Ep. 285 – Across the Decades: Resting in Awareness

Just allow your awareness to expand, to embrace everything you hear or feel or think. Just. And that too. Yes, and that too. And just keep seeing there is space around each thing. And see that your awareness is the space in which all of the thoughts and all of the sensations are appearing and disappearing as if your awareness were the sky. And all your thoughts and sensations of the clouds coming, passing through, disappearing in the far horizon.

Hi, everyone, this is Ram Dass here. And now a new episode. And I'm Raghu Marcus. Glad to be with you in this moment. And before I get into just a little bit of an intro about the podcast, about this particular content, I just want to say we just got back from Boone, North Carolina, where we do our annual summer mountain retreat. Just this beautiful property overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains. It's extraordinary. And we had some fantastic speakers. And of course, we had Krishna Das and we had East Forest doing his thing based on the music that he created with Ram Dass a few years ago, before Ram Dass left, obviously.

And.

And we had Bob Thurman, who is just a phenomenal, entertaining speaker. Bob is like very close to his holiness, the Dalai Lama, and had been a teacher until he retired a few years ago at Columbia University. So just fantastic content from him as well as this somebody new, Acharya Shunya from India, whose grandfather was a devotee of Neem Karoli Baba, and she brought something brand new to the table, so to speak. So this wonderful content, I just wanted to mention we have a platform, it's called Inner Academy. And on that platform we put our courses, we put our retreats and make it available to people. Right now there's over 100 hours on there and we continually are putting up more content as we record and video it. And I suggest a peek. Go take a peek, ramdas.org inner academy, and see what the offering is. There's a couple of levels of it. There's the level of just, just join. I mean, we have four or five thousand people right now that are on the platform communicating. There's offerings that are presented and so on. And then the subscription part, which allows Love serve, remember to be able to put on everything that it does, from retreats to courses to books and films and so on. That is a way for us, as I said, to be able to continue doing the things that we have been doing for years, serving the community. And so just take a look and see what you think in terms of becoming part of it, either the part in which you can just communicate and be part of the community. And then further to that is the subscription, which you'll see when you get there to the platform. I highly recommend it. It's just so very rich and.

Related.

To the theme of this podcast, which is around Resting in Awareness. Just one anecdote. We have these mentors. K.K. shaw is one. And by the way, that film is available as part of the subscription. And others of our films will be available as we move along here and make more content available. But KK of course, was just an extraordinary figure who many people do know because he came to the retreats in Maui and over the years, a number of them. And then KC Tiwari, whose movie Brilliant Disguise we produced and put out maybe three years ago, that is about this seminal figure in our lives, meaning those people that were with Neem Karoli Baba. He was very close to Maharaj and he was like our. I don't know if you remember this great cartoonist, R. Crumb, from back in the 70s. He's still alive, I think. And he had something called Mr. Natural, this strip, comic strip that was just fantastic. Well, Casey Tiwari was like, Mr. Natural, you know, whenever you're going off in terms of your thinking or your depression or whatever, which was happening to us all the time when we were much younger, he would come up to you and say, my boy, awareness, awareness. He was a reminder of what that is in our lives. And so this, this talk, which is really. It's knitted together from four different talks over four decades. That's the phenomenal thing with Ram Dass, exploring being in harmony with the way of things. How awareness and love are really the same thing. How to deal with clinging, what clinging is that really prevents us from being spacious and in harmony and, you know, full of equanimity and love. We all want to get there. And so this talk from him is, as I say, over these decades, which is phenomenal in itself. I mean, that, you know, he did this, that Ram Dass did this over these many years. And there's one thing that I love, and he used to tell this story over the years. Not story, but this analogy, which. The analogy is the pure sky, the blue sky. There's nothing there. There's no clouds. And when the clouds start to come, they're simply the passing phenomenon of your life. Your whole concept of who you think you are. All the stuff of me me is all the cloud. And the cloud is being appreciated and embraced or carried by the sky. The sky is just awareness. It's really beautiful talk. And in the end, he. He does A meditation around loving awareness, which was this great teaching over the last years of his life in Maui, almost 20. And that alone is worth the price of admission, which there is no price of admission. It's a podcast. Anyhow, here it is. It's Ram Dass and the Importance of Resting in Awareness. And we'll see you next time, Ram.

Ram.

And it is in the freedom of non clinging to models about self and other that you begin to tune to and hear the way of things called the dao. The way, the way in which forms relate lawfully, not rational analytic law, but the natural law, the divine law, the law that includes paradox. And the way in which you tune to that law of the universe.

Is.

Not necessarily with your intellect. It's tuning at a more profound way of relating to the universe than even through your senses. And it's that tuning.

And when you.

Respect that tuning mechanism in yourself.

That.

The actions that flow from you start to be what is called dharmic, or in the way of things or acts which release beings from suffering and do not perpetuate illusion. As long as you are in an incarnation, there will be actions. As long as there is form, there will be changes. But depending on who is doing the acting or who thinks who is doing the acting will determine whether that act is part of the flow of things or in opposition or antagonistic to it. It's like the story of the king's butcher. I think the story is written in Rep's book and the king is a very fine butcher. And the king asked the butcher how he does it, that although he has been cutting with the same knife for 19 years, it's never needed to be sharpened. And it turns out that what the butcher does is he is in tune with that which he is cutting. And the knife finds its way into the joint. It doesn't hit against the joint, it finds its way in, around, around the bone. And because he is tuned, not only he isn't busy being. I am a butcher cutting this piece of meat. He is awareness. And that awareness includes the meat and the butcher and the knife. And so there is an act happening, but there is no doer of the act because there is nobody that thinks he is a butcher or the king's music stand maker. And he makes incredibly beautiful music stands. And the king says to him, how do you make such incredibly beautiful music stands? The music stand maker says, there's nothing to it, sire. First I fast for five days until I forget that I am working for the king. Then I fast for another five days. Till I forget I am a music stand maker. Then by then I am staggering through the woods and I come across a tree and in the tree is the music stand. And I just clear away everything that isn't necessary. That is the level. That is the level at which awareness works. Because when you are aware without clinging and in harmony with all of the forces, you are no longer in time. Your body's in time, your thoughts are in time, your personality is in time, but you aren't. And when you are not in time and everything in the universe interrelates in a lawful way, though not a law that is knowable by the intellectual. And you are in harmony with that law. You are in harmony with the way everything comes out and everything that preceded it. So that you cannot act wrongly. For not only are you in tune with the particular act you are doing in terms of time, but the gestalt, all of the ways in which that act is interrelated with everything in the universe. That is a level of consciousness in which social action that flows from it truly liberates humankind. For it is a level of awareness from which actions are manifest that have no clinging, not even clinging to the effects of the act. You can work with all of your energy and total one pointedness towards bringing about an end. You have done all you can do at any moment. It is total involvement. And it doesn't happen at the end. And at the moment it doesn't happen.

You are right here now.

You are not holding on with despair or anger or frustration. That's then. You're right here. The new existential moment is now. It's always the beginning of things.

Always.

Don Juan says, no personal history. You keep giving up your storyline. You have it, it's there. You can write about it, you can keep a diary of it, but you don't cling to it. Because every time you walk into a situation and you have a model of who you are or who you aren't, stops the flow. I never dance. I'm Brahmacharya. I love dope. All the time. I love dope. I'm a responsible person. I'm a mother. I'm a seeker. I'm dependent. It's interesting when you're just aware and you walk down the street because you see too much, because you see who everybody thinks they are. Me. Because everybody dresses and walks and looks and smiles or averts their eyes in harmony with this model they are holding on to of who they must be. Night before last I was doing a television show with a fellow Interviewing me. And he started the interview by saying, whatever it is you are, I want. How do I get it? She was right out front. So I said to him, well, why don't you stop being who you think you are? And we looked into each other's eyes and we saw interviewer, interviewee. He was busy being Patrick, and I was Ram Dass. And slowly all these roles just kept becoming, passing show. And here we were, and the television cameras were grinding away, and he was getting higher and higher and lighter and farther out. And I said, you can go as.

High as you want, but don't forget you're an interviewer.

You can keep the game going. You don't have to be in it, just play it.

You know, you can keep doing. You have to blow your scene, which.

Is all on the television camera. And then he said, I don't understand what's happening.

He says, this is weird.

He says, I love you, and I.

Couldn'T possibly love you.

I don't even know you. You're a man. It's impossible. See the problem? I mean, all of our social, cultural bloops are based on thinking everybody's somebody doing something right. When you fall in love with somebody.

What are you supposed to do?

Love is so far out, there's this flow. It's not the word love is. You know, we've got an awful lot of overload meaning to it. Making love, falling in love. We love each other. The whole romantic, poetic metaphor of love, but that romantic one.

Is like.

I fell in love with her or him, meaning she or he turns me on to the place in myself where I am love. And I can't get there other than through my connection, which is her or him. And I get attached to my method, my method of getting high, of being in love. So I want to have my method with me all the time. My mala beads. My beloved, I call it. And the thought that my beloved might split is a little bit freaky. So that I want to possess my beloved. So romantic poetry often has in it jealousy and even hatred. But can you imagine when that place you've only touched through your methods, you become. You are love. You finally acknowledged who you are. And you've cleared away all the mind trips that keep you from being who you are. So you just are it now. Everybody you look at, you're in love with. What do you do about it? I mean, maybe two, three. But it's absurd. I mean, the least you want to do is go up to somebody and say, I love you. We tried that for A long time, but it's even out of hand. I mean, it's way beyond that one. Because you can't do it to policemen. And, you know, people you're just passing on the street, you can't do it. It's just not done. Then you see the exquisiteness of the predicament of being in love with everybody. And there's nothing that has to be done about it. Because you've developed compassion. Compassion to let people be as they need to be without coming onto them. And the only time you come on to people are when their actions are limiting the opportunities for other human beings to be free. And then the way in which you come on is critical. For if you are somebody coming on, forget it. You are just creating more anger. If you are nobody special, but it is your dharma to come on about injustice, then it is merely a pure act of the Dharma. And not for a moment do you forget that you love the other person totally. It is interesting to separate out the space in which we love. We are love, we merge in love from the yeses and nos of life. To be able to say no to somebody without withdrawing love, it took me a long, long time because I so identified doing what other people wanted me to do as a way of demonstrating love. It was a long time before I understood that I cared enough about other human beings to be straight with them. And that straightness could be love. And I could say no without withdrawing that love. That's a big one. For the love is not on the domain of social relationship. And that awareness that I was talking about earlier and the love I'm talking about now are the same thing. Because what we're talking about has no labels. These are just ways that you can approach it intuitively. Through what you know about love, through what you know about awareness brings you into ah.

Be aware of your breath, all the sounds around you, just notice them. Everything that arises, a sound or a sensation, just let it arise and then pass away. Don't grab hold of it. Don't try to push it away. There's pain in your body. Just notice that. Allow it. Don't get upset. Don't. It's not going to keep you from anything. Thoughts about past or future, just notice them. Just allow your awareness to expand, to embrace everything you hear or feel or think. Just. And that too. Yes, and that too. And just keep seeing there is space around each thing. And see that your awareness is the space in which all of the thoughts and all of the sensations are appearing and disappearing. As if your awareness were the sky and all your thoughts and sensations of the clouds coming, passing through, disappearing in the far horizon. And feel that this awareness has qualities to it that you can notice at this stage. You can notice spaciousness, notice spaciousness, feel the spaciousness that expands into this whole theater, so that really there is one awareness and there are all these different forms through which it is passing. And now another quality of this spaciousness, equanimity. Just see that no matter how agitated you are, no matter how frightened you are, no matter how despairing or aggravated or doubting or confused, see that also in you is this place behind it, which has equanimity, which is equanimous.

And allow that too.

And that too, it doesn't make your depression or despair or confusion or doubt or agitation any less, but it merely says, also here is equanimity. There is a place in me that always is at peace, if I will merely acknowledge it, even at the most frightening moments, tiny thread though it might be, it's always right here. And see how this quality, this awareness, also has the quality of love, of an appreciation of forms. Bring before your mind's eye somebody that you love and feel that place in your heart that opens and how fortunate you are to have shared part of an incarnation with such a person, whether that person be in flesh or not. Now bring to mind before your eye an image of yourself standing in front of yourself, your separate self, and see what happens to your heart then. Does it close down? Does it stay open? Do you have that same feeling of love and appreciation for the preciousness of yourself if you pull back into your judging mind? Release, relax, look more deeply, part the veils and see your own beauty, your own precious isness. See that behind all of the dramas of that person, that self that stands before you, there is, I am. Listen to this poem of Swami Ram Tirith and keep in mind yourself standing before you. He said, I am without form, without limit. I am beyond space, beyond time. I am in everything.

Everything.

Is in me. I am the bliss of the universe, everywhere I am. Recognize your own higher self and recognize the way it has come into form, and appreciate the perfection of the creation. See that you are the creator and the created. You are the lawful form unfolding, and you are that which is behind the law. You are one of the many, and you are the one. Can you not love that being that stands before you? Can you not allow it to be just as it is and recognize the possibility that it is not an error? It has nothing to do. You are just as you are. And the work and the changes all will happen naturally if you will just allow yourself to be as you are. And you can delight in the changing form of that being that stands before you. Work on yourself is one level, another level. There is no work. It's all dance. Another level. There is no dance. There is no time or space. It all just is.

All true. All who we are.

We are so much more than we ever think we are. Now bring before you somebody who you have a difficult time liking. Somebody who's who. You feel their actions hurt others or create suffering, or take away others freedom. Feel what happens to your heart then. And once again.

Hold quiet.

Notice your reactivity and stay aware in the space. And allow yourself to see through the veils of the action to the being back inside. And realize what a hard incarnation it must be for somebody whose actions create suffering in others. And see the way in which you can say no to the person's actions without closing your heart to the soul that has taken that birth. See the way a no can be, a healing no. It can heal you and that other person into the one that lies behind the no and the yes. And now, from this collective place of isness, this quiet, equanimous, peaceful, spacious present.

Moment.

Let us at this moment send from here our blessings, our love. Let us be instruments through which pure spirit passes to earth. And let it be guided to those who suffer, those who are caught, who are lost into the drama. Let our thoughts and this spaciousness surround them with love, with peace, with equanimity. If there is somebody special you wish to bring to mind, do so. People who are imprisoned in their minds, in their bodies, which are suffering in institutions caught in any way, may they see through the veil and realize that we are all always free. No one can imprison us but ourselves. May each of us become such clear and pure instruments of light, of love, of presence, of clarity, of equanimity, that the light of spirit pours through our every, every cell. And everybody we meet is touched by living spirit. No matter how we meet them in whatever role in life. Then where we are, everywhere we look we will see flowers blooming. It's what the sun sees when it looks down.

From.

What grace, what incredible grace.

Well, if you can see a cloud in the sky, can everybody see a cloud somewhere? Okay, look at that cloud now and think of that cloud as your life. If it's a long cloud, it might have a birth, a middle and and tailing off. Or it might be just a round cloud in which it's all present all at once. But it's your. It's her or it's him. Now, in as you are looking at that cloud and seeing your life, and it has thousands and millions of components to it. It has all the feelings and all the memories and all the plans and all of the economics and all the relationships and all of the sufferings and all of the joys. It's all there in that cl. Now, just to push you a little bit harder, you're looking at that cloud from here, and here feels like a very precise place. We're all sitting together on this porch. But now let me explore with you another way of defining who you are. Look at the cloud again and become aware of the sky that surrounds the cloud. And now I invite you to identify your awareness with the sky. And in your awareness, there is your life. That is the cloud. Not pejorative cloud, just cloud. In other words, your whole concept of who you think you are, all your sense experiences of your body, the sounds you're hearing now, all of that, all of this stuff of me is all the cloud. And the cloud is being appreciated or.

Embraced or carried or.

Allowed or by the sky. The sky is just awareness. It's much easier to describe the cloud than to describe the sky. The sky doesn't have a beginning or an end. And it's really doesn't have qualities. It's just sky. And that's the quality of awareness. It doesn't have. It doesn't have a trip. Sky doesn't have a trip. It's just hanging out. And through the sky are coming clouds and airplanes and birds and this is. And that. They're all within the sky. When you look up the sky, there are stars in the sky. They're all within the sky, but the sky just is. Now, what I've just given you is the ground for one of the most advanced spiritual teachings that is now available to us in the west, which is called Dzogchen out of Tibetan Buddhism. It is basically saying, the sky is awareness. You are awareness. Into your awareness arise phenomena. The phenomena arise. They exist and then they pass on. The phenomena include your thoughts, your senses, your feelings, stuff. Phenomena come and go. Awareness is awareness has nothing to do with time. It's not coming and it's not going. It isn't born and it doesn't die. It's nothing personal. It's not my sky, it's the sky. It's awareness. It's not my awareness, it's awareness. So just imagine that we're playing a game here of life in which we. We got caught along the way in thinking we were the cloud. As beautiful as it might be, as romantic as it might be, as sensual as it might be. And then at some moment, we begin to awaken and we're awakening to the I. Not the me, the I. That which sees that which is that which embraces that which. The presence, the awareness. We're awakening to our identity behind the clinging to separateness. That's what awakening is. And there's only one of it.

So when you.

When you say Shema, Yisroel, Adonoel, oheno, Adonoe, hero, Israel, Lord our God, the Lord is one. Of course it's one. There's only one. You can arrive at it through any religion you want, except through Buddhism, which says it's really zero. But when you're in one, it is zero. It only seems like one when you're looking at it from two. If you miss any of those, just let them go because they're. They come around again in another lifetime or something. Let me first ask, did you understand that example? Did you work with it, the cloud in the sky? Because that is basically. That is a full spiritual practice. If you went out an hour a day and lay on your back and looked up at the sky and see the sky as sky, and then experience the sky as a mirror of your awareness. So your awareness is the sky now. And then you watch what comes into the sky. And into the sky comes hunger, into the sky comes memories, into the sky comes smells, tastes, feelings, thoughts, memories, plans, and they come in. And then you just sit with the awareness and then they go, or they don't go, and maybe they cover the whole sky. So you don't see the sky. You just think, I'm depressed. Depression's great. It fills the whole thing. Those are called mind states in one system. So if I were to say, what is my life about? I would say my life is about awareness and becoming or being aware, because becoming is already a trip in the cloud.

I'm getting aware.

It's another one washing dishes now.

I'm getting aware.

It's just another trip. It's another thing you're doing. You're. So I'd say my life is resting in awareness and into the awareness come phenomena and some of those phenomena. First of all, I would say, if you want to really play technical, that the only phenomena that arise in your awareness are reflecting your attractions and your aversions. Otherwise you wouldn't even notice them. You hear that one? That's an interesting one. That's one. We say, well, it's really out there. Sure, lots of stuff is really out there, but you don't notice it. It's fascinating to see what you notice. You never notice what you're noticing because you're so busy you're noticing it. But if you stand around the corner and watch, it's fascinating to see. See what you noticed an hour ago. I mean, if you're in the. If you have a sailboat, when you went down to the water, you noticed what make of sailboat, what length, how it's kept, how recently it was painted. You noticed everything. Otherwise, you saw a group of boats. Well, you didn't see anything. You tasted the water, didn't even notice the boats. So when I look at the phenomena that arise, I'm looking at, of course, the projections of my own karma. I'm really looking at a movie that's being projected because, not that the stuff isn't out there, but what I'm selecting to see of what's out there is selected by the predispositions of my own block. Whatever it is I bring to this situation. Is this too weird? When it gets too weird, raise your hand and I'll try to backtrack and bring it along because otherwise it's just fun to go out, you know, for a while. And then I'll get bored. And then you can talk. If you feel a need to talk, talk. It's okay. I can. I teach listening, so I have to listen when you talk. Although I'm not really interested in what you're going to say because I'm not interested in what I say, because stuff is stuff. It's more clouds. And the awareness is the awareness. I'm not disinterested. That would be another trip. Not interested. As far I got to a point where I started to say to my friends, people around me all the time, I don't care if I never see you again. And it's funny how many of them got offended, you know, and there was nothing personal in it at all. I mean, it wasn't that I, you know, I don't like you. It was just that I don't think they trusted me, that I meant it. I don't know that I trust me either. I mean, I thought I meant. But it's fine. So into awareness comes all of these phenomena, and you can feel the qualities of attraction or aversion that are involved in them. And I work with lines like the dao line. Truth waits for eyes unclouded. By longing. When you desire something, you see only the outward container. I mean, it is absolutely true. If you haven't had that experience, just go watch your mind for a little while. You'll see it. If you're horny, you see what's makeable. If you're hungry, you see what's edible. If you're tired, you see mattresses. If you. I mean, that's what you see. You don't see flowers when you're tired, you see mattresses. You know it. Your motivation selects your perception. I mean, that's just straight that. Even the Western psychology knows that. And they don't know much. Ooh, it's going to be one of those kind of weeks. I can see that. So I see clingings and aversions like I've had clingings to power. There's most people that grew up feeling inadequate do. Which includes everybody here anyway. You think you don't. You're just defending. Even if you were here last week and I've watched it made me move towards powerful people because. And in my mind, in my. All the little veils you have in your mind, one of them is righteousness. See, So I think I want to be around powerful people to do more good. Powerful people have access to more energy so I can do more good. But then I saw that Western thing in my mind of more is better, very suspect, as is righteousness. And I've watched over the past five years how my whole attitude towards power has changed, that I've begun to see people that have power as people that just have a certain karmic trip they have to work up. It's not necessary to hold power to be an instrument of change in the universe. That's an interesting one. One point. Maharaji said, all the money in the world is mine. Can you imagine more psychotic statement than that? I mean, what. Who would have the chutzpah to say a thing like that? All the money in the world is mine. Depends on who you think you are. If he thinks he's the guy in the blanket, it may seem far fetched. Although maybe not if you know about his powers. But if you think of him as the sky that contains everything, certainly contains all the money in the world. Just more clouds. There was a beautiful swami, Swami Ramtirath, who spoke in the United States. He died, I think, in the. Didn't he die in the Ganga Chai? Yeah, when he was about what, 28 or something like that.

But he had a great.

He went around the United States speaking and he had one Incredible line. He said. Poem. He said. I am without form, without limit. I am beyond space, beyond time. I am in everything. Everything is in me.

Everywhere.

I am. I am the bliss of the universe. I am Sat chit Ananda.

I am.

He's describing awareness. He's describing awareness.

Sit or lie or whatever you're doing. Spine straight. It lets your energies come up. Bring your attention to your breath. Keep it on your lungs, on the chest. In, out. In, out. Let the breath go in and out. Now attend to your. To the middle of your chest with the breath.

And.

Concentrate on the spiritual center. Loving awareness. Loving awareness. Loving awareness. Just be loving awareness. You're inside your personality, your inside your body. All you are is loving awareness. You may be aware of what your ears are hearing, what your eyes are seeing, what your skin is sensing, what your mind is thinking.

Love.

All of that. You are in an ocean of love. An ocean projected from your heart. We are all in the ocean of love. I am talking to myself. We are waves on the ocean of love. Let your awareness travel from this to that. Loving it all. It's all Ram. It's all God. It's all the one, subjectively. You are the world. You are the universe. You are the trees. You are the bushes. You are the guns. You are poverty. You are commerce. You are relationships. It's all one. It's all one. It's all one. Loving awareness. Loving awareness. Loving awareness. The whole universe is loving awareness. Stars our loving awareness. We are loving awareness. The silence is loving awareness. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste.

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.