretty good. It could get worse. I mean, if we take you into the. You could really. You want to handle a total breakdown? Well, that would be useful. I could clean up this, this, this and this. Aha. Well, let's think about it. You don't. You sure you don't want a golden age? No, I had that last time and it. I mean, I did nice stuff, but I think I really want total chaos this time. You know, you're going to get really frightened in it. Well, that's the game, isn't it? I mean, if I don't take it seriously, it doesn't work. I mean, if you come through knowing you're in avatar form and you're God and the shit hits the fan, you're gonna say, ah, shit hitting the fan, yay. But if you. If you think you're real and the shit seems real, you're gonna go, oh my God, it's hitting the fan, you know, so the whole game doesn't work unless you take it real. But you've also then gotta see through it. And then so it's real and it's not real. And you're delighting in it and joyful in it and part of it, and you're also not part of it and you're empty. And you just. Here. And that's the curriculum to just get free. To be able to freely be compassionate in it, be freely part of it all. To not be ripped off by being so caught in the role and the drama of it all that you lose the play of it. You lose the play of it. And that includes death, sickness, suffering, and all the rest of it. So that in a way, the Chinese curse, it's called a curse, usually, may I be born in an interesting. May you be born in an interesting time, which is considered a curse because it's the one where you'll get so caught in the drama that you won't wake up. If you start to awaken then and you say, come on, give me a hot fire. I don't want the water, I want the fire. Then you say, may you be born in an interesting time is grace. It's a blessing. It's not a curse because it gives you real stuff to work with. It's very easy to get really high in a meditation cave. It is a whole other thing to get high in the middle of, you know, being a judge in a courtroom, or being a social worker in an inner city, or being a mother or any one of a thousand roles that you and I get involved in. And that's becomes the beautiful spiritual practice. So what I'm really referring to today is the way in which one uses one's daily stuff as practice and quiets down enough to look at your life and reflect about how it can be practiced. I mean, I have a little sort of inner technique because I have a relationship to Maharaj, to my guru, who is Hanuman, by the way, in drag also. I mean, they're all somebody else. You know, everybody's nobody's who they seem. And So I see my life as a dialogue with my guru, and he's dead. I mean, if you really want psychosis, this is it. I'm living in a world in which I'm having a dialogue with a dead person in which you are his teaching to me. Okay, I can look at a different levels. He sent you to awaken me or he is you in drag, you know, and when I get a particularly difficult you, you know, I say, all right. He's like saying, well, let's see how he does when I put on my Casper Weinberger mask, you know, and see if he sees me in there. And the question I have to do is always look through the form without rejecting the form, with loving the form and honoring it. It doesn't. When you say to look through something, it is not a put down. It is not a denigration of its beauty. It is just seeing the deeper beauty that is also in it. Because the shallow beauty sometimes allows you to miss the deeper beauty, the deeper beauty of realizing there is God in your child, not just your child and your child. So I have the. The practice of that dialogue with him, which is a continuous method. It's called the grace of the Guru, Guru Kripa. And I just experienced that as a dialogue. And you can do that because he's dead. You can have him just like I got him. I mean, it's just having an imaginary playmate who's really hip, wise, humorous. Every wise book you've read is a description of this playmate. And then you keep the playmate around all the time to hang out with until you realize, see, the playmate is imaginary and you're real. And then in the process of dialoguing, you begin to see that the playmate's real and you're imaginary. And then you realize you and the playmate are one, and then the whole thing's over. So just giving you quick clues for the quick paths. So when you look at what you got to deal with in life, you take each thing and you, for example, as you see that your mind is so busy always planning as you might have seen yesterday, planning and remembering and running old fantasies through and thinking what you'll do next and how you use all this you hear in that the possibility to extricate yourself from that. The way the mind invests those planning and memories so deeply all the time, is to practice coming into the moment so fully. Like the way you walk mindfully or eat mindfully or sit. I mean, I practice like I would washing a dish. And I. I'VE got this image that I so vividly remember that I've again talked about. But it's so powerful image. I was at a Benedictine monastery for a while, that one where I was with that Father Damasius I talked about the other day. And we were silent in the halls, in the rectory and so on. And the only time you could sort of whisper was when you were in line washing your dishes. And all the monks, the brothers were there, monks in their black robes and surpluses. And I, we each had our cup and our plate, metal cup and plate. And I was standing behind this man who must have been in his, oh, late 40s, I'd say. And we were just standing there and I. So I leaned over his shoulder and I whispered. And he got to the washing stand and he had the hand mop and he was washing his bowl. And I said, brother, how long have you been here? And I was looking, my eyes were focused on the bowl. And he said, 17 years. And the quality with which he said 17 years was he wasn't bragging, he wasn't complaining, he wasn't judging, he was just stating. And there was a way in which the way he was washing that bowl, it was like 17 years of that, because he had done that every day for 17 years, the same way he went to the same offices every day. He just lived this life. And what I heard was in the washing of the bowl was the fullness of it all, that it wasn't like he was doing it so that he could change in his 18th year, he was coming into the fullness of this and it was enough. And there is a way in which change occurs freely when you can open to the enoughness of what is. Most of us think that if we open to the enoughness of what is, we are going to not want to change or not change fast enough or not deal with the crises at hand. And I want to have you explore the other possibility that as you open to what is fully, what is includes everything that is needing attention, it becomes part of the moment and it guides your life. I'm really suggesting a quieter, more intuitive approach to the way in which things are done, rather than so much analytic planning all the time. So part of it is that the. Like, there was. Paul Reps at one point wanted to go back. He was a. He's written books about sort of Zen consciousness, and he wanted to go back to Japan at one point, right after the war. And they weren't letting in people very easily. And he stood it at the immigration center where there was a Japanese officer there and he wrote on his application, making a cup of tea. I stopped the war. And the officer said, we need people like you in Japan. Remember that the way you do each act is the way in which the healing of the universe happens. And that the way in which you cook a meal, the way in which you do a dish, the way in which you. You deal with a. A, a patient or a client, the way in which you deal with your child, the way in which you deal with the opposition, the way in which you deal with corruption, the way in which you deal with all of it. All of it is the process, because of the interweaving nature of it all, so that you start to. It's like making life sacred. It's like investing the acts. Instead of saying, this is trivial and that's important, like this retreat is important, realize this retreat is part of a web of your life. This is just a little microcosm of it all. In dealing with these changes that are going down, part of the real art is to look at what is changing and see how your identification with that which changes is creating so much fear in you that you're pushing against change. And notice how when you push against, it's like pushing against a river. That's going to happen anyway. You can't stop it because everything's changing. Is there a place you can be in the universe where instead of resisting change, you can ride with the change? You can be in the change. And part of the answer is by cultivating an appreciation of what is beyond change. See, now the predicament is that everything that you can see and think about is changing. So that's a part of you. This body is part of you. But it's going to change. I've just been giving a lecture. Some of you were at the 4 Omega in New York City on aging. And I was describing changes that you could expect, and I was just giving a list. You wouldn't all have all of them, but each of us is getting some of them. And I become particularly interested in them at this stage of my life. I mean, the changes that I'm planning to work with are things like arthritis, neuritis, insomnia, constipation, poor circulation, high blood pressure, nervous tension, confusion, atropying muscles, stiff joints, bones breaking easily, motor nerve signals, slower lungs, less oxygen, pain, loss of mobility, seeing less well, hearing less well, loss of energy, sickness, nausea, feeling lousy, becoming incontinent, peeing and shitting. Does that sound like fun? Now you say, oh, that's not going to happen to me. And that business of saying it's not going to happen to me, you are probably going to get old. Unless you die early, you're going to get old and a lot of these things are going to happen to you. Now you can spend these years being absolutely freaked about them, collecting your sleeping pills so that when the time comes, you don't have to face it. Or you can say, hey, you know, wow, what a new curriculum this is going to be. You know, when I talk to old people, I say, isn't it interesting? When I go to meditate, I draw my awareness in, I sit quietly and I just go and do the beautiful inner work. Funny, when you get old, you get deaf, you get blind, and your joints ache, so you got to sit quietly. Doesn't it tell you something? You think there's a message in there about the perfection of the opportunity for inner work. I mean, isn't that just absolutely defining the curriculum? See, and you can take it that way. You can say, oh, see, by holding on to who you are, you're creating suffering about who you'll become. And the art form is to see that the body is part of nature. Of course it's going to change. Now you can keep it in pretty good shape for a long time by, I am sure how you live. But most of you, unless you have figured it out, some other game will fall apart and die. I want you to know that. I want to tell you, in case you, because you keep forgetting it, that you, I promise you, everybody in this room is going to die again. And you can say no, not me. But if you trust me, I'm telling you, you are going to die. Now the question is, who's going to die? Are you going to die or aren't you going to die? Well, the answer is I am and I'm not. And your identification with that which dies is going to freak you unless it is balanced by an appreciation of that of you which doesn't die. And that's one of the balances that you're working on because you turn suffering into grace. You turn the whole thing, you turn your fear of change into a device that shows you where you are clinging exclusively to that which changes. And it, if you use it right, it's like judo. It keeps awakening you to remember that which is not changing in you, which is awareness. Awareness isn't born, it doesn't die. It's not common, it's not going. It's not collecting anything, it doesn't lose anything. But it can't be seen, heard, tasted, touched, smelled, or thought about. What could it be? It's like a question. What it could be is isness. It's what you is. But those of you that say, but how do I know? You don't. You can just be it. And to realize that everybody goes around being what they think they are instead of just being, you realize how much suffering is created. Because everything you think you are will change. If you're a mother, your kids will grow up, then what are you going to do? No, I'm a mother. But mom 50. I'm still your mother. Yeah, it all keeps changing all the time. And the nice thing about practices and metaphysical readings and all of this stuff, this wealth of stuff, devotional practice, all of it is. It keeps getting you to be comfortable with the changes that are going down all the time in your mind states of emotions. You go from, I'm depressed to, wow, look at that depression. And depressions come and depressions go. I mean, you look at us, you probably were in a dozen different emotional states yesterday. And each one is like, it's real. And if you talk to somebody from that state, you'd build a whole reality out of who you were. People come up to me and they come up with a big definition in their mind of who they are. This is who I am. This is real. This is who I am. This is who you are. This is real. This is who I am. This is who you are. This is real. This is who you are. I want it understood. This is who you are. This is who I am, and this is real. And people have a very deep investment in who they think they are. And my job is to love them for who they think they are and not get sucked in to say, sure, you can be whoever you'd like to be if you'd like to be it, but if you don't want to hold on to it, you don't have to. So they say, I've just had this absolutely ghastly. And I'm just. It's terrible and it's getting worse, and I've never been so. And you're listening and you feel this person creating. I mean, this is reality. It is real for them. But they did come to you about it. I have no moral right to say, hey, you know, that's just one reality. But they did come to me. And my job is to create an environment of love and presence and spaciousness, which says to another human being, if you want to hold on to your stuff, be my Guest. But if you would like to let it go, here we are. And I want to encourage you to think of yourself in human relationships as an environment for other people to live out their karma. But the less you get stuck in the reactivity to who they think they are, the less you keep reinforcing that identity and digging their hole deeper. And that takes such an art form. Because what happens is that as you start to cultivate a little bit of space in your life, you feel extremely vulnerable to losing it. And so you want to stay away from people who have really powerful minds. For many of you, it's a parent, for example, people who know how to get you, but just a way. Like I used to when I first started to, quote, get high. I'd be out there, I'd be one with Christ and Buddha, and I'd love. And I'd be spacious and aware. And then I'd come home and my father would say, you got a job yet? Or something? And I'd be like, down right away. I'd be caught almost immediately. What do you mean, do I have a job? You know, and then over time, I could last 20 minutes, you know, and then it just kind of getting more spacious until I could see him as being an absolute essence who he was. Got a job yet? So you look at. Look at it as an art form. Got a job yet? Instead of got a job yet? I mean, I don't take it personally. I don't, you know, if it rains, I don't say it did it to me. It's just doing it, you know. And when my father says, got a job yet? He sees son, his son. And out of which he responds, got a job yet? It's like, come, son, come response. Got a job yet? If I get stuck in the cycle of it, it's got me, you know, why do I have to buy in? I can love him, you know, I can say no, you know, but usually the way I would respond no would make it all real because there'd be juice in it. And I would invest the reality of the question. And then we had to go through the whole rest of the dance that a nice Jewish family goes through. I mean, I'm sure Christians do it too, but birds do it, bees do it. So what happens is at first, when you feel very vulnerable, like Ramakrishna says, at that point, you have a little fence around the new tree so that the cows don't walk on it, and you want to keep protecting your high all the time, your space. But then as time goes on you get so that you're willing to open up a little more. As your connection gets deeper, your faith gets stronger. In other words, the essence of your being is in it. You've gone in and out of it so many times. Because I will guarantee that what is high will pass and you'll go low. But I will also guarantee that what is low will pass and you'll go high. I used to get high. Wow, I'm here forever, thank God. And then I'd crash. And I lost it. I'm too impure. I'll never get high again. Poor me. God didn't look. I was wearing the wrong wedding garment. I was thrown out of heaven. I was right. I am a complete louse and an incompetent, impotent, inadequate human being. God doesn't want me. And then I get high again. Wow, phew, I'm back, thank God. And then I crash again. You know, how many times can you do it before you get to notice the pattern? You know, you want. You cling to the high. You're going to cling to get caught in the low until you get. So you say, ah, hi. Ah, low instead of wow, bliss, wow, depression instead of I'm depressed. Even though it fills the space, you know that it's passing show. It's just coming and going. It's stuff. It's stuff. And as that. As that wisdom starts to sink into your bones of your being, to your cellular wisdom, it reminds your cellular wisdom. You get much more spacious in risking more in human relationships with your heart open, without that kind of guardedness, because you realize that some stuff's going to catch you and you're going to get caught and you're going to get sick and dense and angry and protective and grabby and all that stuff. And then after a while you're going to let go again. And you realize that if you keep protecting yourself from something in life, it's got you. An aversion has got you just as much as an attraction has got you. Saying I can't go near that is the same as lust. It's the same thing. It's the same thing. It's something that. The clinging of the mind. That's what the Buddha said. He said there is suffering and the cause of suffering is the clinging of mind. And if you. If you don't cling, you are with what is. And then you do what you got to do about it. And some of it stinks and some of it's beautiful and you. And it hurts and your heart breaks and it's all true. And here we are in the stew together. And you find out as the faith gets deeper, that you can not only embrace, but as Rumi said, you wish you had more moth wings to throw into the fire. Because dealing with the fire of stuff becomes. It's so alive. It's so alive. And it's hard for people to understand that when I say I'm incredibly excited today because I am going to be with somebody that's dying. And I feel when I. The looks people give me at times, like I'm a Charles Adams cartoon of some sort, you know, you're excited because you're gonna. It sounds like a necrophilia or something. They don't understand that being around that kind of powerful transformation and dealing with death, which is the deepest fear of the incarnate individual, including me, including every incarnate, is getting as close to the fire as one can to see, to keep the heart open, to stay as fully in love from moment to moment. Because the way you guard. Like I've noticed over the years in working with people that are dying, there is a way in which I can be open and loving. And then as their pain increases or their predicament increases, the way in which intellectually I disengage myself and begin to feel empathy, compassion, kindness, pity. A whole set of emotional qualities that keep me as a subject object. Because I am afraid to be in love with that person. Because fully merging with them. Because merging means taking on or having their pain in me as well. And I'm afraid of their pain. I'm afraid of it. And you watch. You watch your mind close and defend and protect. And that's not bad. And it's not. You're not a failure. You just come as close to the fire as you can and you sort of play with the fire. And you see that over the years, each day you're allowed a little more opportunity to stay open. Until pretty soon you're able to start to stay open in the presence of more and more suffering. It doesn't mean your heart isn't breaking. It doesn't mean that you and more and more your life is. Becomes an instrument for the relief of suffering. But it's coming through the opening to it and seeing that. Like there's a line in Lama Surya Das's meta meditation that I would never dare use because it seems so gutsy. He's doing the Bodhisattva vow, and it's the one of, may I take everybody's stuff into myself and Then he says, and, and, you know, and, and bring it into the emptiness of my being. What everybody here is afraid of is I'll bring it into myself and I'll get stuck with it. See, and that's why the key thing is cultivating the emptiness inside so you don't get stuck it. So that. But yet not. Not getting stuck through denial of it, but through embracing it, but letting it go, fully being with it and fully letting it go at the same moment. So the practice I experience is one of going over these past 20 years for me has been one of tasting the possibility, tasting the non tasting thing, tasting the non dualism, tasting the love and the presence and the awareness. Becoming greedy for it and addicted to it. Then trying to find every method I could to get there. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, meditation, yoga, gurus, everything. And then becoming addicted to the methods to get me there. And then slowly experiencing the change in the nature of being that's deeper than that. And then seeing through all the addictions to going somewhere, to a path to methods, to all of it, and slowly coming into the deepness of the moment and then going from pushing away the world to coming back and starting to learn how to embrace the world and then finally to be the world. And this is a whole sequence that my whole life has been about. And so that when you are sitting there and I'm sitting here, more and more, I am you and I am me both. I am the part that is caught in this and I am the part that's working on it. And I'm the part that's free and I'm all those parts. And we begin to feel like Thich Nhat Hanh, you know, call me by my true names. Because more and more you find that each part of your life becomes. And the places that catch you, that you push against or that you're terribly frightened of losing are clues to you of the clinging nature of your mind. And that you begin to see that people are just doing what they do. And at the psychodynamic level you say they're doing it to me. But at another level they're just doing what they do. And you are reacting as you react. And you learn how to, as I've talked before, say no to somebody, or yes, to stop their actions without closing your heart. Stopping the action of a person without pushing them away to do it. And I've read, I'm not going to read it this time because I've done it at every retreat and lecture for so many years. The Terry Dobson Story of Aikido and the railway train. And it's in how can I help? And if you haven't read it, I suggest not to suck you into getting how can I help? But it's a wonderful story to show you how you can take negative energy and start to work with it in a way that you embrace it into your heart. At the same moment, you change it. You change it. The excitement for me is sharing with you the possibility. Like for me, each act becomes part of the awakening. Like this moment. You are my karma, I am yours. We are using each other to get free. And that isn't exploitive. It's collaborative. And I only see you as other than myself on one plane of reality. If that's all I see you at, I'm talking to them. Are you them to me or us? I think what a lot of you feel in relation to me is that you are us. Because you are. Then the question of who isn't family, who isn't Uncle Henry, you know, who's them? Who's them? It was even in Clinton's speech. I think o. Gore's speech must be good. So. So I. I want to invite you to. To use. You know, to use those moments as well as you can. Just one read this wonderful quote about aging, Florida. Scott Maxwell, at 83 said, as we age, we are more alive than seems likely convenient or even bearable. It can feel as though all our lives we have been caught in absurdly small personalities and circumstances and beliefs. Our accustomed shell crack here, crack there. And that tiresomely rigid person we suppose to be ourselves stretches, expands, and with inhibitions gone, we realize that age is not failure, not disgrace. Though mortifying, we did not invent it. Age forces us to deal with idleness, emptiness, not being needed, not able to do things. Now that I am sure that this freedom is the right garnering of age. I'm so busy being old, I dread interruptions. There is an expression says you can't stop the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair. That there is a lot of suffering in all of our lives and it's not going to go away. There's a lot of pain and there's a lot of loss and there's a lot of fear and there's a lot of uncertainty and there's a lot of unstability. What you can do is cultivate a place where it doesn't all cling to you, where you deal with it in the moment and then keep letting it go. Deal with it. Let it go, Deal with it. Let it go and come back to this moment. Deal with it, Let it go and come back to this moment. It's like the art of emptying the mind. Of emptying the mind. You'll notice when people ask me questions like at the lake, I stop for a moment. I don't stop to think of the answer. I stop to empty of the person who thinks of the answer and trust that that question in us elicits that answer in us. This podcast is brought to you by the Love Serve Remember foundation and Ram Dass.org we appreciate you listening and watching. 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 Ramdas has been sharing for all of these years. Thank you.

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