Ep. 292 – Coming Home to Being Human

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Welcome to Ram Dass's Here and Now. This is episode 292, Coming Home to Being Human. Thanks for tuning in and being a part of this living community. So this lecture was a keynote that Ram Dass gave in 1987 as at the second annual Buddhism and Psychotherapy Conference, which was sponsored by the Karmakaya Institute. And so he starts by talking about his connection to the Kaya lineage, including stories of Kalu Rinpoche, who was respected for his humility and deep practice and skill in bringing Tibetan Buddhism to the west, as well as Trungpa Rinpoche, who was brilliant yet complex and often controversial. And Ram Dass speaks honestly about how their teachings reached him through very real human beings shape, showing that wisdom often comes wrapped in imperfection. He also recounts that initial psychedelic trip where he really woke up to different aspects of himself and how that shaped his path for not only the next 28 years, but for the rest of his life. And listening today, it just really brings up this curiosity of these brilliant maps of consciousness from the east and how and if they are being integrated into the psychedelic renaissance, in the therapeutic settings and beyond. And then he goes on to reflect about what it's like to just live in this world and moving that transition between who we think we are when we wake up, that we're more than that. And as we learn more about ourselves, how we often move into theory or we think we can use these practices to fix ourselves, but that it really. It's not about that. It's about holding ourselves with compassion and trusting the process and learning to be present with everything. He reminds us that the only way through is through, and he doesn't leave us there. He actually tells us the path of how to move through without collapsing, without contracting, without bypassing. So in a world today that feels so full of fear and division and chaos, his teaching invite a question. How do I treat myself? How do I treat my neighbor? Can we meet all of the people, from the government officials to the immigrant family next door, to my parents, to myself, with steadiness and compassion and unity? As you listen, just notice what resonates for you, what it brings up, and how you can bring some of these teachings into your own life. If this feels alive for you, please consider joining the Ram Dass Fellowship where we explore these teachings as a community. And you can also dive deeper in Ram Dass's new book, there is no Other. So with that, let's just take a breath, dive in. Here is Ram Dass, here and now. And may whatever good comes from these lectures ripple out to be a benefit to all beings. Namaste and blessings.

Your eminence, Honored Rinpoche, fellow Buddhists and psychotherapists, I. I must stand in awe of a program committee that would keynote a conference like this with a Jewish Hindu. And in trying to fathom it, and after hearing the lucidity of his Eminence, I can only assume they wanted you to see the range of consciousness that was possible in the human condition. So I feel that the more natural I am, the better it will be from their strategy point of view. I have had dealings with the Kagyu line for many years, and I have. I use a term that people sometimes think is pejorative, but it is actually a term of great honor. And the term is rascal. That there is a rascality in Tantric sects that delights me. And every time I am had again, I feel like I have just been. Have received true, compassionate love. I've had dealings with one of the group named Chogam Trunk Rinpoche. The first evening I met him was in Brooklyn at an apartment where a number of people had come to hear him, maybe 20 or 30. And he was several hours late, which led a number of people to leave in disgust because their egos couldn't tolerate the. What they considered the lack of respect. But those of us that hung in welcomed Rinpoche, who came in in a, I would say, a slightly inebriated state and wended his way to the platform, sat down and proceeded to deliver a brief discourse of such lucidity that it was like looking into a bottomless still. And after this address, he got up and he came off the platform, still seemingly under the influence of alcohol. And I went up to honor him, and I had my mala beads, and I looked him in the eye, and I got so disoriented that I dropped my beads. And he, very gentle, gently, and with perfect control, reached over, picked them up and handed them to me. And I sensed in that being, at that moment, a quality of presence and of clarity and of mindfulness that was tantalizing. I'll just tell you one more anecdote about that, because a few weeks later, I heard that he was at Tale of the Tiger in Vermont. And I decided to check him out once more, see if it was the real thing. We Westerners have a very judging mode of dealing with teachers. And I sat in the back of the room. He was giving a workshop on Don Juan and the writings of Cast Carlos Castaneda. And I sat in the back. And he came in again in his unique state. And when it came, he gave again a very brief lecture. And then he said, are there any questions? And I was sitting in the back of the hall, very relaxed and enjoying the dialogue, but a little frustrated that it had been such a short lecture. It was a very hot day, and somebody asked a question that was a very scholarly type question. And he said, why doesn't Ram Dass answer that? I went through a number of paranoid responses at that moment. And I came forward, and he was sitting in a chair, and there was a big vase of goldenrod, which I'm very allergic. And the microphone was such that I had to lean through the goldenrod on my knees to answer the question, which I. I did in his erudite fashion, as a ex Harvard professor could do. And he thanked me, and I started to go back to my seat, and somebody asked a question, and he said, why doesn't Ram Dass answer that question? So I came up and I again knelt and put my head through the goldenrod to give a scholarly answer. To this question, and I was in the middle of the answer when I understood that here he was giving a weekend uncontrolled folly and that he had just put me in the role of Carlos Castaneda to his Don Juan. And I was so awed by how he was giving a demonstration of the phenomena to the class using me, that I got up and I came around front and I pranamed I did dundapranam to him, honoring him as highly as I could. Because even though it was at my expense, who would care if one could, through that process, see the way in which one is clinging, the way in which the mind is clinging? So I have appreciated immensely the opportunity to work in situations where my own lack of mindfulness is brought to my attention. For some of you who are not familiar with me, I would give the briefest history. I was a psychologist, professor of psychology, teaching courses in human motivation, child development, existential transactional analysis, Freudian theory. I had been trained in Freudian disciplines at the Institute in San Francisco and in academic courses and was in analysis for a number of years. And I did therapy of an eclectic sort of. In which I was so psychologically needful of being a therapist that I insisted that everybody I met was a patient. And I mediated between me and them, my theoretical constructs, so that all I ever saw in the world were late anal retentives and early phallics and things like that. There weren't any real people at all out there. I was caught in my habitual structures of mind, as His Eminence would suggest. I was rudely awakened out of those by taking a mushroom called Tiana noctyl, or flesh of the Gods, which is a psychotropic agent, psychedelic, which allowed me to see in a moment the nature of the constructs of my own mind and the way in which I was creating reality. The vantage point from which I saw that was a context behind or beyond my thought that I touched for the first time that I recognized in my knowing life. And it was so profound an experience, the experience that at once I felt at home and familiar and at peace, that it started a process that I think the last 25 or 28 years have. I have been growing into what happened that particular evening. For those of you that are therapists who understand the nature of neuroses, you will appreciate the humor of the moment when, still under the influence of this psychotropic agent, I went home through the snowstorm to my parents place where I was staying for the weekend. I was at that time a professor at Harvard, and I was visiting with them. And it had snowed heavily that night, and I shoveled the walk, and it was about 4 in the morning, and they came to the upstairs window with a look of judging, An evaluation of the fact that one doesn't shovel snow at 4 in the morning. And I looked up at them and I saw in them the structures, the ways in which I had found legitimacy for my life. First from my parents and then it turned to my professors. And on and on it went. And I looked inside myself, which was quite a new experience. And I realized that it was perfectly all right to be shoveling snow. And at that point I waved at them and laughed and went back to shoveling snow. Now, you can hear that that is a critical moment for a Jewish neurotic. I just want you to appreciate. Shortly thereafter, Aldous Huxley, who was working with our project, introduced us to the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Bardo Thodol. And I read that book as a thirsty man would find a glass of cool water. It was as if what I had experienced that I described as ineffable, indescribable, was being described in exquisite detail. And I realized then that there were entire maps of the nature of the experience that I had just had. And these maps were not within the domain of Western psychology at that time. People like Abe Maslow were playing with them. But it was still, that was just at the beginning edge of what I found in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, That started a whole movement towards sensitivity to Eastern mystical writings and finally going to India and taking teachings and meeting an Indian guru who. Represents to me the unconditioned mind. I feel that in I, I have had the grace to meet a being who, no matter how hard I look, I can't find him anywhere. And you can understand, those of you that understand the term there is nowhere to see. You understand what that means, that every time you try to grab hold and say, this is who he is, it just turns into, as Thurber would say, slish. At that point, I began to become familiar with the term siddhis, or spiritual powers. And he was a person who, at one point, point an insane man was brought before him in chains from the hospital who was screaming deprecations and naked and ripping his hair. And my guru picked up a stick and struck him three times on the back and then screamed at him to go and fetch him a banana leaf. And the man had been unchained. He went and fetched the banana leaf and handed it to Maharaj. And my guru said, thank you, and then turned to the hospital officials and said, he's fine now, don't worry. For those of you that do therapy with, I just thought I'd share that with you to let you know that the game may be more interesting than we think it is at some points. In 1970, I started my more intensive practices of Buddhism through primarily Theravadan Buddhism in Bodh Gaya. And I began to experience directly, as the Buddha had suggested and promised, the way in which my mind was a out of control, the way in which it was creating my suffering. And I started to appreciate the possibility that the Eightfold Path could indeed deliver me from my own suffering. If you trace my path from that time on, you see what I would consider a spiral path, which I think is relevant to this discussion tonight, that after some period of time of being in a monastery or in a retreat, I would come back from the retreat into the marketplace and I would function. And then over time, the toxicities of my own clingings of mind would rise up to smite me once again and I would realize it was time to go back to the monastery. These. It's interesting as an aside just to play for a moment, that in all the years that I was in analysis, that I was teaching Freudian theory, that I was researching human motivation, that I was taking psychedelics, that I was sitting at the feet of my guru, that I was doing mindfulness meditation, that I was teaching yoga, in all those years, if I examine it carefully, I have not gotten rid of one neurosis. Doesn't that seem strange to you? The only thing that has changed, however, is that while the neuroses used to be these huge monsters of, ah, don't do it to me again. And I was caught in this web of intense neuroses, they have now turned into these small shmoo like figures. And when I see them, I say, oh, sexual perversity, come in and have tea. It is more like they've turned into my friends. And that is not an insignificant notation that my neuroses are now my style. Rather than my problem. Almost some of you that are analytic are saying, well, now we just see about this. Sounds like denial to me. Going back and forth between the retreat and. And the marketplace, and the retreat and the marketplace showed me. I realized after a while my students used to say to me, people that I was around, they would say to me, you know, I meditate and I get so high, but I hate New York City because it brings me down and they'd say, I hate politics because it brings me down, and I hate economics because it brings me down. And it took me a while to realize that, as His Eminence was really pointing out, the only thing that brings us down is our own mind. It's the way we. What we. New York is just like the cave in the Himalayas, if you don't want anything. But if there are lurking desires in you, you can count on New York to fan them. So that in a way, you are just meeting yourself in the marketplace. And in a way, the quality of the sweet, blissful high and clarity that comes in the monastery must be balanced with the situation in the marketplace where the phenomena awaken what Ramakrishna calls uncooked seeds, which awaken those attachments of mind that are not awakened by monastic life. You can understand why renunciation life is very attractive for people that want to be high. But each time I would go back and forth, I would learn a little more. Several years ago, I was in Burma spending some months in meditation with Sayada Upandita, who is a very remarkable meditation master. And it got very subtle indeed. The Nama and the Rupa were starting to separate from one another. Those of you in the business know what that means. That's an inst. Line. And for those of you that don't know what those experiences are like, you are. You are in your cell from roughly 3 in the morning until 11 at night. That's you can sleep the rest of the time in your cell. And you are following the breath, rising and falling in the abdomen, or walking, doing walking meditation. And when you meet the rim, the sidow, for maybe two or three minutes a day, you report to him about your meditation practice. And you describe that you've been following your breath, which of course he knows, but you have to report it anyway. And then you say, and at one point I heard, for example, the sound of a bird. And he said, doctor, did you hear the sound of the bird on a rising breath or in a falling breath? I didn't notice. S', Aidel, please be more attentive. And as I go to leave the room, he said, did you awaken this morning on a rising breath or a falling breath? You can hear how it closes in on you. And if you're going to examine your mind, there's nothing better than a quiet space and somebody who is a master at hearing the dynamics of the human mind, just showing you where you are sloppy and letting the thoughts grab hold and carry you. So at the end of two months, I received A telegram, a cable telling me that mice stepmother had cancer and was about to be operated on. She was considerably younger than my father, who was very frail and was dependent upon her. So when the telegram came, my immediate thought was, well, I'll have to leave and go back to take care of the scene. So I went to the Sayadao and I showed him the telegram and he said to me, I don't think you should leave. He said, you are making good progress. Now. I think many of you in the room would have difficulty hearing that. I certainly did. And I said, well, I have to leave. He said, if you were a Burmese, I would not allow you to leave. But because you're from another culture, I can just tell you I don't think you should leave. And at that moment I saw my karmic predicament that I was not a sadhu in the sense of somebody who had renounced family, that I was a Jewish boy from Boston and I had my karma to live with. And when my family needed me, that was my work to go. And we both sat there appreciating the poignancy of the predicament. It's the interesting question, how much do you want liberation and for who? He said, you might go back and help your stepmother and your father, but if you continued your work, you might be able to help many people. But I couldn't stay. And that has been the course of every time I've left retreat. It's with that appreciation of honoring my own unique karma. You can call it cop out a rationalization if you wish. But all I could hear was that I had to follow the rhythms of my own inner wisdom. That said, now go deeper. Now take it and integrate it. Now go deeper. Now take it and integrate. There is a line from Sarah that says, he who clings to the void and neglects compassion does not reach the highest stage. But he who practices only compassion does not gain release from the toils of existence. He, however, who is strong in practice of both remains neither in samsara nor in nirvana. And that has come home to roost very deeply for me. There is another quote from Tibetan Buddhism. The way is not one of running away from the world, but of overcoming it through growing knowledge. Prajna through active love, maitri towards one's fellow beings through inner participation in the joys and sufferings of others. Karuna and Mudita and Upeka equanimity with regard to one's own weal and woe. The way is not one of running away from the world, but of overcoming it through growing knowledge, through active love towards one's fellow beings, through inner participation in the joys and sufferings of. Of others. Inner participation in the joys and sufferings of others. I have come to realize that there are levels that, if I can understand it properly, that at the beginning of the journey, the psychological factors are very potent. Because the mindfulness is so weak. But as the mindfulness gets stronger, there is a capacity to be in a witnessing role to one's own psychodynamics, such that even though one goes into them and starts to identify and get lost in them, one then is capable of bringing oneself back into a mindful context in which one sees them as the creations of mind. And once that process starts to get going, in a way, it is a process which only happens after a certain time. Degree of mindfulness has been developed. There is a process where you are using your life experiences as a therapeutic process. Now people will say what the therapeutic process involves. Relationship. The question is, who is it relationship with? And I will talk about that just in a moment. To make this clear to you what I'm trying to talk about, I'd like to quote two things. One is a quotation again from the Castaneda material of Don Juan. Don Juan is describing that his son Eulalio, was crushed by rocks while working on the Pan American Highway. And Don Juan was called there and told the men to leave the body alone. The body was still shaking and still dying, badly crushed. And he said, I shifted my eyes so I would see his personal life disintegrating, expanding uncontrollably beyond its limits like a fog of crystals. Because that is the way life and death mix and expand. That is what I did at the time of my son's death. Death. That's all one could ever do. That is controlled folly. Had I looked at him, I would have watched him becoming immobile, and I would have felt a cry inside of me, because never again would I look at his fine figure pacing the earth. I saw his death instead, and there was no sadness, no feeling. His death was equal to everything else. Lucky you, Don Juan said Castaneda. You can shift your eyes. Lucky bull, he said. It's hard work. Now I just want to juxtapose that with the story of the Zen monk, the Zen master who is crying, sobbing, at the death of his son. And his student says to him, why are you crying, Master? You know that it's all an illusion. And he says, yes, but the death of a child is the greatest illusion. Now, what I want to do is suggest, if you listen to those two examples, a difference. After my initial work with psychedelics and my study of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I began to appreciate that what I had touched in myself, what kind of quality of awareness had very little to do with birth and death and coming and going. As Hakone, the Zen master, says, your coming and going is nowhere but where you are. It's just presence, it's isness. And as I touched that quality, I began to feel a different feeling towards death. The result was that I found myself hanging around people that were dying for two reasons. One was because I saw the incredible amount of fear of death in the culture. And it was extraordinary to be in the presence of this much fear and feel this inner peace. And I found that it was experienced as useful by some people that were dying. The other reason I did it was because as you realize that you no longer just want to get high, but you want to be free, You realize that you do not want to push away those things where there is still, still unfinished business. You want to go close to the edge. You want to deal with the places where you are inclined to get stuck, holding tightly to your mala and your mantras and your guru and going under and coming back and going under and coming and staying right at that edge. Because you want to get to the point where you are not afraid to be anywhere. And death being the deepest fear of the species. That seemed like the most exciting place to hang out around the dying. So I would go into ecstasy at the thought that I was going to be with a dying person each day, which wasn't easily understood by all my friends. But what I did initially was that having had these experiences and having read these texts, I was in the presence of death with a metaphysical stance, with a memory of a certain experience. And I was very equanimous and impersonal. Over the past, that was in the 60s. Over the past 20 years, what has changed is that as see how to say this? If you think of planes of reality, which we'll just play for as a metaphor, if you're on the plane of this normal waking state of consciousness and you're standing on the ground, and then you do something which takes you into a state of consciousness where you are awareness and you're feeling at peace and present and clear, and then you come back to this, you see the term come back to. It's where you are sitting here, going there. Now, over time, as you keep your practices going, you get so that that that domain of awareness or witness or context becomes extremely familiar, and it starts to become home. And as it starts to become home and you begin to have the faith in that component of your being, you are not as afraid to. To engage in the stuff of this plane. So what I have found is that while for the first 10 or 15 years of working with dying, I was very calm and peaceful and philosophically expanded about all this, I was extremely afraid of the emotional content of dying, specifically my own emotional reactions. And it's only in the past, I would say the past eight or ten, eight years, That the process of transformation has gotten far enough along, at least in this little domain, so that when I am with suffering in the world, my heart breaks. But the strange component is that even as my heart is breaking, which I was afraid to do for a long time and therefore stayed in this other realm, but even as I come back into the breaking heart, it has not taken away one bit from the equanimity inside. What I hear in Don Juan is pushing away the human plane, the normal waking consciousness plane, in order to protect oneself from the suffering. And what I hear in the Zen monk that is crying, even though it is an illusion, is the ultimate integration of these things. And I see that as an extraordinary adventure of coming home to being human. It's interesting that more of the letters I've gotten in the past year have said to me, thank you for being human. Isn't that bizarre? I mean, I've spent 25 years trying to be divine, and people write and thank me for being. Being human. I mean, that just seems like a bizarre paradox to me. I have another dear friend in the kagu line, which is named Kalu Rinpoche, who's an extraordinary, extraordinary being. I very deeply love him. And I was sitting with him at one point, and he was doing a. He was initiating us into a mantra and a practice. And I said to him, rinpoche, I don't think I can take this initiation because I probably won't do the mantra because I have a guru, and I. And I have my practice as Guru Kripa, or grace of the guru. And he said, ram Dass, you don't understand. He said, every time you think of your guru, you do all of these practices. He said, you just have three things you should do in this life. Nice statement. Sounded simple. He said, honor your guru, deepen your compassion, and deepen your emptiness. That's all. That's all I have to do this whole life. You can see why I like him so much. So I'VE tried to understand what deepen compassion means. I do understand about honoring guru. I mean, I spend. That's deep in me. But what did honoring compassion mean? It had to do something about not just dealing with my own suffering, which the Four Noble Truths are about. But dealing with other people's suffering as well. Now, at first, what I did was I taught as a spiritual teacher. Assuming that the root of suffering is ignorance. And therefore, if I teach Dharma, I am doing the deepest thing I can do. To relieve the suffering of the human condition. But my guru used to say, God comes to the hungry in the form of food. And when I'd say to him, how do I get enlightened? He'd say, feed people. When I'd say, how would I know God Maharaj? He'd say, serve people. So I started to serve people. Part of the lineage that I'm a follower of in Hinduism. I went into karuna training. The first kind of service that I did was almost straight psychodynamic in nature. I was serving somebody else. And I was gaining an image of myself that was righteous as a result of doing it. And I was doing it to help them. And I was feeling better through my empathy with their suffering, being relieved. And we all know the psychodynamic nature of the helping act. But then I started to see that there was another way of doing service. Which was called in Hinduism, karma yoga. It was using service as a vehicle to awaken out of illusion. To do that kind of service, You recognize that who you were serving. Just as Mother Teresa, when she picks up the lepers on the streets of Calcutta. She says, I am serving Christ in all his distressing disguises. So you are serving. You are serving awareness through the processes. You're serving awareness in yourself and the other person. Through the process of helping them. It's a whole new act. It's a different meaning to the act. It's now a practice of awakening. But then I started to realize. I started to hear another level of the. Of the dance of service. Another of my friends, Lama Govinda, Anagara Govinda, said, the spontaneous urge to help others. Flows from the knowledge of inner oneness. The spontaneous urge to help others. Not the choice to help somebody else to awaken. But the spontaneous urge to help others. Comes out of the unit of experience. As I started to rest more and more in. In the quality of spacious awareness that was not differentiated. I looked at other people. And they were no longer so readily categorizable as them. They started to be not only us, but me and it became less easy to say, well, I'm sorry about their suffering. Because it was at the very least our suffering, if not my suffering. There's another line. If you realize the voidness, compassion will arise within you, within your heart, if you lose all differentiation between self and other fit to serve others, ye will be. Now that's a whole different level of the ball game. That isn't somebody serving somebody else. That's something different. And one of my other guides is Mahatma Gandhi who said, God demands nothing less than complete self surrender as the price for the only real freedom worth having. And when a person thus loses himself, he immediately finds himself in the service of all that exists. It becomes his delight and recreation. He is a new person, never weary of spending himself in the service of God's creation. I was in Thailand and I was with a wonderful woman whose husband had been the ambassador to Thailand. And she said to me, there is a monk that I would like you to meet. He runs a monastery where, where they cure opium addicts in 10 days for $15. And they have a 70% rate of recovery, in other words, 30% recidivism. Now those of you that know the statistics about opium addiction realize that that is pretty extraordinary. So it piqued my curiosity. So we drove the hundred or so miles to visit this monastery. In the course of the trip, she told me about this gentleman. This monk had been a Thai narc, he had been a narcotics official and he had an aunt who was supposedly, whatever that means, a Buddhist saint, so the story goes. And she said to him, why are you doing what you're doing? Don't you realize you're going to kill somebody? Why don't you help people? And he said, I don't know how to do that. She said, well, you clean up your act and I'll help you. So he left the narcotics division of the government and he became a Theravadan monk. Now the Theravadan monks, as you know, have, I'm not quite sure, I think it's 218 prohibitions, Sheila is expanded and you can't do anything. It's 218 no no's, you know, you can't sit on a hard seat. You can't have music, you can't have perfumes, you can't eat afternoon, you can't. And he added 10 more. He was so gung ho. And then she gave him an herbal brew that was a diuretic to use. And he opened, went into the monastery business of curing opium addict. And I got There. And there were 300 addicts. And the first day, people were in one room on pallets next to each other. And they looked just like extreme junkies, like the people you'd see in opium den. And the third day, they were in another room, they were looking a little better. And the fifth day, better. And the seventh or eighth day, they were walking around smoking cigarettes, talking. The tenth day they left. And I talked to him about his statistics. When I met him, it was like meeting an oak tree. I never quite met somebody like that. And I said to him, well, what you do here, I mean, they do all the usual things of saunas and all that, but they also. And they pass the bucket around of this diuretic, which they drink out of a pail. And then the next pail comes and they vomit into that. That. And they do that several times a day. And he said, I tell them that in 10 days they will be free of this addiction. And that they never need be addicted again. I said, you give them religious training. He says, oh, no, that's not suitable for them. I said, well, whatever it is you do. Because she said to me that. That's. Congressmen from the United States had been there, reporters from CBS and so on. And nobody could understand what was the going on. And they all left confused. They don't have a spiritual context. And I said, well, whatever it is you do, could anybody else do it? He said, probably. I said, could I? And he looked at me and he said, perhaps, But I could see that I. I wasn't a strong candidate then. He said, now this is a very perplexing story, and I'm sorry to lay it on you because I don't have the answer. I don't understand the story. But those are the best kind, in a way. He said, imagine, he said, that you had a blanket and you were up in the mountains and it was cold, and I came along and offered you another blanket. Would you accept it? So all of the righteousness in me, Boy Scoutness, I mean, I was trying to think of what he wanted me to say. Of course. So I said, no, I wouldn't accept it. I have my blanket. Huh? He said. He said, but I leave the blanket anyway. He said, and then you go off to pee and it's raining. When you've got your blanket, you come back and the other blanket is now dry and it's under a tree and your blanket's wet. Will you use it? I said, of course. I said, my blanket's wet, that one's dry. And Then he changed the subject. I mean, I obviously flunked at that point. I have no idea why I flunked, but I flunked. All I can say to you was that on reflection, I realized I had met something that was new to me as a Westerner, was that I had met somebody who had literally died into service. That he was no longer. His mind was stronger than their addiction. And the reason his mind was stronger than their addiction was that he wasn't busy curing them of addiction. He was the cure of addiction. But he didn't do it from nine to five. That's what he was. He had become that. He was the thing itself. Gandhi says, when you make yourself into zero, your power is invincible. So I understand that as you become more mindful, as you see the nature of the way in which the constructs of about yourself and others is separating you from the universe and causing unhappiness as you rest more in the unitive nature of things, as you become part of the web of the process of law unfolding with no attachment to a time and space locus, You in fact become like a tree or a river. And then as you do, your unique manifestation. It has the integrity and the truth and the sweetness and the power and the compassion that a tree has or that a river has. That is what we have gotten so separated from. That, to me, is what the whole game we are here this weekend is about, is finding our way back into the harmony of things where we are unique but not necessarily special, Where the quietness of mind is not separate from the tenderness of heart, because the tenderness of heart is part of the laws of nature. That you don't deny your humanity in order to become divine. That we embrace our full humanity. For me, the job is embracing suffering, is drinking it, swallowing it, regurgitating upon it at times, but staying with it. And whether I'm in Guatemala or in Nepal or with the AIDS patients or here in New York with the homeless, it's the same thing. It is dealing with other human beings, with other sentient beings in a way that my mind doesn't create divisive model. So it is constantly coming back to my breath, coming back to my. The quietness of my intuitive heart. I cannot conceivably repay the debt that I feel to the Eastern traditions for having introduced me to myself. Thank you. 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 Ram Dass has been sharing for all of these years. Thank you.