Ep. 298 – The Web of Human Caring

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We've done a bizarre thing. We got so carried away way with being free individuals. We just cut off everything. So we don't have babysitters like uncles and aunts. You know, we don't have extended families. We keep cutting ourselves off to be free. So you're free but miserable. You're totally alienated, but you're free.

Welcome to another Here and Now episode with Ram Dass. I'm your host, Jackie Dobrynska, and each one of you. You are the Ram Dass community. And this is Episode 298: The Web of Human Caring. And honestly, this one feels like an instruction manual for these times. So it is a continuation from the last episode, which was a lecture given in 1992 in St. Louis, Missouri. So picture it, 1992. The Soviet Union has just collapsed. The Gulf War, the first Gulf War, has just ended. And environmental scientists are sounding alarms that nobody wants to hear. There is a zeitgeist that is going to take a miracle to save us. And doesn't that sound familiar? Here we are, 2026, and we're having that same conversation, except it feels heightened today. It's the polycrisis. Climate chaos, dominator culture, disparities of wealth, artificial intelligence, algorithms, the constant othering, the scrolling, the outrage, and this feeling like everything is spinning out of control. And so some days it really does feel like it's gonna take a miracle. But here's the thing: maybe miracles are happening all the time. Maybe they're not so precious. Maybe they're in your life every day and we're just too distracted to notice them. I mean, the sun rises and flowers bloom, and there is this subtle, unending, deeper power beneath everything. And that miraculous power, it has wisdom. So these two episodes, they're pointing to something important that Ram Dass talked about for 50 years, that we live on more than one plane of consciousness at the same time. Or maybe better said, to pull us out of our separateness, We are lived at more than one plane of consciousness at the same time. And it's not a concept, he tells us. It is actually our work. Can we be at peace in the midst of great change? And can we be an agent of change and keep our peace? Can we be present to what is and keep our heart open and trust and act? And so I always wonder what happens after you listen to these episodes. And so I invite you to come and share, unpack, learn from others at our fellowship gatherings, because often people will say, "I thought I understood the episode, and then when I talked to others, I really grokked it." Or people will say, "I have no one else to talk about these things with." So come be a part. Just go to ramdas.org/fellowship, check the— join the general fellowship, and You will get invitations right into your inbox. And if you want to take these concepts and go deeper, check out some of Ram Dass's books. So the most recent, There Is No Other, so fabulous, a manual for these times. And some of his older work is also so helpful right now, How Can I Help? and Compassion in Action. So ramdass.org, go to the shop, or find them wherever books are sold. So with that, Take a deep breath, settle in. Here is Ram Dass, here and now.

I was just sitting with an ecologist. Recently. I was interviewing him, beautiful man from Australia named John Seed. And John was describing the rate at which the rainforests were being decimated and the way in which the rainforests contribute to the winds and water supplies in the world and, and so on. And he said it's gotten to the point now, and the inertia is so strong that it would take a miracle to save life on Earth. That's a far-out concept to live with, isn't it? Because now we're talking not about the individual death, but we're talking about the whole death of the game. It's like when you put the Monopoly players together, you know, put the money away, close up the board. And go to bed. It's the death of a culture. It's the death of civilization. It's the death of all the history of Plato and Aristotle. It's the death of it all. It's the death. It's the death. It's the end of it. So whatever feeling of anxiety you had about your death, see, I mean, just think about all that now. It's the death of the unborn children. It's their death too. And I said, you mean it's gone that far? He said, yep. And we sat there with that fact. Now we say, well, what would be a miracle? Well, he said, a miracle would be if everybody woke up one morning and thought differently, so that they weren't lost in what they're lost in, so that the game would change just like that. He says that isn't very likely, but he said, you know, when you think about it, we have a very unlikely history. I mean, you think about when we were— like, we have gills in, uh, during, uh, in our embryonic periods. Think of when we were fish and we chose to go up on land. That must have been a big deal. He said, so, you know, don't underestimate us. Now I look around and I see in the— certainly in the political arena, I don't see that shift in consciousness that would put my mind at ease that we are part of a miracle yet. And I see the media for the most part conspiring within that system because anybody that's making it in the system is going to conspire to make believe it's going to go on. So the rich and the powerful and all those people who have got it good or got it safe, they don't want to know from nothing about, you know, here, I'll give a check to the fish or something. Or isn't that terrible? We are part of something that is such a massive denial system. I mean, with regard to our toxic waste, with regard to our polarity, our permanent underclass in society. We didn't have that 40 years ago. But if you are— if you have a little stash of money and safety and a house and a lock on the door and a car and so on, you want to hold on to all of that. Because if you're busy being who you think you are, you need that to exist. And it's only when you connect to that part of you that doesn't need all that, that you can even hear the information. Because when you're so frightened, you get very reactive. In order for me to hear the predicament I find myself in, I have to quiet down enough to be able to listen clearly. And that quieting down has to do with the attachment I have to my own thoughts. And part of why I meditate as a support system for karma yoga is because through disciplining my mind, I can draw my awareness back so that instead of it being trapped by each thought as it arises, it can embrace the gestalt, the whole situation. And just appreciate what is. It's the difference between, like, thinking and knowing, difference between, say, knowledge and wisdom. I mean, these are all little ways of playing with this distinction. You go into wisdom training, So you quiet the mind. But part of what you see when you look at your karma and you see your identity with all these groups, you see that you are part of a web of phenomena, that part of you that's in form— this part of me, this body and this stuff that goes with that— was born an American, was born Jewish, was born in 1931, was born Caucasian, etc., etc. And to honor each of those components, to honor the fact that I'm part of a family. Like those of you that have followed my, my storyline may remember that a few years ago, for many years, I had been helping my father keep his home together and keep his, you know, be taken care of and be protected and make sure the finances, his finances were in order and so on. And I had the chance to serve him in that way until he died. At 90. Now, when I started out to do that, in my head was, well, I'm the unmarried child and there should be somebody around there and I could base camp in his basement. I mean, all the rational stuff for it and also the righteous stuff for it. But wouldn't it be good? I'll take care of my father. People would come up and say, aren't you good to be taking care of your father? And I'd say, well, somebody has to do it. You know, in those days I was milking it for what I could get out of it. All right. But then it goes on and on. I mean, there's, you know, there's more showering and toileting and feeding and arranging, and it goes on year after year. So pretty soon I was doing it as karma yoga. Dad, you're my karma yoga. I'm going to get to God right through you. And then it works. I mean, it works so that he's God and he's my father and I'm God and I'm me, and it's God playing with God. And what's happening? Nothing's happening. And here we are. And finally, you're just taking care of Dad. It's no big deal. It's not a process. It's not going somewhere. It just is. You say, "Well, I knew that all the time." Hahaha. Took me a long time to get there. And it was interesting that when, after he died, I looked and I realized what a blessing it had been for me to have that opportunity to do that. What an incredible experience of grace that was. And yet I had grown around the whole idea of individuality— leave home, go off on your own. And I wasn't alone. I mean, we have all these senior citizen communities everywhere to keep them there. We've done a bizarre thing. We got so carried away with being free individuals, we just cut off everything. So we don't have babysitters like uncles and aunts, you know, we don't have extended families. We keep cutting ourselves off to be free. So you're free but miserable. You're totally alienated. But you're free. It's called AA, and we're all together and we bond and we're a family because we're all drunks together. At least in the original family, only some of you were drunks. There was much more heterogeneity in the original family. You got a real homogeneous thing built around pathology. Isn't that far out? Far out society. And we create all these incredible surrogate family groups. I mean, I have them. I have, like, the Seva Foundation. That's a group of people that came together in order to feed their addiction of wanting to relieve suffering. We are all addicts of compassion. And we're trying to learn how to do it together. And we've been doing it for 13 years, and it's a gas. And it's an intentional community around Caring around cultivating compassion. I figured if I'm going to join a group, I might as well join a group that is in harmony with the deepest wisdom I have. And the deepest wisdom is that when I pull back from my separateness and I look at the oneness that I am part of, everybody is not only us, which is one plane of reality, but everybody is I. And now when I'm in the Guatemalan highlands meeting a woman who has watched her husband and her child be murdered before her eyes, and her baby in her arms, its hair is all red and brittle from vitamin deficiency, and she's got nothing. She's got no hoe and no seeds. She's just got the will to live. And we look at each other, and if I don't get caught in, "Oh, poor woman," and all that, and just look in her eyes, there is me looking back at me. There is that part of us which is like, "Ah!" And just as if your hand is in the fire, it feels good to take it out. And you begin to see something about the cost of our individuality to our human heart. To our compassionate heart. I was teaching a course 3 years ago at St. John the Divine in New York, and it was a course for people around homelessness. Maybe it was more than 3 years ago. And, uh, everybody had to go out and work in the community, uh, do volunteer work. There were about 200, 300 people. And then we had an open mic, and they reported their experiences working with political organizing or low-cost housing or shelters or food kitchens. This woman got up and she said, "Every day I leave my apartment and I go to the bus, and for the past 8 months at the corner there has been this man standing with a paper cup with some coins in it, jiggling it. He's there almost every day." She said, "We know him. We wave to him." She said, "I give him money now and then." And then she kind of smiled. She says, "Actually," she said, "I've worked out a budget. It's been going on for so long. I give him $2.50 a week. And I give him a quarter now and a quarter then, but it adds up to $2.50 a week." But she said, "As a result of taking this course, I realized that I had never acknowledged his existence as a fellow human being. I always treated him as 'that homeless man.' And she said, when I looked at that, I realized I was frightened. She said, I thought about what was I frightened about. She said, I wasn't frightened he was going to rape me or he was going to steal my pocketbook. We knew each other. She said, I was afraid that if I opened to him, he'd end up living in my living room. Can you imagine the pain? Just take that one case. Don't go into your own life, but take that one case and imagine how Her human heart's wanting to acknowledge the truth of the fact that we are all family, we are all one, becomes the enemy. She's afraid of her own heart because she's afraid she'll lose control of her game. It's an issue about boundaries. It's an issue about how you know how far you can go in this and how much you have to go like this. And learning how to go like this without closing your heart— there is such an art in learning to say no without closing your heart, because the no is coming out of the inner truth of your being, that you are a unique being with certain stuff that you have to do in order to be able to play your game. It's an incredible balancing act to set those boundaries. But part of what skillful means is, is to keep cultivating the qualities of compassion in the heart. I can't tell you how many people call me and they say, "Would you give me a spiritual practice?" And the easiest one I can think of in the moments on the phone is, "Go find someone who's suffering and help relieve their suffering." Because just in the process of the act, you meet another human being and the whole process happens. And finally, What feeds and liberates and works is when one being meets another being through the drama of the interactive process. Like I'm sitting by the bed of this fellow the night before last and we're holding each other in our arms and it's unclear who's helping whom or I'm the helper, I'm Ram Dass, I've come to be with you. I'm dying, you know. The whole drama of who's dying, who's helping, all of it is true and it's not true. Because there we are, we're just two, two moments of God, two sparks, two awarenesses recognizing one another through the veil of the dance. That's taking that situation and turning it into karma yoga. It's the intention to use your life in order to remember God. And with that intention, however you want to label it, the conditions that exist at this moment in this world are optimum conditions for you to awaken. Because every time you resist change. I mean, it's perfectly fine to be against certain changes that are chaotic, but when you find yourself doing it with fear or with anger and reactivity, you know at that moment you've just, you've just plumbed to a secret stash of attachment, of clinging of mind. I mean, I just have so many wonderful moments. I work with a friend who is a quadriplegic, and he can't speak. You know, "Ah, ah, ah." Aha. And he's like, eh. And he's been that way since 12, and he's 31 now. And for just his life's breath, he has to be taken care of all the time. And he's a very beautiful, sensitive guy. And you can put his hand over an alphabet board, and he can spell out words. And so you talk through that because he can't speak. And he and I, when I started being with him, at first I was so overwhelmed by the immensity of the incapacitation of this being in this body that I— and I was so guilty that I didn't— I was okay. I mean, all of the stuff that goes with it that I never even heard him. I was just too busy reacting to quadriplegic. And over 6 months of hanging out with him, pretty soon it's just you in there, I'm in here, you know. I'm bald, you're quadriplegic. What else is new? Yeah. And it wasn't treating it trivially, trivially. It was just getting the other perspective. Because when anybody— is this too much for you, or you— no, it isn't. You still haven't rustled. I wait for that. No, I can't. When anybody has immense or intense symbolic value in a society, it's very hard to see through the symbolic value to find the person inside. I mean, this fellow Kelly has symbolic value in terms of his body, and it sends out a message, and it's very hard for people to see through the message. So he ends up being kind of lonely in there because everybody's seeing quadriplegic. Nobody's seeing him. I didn't— his humor is incredible. I had— I entered— I was speaking to a group of doctors and nurses in Northern California, and I invited Kelly to introduce me. So they wheel Kelly up on the stage. I guess all the people are freaking. They don't know what's happening. Is this a case study or what? And they're all smiling, you know, this kind of hysterical smile. And Kelly taps out on his board, R.D. Ram Dass says we are not our bodies. Amen. And the whole place broke up. Now, to me, that is such a gift. It is such a gift to be— have the chance to awaken through getting caught, and then seeing I'm caught, and then extricating myself from the cot by going deeper into love and into oneness and into truth. I was working with a group. We were running a, a spiritual retreat for social and political activists, and there were about 100 really intense social activists who had come together in order to do spiritual practices. And there was some ethnic heterogeneity in the group. And it was set up so that I'd be one of the teachers and some meditation people would be one of the teachers. And about the second day, there was a caucus among the ethnic minorities who then spoke up and said, "We've had enough of this Mickey Mouse stuff where white honkies tell us what to do." We're taking over. So that's interesting, Momin. So I said, great. So we all had meetings and we heard each other. We had fishbowls, we had all kinds of things that showed the pain of our separateness. Whether it was in ethnic diversity or sexual identity or illness, whatever it was, whatever symbolic thing it was that we got caught in. And I heard resonating in my head what a rabbi, Zalman Schachter, had said to me one about 2 years ago. I said to him, Zalman, "if you were in Israel, what would you say to a Palestinian?" He said, "Oy vey. That's a problem." He said, "You know, before we can hear each other, we've got to be able to grieve with one another." And I really heard that. And at this moment, as this woman was telling about her slave family, her slave ancestors, and how her grandmother at 9 years old was expected to go to bed with the, the landowner, the white landowner, and I just felt what lineage, what heritage she was carrying inside herself. [FOREIGN] And I realized that I could sit around and say to her, don't you see, we're all one. But until she felt that I could hear her pain, she couldn't really hear the fact that there was also something else. So I can feel that in my path of karma yoga is not just upleveling individual differences, but honoring them. Honoring them, but not being trapped by them. Honoring them, but not being trapped by them. You know, it might come a time when our whole lifestyles are going to change, even in our lifetimes, dramatically, dramatically. And if you use skillful means Those changes will all be opportunities for you to find the place in yourself that doesn't change, so that you can delight in the changing process without getting trapped by it. If I identify with this aging body as that's me, I can feel the finiteness of it in a temporal line and somewhere there is fear. If I deny this and say, "Oh, I am eternal, there's no nothing," I'm still motivated by fear. It's only when I get the balance—this is aging, this is not. The Dalai Lama says the enemies you have are the best teachers because they awaken reactivity in you. They awaken anger, they awaken irritation. That shows you your stash. It's so easy to be holy when you're in a cave all by yourself. But wait till somebody mugs you. Yeah. Wow. But the Zen monk comes back to his hut and everything's been stolen. And he looks out the window and he said, they forgot to take the moon. Mm. Mm. Just to be at peace in the midst of change. Ah, so. Ah, so just to see change as a creative situation. Well, we'll make do with less. Gee, instead of going on that vacation, why don't we have a picnic? To recognize fully that we have cut ourselves off from our spiritual lifeblood by cutting ourselves off from the community of fellow beings because our mind has caught us in our separateness. And therefore, reaching out to create community through helping, through loving, through sharing, through acknowledging family, through whatever— build the network of the web of human caring and be part of it. This is all my strategy for how to survive in the '90s. Not only to survive, but to become free. The ancient masters were profound and subtle. Their wisdom was unfathomable. There's no way to describe it. All we can describe is their appearance. They were careful as someone crossing an iced-over stream, alert as a warrior in enemy territory. Courteous as a guest. Fluid as melting ice. Shapeable as a block of wood. Receptive as a valley. Clear as a glass of water. Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself? The Master doesn't seek fulfillment. Not seeking, not expecting, she is present and can welcome all things. Once you are quiet, you begin to hear. You hear fully the way of things, and within the way of things, you hear your unique dharma, your unique route through. For somebody to say, 'Oh, he does such good service, I've got to go do service like him,' Sorry kids, I can't take care of you. I've got to go do good. A woman comes up to me and she said, I'd love to meditate if it weren't for my kids. I said, your dharma are your children at this moment. Your route to God is through them, not in spite of them. For Kelly, his quadriplegia is his path. For somebody that's losing their business, that process becomes part of their path. And you listen and you hear, what are your skills? What are your likes? What are your opportunities? And within that, you find within that web, you keep feeling your way into your unique dharma. And it's not a fixed thing forever. You got to listen again because it may be— people say, I mean, in the old days, people used to say, what will I do for a career? That now sounds a little dated because we don't have those kind of lock-ins from birth to death. We say, what does it feel appropriate to do now? Now, that can be the height of narcissism, or it can be come from such a quiet place that it's tuned to our interconnectedness with all things. I am still not living as part of the biotic community in a responsible fashion. I am still living with the old ethic that humans are the stewards of it all and we'll figure it out with technology. But I have to listen my way in. To hear Gaia, to hear what the Earth is experiencing, what process I'm part of, in order to hear what my part is. And there's a way in which you know it's right on when you're doing it in harmony with the deepest karmic proclivities of your being. So you keep listening. That's the stance. The stance is like The Tibetan chungs are just listening. Milarepa, Milarepa is just always like this, just listening. You keep listening into the next moment, the appropriateness of the next moment. And because you would like everyone else to do that, you help them by not having a model in your head that is locked in of who they are. Because if you have a model of who they are, then they can't hear the next moment in around your mind because your mind keeps forcing them back into who that was. It's like if I'm working with somebody that's dying of AIDS, who is it? Is it somebody dying of AIDS? Is it God reconnecting itself? Is it a biological process I'm seeing? Is it grace? What is it? Any model in my head becomes the environment that makes that other person get caught in one reality or another and thus suffer. The art is to be an environment where each person can grow as they need to grow. So you work on yourself to be spacious, to appreciate individual difference without judging it. It's a big one to appreciate individual difference without judging it. You don't have to decide everything's better or worse. You know, you go out in this woods and you look at trees and you see a big tree and a short tree and a bent tree. You don't say, that's a good tree and that's a bad tree. They're just different. But you get around humans, it's a whole different ball game. Try appreciating. Individual difference and going for unity. 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 at ramdas.org. We can then continue to share what Ram Dass has been sharing for all of these years. Thank you.