Ep. 287 – The Secret of Compassion

This show is brought to you by BetterHelp. We've all been there, sharing too much with a friendly face who isn't really qualified. While it's nice to talk, it's not enough. When anxiety or depression is involved, not everyone is the one. BetterHelp connects you with licensed, credentialed therapists trained to guide you. Talking to a real therapist isn't just supportive, it's transformative. 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. Find the one with BetterHelp, our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com Ramdas that's BetterHelp. H E-L-P.com Ramdass.

And I ask you, do you want to help or do you want to help? I mean, do you really want to help? Are you willing to give up your righteousness to help? And if you give up your righteousness, would you help? Can you hear the problem? I mean, I'd really like. I. I'd really like you to share this dilemma because it's so tasty and it is so at the root of what liberated helping is about. The helping which liberates.

Welcome to the Ram Dass Here and Now podcast. This is episode 287, the Secret to Compassion.

Whoa.

Wouldn't it be great if we could all get let on that secret these days? So this episode is a rare recording from June 28, 1983, when Ram Dass was teaching at the Omega Institute Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. The lecture was called Helping out, and it's a contemplation conversation about one of perhaps the oldest and most difficult questions we face every single day, which is how do we respond to suffering? And we see it every day, everywhere we look. We see it in our feeds and in the news, walking down our streets, in our neighborhoods. Maybe you see it in your own family. And we definitely see it in our own minds, Dukkha. This space of suffering, and some of it is so vast and incomprehensible that we want to sort of keep it away. And we have various strategies, right? We try to explain it away, or we numb ourselves in a thousand and one ways, or we rush to fix it from our ego identity, and it doesn't touch it in a deep, profound way. And so we end up wrestling with questions of randomness and fairness and God and our own agency. And one of the reasons we love Ram Dass is he invites us to do something different. He invites us to notice how our responses themselves shape what we actually are able to bring to the world. So in classic Ram Dass form, he tells incredible stories of incredible wisdom teachers. And he doesn't shy away from the contradictions and paradoxes or addressing an issue from these multiple planes of reality and consciousness that we all live on at the same time. Which means we don't walk away with some like neat little formula or answer that we can put in our pocket. Instead, it's this journey into the mystery. This journey into the mystery of compassion. Not something that's sentimental or a concept, but what arises when we actually be present and find our way through and face what is unbearable. So I know you'll get a lot from this. But before we begin, two quick notes. One, as my friend used to say, lovely reminder that none of us get out of here alive. Meaning at some point we all face death and if we're lucky, our own aging. We also will potentially face the death of our parents and our friends and our pets and loved ones, and potentially even the systems and culture and the way that we know to live. But here's the question. What if change and aging and dying weren't something to fear, but again, just another mystery to embrace? So inviting you to dive into this topic together in our upcoming 10 day online immersion that begins Monday, October 6th. It's called Walking each Other Meeting the Mystery of Death and Aging. And each evening we'll meet live via Zoom, where you get to talk with incredible teachers like Mirabai Bush and Sharon Salzberg and Mirabai Star Krishna Das, Ramdev Aditi Sethi, people who have really focused on these mysteries. And then each morning you'll get specially curated teachings from the Ram Dass archives. And so together we'll explore aging and grief and impermanence and culture shifts and what lies beyond the Bardo states. All so that we can keep our hearts open and keep walking each other home. Check it out. Ramdass.org Mystery it's in the show notes and also in the show notes. Magic mind. You know, I've been talking about these green little shots for about 18 months or so. It's something that I do consistently so that I can show up more fully. And they sent me samples, as I said about 18 months ago before we partnered. And it absolutely won me over because I just felt better every day, just a little bit better every day. My mood was better. And that afternoon slump where, you know, I want to like distract myself in some way or procrastinate. There was a steadiness right through that where I had more clarity, more focus, no crash. And it's in part because Magic Mind is packed with these incredible ingredients. Nootropics and adaptogens and time released caffeine has lion's mane and matcha and all sorts of great stuff. You get the smooth energy. So if you have been curious, this is a perfect time to try because they are offering our listeners 48% off with their first subscription and up to 20% off with the first time one time purchase. So check it out. Magicmind.com Ram Dass in the show notes all right, so with that, let's settle in, take a nice big deep breath and open our hearts together as we listen to this wisdom of Ram Dass. And as always, whatever good comes from sharing and listening to these lectures, may it ripple out into our lives and be a benefit for all beings everywhere. Namaste and blessings.

When you look around and you see suffering in the world, especially among people who aren't obviously in any way responsible for their suffering on this plane, that is, they are living in a third world country and they're malnourished child who's dying of attendant diseases that go with starvation, like diarrhea, things like that, or you see people being tortured. And I that we're not particularly political like the Jews in Germany. It's extremely hard to plumb the depths of that mystery of what is the meaning of that suffering? Is that an error? Is it a sin? Is it an error of God? Did God blow it? Is there no God? Is it all just kind of random events? And you and I wrestle with that in so many different ways in the way we explain away suffering all the time or handle it, because we do have to handle it because there's so much of it. And to just to give you a feeling for like just an image of suffering for you to work with and a breakthrough in perceiving it. I'd like to read you this interview. We have lots of interviews and one of the interviews was with extraordinarily beautiful and compassionate man who many of you I'm sure know his name is Wavy Gravy. And Wavy is a clown, among other things. And he works often in the children's leukemia ward at the hospital in San Francisco where he goes in his clown outfit and entertains and blows bubbles and draws pictures on their bald heads that they're bald from chemotherapy, etcetera and so in this interview, he's describing how he started working at the hospital. And he said, when I was starting out, I was making the rounds one day. The Children's Hospital in Oakland. He usually would go around with his clown outfit. And he went around with his red nose, which. And this is it. He's given it to me, so now I have it. I should really read this with that nose in mind. I was making the rounds one day at the Children's Hospital in Oakland. The shade was pulled on this one room so I couldn't see. But I peeked in the door. It was a room with a badly burned child in it. They had badly burned children in them. They had them in chrome cribs with walls on the side so they couldn't crawl out or fall out if it got too terrible in there. There was this little black kid in one of them. He was horribly burned. He looked like burnt toast. Pieces of his face weren't there. Pieces of his ears were missing. You could hardly tell who he was. There was no way of pinning a person to the face. What there was of it, it was just terrible. Mind boggling. My jaw dropped, I gasped and I came completely unglued. I remember flashing back to the anti war movement. There was a picture of a Nippon kid I used to carry around on a poster to try to wake people up to that. And here he was, right in front of me. I was overwhelmed by his predicament. What's it going to be like if he lives? Will he ever play with other kids or just be the science fiction monster the kids will goof on? And I was overwhelmed by my predicament. This guy in a clown suit came in to cheer kids up, falling apart right in front of one of them. So there we were, burnt kid and uptight clown. Quite a sight. And I'm fighting just to stay there, trying to figure out how I'm going to get past my horror. And all of a sudden this other little kid comes whizzing by, skating along with his intravenous pole. And he stops and he kind of pushes around me. And he looks into the crib at this other kid. And he comes out with, hey, you, ugly. Just like that. And the burned kid kind of gurgled. And suddenly I just went for his eyes. And we locked in and everything else just dissolved. It was like going through a tunnel right to his heart. And all the burnt flesh just disappeared. And I saw him from another place. I settled right down. We settled right in, just like that. Now you and I live in a world with many burnt children and many psychologically crippled people, and many frightened people. And many people locked in violence and anger. And how we react to all that has a lot to do with what kind of help we are to the universe. There is a statue of the Buddha that has the mouth, has a little turned up smile at the corner of the lips. And it's called the Buddha with the smile of unbearable compassion. The smile of unbearable compassion sounds like a contradiction in turn. What does he know that we could reflect about? Because most of us, when we come to suffering, when we face suffering if we can, the first thing is we have to react immediately because we have to change it. That's the first natural spontaneous reaction. And fed by our psychological ego. Because the recognition of suffering is a threat to the stability of the ego. So that when you look at it, you want to either push it away, which is all of the defense mechanisms, all of the denial which you rationalize it like you can push it away by going up in levels of consciousness. You can go up to the plane where you're looking out and you see it all as karma. Somebody falls down in front of you and you say karma. You say of that child, karma. And that's really pushing it away. You can feel it, you can feel the coldness of it. And you can feel how. How cut off a person who would say that must be when they use the spiritual label in order to push away the pain of the situation. And another one we all use is pity, which is a way of pushing people away too. Oh, isn't that terrible? Which is a. It's a certain distance that you put between you and the suffering in another person. Pity, sort of, I'm glad it's not me. And of course denial and so on. And one of the things is, since it is the heart that reacts so first initially. And the human hearts, what's having the commerce with the suffering. The general thing is the heart just closes, you just freeze, you just go dead, you go cold, you go icy. You don't know what to do. I mean, that's what Wavy's problem was there. He didn't know what to do. He just came unglued. He couldn't handle it. Because you feel impotent to do anything in the face of immense suffering. And you develop not only spiritual up level intellectual defenses, but you develop just other intellectual defense like cynicism, which is a way of getting into your intellect and pushing and putting distance between you and that which is threatening to you. The other Strategy for people that experience the suffering is move towards it to change it. I got to do something about it. And a lot of you are feeling I gotta do something about things because there's so much pain and suffering. But since no matter what you do, there's going to be more, you can never do enough. You will never have the satisfaction of having eliminated suffering, which we'll see why in a moment. So that as long as you are at all attached to getting rid of the suffering before you can stop doing, you will just do and do and do and do. And if you don't watch out, your identification with being the doer will finally burn you out. You just get exhausted from trying so hard and you will get frustrated and frustration leads to aggression. So you'll end up being angry at yourself and at the whole system and you get depressed. And so what are you contributing then? Now, if you can hear the edge of it, any reaction you have to the suffering in which you're identified with the reactivity is reinforcing the plane of reality in which suffering is real. Let me come at that much slower. I just wanted to say it out front before I forget it. Now, the. The Buddha, the Tama Buddha, it was said that at night, in the early watches of the night, the Buddha would look out over the entire Buddha fields and see all the suffering. And then he'd see who was ready, whose veil was very thin, who was ready to awaken out of the illusion that creates the suffering. And anybody that has done sadhana of any kind, spiritual practice realizes that what ultimately has to be done is that you have got to break in between the perception of the suffering and the reaction to the suffering and bring into, into it some mindfulness so that the first thing you do is start to break in there by just sitting with the suffering, not do anything about it, just sit with it first until you can be with suffering, till you don't have to push it away so hard. And I've had many LSD trips and other psychedelic chemicals in which I've sat with suffering, not just my own, which, in which my whole, all my musculature and all everything is aching and wracked with pain. My jaws gritted, all of that, but just looking with like eyes, those kind of hollow eyes feeling that you see in people in prison of war camps or things like that, that look of just looking at what is and looking at suffering and suffering and just visions of suffering going before your eyes. And I think of people that didn't ask for this, getting this in An LSD trip. And it's what's called a bad trip from my point of view. It is opening to what is. And it's. That's part of what meditation is about, is opening to what is. Not pushing and pulling, just being with it. And one of the big leaps is when you are ready to stop reacting so fast in order to be with it, to hear the whole nature of things, to hear how it all is about suffering. And what is required is that because your heart is closing down as the reaction. As you sit with it for a while and you just start to be able to look at it, your heart starts to open in the presence of it. And you have your heart open in hell is really what is being required of you. I have, with Stephen Levine and others have had dying retreats. And in these retreats, very often for the first few days, it's very cathartic. It's just bringing out all the kind of emotional. The pain and fear people have about death. And then very often we show films. We've been showing films. We'll show a film like Red Asphalt, which is a film put out by the California State Highway Patrol to show to drunk drivers about what happens on the highway and its heads sticking through windows and decapitated and smashed bodies. And it's really. It's police photography. It's not cleaning up the act. And people look at it and they immediately react. It's, you know, turn away, steel themselves. And we look at it and then we start a meditation, bringing awareness to the breath. Just be with what is. Hear the rain outside, see the lights, see my body up here. Just be with what is. And then we've got somebody being with what is. Quietly, we run the film again, silently, with a meditative soundtrack. Just be with what is. Because part of the secret of compassion is being able to embrace darkness into light. It's being able to embrace suffering into yourself. It's being able to acknowledge and allow. And then the impeccable warrior hears what to do about it. But the first step is slowing down. And when you're too righteous, you can't even slow down. How can I even consider allowing this? I've got to do something about it. Can you hear that little place in there? A very interesting one. It's really the one that the social action groups are having to deal with right now in terms of their own growth. When the Buddhist sat and looked at the nature of suffering, he came back and he got up from under the Bodhi tree and he drifted away. And he ended up at the Deer park in Sarnath in India. And there he met five other yogis who used to be on the yogi circuit with him. And they were all ascetics. And they said, let's ignore Gotama because he broke. He's not. He didn't follow the traditions anymore. Let's not have anything to do with him. But he was so radiant that it was really hard for them to ignore him. I mean, light was pouring out of him, called Tej, it comes out of your head. So they finally said, what's up, Gautama? You know, and he said, you want to hear? And they sort of were going to begrudgingly listen. So they sat down and he delivered his first sermon in the Deer park at Sarna. And his first sermon consisted simply of the Four Noble Truths, which have come to be called the Four Noble Truths by Buddhists, not by Christians. And the First Noble Truth is there is suffering. And in fact, if you explore that, you will see that suffering is inherent in form, because all form is limit, and limit is not unlimited. And there is suffering just at the edge. And suffering is in not getting what you want. Suffering is even in getting what you want because you're in form and form is in time and everything changes. So it means you're going to lose it anyway. So there's suffering. Even in winning, you lose. So he said there's a lot of suffering. Second Noble Truth, he said, pointed to is that the cause that an individual suffers, that awareness suffers, is because it clings to something. It's called the clinging of the mind. Second Noble Truth, Third Noble Truth seems to follow rather obviously. You let go of the clinging, you end suffering. And the Fourth Noble Truth was his Eightfold Path. His method for letting go of clinging sequence is very obvious. There is suffering. The cause of suffering is the clinging of mind. Like you take the most extreme examples. Take somebody starving to death. Well, you. Many of you saw the movie Gandhi, and Gandhi was starving to death. But was he busy starving to death? His mind wasn't clinging to the body that was starving to death. When you say, hello, who are you? Well, I'm starving to death. I mean, that isn't the way Gandhi would have put it. So there you have one of the, like, the most extreme example, and for a moment, in a moment, we'll get to the whole sequence of how a human being happens to get caught in the first place in form. But since we'll really go all the way with this stuff, one of the Eightfold Path is right understanding and right Understanding has three components to it. Dukkha, which is suffering, meaning understand the nature of suffering. A nitya, meaning impermanence, meaning everything's changing all the time. And anatta, meaning that there is nobody there and that understanding frees you from suffering. It's as simple as this. As long as you think you're somebody, you're going to suffer. Somebody suffers. WAVY has another wonderful thing. He's running nobody for president every four years. Nobody can solve our economic problems. Nobody cares. Nobody, you know? And nobody doesn't suffer. But somebody suffers. The question is, what is it like to be nobody? Would you do anything as nobody? Don't you need to be somebody to do something? When you took birth. See, you notice how I said it? When you took birth? I didn't say when you were born. When you took birth. See, I always have this funny situation when I'm lecturing night after night. Who am I talking to? Which level of reality are we meeting in? Are we at Omega, you know, in New York State on Tuesday? Is that the reality you and I are meeting in? Hi, Omega I. Is that it? Are you women and men? Is that it? And part of what awakening, spiritual awakening is, or awakening consciousness is doing what Einstein did to Newtonian physics, doing it to the social, psychological, phenomenological universe, that is seeing the relative reality of all of the places we stand rather than their absolute reality. And then you understand the meaning of the term there is nowhere to stand. Because if you're standing in astral, you're looking up at the One and you're looking down at the personality and the body you're pushing, these are all not me. If you're just your body, you're not your personality, you're not, etc. And as long as you deny any part of yourself, you're short changing yourself. Now, can you see that those first three planes, in fact the fourth plane too, the one of soul, now bringing in Anatta, the one of soul as well. All four of those first, those first four channels all have form. They are all something. They're all in. Actually, they're all in time and space. Although the time of souls is Kalpas and Yugas, and you remember Buddha's second noble truth. The cause of suffering is clinging. Clinging to what? Clinging to form, clinging with the mind, clinging to anything, any identity, any sense of who you are, any answer, who are you? Anyone you give that you believe is real in the sense of absolutely real. Therein lies suffering first, because it all changes all the time and it will go away. I am Ozymandias. Look on my works, ye mighty. In despair. Nothing more remains. There's another component worthy of notice. That those planes at which there is form, that all form functions lawfully, everything in time and space functions lawfully. We may not understand the laws with our intellect, but we have a sense of the lawful nature of things. And everywhere we dig deep enough, we see law. If you go into biogenetics, if you go into astronomy, if you go into astrology, if you go into the I Ching, the Kabbalah, the Quran, the Talmud, if you go into music, if you go into psychology, if you go into history, wherever you go, politics. You see law. You see things are lawfully related one to another. You see the law of the dao, the natural law. It's not necessarily the law of the logic, the laws that fall within logic, but it is related to each other in some kind of systematic fashion. Now you can see the predicament that if you are identified with anything that is in form, you are therefore an unfolding lawful event. I mean, I am in a 1931 model, okay, body. It is decaying according to the laws of decay. If I am this body, I would be freaking. Like, in my younger years, I was busy not being bald, you know, And I had a long piece of hair that I sort of wore like this. And when the wind blew, I was always thinking, you know, that kind of thing. None of you have that kind of neurosis. But for me, it was a lot of pain. I mean, that was suffering. And you'd go home and you study it at night and you read transplant ads and stuff like that. This was before transplant. This was when you look at toupees as you went down the street. If you identify with any form, you are experiencing in some level of your emotional makeup, being a victim of circumstance. It's as if you're in the presence of forces that are so vast. And you are just this little thing being pushed and shoved and pulled and you're dying before you even got a chance to live. And you can't get out from under your neurosis. And. But there is a line from Galatians 5:18. It says, if you are led of the spirit, you are not under the law. If you are led of the spirit, you are not under the law. It means that when you get up into those higher channels, there is part of who you are that is equally as real as all the rest of it that is not in form. But how are you going to conceive of it? Because Any conception you have of it is form is reductionistic. You see your predicament. Your thinking mind cannot acknowledge within itself who you are. Or put it another way, you aren't who you thought you were or you aren't who you think you are. You exist behind form. Now, form. When for things to come into form in the beginning, you start with yin and yang and yub and yom and positive and negative and dark and light and all the polarities, good and evil, for example. That's an interesting one. We're talking now about being behind form, meaning there is a part of your being that has nothing to do with good and evil. And this turns out to be quite scary to people to realize that they are outside the law and to realize that you are beyond all of the conventional curbs and motives and fears and hopes and desires. It's very, very scary. This is what the journey, the spiritual journey has inherent within it is facing a lot of this fear of not being able to have the security of the Ten Commandments up there. And if you do bad, somebody's going to knock you dead. Either. The Ten Commandments and the Yama and the Sheila and all the different purification criteria of each, of each method, of each program have to have a validity that comes as you look into form, from the formless, or forget them. And when you're standing behind. Now, if I look at you and I realize the absurdity of saying, if I look at you and you are also behind form, what are. What is this? What is this? What is this? It's like that story of the man rowing the boat, rowing his rowboat in the fog in China, very thick fog. And he hits another boat and he starts to scream, you fool. Why weren't you looking where you're going? And the other boat comes alongside and he sees there's nobody in it. There are little humorous examples of that. Of. I had a Seattle newspaper I found, when I was lecturing that Seattle at. The article was called John Doe. And it was a guy showed a picture behind bars, a guy in prison. And it said in the article they had found a suitcase. He came, they caught him with a suitcase which was filled with hundreds of identities. And they had ascertained that he was none of them. The problem was they couldn't find out who he was. And he said, they're the ones that arrested me. It's their problem to find out who I am. I know who I am. And the sergeant said, this gentleman has boggled our system because you got to be somebody. It doesn't work if you're not somebody. On the plane of this plane, there's the rabbi that's in the temple and he falls on his knees and he's beating his chest, and he's doing it in front of the Torah. And he says, oh, God. Oh, God, I'm nobody. I'm nobody. I'm nobody. And the cantor comes into the shul and sees the rabbi there. So he comes up and he kneels down next to him and he, oh, God, I'm nobody. I'm nobody. I'm nobody. At this point, the janitor walks in and he sees these two guys doing this. So he goes up and he kneels down. He goes, oh, God, I'm nobody. I'm nobody. I'm nobody. And the rabbi nudges the canter and says, look who thinks he's nobody. I'm just playing with the. Just. So the nobody issue gets in a little bit. It's the one of Nasrudin, the rascally Sufi who goes into a bank to cash a large check. And he's very disreputably looking. And the clerk looks at him and the check and him and the check and studies the check and says, well, the check seems all right, but can you identify yourself, sir? And Nasrudin reaches into his pocket and pulls out a mirror and looks at it and says, yup, that's me. There's a. There was a saint lived many years ago up in the Camoen Hills named Sambari Maharaj. And one of his devotees said that told the story that one day some Bari Maharaj came out of his cave and he said to another devotee, here are two potatoes. Go to the river and eat both potatoes. So the devotee took the potatoes down to the river and he started to eat the first potato. And he was halfway through the first potato, and a very poor beggar appeared. Babaji, Babaji, you have two potatoes. You give me one potato. See your reaction at this moment. Just feel it. Of course I'll give you the potato. Righteousness. There it is. The fellow finished eating as the devotee finished eating the first potato. And he walked back up towards the cave, which was out of sight of the river. And some Bari Maharaj came out screaming, you fool, you idiot. I told you to eat both potatoes. Ah, well, that's your destiny. It's your karma. And the other devotee who tells the story says, and that devotee, the one that ate the potato, he went on to become a very high judge. He had five children. They all made good Marriages. He lived a very happy and successful life. Then the devotee said, of course, that was the first potato. Turned out the beggar was some bari Maharaj. Just testing. It's Ha Tui, the Zen master, who was dying and hadn't written his death poem. And his students got freaked and they said, you haven't written your death poem. Because every Zen master is supposed to write a Zen death poem. Right at the last right, close to death, Hatui sits up and he says, oh, my God, I haven't written my death poem. And he grabs his brush and he calligraphies madly and he dies. Loosely translated, the poem reads, birth is thus, death is thus. Verse or no verse, what's the fuss? And I throw into this stew Gandhi statement, if you make yourself zero, your power becomes invincible. And I ask you, do you want to help or do you want to help? I mean, do you really want to help? Are you willing to give up your righteousness to help? And if you give up your righteousness, would you help? Can you hear the problem? I mean, I'd really like. I. I'd really like you to share this dilemma because it's so tasty and it is so at the root of what liberated helping is about. The helping which liberates. One of the ways of saying how you work is, as Don Juan says, you huff and you puff and you make believe that it matters, even though you know that it doesn't. That's so hard to hear. And into that place also fits the third Chinese patriarch that many of you are familiar with. Third Chinese PATRIARCH of Zen lived in China. This tiny little book starts, the Great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. But make the slightest distinction, heaven and earth are set infinitely apart as long as you invest in a reality with attachment, not involvement. I'm not talking about being involved in realities. I'm talking about being attached to reality, meaning identifying it with it, meaning thinking it's you and thinking that plane of reality is absolutely real. As long as you do that, there is no way that you can release you and everybody else from suffering. In an absolute sense. When I walk into the room with somebody who is, quote, dying, the question is, do I see, quote, somebody who is dying, or do I see a fellow soul who happens to be in a body which is dying, the soul is about to drop this body, or do I see this all as though whimsy, the play of God, or do I see it all as form that is nothing other than formlessness. It is the form of formlessness. Where I am perceptually standing determines what will come out of me. And what comes out of me will determine whether or not my presence liberates that other person or not, or could liberate them if they were ready to be liberated. Because you don't liberate another person. You merely create an environment in which they get free if they're ready. There is a rascally Tibetan lama named Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche some of you, I'm sure, have heard about. And I met him in Brooklyn. I've told this story before, but it's relevant at this moment. I met him in Brooklyn. He came to. He was lecturing, and I went to hear him in an apartment, and he arrived two hours late, drunk. Now, by that time, all the people had said, I'm not waiting two hours to hear anybody had left. And when he arrived and staggered down the the aisle drunk, he lost another chunk of the audience. And I'm not going to sit here and listen to a drunk. So the few of us that were left sat before him as he then delivered a discourse that was absolutely like a still and bottomless pool of brilliant clarity. Well, after the lecture, I went up to him, somewhat filled with my Ram dustness, to honor Trungpa Rinpoche. You know, I'm. How do you do? I'm welcome to this land. I'm, you know, I'm one of the elders in training, and I've come to. And I had my beads with me, and I came up and I said, I just want to thank. And I got. So I just looked into his eyes and I dropped my beads and he is drunk and he's had an automobile accident, which he had had in Scotland, where he was making out with a girl while driving a car. And he drove into a joke shop. And see, there are a lot of things that put you off about Trungpa if you're holding anywhere. That's what a good Tantric teacher does. You see, a good Tantric teacher will have something like 22 Rolls Royces or something, and he'll. That'll be terribly offensive to you just to play with your stuff. Then you never know whether they're just greedy. It's always, now you see it, now you don't. You know, it never gets that clear. And he just bent over and he picked up my beads and handed them to me. And I knew I had just sort of been had. Well, he fascinated me. I always get Fascinated when I think somebody's got it. Something that I want, you know, I. So the next weekend, he was giving a lecture on Don Juan, and I went up to hear it up in Vermont, Tail the tiger. And I was out in the parking lot with some friends, one of whom is here in a Volkswagen Microbus, preparing ourselves for the lecture. I was going to sit on the lecture, getting my consciousness in the right place for the lecture. And somebody came along and said, rinpoche wants to see you. Okay. So I went inside and I came upstairs, led into this room. There's one chair in the room. He's sitting in it. There's a bottle of sake on a table with one glass. He's drinking from it. So I. The doors close. So I sort of psych out the scene. And I kneel in front of him, which seems like an appropriate thing to do under the circumstances. Sort of enforced humility. And he looks at me. Now, the only thing I've had with him is in Brooklyn, where I drop my beads. And he looks at me and he says, ram Dass, we must accept responsibility. I mean, what do you do with a line like that? Well, see, I'm one of these kind of old Harvard jousters. You think that. Take that. You see. So I figured I'd give him. I give him a bhakti up level. So I said, what do you mean, I have the responsibility? I don't have any responsibility. God has all the responsibility. Not my. But thy will, O Lord. Trungpa said, you're copping out. And then we went on to talk about something else, and that was in 1974. And that's gnawed at me for years. I mean, I've had lots of dealings with Trunkva since then, but I've always wondered. And over the years, I begun to have an inkling because I have this other friend that I've mentioned to many of you called Emmanuel. And Emanuel has no body. He's my spook friend. Emanuel speaks through a woman named Pat Rodegast. And he's an incredibly delightful guy. When you say to Emanuel, Emmanuel, what do I tell people about dying? He says, tell them it's absolutely safe. He said, it's like taking off a tight shoe. He's got a delightful light humor. I mean, if you're going to have one. I'm always impressed with people who. I don't believe in that sort of thing. They tell me they're liberal and they have no prejudices. They're not prejudiced if you're black or Yellow or red or white or fat or thin or old or young. But if you don't have a body, no way, baby. You drink from that fountain over there. That's not here. Well, Emmanuel's my friend. I don't care about anybody else. Then Emanuel says, you've got the choice. Do you want to be the victim or the creator? And you can see that if you identify with form in any way, even with your thoughts, you are the victim. You are part of an unfolding law. You experience it happening to you, and yet there is a part of you that isn't in form. And that part out of that part comes the creation of all the form. The form comes out of the formless. And at the part of you that is just what you might call blob or spacious awareness or is pure mind, whatever you want to call it, that part of you, the Atman, that part of you is the Creator. But you look, you and I, having grown up for the most part in Western religions, do you see what heresy, what chutzpah it is to say I am the Creator? I mean, you can get just so close in this I thou business. You can be aware of it, but you better not go that next step and merge with it. But that is the only part of your being which really is free to create. Only the part that is not in form is not in law. And only the part that is not in form and not in law is free. And only the part that is free free can truly create. All the rest of it is merely lawfully unfolding. And you can sense when you focus on a Bach or a Michelangelo, a Picasso, you can feel the sense in which the or an Einstein, the one pointedness of their being, the laser like discipline of concentration, brought them into the part of their being, brought them out of form, into the space where all is, but not in form. And from this they bring back in through themselves as a vehicle, a form which is unique to their being. So for Einstein, it's E equals MC squared. For Bach, it's the unaccompanied cello concerti for et cetera sonatas. And when Trunkva says to me, we must accept responsibility, can you hear that from that point of view? Can you hear him saying, hey, Ram Dass, come on up for air and let's get on with it. I just came from the Planetary Initiative for the World we choose meeting, and everybody was talking about, well, now what do you say? Let's start to choose the world we're going to live in. And I said, hey, I'd like to point out you already did. And if you're going to change anything, the first thing you got to do is cop to the fact that you are responsible for the one you're in now. It's so easy to say they did this to me, but I'm going to choose to change it. You can't get out that cheap. And when you look at some people who are suffering, you see that you too have suffered in a similar way in some way in your life and that you remember when you were that attached to that form and thus suffering when I suffered so much because I was going bald. That has deepened my compassion for people who suffer because of physical beauty, so that my compassion conveys to them. I feel what you feel. I understand what you're feeling. I'm in here with you. But at the same moment, the fact is I am no longer there exclusively. And thus I am also a consciousness which is a vehicle through which they can get free if they want to. If they want to come up for air, they can. They don't have to, but they can if they want to. And as we will talk about in the next couple of days, compassion is learning how to leave people alone to suffer. Because the zeal to heal somebody that doesn't want to be healed or remove people. Now this doesn't apply in third world countries for the most part, where this is being done to people not talking about those situations. Political victimization or does it? See, that's the one that's the stinker. At one point, Wavy was in a full body cast and he went to hear Trunkpa speak. And he was laying in front of Trunkpa and they had placed a candle on his cast. And Trungpa was speaking about the noble truths and the end of suffering and clearing the mind. And. And Wavy said, well, what are you going to do about the people that are starving? And Trunk was sort of ignored him and went on with his lecture about the Dharma. And Wavy said, well, what are you going to do about the people that are these kids that are hungry? And Trungpa ignored him and went on. And Wavy said, well, I think I'll just get out of the store and get some stuff and send it to them. Some food, some rice and stuff and send it. And you can hear that Trungpa and Wavy were just representing two parts of the dance. Wavy could hear perfectly well what Trunkpa was saying, and Trungpa could hear what Wavy was saying. And part of what I am inviting you to into is the feast of helping that comes out of not helping and hearing the statement, you do nothing and nothing is left undone. This podcast is brought to you by the Love Serve Remember foundation and Ramdas.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 Ramdas has been sharing for all of these years. Thank you.

This show is brought to you by BetterHelp. We've all been there sharing too much with a friendly face who isn't really qualified. While it's nice to talk, it's not enough. When anxiety or depression is involved, not everyone is the one. BetterHelp connects you with licensed credentialed therapist trained to guide you. Talking to a real therapist isn't just supportive, it's transformative. 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. Find the one with BetterHelp, our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com ramdas that's BetterHelp H-E-L-P.com ramdas.