Ep. 306 – Our Place in the Dance

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So I see this as a way in which we can figure out together How to live our lives consciously, with awareness, so that we can have our hearts open to one another, to one another as a species, one another across species, to the Earth itself, in fact, to the entire cosmos, so that we can hear our place in the dance. Our place in the dance. Because I feel that what we're talking about is just the way of viewing our daily life events in such a way that we find the excitement and the enthusiasm and the adventure and the possibility and the opportunity to become free.

Welcome to another Here and Now with Ram Dass. I'm your host, Jackie Dobrynska, and this is Episode 306: Our Place in the Dance. So imagine it. It's a quiet Sunday morning, December 8th, 1996, and Ram Dass walks into the studio at KSRO Radio in Northern California. He puts on some headphones and he tries something he's never done before. A live call-in radio show, which to us now probably seems a little old hat, but was completely novel for him at the time. So he's on air, and he talks about wanting this to reach the whole nation someday, to be a place where strangers could figure out together how to live with open hearts, how to hear, as he puts it, our place in the dance. Mm-hmm. And that radio show? It never happened. But 30 years later, we're listening to Ram Dass right now, and he meets us in the moment again and again. Maybe you're in Tokyo or London or in your car in Cincinnati. And this podcast, it carries his voice around the world. And this year marks 10 years of the Be Here Now Network. Wow! That's 10 years, more than 50 million listeners, and this incredible family of dharma teachers from Ram Dass to Jack Kornfield, Krishnadas to Sharon Salzberg, to so many others. And it's all in one place, and it's all free, and it's for anyone who needs them at any time. And it's all about the dharmas. And we know about 70% of people these days, they find Ram Dass through this podcast. And every week we get these messages about how they just discovered this podcast and Ram Dass saved their life. Maybe it's someone in their 20s, maybe it's somebody in their 70s, but they're just finding him for the first time, and they have their hearts and their minds blown open. And so often they say, "It just felt like home." And so to celebrate all of this, to celebrate the 10 years, we are remastering the Ram Dass Here Now Podcast. Mm-hmm. Many of these recordings, they are old and they have hisses and pops and you can't hear the questions and they're muffled. And so our engineers are restoring them so that it sounds like Ram Dass is sitting across from you with a hope that these teachings will last for generations to come. So please, if Ram Dass has ever touched you, has ever met you in the moment, please give what you can. Thank you. Through the end of this month, every donation is matched dollar for dollar up to $50,000. So your $25 becomes $50, your $100 becomes $200. You know, Ram Dass, he dreamed that this radio signal would reach everyone. And now it does because of you. So please help that continue. Go to beherenownetwork.com/10years, and help us keep these teachings alive. That's beherenownetwork.com/10years. So now, today's episode, Ram Dass, he opens the phone lines and the calls roll in. He takes questions about keeping the heart open in the presence of immense suffering. He talks about polarization and living in hard-hearted times. He talks about Right Livelihood, conscious dying, and the recent death of his old friend Timothy Leary. And he closes the show with a question about advice you might give children, which is worth the whole hour. So it's like he's speaking to us right now, as he so often does. So let's settle in for a Sunday morning 1996 or 2026, and listen for your place in the dance. Here's Ram Dass, Here Now.

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Happy Sunday morning. This is Ram Dass, and we are on NewsTalk 1350 KSRO, and the show is called Here and Now with Ram Dass. And I can't tell you what an absolute delight this is, and I'm going to spend a few minutes trying to tell you why it's a delight. Because I've chosen— this is the first radio show of what will sooner or later be, I hope, a national call-in series in which we have a chance to hang out together in a compassionate way. In a way in which we can explore how close we can get to truth. And I really— I found I'm a people person, and I really like hanging out with people. And I'm learning the art form of listening in to other human beings and how to listen without judgment. Just listen.

Ah.

And the opportunity for us to talk to the point clearly, simply, truthfully, with heart, and then to listen non-judgmentally to one another. To me, that's the way in which you and I can recognize that we are part of a community of consciousness. Who am I? For some of you, I'm an old familiar figure around who you know introduces himself at lectures as Ram Dass, which means servant of God. And— but I use RAM also as an acronym for rent-a-mouth, because I feel the audience has rented my mouth to tell it what what it wants to hear. And what does it want to hear? It apparently wants to hear things it already knows, because when I tell really far-out things, I notice the audience all nods in agreement. So they already know what I know. So apparently we just come together to say over and over again to one another what we already know until we can hear it.

Yes.

And I kind of see this show a little bit like that. It's not so much focused on information as it is on perspective, on how do we take the experiences we have in daily life and look at them in a way that minimizes the amount of suffering we might create to ourselves and to everybody else, and also enhances everyone's happiness. There are a lot of topics that I imagine will come up over the course of these next 4 weeks together, because I enjoy working in fields like politics, relationships, social action, issues of responsible business. And then I figure we'll talk some about stages of life. And I've just been working on a book on aging, so that'll be fun to talk about. I'm 65, and, and part of why I'm doing this show is because I've been been traveling, lecturing for years all around the world, and I'm getting kind of to the point where my old bones would like to stay home a little more. And so I figured we'd all gather on the airwaves rather than in physical buildings. It saves renting and all kinds of things. I assume because I've done a lot of work with the dying with AIDS, cancer, that issues about suffering will come up, just as the suffering of poverty will come up. And so I see this as a way in which we can figure out together how to live our lives consciously, with awareness, so that we can We can have our hearts open to one another, to one another as a species, and one another across species, to the Earth itself, in fact, to the entire cosmos, so that we can hear our place in the dance. Our place in the dance. Because I feel that what we're talking about is just the way of viewing our daily life events in such a way that we find the excitement and the enthusiasm and the adventure and the possibility and the opportunity to become free. And that's a— that's describing what my life is on the inside. On the outside, I was a— took a PhD from Stanford. I'm from Boston. I then taught at Harvard for 5 years in the field of psychology, social relations. Then I was involved with psychedelics with Tim Leary. I left Harvard in '63. I went to India in '67, started to really tune into Eastern metaphysics, and for the past 25 years have been integrating metaphysics, Eastern metaphysics with Western psychology, and trying to figure out how these changes in my own consciousness play into the way I live life as a responsible human being. So in the course of these years, I've tried a variety of spiritual practices, and I hope we'll not only talk about those but actually try some of them. Mm-hmm. Seems to me this is our living room and we can hang out and do the things that you and I would find most useful. A lot of talk radio is often feeds on a certain kind of an adrenaline that has to do with confrontation. And I think how we hold opinions is really interesting. I think we all do have opinions, but that who we are is not our opinions and our opinions should be open to discussion. And I'm much more in favor of reflective discussion and conversation rather than debate and confrontation. So I think that helps define what our, our ground rules are of what— of the kind of people I like to hang out with and have conversations with. So in a few minutes, we will be taking calls. Here at NewsTalk 1350 KSRO, and it will be after a break coming up. As I become older, I realize that society needs new roles for people like me, older people, and the role I would like to be in is a wise elder. A member of the society that stands back and reflects and contributes and looks and offers. But I'd like it understood that I'm not saying what I say because I know. I'm saying what I say because it's— it's as close as I can tune at that moment to the truth of the situation when I listen carefully.

Thank you.

And so whatever I say, run it through your own intuitive heart to see whether it's of value. And I think there is an opportunity in a good way to say, "I don't know." So we'll take a break now for our first advertisement. Welcome back to Here and Now with Ram Dass. This is News Talk 1350 KSRO. And now if you want to call in, we'll be getting close to taking some calls and we will— in—

in—

there are many traditions. In fact, in most traditions there are the opportunity for people of like mind to come together in a community to give each other support for what they're doing. And in this case, that's what I see this as, whether you call it the fellowship or the satsang or sangha or whatever. It's a group of people that come together, and you can look at your own life and see who you come together with and why. Many people come together with other people who share their pathology. Like in 12-step programs, you know, and share their opening faith. But in this case, we are coming together to see how we can grow together, how we can awaken together, how we can use our daily lives as a vehicle to awaken. Okay, we have a first caller who is Jerry from Santa Rosa. Hello.

Oh, hi, Ram Dass.

Yeah, hi.

This is Jerry. I've been following your talking for 30-some years, and I love the story with Maharaji about to love everyone and tell the truth.

Yeah.

And you say at that point you didn't love, you know, the truth is that I don't love everybody all the time. And I'm just, you know, when I saw you at Spirit Rock recently, you started by saying how painful it is to live with a closed heart, and that really struck me. My question is, when you open and you're kind of innocent and loving towards people and then you get your feelings stepped on, what's the stance or how do you deal with that? Because, you know, correcting people or straightening people out, you can't really do that. Getting even doesn't work because if I'm mindful of how I feel when I do that, that doesn't work. I don't really want to be stepped on and I just— I wish I had a way of just coming to peace with that because people are going to both consciously and unconsciously hurt my feelings. Maybe I'm a little too sensitive, who knows? So just that issue.

Thanks, Jerry, I hear it. Years ago, there used to be a comic strip called Doctor Strange, and in the Doctor Strange comics, people would walk down the street and they'd have in front of their heads these huge mind nets which were full of definitions of reality. And you could see somebody coming down the street with this mind net, and you, as you came into their field, that net, you would see yourself as they saw you. You'd see their projection of who you were. And I found that as I began to walk down the street looking at these projections of people's minds, I could take them in or not, and I— how I took them in, or did I reject them and push them away, or did they just go through me like Chinese food? I mean, it was an interesting question of how I worked with these mind maps. And over the years, I've come to just see that people are always projecting onto each other things that reflect their own needs and their own desires and their own fears.

Mm-hmm.

And when people are putting you down, a lot of that is coming out of what's in them. And then the question is how you buy it. And when somebody puts me down, what I do is I run it through and see if it feels like there's some validity in it, like there's something there for me to work with in myself. And I'm appreciative of it. I mean, I hate them for doing it, but I'm appreciative.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, the hate is there, the anger is there, the frustration. And then I'm inclined to say, look, this is their projection. And I walk through not buying other people's projections and learn how not to buy them, not to deny them, but not to buy into them. And the more centered I am, the less I buy into other people's projections.

Okay.

That's a good start for that. We have Marilyn in Bodega Bay.

Hello.

Hi. Hi, Marilyn.

I'm so glad that you're on the air, number one. Uh, number two, I wanted to ask how you would deal with potentially or actual violent situations. And, um, I'm bringing it up because I, I tend to want to run from it, and at the same time, I could be helpful. Possibly by sticking around.

But there's the real—

an example that just happened, buying gas, and an irate customer was saying very inflammatory things to the clerk and running out.

And I, I just wanted to pay and get out.

Then I also realized, well, I should probably just stick around. Not that I would be effective, but I don't know how to deal with I hope I'm not attracting it, but the violence that's out there, whether to run, you know, what do you stick around and— do you get a feel for what I'm—

Yeah, I do indeed, Marilyn, and really there are no ground rules about what you do.

Okay.

It's who you are that's doing it, and that's where your work is. I mean, you're sitting in the gas station and the filling station and there's that violence going on, maybe just your presence calmly, quietly, just presence as a kind of fair witness, not a judge, not trying to do anything, not reacting. Because when you react, you're often feeding the very thing you're reacting about.

Right.

And, uh, so sometimes from that quietness you hear the whole thing and you see that you could say one simple thing and change the direction. Or you could walk up and say, you know, fellas, there must be— or whatever, you know. Other times the best thing to do— you'll feel there's a lot of controlness in the scene, and the best thing for you to do is to walk away because you're not offering your body up to this thing. So there's no rule book, but you can see that how you reacted in that situation is the clues of your work on yourself. Because what happened was your getting frantic and running away—

Mm-hmm.

—took your consciousness so you couldn't just hear the whole thing for what it was. It took you out of a quiet place.

Right.

And we really— every time something takes you out of a quiet place, wow, thank you, here we go. Okay?

Thank you.

Thanks a lot. Okay, bye-bye.

Okay, we have Robert from Santa Rosa.

Yes, good morning. Can you hear me okay?

Yes, I can, Robert.

Great. I have great joy in my life, Ram Dass, and it's a pleasure to hear your voice on the air.

Thanks, Robert.

But lately I've noticed as we have the long winter nights and the short days and we approach the winter season and the equinox, that I have been doing deep thought as a lot of us have. It's a time for introspection. And I've noticed this year that I have tuned into the suffering of others much more. I've been much more sensitive for some reason, and, um, I would like to help the people that suffer around me as they come up, but it takes a lot of energy and a lot of time because some of the wounding is very deep, and I, for some reason, I can see that intuitively. Do you have any advice there on, um, perhaps how I could work with that energy?

Yeah, sure. I mean, I, I hear it just as Um, because it seems to me that one of the major tasks before us is how do we stay open in the presence of suffering and how do we respond to it. Not to make believe it doesn't exist, as most people do, to denial, but to stay with it. And, um, first of all, we don't take away all the suffering. And often you just get overwhelmed by the immensity of it, and you know you can't take it away. And so you end up frustrated and cynical and kind of dark. And the other way is to see that suffering is part of the mystery of life, and caring to relieve suffering is part of the mystery of life. And you work to keep both of those things going. I'm using this as a teaser to get us going, because we're going to take this shit call into the next time. So if you hold, we'll come back to your call right after these words.

We return to Here and Now from us.

Robert, are you still around? Robert? Well, I assume Robert's listening.

Yeah, I'm still here. Still there. Great. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. I just wanted to continue our discussion about suffering because it's such a key I'm sure I'm going to talk about it hundreds of times on the radio in the next few years, but what I'm saying is when most people, we are so inundated with information about the suffering of people, animals, the world, the Earth, etc., that we end up protecting ourselves, armoring ourselves against it, and we end up saying this is unbearable. And so we put up a block and we close our hearts down and we just see it impersonally. You walk through the streets and there are homeless people and you just act like they're like lampposts, they're part of the landscape. And we got to realize that when we do that, it's really doing ourselves in too. It's cutting us off from life energy, from being really alive in the moment. And the question is, how do you deal with suffering? And what I hear in you when you say you'd like to do something about the suffering is that's the emerging quality of compassion that comes out of our realizing that other people are not them. They're us, that this is a family, this is a group of beings, and that the Earth is us as well. And somehow you don't treat us with as much denial as you do them. So I'm going to talk about this over time, and this is enough for now. And I'd say you can't take away all the suffering, as I said earlier. So you listen, you feel the suffering, and then you listen to hear what your opportunity, skills, the situation calls for, and out of the quietness of your being will come an appropriate action. Now we have Jay from Sebastopol. Jay?

Hi, good morning, Ram Dass.

Good morning, Jay.

Hi. Well, I have a question. In my life, it's impossible for me to commit myself to really build anything because I see how at any moment you'd be hit by a car, there's earthquakes, as in the San Francisco earthquake, and it's just on some level I always expect everything to sort of vanish at any moment. And I was wondering what attitude you might suggest that could take me through that.

Jay, that's great. I hear that one, and the way I see life is that process and product are one thing. That is, the building of the thing— either the building of the thing is enough or it's not. If you're only building a thing to have it built, you're kind of denigrating the building of it as if it's less than the having it built. And since life to me is a continuous— Suzuki Roshi once said, life is like setting sail aboard a boat that is about to go out into the ocean and sink. Why would you set sail?

And that's exactly what goes on.

Exactly. But the actual journey in the boat is part, and including the sinking, becomes part of the richness of the moment. And in India, they talk about doing your dharma, meaning acting in a way that is appropriate to the situation. And you build— we are all building. We're taking care of our bodies. We may be run over tomorrow. Yeah, we are building social institutions. The whole thing may collapse. There may be an earthquake at any day. That's all part of living with uncertainty. And to live with uncertainty with joy— ah, there's an art form. So I hear the question, and we'll keep playing with it over time. Thanks for calling. Okay, thank you. We have Paul from Fairfax. Paul, you there?

Uh, thank you, uh, for, for being a wise elder.

I'm in training. I'm a wise elder in training.

Great.

Thanks.

Um, and my question is, is, um, I saw Uri Geller, um, the spoon bender, in San Francisco a few weeks ago.

Yeah.

And, um, he's asking for help, um, uh, to practically, um, disarm all the nuclear weapons. And I'm wondering, uh, what your comment is about that kind of stuff.

Wow. Well, um, I've never met Uri Geller. I've certainly read about him and seen some demonstrations on television. Um, I don't question that there are uses of energy through the mind that can change material substance. That's clear. Um, it feels to me like, um, that level of power confrontation isn't the way to stop the game of nuclear proliferation. I would rather work to cultivate a level of collective consciousness in which these are less and less relevant. I watch, like, um, uh, that recent, um, a government military officer who was in head of the nuclear arsenal for a long time come forward. And I was at a lecture he gave in which he said, these are the wrong things, we've got to get rid of them. And this is the guy who was in, you know, the leader of holding them. So I'm much more in favor of the shifts of consciousness rather than in the using power to be power. And, uh, because also, uh, I think the game is more interesting than all of this. I just don't think it is, uh, having these nuclear heads somehow not be active for people who still want them to be active, because they'll just figure out another way, and then they'll go after the spoonbenders. I mean, I just feel it's polarizing the world rather than bringing them together. And I want to say, uh, thank you, Paul. The, um, that issue that I was just talking about, about, um, polarization— I've been trying to see how when I deal with somebody where I disagree with them and I'm opposed to their position How I can do what beautiful poet Kabir said. He said, do what you do with another being, but never put them out of your heart. And is it possible to oppose somebody like somebody who believes that nuclear deterrence is a way to keep peace in the world? And now, I don't think that's the optimum strategy for keeping peace. But I also feel that I have to honor that that person is another being just like me who's arrived at these positions in a way that is very— coming from a very strong and true place in their being. So learning how to love a person and still disagree with them and oppose them, say, no, you can't build any more nuclear warheads. No. And we're going to protest. The question is, can you protest without making the other person them? Gandhi said, I want the British to be out of India, but I want them to leave as friends. And I really hear that level of dialogue with opponents. Gus from Woodacre, are you there?

Hello, Ram Dass.

Hi, Gus.

I was calling to share a story. My mother died consciously about 2 weeks ago.

Yeah.

And it was beautiful, and it was so interesting to watch someone die consciously and really experience the moment. And I was with her when she died, and it was just great. And I read to her for 3 days after that out of the Tao Te Ching.

Wow.

It was really beautiful. And years ago when I read Be Here Now, I go, God, this guy says what Mom says. What did—

tell me what you meant when she said she died consciously. Tell me about it.

Well, through the whole process, she was— she had a hemorrhage, a brain hemorrhage.

Yeah.

And she was left triplegic and just little use of one hand. And you'd go in to see her and she would ask how you were. She was really caught up in just the way things were. Right, I hear. Throughout the whole progression, it took about a year for her to finally leave, but it was beautiful to watch. It was never pity, it was never 'Oh, I'm so sick. It was—

how are you right now?' Boy, was her whole life like that?

Yeah, it was.

Really?

Yeah, it was really nice.

Boy, weren't you lucky to have a parent like that.

Yeah, I really was. I think that they would—

That's extraordinary. Why do you think she was that way?

Uh, I don't know. It reminds me of the story you used to tell about the woman in the front row knitting.

Yeah.

Who gets it. Yeah.

You know, she— She shows faith.

Yeah, she grew up in cotton fields and worked hard when she was young, but— Yeah. Was always around nature. She always came back to nature.

Oh, great. And, uh, that's a good connection to that truth. It really was.

It washes away a lot of their ideas that we think come up with.

And consider how much we're alienated from nature and the way we live, you know, how much everything we see is run through the human mind before we get back to those rhythms. And those rhythms are really helpful around aging and death. Really helpful.

Yeah, they seem so natural. They're ineffable, of course, but They're very healing. But it was real neat, and I just wanted to thank you. She always called you, uh, Robbie Doc.

Robbie Doc?

Yeah, she could never get the name right.

My father called me Rum Dum.

Right, that's the reason I shared that with you.

Well, thanks very much, Gus. I appreciate it.

Thank you, I appreciate your teaching.

This is, uh, talk radio 1350 KSRO. Welcome back to Here and Now with Ram Dass. And Ben, you're on the line. Ben from Palo Alto. Hello, Ben, are you still there? No. Okay, let's try Judy from Santa Rosa. Are you there?

Yes, I'm here.

Hi, Judy.

Hi, greetings.

What can I do for you?

Um, I'm delighted to hear you on the air.

I'm delighted to be on the air, so there's two of us then.

Yeah, I'm reading a wonderful book and it talks about some of the things that you were talking about, gives them a little bit— it's coming to more moral consciousness and how to help people continue to grow and develop in their character, and it's called "Changing the Bully Who Rules the World," and it's reading and thinking about ethics by Carol Bly.

Mm.

And it is wonderful. He talks about how listening with empathy and asking civil, courteous, interesting questions and things like that, with a lot of support, that can help people grow and learn to particularize their thinking, learn to discover the fineness and the distinctions, how they say, We say a big thing that's a generalization, and then someone is listening attentively and with love, we assume, or the intent to be loving, asks a careful question about, "Can you tell me what qualities of that?" It's great.

I hear all that. Sure enough.

And it's wonderful. It's also— I haven't got to the part yet where they're talking about how rich privileged people can be encourage and, um, have somebody be present.

Well, look, here there are things, uh, Judy, that are interesting because when you make the distinction how rich privilege or how this person or how that person—

Yeah.

I think you can go back to the general quiet thing that this general statement, which is you listen deeply and intently to another human being, setting aside your judgments, and then you respond to them in a way that helps them awaken to their predicament.

Yeah.

Helps them hear more clearly, and that's a wonderful role. But oftentimes there's nothing to say, or there's no rule as to what you do under those conditions. And that's why I take it one level out and say the work is— the work is on myself, that I'm really seeing that how I listen and hear is going to be what is useful to them. And therefore, I work to become an environment for them where they can do what they need to do. That is, I'm a little more passive about it in the sense of I create a space. I don't try to— I try to see other people as a statement of what they are, like I see a pine or an oak or an elm tree for what it is. I don't judge it saying it should be this way or that way.— and in that way I create an environment, and out of that environment— the environment is spacious to allow the person to grow, and what they feel is nothing coming from me that increases their paranoia or their feeling me as object, and then we start to move from there. We'll talk more about that again. Thank you again, Judy, for calling in. Bernie from Occidental.

Hey, how are you today?

Okay.

I kind of want your opinion on this. I have some of my own, but it seems like we're living in a time where it's once again socially acceptable to be racist, where welfare reform is, you know, kicking mothers and children into the streets. It seems like a really hard-hearted time, and I'm just wondering why you think that's going on. You know, what can individuals do about it?

Yeah, I hear the— I hear the question. What I hear is that a lot of that, a lot of that hard-heartedness is really rooted in fear, that a lot of conservatism and fundamentalism is rooted in fear, prejudice, What I see is when people who identify themselves only as their separate entities feel the instability of culture or economics or world situations or weather or whatever, they get frightened. And when they get frightened, they contract. And when they contract, they get prejudiced. And when they get prejudiced, they often can get violent. And it seems to me that a lot of our work is to not get caught in that sequence. By realizing that we're part of a larger context in which there is cause for fear on one level and there is cause for joy on another. And when we get the balance in ourselves, we don't feed that thing in the culture. I don't think you should look at a cultural conspi— conspiracy or a cultural hard image in a culture as solid. I think it's still made up of individual human minds and hearts. Mm-hmm. And that I'm one of them, and what I can do to change that is be as clear as I can and at least— least caught in fear, and that's what I can do for that. Thank you, Bernie, for calling. That's a good question. Uh, Tracy from Ross, are you there?

Uh, what a great blessing to have this as part of our Sunday morning dialogue.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

It's like going to church.

It is like church, but it's, uh—

It's fun too.

It's the dialogue we've longed to hear for a long time. I have spent my life really working to invite more people into servant leadership and to get involved in their communities and community building. And we hear a lot in the news about the gap between the rich and the poor and the— really the transfer of wealth that is about to happen. I'm interested in hearing your perspective about the transfer of values. What are the values that we— how do we make visible this wonderful spiritual revolution that is happening between us and the transfer of these values to the next generation, get people more involved?

Tracy, that's a really deep question and I would like to play with it, and if you would be willing to just hang in by your radio, I will do that, but we're going to have to take a break now for our very kind advertisers. So we will take a break now.

And now we return to Here and Now with Ram Dass.

Here I am and it's now. So this must be Boostalk 1350 ASRO, where we're having the luxurious opportunity to hang out and to explore our consciousness together. I did start talking with Tracy and we would— she asked about passing values on to the next generation. And a lot of people often ask me, you know, how do you teach children? How do you, etc.? And obviously the content of the teaching is important. But I also think that the way we talk about roles role modeling is the nature of the being is important. There was a great image of Mahatma Gandhi at one point. He was on a train that was leaving the station, and a reporter rushed up and said, Mahatma Ji, give me a message to take back to my people. And the train was already moving, and the reporter was walking along next to the train, and Gandhi just quickly scribbled on a paper bag, and he handed it out to the reporter, and it said, My life is my message. And my feeling is that what you transmit to your children that is of essence is what you are, and therefore you work on yourself, not necessarily what you do, although doing is part of what you are. So I feel that our work on ourselves, we come back to that as our offering to our children. And I really feel that you can't just play at the intellectual level about values. There has to be a quality in which you really grok them or have tuned to them or become one with them. Well, Tracy, that's a beginning. That's a deep question, and I hope we'll be talking about it more in the weeks to come. Peter in Balinas.

Hello, Ram Dass.

Hi.

Good morning. I have a question about how to balance right livelihood. I have a job that I love and and stuff, but it's real hard. I'm in the process now of renegotiating my contract and making less money than is really needed to get by, especially in Marin County. And I'm wondering how to do— how you deal with something like that.

Oh, you're negotiating for less money, what, in order to do a job you love?

Yes, yes, I have a job that I love doing.

Yeah.

And Of course, the budget never balances and stuff, and so one of the ways to balance the budget is to renegotiate my salary.

The other way to renegotiate is to live more simply. I mean, when you find something you really love to do, you'll do it even somehow if you have to go through hardship to do it. You know, our society has become so materially oriented that people's worth is defined, or a job's value is defined by how much money changes hands. And I really don't experience that as the way in which people are going to be happy. I think when you find a job you love and you're working with people you respect and like, you all do the best you can to figure out how to make it work. And so you may not live up to the standards of everybody around you, and in Marin, that's pretty hard to do anyway.

Mm-hmm.

But you, uh, you find you can simplify life, and when you know that you're simplifying it for something that you value, it's possible not to feel deprivation but to feel enriched by it. Is that making any sense to you, Peter?

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, it really does.

So I'd, uh, I'd look— I'd re-examine your hierarchy of values. And to go to a job you love with people you like working and that you respect the job Believe me, that is a treasure, and I wouldn't let it go too lightly. Thanks for calling, Peter.

Oh, thank you.

Uh, Reese from Sebastopol, are you there? We're waiting. Reese, are you there? Okay. Reese, we'll be back with you after a couple of minutes, so when you find the phone, we'll be there. And we have Tom from Timber Cove.

Hi, Rhonda.

Hi, Tom.

I first saw you at Millbrook when you were polishing the headlight of an antique car.— and I'm the mother story in Kenshi, a year and up in India, and I said, "I have not yet met Nimkareli Baba, and I have no idea how to find him." And the next day, someone at Chandachok said, "I'm going to Nimkareli Baba." And as a recovering Roman Catholic, I was amazed to find myself massaging his feet 20 minutes after I met him. And I'm deeply grateful for all the work you've done. Thank you. I wanted to speak about the passing of Tim, because I was in touch with him a few months before that happened, and I was curious, uh, what your take was on it. I found myself very much yearning for a more spiritual dimension from Tim as he was, uh, leaving, and I wonder if you had any, uh, contact. I'd be happy to hear that.

I would love to talk about that with you, Tom. I think, um, I'd like to— what I'd like to do is, if you wouldn't mind hanging around, we're going to take a break for a couple of spots and then we will be back. Is that okay with you?

Yeah.

All right, great. And, uh, you are listening to Here and Now with Ram Dass on NewsTalk 1350 KSRO. We'll be back shortly. We're back, and, uh, we were talking with, uh, we are talking with Tom from Timber Cove and, uh, He had asked about the spiritual dimensions of Tim Leary's death. You know, I was very close to Tim, and at the end of his life I had a lot of chance to be with him, and it was a very profound experience for me. I want you to hear that. And that I had the model as I watched him, and he was downloading himself onto his webpage, and he was having his brain frozen and doing all the things that a philosophical materialist would do. And, uh, I thought, this is all defense. Somehow he's not really facing death. But what I experienced in the last weeks that I knew him was that we would sit and look into one another's eyes, and his— he was so far back in there behind all of this stuff, that the theater piece that he was doing, that he was doing it as a theater piece. But if I saw that, that kind of, um, empty presence and very, uh, present and a kind of compassionate being was sitting there just waiting for the adventure of death. And, uh, one of the things that I thought was a very controversial but very interesting statement he made was that he used— he published in CNN and Newsweek and all these places the medications he used during the last months of his life. And the medications were clearly for 3 purposes. One was to alleviate the pain, and he had a great deal of pain from his prostate cancer as it metastasized. And the second was to, to keep his consciousness as clear as possible. And the third was to have fun. And that is a no-no in our society, that you can have fun dying. I mean, it just— it delighted me that he just brought that into the culture. Is that dealing with the question, Tim, at all? Tom? Tom, are you there? Okay. I guess it's dealing with the question. Tom is silent in awe of my answer. We're going back to Rhys, who has now found the phone.

Hi there.

Hi, Rhys.

Yeah, I guess I went right out on the air with all my frantic finding.

Oh, it was wonderful. We were all desperately looking under the cushions.

Well, I got tired of holding the phone to my ear and it got buried under some papers I was organizing.

That's true.

No problem. Well, anyway, I want to say I'm 68 years old. Yeah. And I have been enjoying and profiting by listening to you since 1965, and I want to thank you for your influence in my life. Very good. Thank you very much. Okay, and also Tim Leary, who I first met at the conference at Asilomar in 1965 called Mysticism, Psychotherapy, and Psychedelic Drugs. Were you there?

I think I might have been.

I'm not sure. Yeah, Houston Smith spoke.

Yeah, Houston was there, yeah.

Yeah. Well, anyway. My question, this kind of follows the last question, um, from your position now and your wisdom from this at this point, uh, how do you see your relationship and what happened to you with the woman in New York who had Neem Karoli Baba sitting in her basement? How do you see that now?

How do I see my relation with that woman?

Yeah, what, what happened there? What, how do you see it from this point?

Well, uh, what happened, for those of you that are just, uh, not in the, uh, listening to all this stuff all the time, um, was that I, uh, I met a teacher in New York, a spiritual teacher, and I became a student of hers for, uh, almost 2 years. And then I finally left her, and there was a little bit of a hard feeling in my leaving on her part, not particularly on mine. I felt that I got good teachings from being around her, but I saw that she wasn't— she hadn't integrated the consciousness that she touched. She did touch some very extraordinarily high places, but she also— what I saw, it's very interesting, it's like meeting somebody with like vertical schizophrenia.

Ah, yeah.

It's somebody that gets very high, and from that high place this incredibly beautiful poetry and wisdom pours forth. And then there's the other person who is very much ego, very much needful. And these two people weren't integrated for her. And for a long time, I kept just treating as if I were getting the teachings from the high being and I was ignoring the other one.

Yeah.

And then the two— I couldn't ignore them anymore. Finally, it was just too It didn't have integrity for me to do that, so I had to stop that. So, but I mean, I felt it was a good teaching, and I think she, she took me on in order to work out my sexual karma. And, and as such, she was a great teacher.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, I'm still a neurotic mess, but she was a great teacher.

When you were speaking earlier, my wife is a highly evolved woman. And, uh, when you were speaking earlier, I don't even remember the subject, but it had to do with— oh well, anyway, uh, she was— I said, does that sound familiar, Joy? And she says, yeah, exactly what she says.

Well, thank you.

Anyway, uh, thanks for your help in my life.

Thanks a lot, Reed. Okay, goodbye. Tom, are you there from Timberlane again? Timber Cove? Tom?

Oh, but I wasn't awed sufficiently to be silent. Okay, thank you. Now, and I did share that. I did. I I did see Tim many times and we lived at Herman Hesse's for 3 months and when I was leaving for the Silk Route, Kabul, he gave me twice what I came with there and said one should always double one's entry. Uh-huh. I was very impressed on many levels, but the distress I felt at his exit is perhaps the worst exit I could imagine for myself, is going out in Hollywood surrounded by hanger-ons and a lot of media people. When that, uh, the exit came, it seemed like it was not mindful and centered, and I too felt the philosophical materialist in there. And I'm deeply grateful to both of you for different reasons, and I think if 30 years ago we could see the state we have today, um, it would have been seen as a bomb trip. The transference of wealth— there's no shortage of wealth in this country, but it's in too few hands. And what I am trying to do— we now have, my wife and I, 3 children, and I'm raising them in the strongest, wisest way to survive all contingencies that I can picture. But what I keep saying is, uh, All you own in life is what you can swim from a shipwreck with: the will, knowledge, and determination to build another ship. And I know your personal history, but had you had children, what would you pass on to your child in these somewhat troubled days?

I would pass on my faith in a larger context in which there is a mystery about life. And I would pass on my love and I would pass on my respect for them as fellow souls who are dealing with their own unique predicament. And I would give them— I would hope to be somebody they could turn to and trust to listen deeply and to help them find their way through life. That's what I do. Thanks.

Well, thank you very much, and I look forward to other programs. Let's get the publicity out there and give Rush a run for his money. He really deserves it. Thank you. Bye.

Thanks very much, Tom. Okay, uh, well, we are drawing to the end of this, um, incredible feast. I, I'm just learning the ropes here, but I think in the next few weeks we're going to have some, uh, interesting people dropping in on the phone. Um, come on back next Sunday to Here and Now with Ram Dass. At NewsTalk 1350 KSRO. So thank you for being with me, and I will see you here and now next week, next Sunday. Thanks.

The Ram Dass Here and Now podcast is brought to you by Be Here Now Network and ramdass.org. We appreciate you listening. You can support the preservation of Ram Dass's legacy by joining our Patreon. There you can find every episode of the Ram Dass Here and Now podcast ad-free, as well as commentary-free episodes of each episode, and guided practices from Ram Dass and friends. Visit patreon.com/ramdasspodcast for a free week trial.

Namaste.

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