Ep. 291 – Across the Decades: Ram Dass on Honoring Parents and Incarnation

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Parents?

Foreign.

Hello everyone, this is Jackie. And welcome to another Ram Dass Here and Now episode. This is number 291. Across the decades, Ram Dass on Honoring Parents and incarnation. So this is a theme that touched many stages of his life, from his early awakening after returning from India, through his middle age and the years of tending to his parents, and all the way to his own aging in Maui. So we'll travel across the decades, from his family farm in New Hampshire in 1969 to the abode of the Message in upstate New York to save a foundation in the 80s and a consciousness retreat in the 90s, and finally, a conversation that was recorded in Maui in 2011. And each of these moments, they capture Ram Dass at a different stage in his human journey. And through them we can feel how his understanding of service and family and love, they deepen and become richer over time. From the like early idealism of his spiritual awakening to the humility of simply being human with those who raised us. And then the very real day to day walking the steps of being someone's child, of being in the family dynamic. And I want to mention before we begin, we are entering holiday season when we get to go be with family. And it can be a very tender season, full of connection, but also full of pressure and pace. So if you're anything like me, that mix of love and overwhelm can make it hard to stay centered and clear. And lately I talk about it often. I have found this small morning ritual that really helps. It's that little drink, Magic Mind. It's a green shot. I take it in the morning. It's made with matcha and adaptogens like lion's mane and nootropics like copa. And it just gives me calm and focused energy without a rush. And it's become one of those quiet supports that helps me stay present in the swirl of all of it. So if you're feeling a little stretched thin, maybe you want to meet the holidays with a little more clarity. Check out their Black Friday sale. Go to magicmind.com and you can get 58% off subscriptions, free free shipping, and a free 15 pack of the sleep shots. I really love how they help me move through my day with more ease and focus, especially when things are speeding up. So check them out. And thanks again for being here, for listening, for practicing, for remembering. So here is Ram Dass here and now.

We have had a rash recently, a rash of beings who have been around here who have come to talk to me and who have said, I'm doing fine. But I really want you to help.

Somebody or other.

I want you to help my aging mother. I want you to help my brother, help my son. My mother is so unhappy. How can I help her now? At first blush, such reactions would seem very humane, conscious and loving. But they are also very mechanical. Lyspensky says to be a Christian means to be responsible. Responsibility comes when a man ceases to be a machine and begins, in fact, to desire to be a Christian. In order to be a good Christian, one must be. Only a conscious egoist can help people. That is that most of our efforts to help somebody are very, very high. Dr. Here is a mother who was saying, look how I suffer. And here is a kid saying, mother's suffering so bad. What can I tell her? Could I get her to meditate? If I could get my mother to sit down and meditate, she would become a better, happier, fuller being. At first, my implication the. My tendency was to always climb in with both feet.

Kind of a.

Kind of a do Gooding tradition of service. I would. Meet with people who I was told wanted to. Somebody else wanted me to see, and I would see them. And it slowly dawned on me that I was merely being a cast in a character role.

And I was merely being asked to.

Play another part in a drama that had nothing to do with change. Everybody was happy in their role. The mother was busy suffering. The kid was busy changing the mother from suffering. I was busy being the wise person people turned to to change their mother's suffering. And everybody had their part to play. The one thing that was missing was that the mother hadn't asked to stop suffering. When my mother started to die, both of my brother and I, my middle brother, the very high and strange and emotional brother, and I were both very concerned to help reduce any suffering she might undergo. But a. A visit after a while convinced me that she was. She had. She had written the whole script herself. She knew just how she was going to do this whole thing. My brother couldn't accept this, however, and he had to relieve her suffering whether she liked it or not. And he reasoned to her, if you understood what was happening to your body more, you would suffer less. So he said, I will endeavor to share an education with you about how the body works. So he brought over Grey's Anatomy, starting with chapter one. He was going to read to her every afternoon and see why they locked my brother up. Whether she liked it or not, she didn't want to read Gray's an End. She said, I've got a headache. We'll only read one page, okay?

Just one page.

Then he figured when you finished Grey's Anatomy, do the Bible. She'd be ready for that by then.

And then it would be really all right.

She threw him out. And after I began to be aware that there was really. That as. See, if somebody is seeking something and then you have something that they can use, you have. You're a vehicle through which something comes up they can use, and that means something happens to them, then they want to share it with everybody they love. But the thing is that a lot of the people they love don't want to share it. So I realized that as that if whatever Maharaj was doing through me was really taking, I was going to have more and more of these peripheral people coming who were being sent to me for something or other.

So.

At first I tried, and then I saw the futility of that. And then I got into a place that was very callous, seemed to me at first. I mean, I could sit and I could watch someone sit, suffer, and I could feel compassion for them. And at the same time, I could not. I did not lift a finger to do anything because I realized the futility of trying to do something they hadn't asked me to do. And even when I was sitting with my mother the week before her death, I sat there and I knew here I had been working with the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and I had been through many psychedelic experiences which involved confronting death. And I had confronted death with, you know, huge doses of LSD in the ocean in the middle of the night and, you know, pounding surf and jungle and all the melodramas. And I was, you know, I was. I was dying to talk with her about dying, but it was none of my business to do. So all I could do was sit there and wait.

And if.

And when. And when she finally did say something about dying, she opened the door and then I could come in, but she had to open the door. It turns out, you see, that there are. That the different members of a family have entirely different karmas. Two brothers can be such that one is a very, very conscious being and one is a completely unconscious, mechanical being. They both come out of the same parents and they almost could be twins. And all psycho ecology's attempts to understand individual differences among siblings on the basis of differences in environment and experience have been flat. Have done. Been trivial in terms of their findings, Because it's like in the grand design of things, somebody is born into a family which will allow them to have a certain set of experiences which is going to help their karmic. Their unfolding, their karmic unfolding. And maybe they are very high. And what they need is the abrasiveness of some completely dense being to rub against, which is going to open them up in that way. And therefore they might have a brother or sister that is completely sleepwalking through life. Some of you have read Salinger's Teddy, the short story Teddy in the nine short stories of J.D. salinger. And in that Teddy's little sister is just a, you know, just a nice little girl. She's a good kid, but she's just not a very conscious kid. And Teddy, on the other hand, is like an old llama. He just happens to be 10 years old, but he. In this life, but he's an old llama. I have sat with my father in the past two years now, literally dozens of times, during which he has been in the presence of explanations about what it is I'm trying to do, trying to be doing, being what's happening here. And what has rubbed off is a feeling we're all good people. But nothing has rubbed off that is easing his own anxiety about dying. Well, I shouldn't say that there is a change in him in the sense that he lives much more in the present because of our presence than he ever did before. Because you can't live around dozens and dozens of people, all of whom are living in the present moment and still hang on that hard to the past. But the rubbing off has been gentle, and it hasn't given him a center that he could use. Were we not around, that is, the minute we are gone, he would lose his center again.

By the early 1970s, Ram Dass had begun teaching around the country. The wave of spiritual seekers that had been following him from be here Now. They were hungry for meaning beyond rebellion, for ways to live love in ordinary life. At the abode of the Message in New Lebanon, New York, it's a Sufi community rooted in devotion. He speaks about the paradox of incarnation, how we honor the divine while also honoring our human story, our families, and these bodies we inhabit. You can hear some of the more nuanced understanding here. Less about leaving the world behind and more about finding God right inside.

If you trace the spiritual journey that many of us have been on, you will see that many of us went from a psychological, economic, political universe into a spiritual universe. And in doing that, we pushed away the political, social, psychological, economic universe as being yik. I have no business with it. And then if you follow our actions until who we are now, you see that most of us have found that we couldn't build our house upon sand and that we had to finally, what I call honor our incarnation. That the way God manifests is through forms. And these are the forms. And if you're going to love God, you have to love the forms. And the first form you have to love is the form you happen to have incarnated into. And to love that form means to listen to it and to honor it and to give it space to be what it has to be, be. Somebody put up on the stage a picture which just blew my mind because I've never seen this picture before. Incredibly beautiful. It's a picture of me hugging my father. I have hugged my father.

Probably.

Well, since I was after After I was a little child. Since that time, probably in 45 years, I've hugged him maybe, Oh, two dozen, three dozen times. It's a very rare occurrence. It used to cause him so much pain when I first started to get into hugging people because it wasn't manly. And here is a picture of my father and I hugging. And the reason it's particularly powerful for me at this moment is I've just come from spending a month with my father. My father is 81 and my stepmother is 62 or 3, and my step grandmother is 92. And the four of us have been together for a month in a house in Maine, which we rented. Now, I've done this being with my father once a month now for several years, because I said to myself, look, you have to honor your incarnation. And one of the aspects of your incarnation is that you are your father's son. And even though on some level that seems kind of funny, it happens to be part of what it's about. Just like I have to honor the fact that I'm an American. I have to pay my taxes. I have to do a lot of stuff. And this is one of the things. I must honor it. And then I had to figure out, what does it mean to honor it? What does it mean to honor it? What does it mean to honor parents in Hinduism? At one point, I remember Hari Das Baba saying to me, ram Dass, before you go any further, you must go back to America and get the blessings of your parents. And I thought, wow, what do you do in America? Hey, Dad, I want your blessings. I mean, really weird. It's just not a language we talk. I figured, well, maybe I could figure out another way of wording it. Do you approve of my doing what I'm doing? You know, something like that. And I came back to America, and I was with dad, and at first he thought I was a complete nut. And then as the year went on and a few years we were together and the love developed and we moved into another space. And finally I said, dad, I got to go back to India. And he said, okay. I'll miss you, but okay. And I said, do I have your blessings? He says, you sure do. See? And that was great. I mean, that was really. That was a jewel that took three years of flipping around, you understand, because many of you have had to deal with the same issue, I think. I mean, it came from such a joyful place in him to do that, because it wasn't me against him. It wasn't threat. So now, in 72 or 73. When I came back from India, I wanted to honor my family because I wanted to honor my incarnation. I'm a Westerner, and I wanted to. I'm living in the West. So each year we would plan some different kind of a thing to do together. My mother had died many years ago. My father remarried. And what I would do is I would go with them somewhere. But then I would. There was a way psychologically inside myself where I'd hang back, protecting my spiritual virginity. Like, I'd go into my room and read holy books. Or I'd say, no, I don't care for that food. Thank you. And there'd be that look, you know, because that's an old family food that everybody always eats, see, and come down. And my father would say, hey, Rich, I've decided to cook this. You know, he makes about three dishes, none of which are yogic, but he makes them with his own hands. It's my father. Is that what honoring father means? Do I have to eat that stuff? And so each year, I've been sort of exploring that. I don't know how you're doing this business of the spiritual journey, but this is the way I'm doing it. I explore it different ways, and I get a certain stance that I'm comfortable with. And then later, I see it was just another stance, and I see that there is nowhere to stand. I mean, I'm going to deal with some of these issues about becoming nobody and nowhere to stand and no stance, because you keep getting these subtle stances to protect yourself. It's like, I want to do it, but I don't want to get contaminated by doing it. Do you hear what I'm saying? It's like. And see, I used to wear beads and clothes to sort of reassure myself and everybody else that no matter how corrupt I was, you knew, basically, you know, I mean, I needed that sort of external reassurance for myself. And then people would treat me certain ways because they looked at me and they said, he's one of those. And then I sort of gave up more and more of that, wanting to risk more and more. And now I'm down to just sort of this and this.

And.

A number of times I've gone into various people with cut hair, and I'd say, what do you say? Let's get rid of all this now. And they say, no, you'd look terrible without it. So there we are. It's purely aesthetic now. It's not even spiritual. I tried. Now, each year I haven't Solved all these problems by any means. I'm just working on them. And this year, for this month, I just completely just let go. I just became one of those four people. We looked at the news. We looked at Mary Tyler Moore. We looked at. We played Yahtzee every night. We went out to dinner. Every other night we had. Because when you get to a certain age, all that's left is eating. So at breakfast, you're planning lunch and where are we going to go for dinner? And you just get, oh, my God, have I got. You know. And you either can say, now, look, folks, I've just gone as far as I can go. I mean, I need a few days of fruit or I'm going to fast today or something. You say, after all, I got a.

Right to do that.

I'm a member of this. They're all doing well. But I just thought for change, I would say, look, Maharaj, you know, it's your problem. You protect me. I'm going to surrender. I mean, if this is God, let me surrender. I'll keep surrendering my form. So I just surrendered. So I have been doing all of this. If I never eat another lobster, it'll be too soon. And me sticking a lobster into a boiling pot of water and saying, goodbye, lobster, you know, oh, oh, oh, oh. But if I'm going to eat it, I got to be willing to kill it. And feeling the kind of horrible ugliness of so much of the stuff of this style of life, and yet just being. And sometimes when I'd be sitting with my father out in the front yard in the sun, we'd be. We sun ourselves in the morning, and we'd be sitting out in the sun. He'd be smoking a cigar and be looking at the ocean, and I'd be smelling the salt water through the cigar smoke. And he'd be usually telling me about stock market things or things like that, but now and then he'd say, you know, I've been dreaming a lot lately. So, yeah. And there'd just be these little intimate discussions, just a couple of minutes of intimacy, and then it was almost as if it was almost unbearable. He'd say, well, I think I've had enough sun now. And off he'd go. And I realized that that intimacy came out of the place, that I had surrendered enough into his world so he felt safe, because I really wasn't anybody special anymore.

By the mid-1980s, the spiritual revolution of the previous decade had maybe begun to settle into something quieter, maybe something a little bit more integrated. And at this point, Ram Dass really was living what he was talking about. He was caring for his aging father and stepmother and facing the very real complexity of offering service within family life. This was also the era of the Seva Foundation. So Ram Dass co founded the Seva foundation with friends like Larry Brilliant and. And Giraja, his wife, and Wavy Gravy and his wife and several others, Mirabai Bush. So their work, it brought compassion into action through service to others. And here we hear Ramnas turning some of that compassion inward towards the intimate terrain of family duty and emotional honesty. So this is a talk from 1985, it's in San Rafael. And he's reflecting on how spiritual ideals meet the raw truth of caregiving. How our parents often become our greatest teachers around surrender.

So I thought, well, you know, in terms of the myth of success in America, moving home at 50 to take care of your father, it's not the greatest shakes in the world, but I'm sure I can milk it for something, which is what I'm doing right now. So I moved home and I started to take care of my father. Well, it has turned out to be one of the most extraordinary sadhanas or upayas or methods I had ever worked with. Because each day, on the days I was on duty, get up, wake my father, move him to the bathroom, bathe him, toilet him, get his bridge, brush his bridge, put his pad on, dress him, take him out to the kitchen, shuffling along with the walker, feed him, wipe, feed, sit him down, sit with him. My father and I in our growing years were he was a great achiever. He was doing wonder. He was a big shaker in mover in society. And we would. He'd pat me on the head and, you know, I was raised by my mother, and he was a nice guy, but stern and remote. You never touched each other much. It wasn't the thing. Now, my goodness, we're cuddling and bathing. When I'm putting on his socks, he's patting me on the back. Imagine that. You know what that feels like. And I might have missed that. I might have missed that because I was so much in the myth that independence means leaving home. I might have missed the whole idea of extended family. Now what I did was I began to see that this was a good silence. So I started to keep a little diary of what was going on. And I noticed that each day was an entirely different me that went to meet my father. I mean, my mind was so fertile. My mind is so slimy. I'll Tell you, it does. So much subtle manipulation. Here's just a list of some of the days of what they were like. See, one day I came up and I was kind. You know what that's like? You know, it's kind and you feel kind. You know, you're kind.

Who are you?

I'm just kindly. It's a kind feeling, you know? But just the next day, I was long suffering Jesus, I got to do this every day. And he's. Then one day, a few days later, there was a lot of filial devotion. That was nice. I mean, I was so enamored of the myth of being a good son. And this was just so juicy. Then there was a day when it was all automatic. My mind was somewhere else. Then we had the day when I was sharing the joy of a new day. You gotta understand, through all this, my father is very stoic. I mean, he's been with me through so much of my shit by now. He's just. You know. So half the time I don't know whether he's my father or my guru in drag. I don't have any idea who he.

Is, you know.

Or a smelly old man, or when we're bathing a fellow male. Or sometimes I'm a scientist and I see him as a set of ambulatory variables because we keep charts of what goes in and what comes out since you got to watch it all. And our conversation around the house is whether it was a tiny small, medium or large. Those of you with intestines know of which I am speaking. Some days I was busy respecting him. Some days I was busy guiding him. Some days I was drawing him out. Some days I was distracted. Some days I was very humorous. These were all models I had of who I was in this situation. And I saw that all of these were just other postures that kept me from just being with him. They were my mind cutting me off from the moment. And slowly I just. They all started to melt and melt and melt. And then there'd be moments when it was just wiping his behind, or it was just soaping his body and it was just holding hands. And when he'd be walking with his walker, I'd be back of him. And I'd be lift, push, place, lift, push, place. And we'd just be meditating our way to the kitchen very slowly together, just being in a gentle space. And I began to see what a method this was, that if I wanted to use it as work on myself, every day was another little bit of awareness of where My mind was grabbing hold. And each day I could come up for air just by being with him again and noticing it. Not getting violent with myself, not saying, you jerk, because that's perfect too. If I were all enlightened, I wouldn't have incarnated unless I just did it for you, which I didn't. I wish I had, but that's perfect too. So I ended up in that particular situation, seeing that dealing with my father was incredible grace for me. Through all these years I have kept meditation going and as another way of working on myself. And this past summer I spent two months in Rangoon, Burma, in a Theravadan meditation center with an extraordinary master named Upandita Sayada. Upandita. Sitting in meditation from 3 in the morning till 11 at night following the rising and falling of the muscle in my abdomen that goes in and up and down with each breath. It's interesting. It's one of the hardest things I ever did. I mean, I've done that meditation, but I never did it. From 3 in the morning till 11 at night for 2 months and 10 minutes a day. You see the teacher and you report to the teacher. The report sounds like this 6pm last night. I was meditating on the rising and falling of my breath. I was noting the rising as rising. I was noting the falling as falling. The rising had a quality of elasticity, the falling had a quality of settling. After about three minutes I became aware of the sound of a bird. Then he interrupts and he said, did you hear the bird on a rising or a falling? And you say I didn't notice. And he said, well, please try to do better next time. And as you're leaving, he says, by the way, did you go to sleep night last, last night are in a rising or a falling breath. And it's extraordinary. I mean, it really is. It's a no nonsense game. And he really sees where your mind is. And speaking of slimy mind, I mean, I saw stuff in me. I was so subtle. Well, at any rate, I was getting very high. I mean, you get really far out. I don't know much more than that. I mean, I'd sit for 10 hours in Tranquility. Nice place. It's a little spiritual materialism, you know, but it's nice. And all your sun scars sort of lurking out of the edges, all your thoughts just waiting for you to not follow the breath, you know, and then they're just waiting to come around. At the end of two months, I got a telegram which I'd been dreaming and Hoping to get for the first month. But by the second month I had settled in and I was prepared to go the three months which I was committed to do. And then at the end of the second month, unwanted now by me, a telegram came. So saying that my stepmother had cancer and was going to be operated on. And the prognosis was unclear. Now she was taking care of my father and if she wasn't going to be around, I should go back and take care of my father. So that seemed obvious. So I took the telegram to the teacher. Teacher had the telegram translated. He said, don't go, don't go. He said, you're really working to end suffering and you're doing very high work. You're very far along now, but you have more to do. And if you leave now, you go back with the kinds of. He didn't say all this, but roughly with the attachments you have. And what suffering will you relieve? You know, you may relieve a little short term suffering, but in the long run, you're just a typhoid Mary. You're just carrying suffering with you like everybody else, and somebody else will take care of them and you stay here. And you know, in Hinduism, when you become a sannyas, a renunciate, they have a funeral ceremony for you and you are burned, you die to your parents and family. But in the Jewish tradition, I mean, I'm a Jewish boy from Boston, you never die to your family. I mean, there was no Shiva sat for me. I see.

And I.

He said, I don't think you should go. And I looked and I saw those sanskara, I saw my karma, my family karma. I saw the whole thing. And I said, I hear what you're saying, but I gotta go. I mean, it's like, it's poignant, but there it is. And I came home and it was incredible. I mean, it was a far out experience. Suddenly I went from, you know, you know, three in the morning, 11 at night in my meditation cell to an intensive care warden hours and days at a time. And it was extraordinary. I mean, it was so beautiful and so clear and so there was so much love for the doctors and the nurses. And it was so. Everybody was so liquid and human. I mean, it was just an incredible experience for me and my stepmother. And I became so close. And I began to see that dealing with her cancer was a whole other ball game for me than dealing with the cancer of somebody who I went to help die because this was my stepmother. And there was a new level of attachment here, a new Level of attachment. There was one moment when I was. We had decided that we would share everything together. She and I have been doing it. We go to the doctor together. We share all the medicines, everything. We plan it all. I don't take the medicines, but we hang in together through the whole process. I'm with her every day, and when she's really needing me. She's getting better now at the moment, so it's fine. So at this particular point, she had had a sarcoma removed from her thigh, and the question was whether it had moved to her liver, which would mean that it was systemic. And they had done a biopsy and they were going to call on this day. She said, you be on the phone with me. And so I was in the bedroom doing some work on the floor and writing, and the phone rang, and I picked up my phone and she picked up hers, and they said, just a minute, doctor's coming. And I looked up at a picture of my guru, and I said to my guru, look, I don't ask you for anything because you know how things are and what the hell. I mean, you know how things have to be, and what am I asking for? And you must. Some of you must know. I did a book called Miracle of Love, which has a thousand stories about how he zapped people and cleaned up their illnesses and.

And all that.

So I said, but by the way, if you can slip it through, you know, karmically without any trouble, would you? At this point, the doctor comes on the line and he says, Mrs. Alpert, I'm sorry to tell you that the cells in your liver are the worst kind of cells, and it's metastasized there. And if we don't take it out immediately, you'll be dead within a month. And I felt my heart freeze and close, and I felt my side looked at the picture, and I said, you son of a bitch. And it shocked the hell out of me. I mean, I never spoke to him like that. And a moment later, I realized I was meeting Shiva. I said, yeah, and that too. And we were just that much closer. We had just cut through, he and I, another level of the kind of goody goody part of the bhakti trip, of the devotional trip. And we had moved into a place where we were recognizing each other across the universe and all of its chaos and all of its change and all of its horror and all of that. She's been through the second operation. Her liver is healing. She's at the moment quite free of stuff. Who knows how long. But what a growing experience for me. I mean, could I ask. I didn't ask for her to have this, but could I have asked for anything that would have forced my own growth and my confrontation of those attachments in myself? Any more than that.

You've got to.

Keep surrendering and surrendering and surrendering. Gandhi says God demands nothing less than complete self surrender as the price for the only real freedom that is worth having. And when a person thus loses herself, she immediately finds herself in the service of all that lives. It becomes her delight and recreation. She is a new person, never wary of spending herself in the service of God's creation. As a statement in Buddhism, if you realize the voidness, compassion will arise within your heart.

By the 1990s, Ram Dass had entered a new chapter. So the baby boomers who once sought enlightenment maybe still were. We're beginning to face aging and loss and the changing nature of identity. So at the Conscious Aging Retreat in Clearwater, Florida, Ram Dass is speaking directly to this generation, to the need to integrate spiritual insight with that full arc of human development. And so you'll hear him describe how even the roles of parent and child can dissolve, even if it's just for a moment, into just being here now, just presence, and that it's a glimpse of timeless love that underlies all of our incarnations at all times.

How do you help a child to stay awake or to awaken and yet recognize that for a child, the curriculum, for the most part, demands that they get lost into their separateness and develop the groundedness and efficiency of ego development, which involves relationship education and become, in other words, the way I say it, my cutesy way, is you gotta become somebody before you can become nobody. But you understand that what you can do is the work you do on yourself. You can't really do it to somebody else because you have no idea whether your child is an old being or a young being. You don't know what their curriculum is either. Even you know. And you may have two children, one of whom is a really old llama that just dropped by to bless everybody, and the other one is, you know, immediately post Neanderthal, and you can't figure out, they both came out of my womb, what is this all about? You know? But they're karma for each other. Each of us is each other's karma. You are theirs, they are yours, et cetera. So since you're dealing with the mystery of each person's curriculum, you keep creating, working on yourself to become an environment where Another person can flourish in the way they need to flourish. And you having the minimal models about how it is they're supposed to flourish because the models will create the suffering. And parents get into this thing of I'm supposed to mold my child. And I think it is better to be. To think of it as a flower and be the fertilizer in the water and then allow the flower to grow.

Okay?

And I would say that if you have cultivated the place in you that sees them as souls and you as souls, that is the optimum environment for them to get through the whole sequence as quickly as possible and get caught as little as possible.

Okay?

So they say it is very good grace to be born into a family of yogis. It says in the Bhagavad Gita, meaning people who are in yog or in union or in one with the one. Because then you can play the role of being a parent because it's your dharma to do that. But you are not identifying. See, like, my mother thought she was real and she thought I was her child. What we were were two souls that were meeting through the roles of mother and child. Had she known that consciously, she would have much less trapped me in my role of child, which I practically never got out of. But she was so good at being herself, who she thought she was. She was very clear about who I was. And you understand that that's solidity was hard to escape from. It took me drugs to blow my brains apart to get out of it. Basically, because she was a good teacher. She was a good teacher. But think how wonderful a teacher is who is somebody who sees. And that's why in India it is so interesting, because parents understand I am doing the dharma of being a parent. But they recognize the souls that exist behind the incarnation. And we are two souls that came together and met. Like when my mother died in Boston of cancer the next year, I was with my guru. And in India, in the Himalayas. And out of nowhere, since no one around him knew. And this is all in Be Here now, my original book about all this. He told me the way my mother died. He said, spleen. She died of a spleen. And that was my mother. She died. And he told me that.

And it blew my mind.

I mean, he actually opened my consciousness using the organ that killed my mother, which is a far out little aside. And then the next day I was with him, and he said.

Ram Dass.

Mother is a very high being. And I said to the translator, didn't he say she was a very high being? And he said, no, she is a very high being. And at that moment, something happened inside of me. And I recognized my mother as a soul rather than as the mother, middle class woman, mother, the ego. And I recognized the few times in our life when there had been that figure ground, reversal, when we had met as two beings outside of our roles. Like once, I remember I had come, she was taking me to the dentist, and we came to a red light, traffic light, and the car stopped and we were playing a game to see.

Who could hold a note the longest.

We were both screaming at the top of our lungs. And we both looked over and there was a man in the car next to us looking at us like we were absolutely insane. And at that moment, it flipped us both out of our roles into just being these two. I mean, the whole energy situation and all. We had a transcendent moment.

And I realized that I could, on.

The fingers of one hand, remember the moments when she and I had transcended mother and childness. And suddenly those moments became real and everything else became the story, you understand? There was a complete figure ground. And ever since then, she and I have been together as souls. And I had no longer ever think of her in those forms of, you know, that woman that was so kind and so demanding and so everything.

And now we arrive in the final years of Ram Dass life. It is Maui, 2011. It's long after his stroke, and so every word he carries has this weight of lived experience. So here he's in a conversation with his dear friend John Welshin, and he's revisiting an early childhood memory, one that sort of shows how our deep conditioning continues to run and how even those incredibly painful moments can be portals for understanding and maybe for grace. It's an intimate reflection and one that perhaps only emerges after decades of practice and surrender and love and living into these teachings. As we come to the end of this journey through time with Ram Dass, you can sort of feel how his relationship with his parents and with his own roles and incarnation just kept evolving. There's that boldness of his younger years and the tenderness of the aging years. And he just kept learning and teaching us how to love without roles, to serve without needing to fix, and to see the soul even in the most human, messy moments. So these stories, they remind us that awakening doesn't have to take us away from our families. It can bring us back to them in powerful ways, maybe with softer hearts and clearer eyes. So you might take a moment and think of the people who helped shape you parents, teachers, so many ancestors, those who gave life in all of its complexity. Maybe we can take a moment to honor them and ourselves and all that we have honestly inherited and all that we are transforming and all that we are leaning into and learning to transform. So thank you for listening to here and now and may we all keep finding the sacred right where we are in the messy beautiful truth of being human.

When I was a psychologist, Psychology was built up from the negative and the categories. Like I used to be a therapist and I had the categories, my patients were negative, negative. And I really wondered why psychology didn't attach me with the beautiful inside. Even my analysis didn't get me to the atman. When I started to see this. Because was when Maharaj and I got together. Maharaj, we were talking about my mother and he knew things a lot more about my mother. And then one day he said, your.

Mother.

Is a very high school soul. This was very different from my mother as viewed by a psychological perception. The middle class woman, power oriented, etc. I had a. An experience. This was before I came to the island. I was touring the islands and I had been invited to the island and I got a letter saying we are a community, we meditate and we'd like to visit you to visit. You know, it wasn't big crowds or anything, it was just accumulating. Okay, I'll try it anyway. And the plane landed and.

And.

There was this 50 year old man and about two, a man and a woman of about 20, 20, 25. And we got into the front of a pickup truck, the four of us, and we started to drive a long way up the mountain and they didn't talk. They were. I tried to initiate more discussion. I was feeling a little secure, insecure. And when I got to my room and they said, that door is down there is my office, so why don't you take a nap and knock on the door and we'll talk. And I took a nap and I knocked on the door and he welcomed.

Me.

The older man. And we sat down and we talked and we talked intimately and our lives and so on. And then he said, perhaps you'd like to meet the rest of the community. And I said, not particularly, I just came to be. Well here, let me introduce him. And he pulled a string and a whole wall. The wall was a curtain and behind the curtain were 30 or so people and they were all looking at us. They'd been hearing our conversation and they were looking at me. So I assumed I was to speak. And I started to tell a story. And girl said, ramdas, you're not nearly as good as your book. And then man said, ram Dass, this is bringing me down. My heart hurts. And the older man said.

Why don't.

You go into the middle of the room with all the retreatants and why don't you lie down on the floor? Well, okay, obviously it isn't just a regular meditation, it's something else that I can't figure. And he said, okay, now we'll all put our hands on your body. And he said, now would you. You raise your hands in fists. He said this to you? He said this to me. And he grows. So I began to sense it was a therapeutic group. And I was lying there growling with my hands and all these hands upon me and my mind, suddenly I was in my crib, the little bars from the crib from all around and I could feel my mother's hand on my chest. And I was, I had a temper tantrum, I was mad as hell. And this was about, it was like three years old or something like that and she wasn't going to have her child. Temper tantrum. Now this was the way I, my psychological mind, I was going to. That's the mother I was used to. And it was the first time I ever went into my childhood, three years old or earlier. The first time. I mean this therapy was good. And I tried to. Your mother is a very, very high soul, Maharaj. And this, she's holding me down, mad. She's mad. And I temper tantrum. And I've tried to, To put them together. And since I know something about reincarnations, since I'm some way along my spiritual.

Path.

It'S probably reasonable that she was a high being. And I wondered how it was that I spent so many years of my.

Life.

Caught in the dream, the incarnation that I was. I had a negative take of her. She and I loved each other very much. So I came to the conclusion that I was, she was a very high soul. But she had a certain incarnation, this middle class Jewish woman. And where I loved her.

She and.

I souls loved each other. Now if Maharaj hadn't said that to.

Me.

I would have gone, gone through life having a mother, which was. Power, etc. And I would have gone through five years of analysis, years of psychological training, I've been doing therapy and I wouldn't have gotten that at all. One sentence from Maharaj, That relationship.

I.

Was in the relationship, in the. Incarnation and nothing that we in the west did got me out of it.

Right.

Right.

And I had gone as high as I possibly could. I had the Ph.D. in psychology. Psychology. I had Freudian analysis. I had Freudian.

Training.

There was no. I was right at the pinnacle of psychology to get at something that I couldn't get.

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Can then continue to share what Ram Dass has been sharing for all of these years. Thank you.