Ep. 297 – Cultivating a Spiritual Perspective

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At that point, when you see that your next curriculum is honoring what, what is in your incarnation so that you end up honoring it as relatively real. You do your dharma, you do your part, you play your part in it, and yet at the same moment there is absolute equanimity in you about it. What is required in the process of karma yoga is cultivating a context And that's what's called a spiritual perspective, or I mean, that's a term you could use. It's a context so that you see any situation on more than one plane simultaneously.

Hey everyone, this is Ram Dass, Here and Now. And I'm Raghu Markus, here to introduce the episode a little and also give an idea of a couple of other of our supporters by which this podcast can continue. This, first of all, this is a two-part podcast, and it's exploring the process of Karma Yoga. I mean, Ram Dass was all about Having a spiritual perspective, or having a perspective that allows us to see all of what we are interacting with and in our situation, whatever it might be, and understand there's more than one plane going on at the same time. This is a very core teaching from Ram Dass. But before we get any further into that, I do want to introduce Strawberry Moon's media. It's It's something that is presented by David Nicktern, who's a good friend, and Debbie Nutley. And it blends education and entertainment and integrates wisdom traditions and mindfulness and contemporary creative expression. It's just wonderful channels. You can see them on YouTube. It's SSM Mindful Living, SSM Meditainment, meditainment.com. Entertainment and SMM for kids. So it goes across the board. It's really— and just go to strawberrymoonsmedia.com and you'll see the call to action. Again, this is— David has a phenomenal meditation platform. He's doing this now. He works with Krishnadasa. And plays guitar in his band. He's a multi-talented guy. He is. So definitely visit Strawberry Moon Media. And back for a moment just to talk about this particular episode of Here and Now. And it, as I said, it's two parts. So check back soon for the conclusion of this talk. And again, it's about perspective. It's about how fear is rooted in getting caught in one plane of reality and how we need to find a balance between separateness and unity. So it's, as usual, totally rich, full of so much intuitive wisdom, which is what Ram Dass is all about. And By the way, you can also— we have a fellowship, Ram Dass Fellowship. And it's something— go to ramdass.org and look that up because that's a great way. You know, these days are difficult, as we all know. And it's wonderful to be able to be in satsang. We can't always do it in person because of our lives, circumstances, but going online We have found in creating these things, going online really allows for a communion to happen, even if it's virtual. So we're living, you know, and this is again one of the other planes of consciousness Ram Dass talks about. Right? Anyhow, here it is. And from Ram Dass, where was it? It was in St. Louis, Missouri in 1992. And I'll see you again sometime. Ram Ram.

Good evening. Good evening. Great. Reminds me, about a week ago, 2 weeks ago, I went to San Quentin Prison in California with the Gyoto monks, who are a group of Tibetan monks that chant. They chant like, "Buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh." And they've trained their voices so that they chant on 3 tones. They each do a chord, so they can do 3 sounds at once. And we went into the prison for a service, a Christian service, and there was the San Quentin choir and the Gyoto monks. And the inmates came out and said, "We're glad to be here! Yeah!" And everybody went, "Amen!" And the whole place just took off. And within about 3 minutes, it was an incredible revival meeting. And the prison was gone, the whole thing was gone. We were just all there in the Spirit. And after the Gyuto monks did their, "Urgh," and the Glee club, the choir did its very swinging gospel. We were all dancing and singing and hugging.

Ah.

And I realized that in that powerful setting— you know, you walk in, you've got to go through all kinds of searches and gates clanging and double locks and this and that. It's a maximum security prison. Suddenly you're in this room with all these human beings, and for you to get through your model about where you are in order to be here, it's an intense, um, transformative process. You watch inside yourself until you look into the eyes of another human being and it's just us. Here we are. And each of us has our own unique predicament, and we're each doing what we have to do. It's like we don't get trapped by the situation if we can. Um, I am what, um, One of the practices that is a dominant practice in my life is what is called karma yoga, which means the yog or the, the route through to union with it all, with God, with the formless, with pure awareness, with whatever metaphor you'd like. The route through is your karma. Karma yoga. My karma becomes my yoga. That means that what are the givens of my life become my route to liberation. It means that it's not just— you're not just— when you're doing karma yoga, you're not just going to church on Sunday or meditating every morning or whatever as your practice, and then the rest of the life is blah. It's all grist for the mill. You use it all. You use your anger and your enemies and your fear and your confusion and your agitation, your lust and your greed and your love for God and all of it. It's all processed stuff that's going on in you. I mean, the reason you undertake any yoga is because you have awakened to the realization that there is more to the world and to your— to you and to it than what you think. That the conspiracy of reality you live in most of the time with most of the people around you is just a tiny fragment of what is. William James said, our normal waking consciousness is but one type of consciousness. While parted from it by the filmiest of veils, there lie other types of consciousness. We may pass our entire lives without knowing of their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus and there they are in their completeness. Whatever they may mean and whatever value they may have— this is paraphrasing— they forbid our premature closing of our accounts with reality. You would only be interested in yoga or in spiritual practice or in all of this if you had started to awaken. If you haven't awakened to the fact that the reality in which your body and your personality are existing is only a relatively real reality, All this yoga nonsense is just that. It's yoga nonsense. It's withdrawal from the world by a lot of fuzzy people. But with awakening comes the realization, and people awaken all kinds of ways, all kinds of ways. Comes the realization that, um, your life experiences of your incarnation, um, are your curriculum. When I first began to awaken in the '60s, through psychedelics, actually. My intention always, because I tasted of these other planes of reality, was to get back to them as fast as I could. It was called getting high, and I certainly was an adept at getting high. Everything through better, better living through better chemistry or whatever you want to call it. Chemistry. And then with other spiritual techniques. And that led me to follow a renunciation path of pushing away that which brought me down. It's like people say, I got to live in the country because living in the city brings me down. Hear that one? See, and you say, I'm going to get high, I'll put— I won't live in the city. But then came the dawning of the appreciation that being high wasn't being free. That as long as there was a high and a low, as long as there was a going up and a coming down, as long as you were avoiding one thing and grabbing to something else, you weren't free. You were stuck in your desire system. And I saw that the renunciate system was really only working partially for me anyway, because you push away— like, you push away as a renunciate, you push away sexual stimuli so you won't lust, but you often end up a horny celibate. You're sort of busy not having sex. Yeah, it's like people who give up smoking for 4 years, 3 months, 2 days and 20 minutes. You know, they're— I haven't drank in 14 years and 3 months. Yeah. So at that point of seeing that high isn't free and you yearn to be free because you realize that only when you are free can you really free another being. From suffering. You are driven to work on yourself really out of compassion for the whole situation. And I realized that what I was pushing away was my incarnation, was the fact that I'd been born a human. I treated it always like it was some absurd error. What was I doing with all these rascals and irresponsible people? And I was much too holy for that. But turning around and realizing that if I was going to stop pushing away life, if I was going to really open to life, Imagine getting free by living life. I'd never thought of that. So I looked at my life and I saw— it was as if I saw a whole montage of roles, of parts that my incarnation plays. As a member of a family, as a member of a community, of a nation-state, of an ecosystem, of a cosmos, of a religion, of a sexual identity, etc., etc., of an age. And that, as I could understand it, what being free meant was in each of these aspects not having aversion and not having attraction, not grabbing at it and holding, saying, I'm this, and not pushing it away, saying, I'm not this. So what it meant was honoring incarnation is the way I put it, the word honoring. You could say acknowledging, but honoring, meaning allow yourself into who you are. It's like getting into a hot tub. No, no, not that. No, I'll be anything, but I won't be a— But you are at that point when you see that your next curriculum is honoring what, what is in your incarnation so that you end up honoring it as relatively real. You do your dharma, you do your part, you play your part in it. And yet at the same moment, there is absolute equanimity in you about it. What is required in the process of karma yoga is cultivating a context, and that's what's called a spiritual perspective. Or, I mean, those are— that's a term you could use. It's a context so that you see any situation on more than one plane simultaneously. Fear is rooted in getting caught in one plane of reality. Specifically, you took birth out of the one into a separate entity, and what happens is you get caught in your separateness. You not only think you're real, you think you are absolutely real when all you are is relatively real. Because that of you which wasn't separate from everything else still is, and it's yelling, hey! And the part of you that's separate saying, shut up. It's like the rational mind versus the intuitive heart. Intuitive heart knows you're connected to everything. You're part of everything. And the intuitive heart always wants to give away everything. You need it, you take it. Take my life, take whatever you need. The mind is always saying, now wait a minute, you have your health insurance to pay, you know, and you get so Because you go into— actually, when you're born, you go into separateness training because everybody that trains you thinks they're somebody, and so they train you in your somebody-ness, and they don't remind you of the fact that we're also all here behind all that because they don't know that. They forgot. Because most people, when they take birth, forget, unless they're an old lama or something. And then you wake up and you say, oh, I was part of it all, all the time. And all the time I thought I was separate. Now that's getting— when we get so preoccupied with our separateness, we have very little and the forces of the universe are very big and it's kind of scary. So you get into power trips to try to feel secure as a tiny little, almost nonentity. You try to become somebody, leave something behind. The objective is not to deny your uniqueness or your separateness, but not to lose the connectedness, the unity. When those get out of balance in either direction, you're not free. If you get too far into the one, you're in la-la land. If you get too far into the separateness, you're so grounded you can't fly anymore. And when you look at the, um, sicknesses that we're facing in our lives at this moment— ecological sicknesses, immune sicknesses, um, economic disparity sicknesses, uh, greed, delusion, violence sicknesses. I mean, we all knew the '90s were going to be interesting, but this is ridiculous. It's like you look around and like in those old Western movies where they've stampeded the herd and they're all running towards the cliff, and you're one of them. That's our karma. Maybe it would be nicer if you and I lived in the '50s again. In the '50s, people had homes and the economics were more stable and there wasn't this much disparity between the rich and the poor and there wasn't so much information. So if there was suffering, you at least didn't know about it. And then It was such a simple, nice life. Ike was good, and, you know, it was that kind of thing. But these are the '90s, and the '90s may make the '60s look like a, a child's tea party, because what the '60s were was I don't know what they were. How would I know? But that's a great line. What the '60s were. I heard myself. How bizarre. I was just in the South Pacific for boogie boarding for a few months, and I was in a French island in the Marquesas, and there was a girl that worked around the place I was living, and she was helping me with my French, and I was helping her with her English. And I'd point and she'd say, "Floor" and "table." And then I'd point and she'd say, "I don't know." And the way she said it was so captivating, I decided that was the mantra I'd bring back with me from my spiritual journey. "I don't know." But I didn't think it could sell for the whole evening tonight. So we make believe. I know we should— of course, it's absurd. Now, what the '60s were— well, in the early '60s, we came out of a very kind of monolithic value system. I mean, there was science and there was— it was the material upsurge of the '50s after the postwar and And rationality was going to win and psychoanalysis would solve all the problems. There was a certain kind of mindset that we could stabilize, we could have an always increasing GNP, everything was fine. And then something happened in the '60s. It could have been precipitated by psychedelics. It could have been precipitated by who knows what. There were— I'm sure it was well over-determined— the television, I mean, a lot of things, travel, mobility, a whole thing. And there was an opening into what was possible. And it's as if your horizon of the possible expanded immensely. When that reality shifts, if you've got a vested interest in how it was, you get frightened. And when you get frightened, you dig in your heels and push against. And in a way, what you saw by the end of the '60s in the anti-Vietnam movement was a polarization in the society of the people that felt that force of opening and responded to it, some by saying, wow, in this opening we will have justice, We will have love, we will have peace, we will learn how to be together. And others saying, this opening is bad, let's stop it, and digging in the heels. And that polarization took us through Reagan years with still pendulum swings of that process. Now in the '90s, We have exactly— we have a comparable condition in that the relationship between cosmos and chaos, between order and anarchy, is the amount of randomness or whatever you call in the system is increasing and the potential for creativity on one hand or reactivity on the other is enhanced, is exacerbated. So you see a whole move of fundamentalism, ultranationalism, a kind of a digging in, hold the line, keep— it's like playing king of the mountain. We're gonna— you keep your place and you just— all— everybody that's trying to come up. Or the other way is you respond to the chaos and the excitement and the uncertainty and the fear that your whole lifestyle may change as a creative situation, as an open situation. Now see the predicament. If you think you are only your personality and your body, and your bank account is meaning less and less because of inflation, your job is less and less stable, your water is less fit to drink, your fish are less safe to eat, your air is less comfortable to breathe. You can't go out without sunblock. All of that, you are starting to freak because it looks like the quality of life is going down extremely fast. If, on the other hand, you have a context or a perspective saying, oh well, it's just the Kali Yuga, what do you expect? You know, like in Hinduism, they have the four yugas. These are vast periods of time, like they last hundreds of thousands of years. They make our written history seem like flicker. And each of these four yugas, they have the Sat Yuga where everything is very pure, everybody's very truthful, everybody sees God in everybody. It's the one, it's the Garden of Eden in the, in the biblical analogy. And then the Treta Yuga, the second yuga, is where it starts to get a little bit people start to get a little bit— it's after the bite of the apple when you start to think for yourself. It's a little bit out of harmony with the whole thing. The image is usually a bull of truth, and in the Satyuga it has all four of its feet on the ground, and in the next yuga it has three feet on the ground, and in the Dvār����yuga, the third yuga, it has two feet on the ground. And finally, in the Kali Yuga, it has one foot on the ground. And that's the time when you have Watergate and you just have outright lying by politicians and everybody's expecting everybody's lying and nobody trusts anybody because you can't afford to, because you know they're going to rip you off because greed is in vogue in the '80s. You know, that's called the Kali Yuga. It's fun, isn't it? Now you can sit around the Kali Yuga and grouse, "Damn it, why did I get born in the Kali Yuga? Jesus, what lousy karma." See? Or you can say, "Wow, I've been born in the Kali Yuga. I mean, it's when it really hits the fan. This is the chance. This uncertainty is a chance when I can grow and awaken so fast." It's going to scare the hell out of me, but wow, you know, it's like the roller coaster. Yeah, here I come, you know. Yeah, right. You'll find out. Don't worry, we're making it safe for you. If you have a perspective that who you are is not just this physical, psychological entity, but there is a part of you that is else, other— I'm not saying these are parts like separate. I mean, they just— that's also there. If you're busy in your separateness intellectually thinking about that, it's not going to give you much warmth on a cold night. But if you've tasted of it, that's certainly helpful. That begins the process. That's the awakening. And ultimately, you want to simultaneously live in your unitive nature and in your separateness. That's the context I'm talking about. It's the context where it's all happening within you. What happened to me was that in the '60s, I opened up to recognize the part of my being that had nothing to do with Richard Alpert's storyline. And I got so enamored of my unitive nature that I just wanted to cling to it because I felt at home, back at home again. And I've spent the last 30 years doing all kinds of spiritual practices, attempting to integrate those two planes so that I can be, as Christ said, in the world but not of the world, so that I can be fully present with my human heart breaking under the conditions I find in the world today. And the same moment having another part of my heart, the deeper intuitive wisdom, the wisdom tradition part of me, that just looks at it all and says, "Ah, so," that allows for change and metamorphosis. Yesterday I flew in from San Francisco, and the day before I was up in Northern California working with, uh, 20, uh, people that are, um, HIV positive and are symptomatic with AIDS. And I was at the bedside of a fellow who was dying, and he's died since the night before last. And I do that a lot. I mean, it's stuff I do. I'm with dying people, and what I experience is that the, the intensity of the transformations that they're going through create a window of opportunity for them to awaken so deeply And I find it extremely exciting to be around somebody who's dying. Now, this fellow I knew very well. I'd seen him many times. We've been working together for years. I helped his lover die 4 years back, 3 years back, been through his grieving, the whole process, now his death. And my human heart felt a lot of pain. For this beautiful man's life and the suffering he was going through. And he was at the point where he said, "I really want to die now." He said, "But you know, I'd really like a Pepsi-Cola, but I haven't taken food or drink for days, and I realize that's the quickest way to die." But I really want a Pepsi Cola, but it'll slow down my dying. And we sat with that until he could just see the want for the Pepsi Cola without identifying with it. We talked about what it would be like after he drank the Pepsi Cola, and we'd still be here. What I find is that as I'm with people, allowing my human heart to hurt because I'm in love with them, and at the same moment cultivating a part of me that is not caught in the intense drama of dying. I mean, you, you get roses and you put them in a vase and you look at them and you say, aren't they beautiful? At that moment, they are dying. You just got these dying things there. They just look beautiful in death. You don't say, "Oh my God, the rose is dying." You say, "How beautiful." But somehow the minute you get near humans, you kind of lose that perspective, don't you? You don't say, "Oh, how beautiful, you're dying." You say, "Don't go, don't go." When you begin, or when you connect with that part of you that is not separate, you are connecting with a component of your being that is— that does not change, that has nothing to do with change. And that change includes birth and death and economics and sickness and health and all of it. As Hakuin the poet says, your coming and going is nowhere but where you are. You're just here, and then there's coming and going. This is a 60-year-old body. It's decaying. It's decaying at its normal rate. No, it's incredible. It's all this loose flesh and blood veins and bones and spots. And I mean, that's absolutely— it's an absolute essence hand of aging. The ability to respond to change with appreciation is a function of finding the part in you that also exists that does not change. Only then can you look at death without freaking. Because if you are a philosophical materialist, when you die, you're dead. And the fear of nonexistence motivates you to the most bizarre lengths to stay alive. Such an interesting line to walk, to honor life, to honor the fullness of the moment, and to appreciate that there are rhythms in the universe and that death follows life. And it is true. And that in the next 70 years, the 5 billion, 5 billion people will die. So it's not just a rare thing that's happening out of prejudice, you know. To treat it as an error all the time seems rather bizarre. So we're talking about cultivating a context in karma yoga. That's where— why you'd call it karma yoga instead of just living life, because karma yoga, the term karma yoga, reflects the intention to use the life experience in order to awaken, to regain the balance between the unity and the diversity.

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