Ep. 310 – The Mainline Reality Trip

A good meditation teacher isn't just someone who meditates a lot. Helping someone work with their own mind is a genuine skill, and it requires training. Join Buddhist teacher David Nick Dern for a free online talk on Tuesday, August 25th at 6 PM Eastern Time. Drawing on more than 50 years of practice and teaching, David will explore what it takes to offer clear meditation instruction, listen deeply, guide meaningful discussion, and share the teachings in your own voice. You'll also learn about Dharma Moon's upcoming 100-hour mindfulness meditation teacher training offered in partnership with Tibet House US, the Dalai Lama's cultural center in the United States. You'll have a chance to meet the teaching team, ask questions, and find out whether the program is right for you. Visit dharmamoon.com/path to learn more and reserve your spot for this free online event on August 25th.

My experience was primarily that I was on the main line of reality and that there were all these kind of weird trips on either side, but that I, as a super scientist, rational mind, power, control, house full of antiques, my airplane, my motorcycle, gratification, more and more sex, more better food, more power, more intellect. I was doing the mainline reality trip, and I was hired to tell everybody else what reality was. Okay, that's what a Harvard professor does. And there was no doubt in my mind at all that that's what reality was until I took psilocybin.

Welcome to another Ram Dass Here and Now. This is episode 310, The Mainline Reality Trip. So today's lecture comes from a retreat Ram Dass gave at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island in June of 1976. So these are still the early days of his teachings, and he's asking those deeply profound questions, which are still so relevant today: How do we understand the forces shaping our lives without becoming trapped by them? So he begins with an ordinary moment, and it opens him into this much larger question about power structures and how and when they change. And from there, he looks at some of these powerful energies moving through human beings: our need for safety, our hunger for control, our relationship to sex and power, and the many ways the ego disguises itself as reality. And nearly 50 years later, the language and the names may belong to another era, but dynamics are still so loud and all around us. And if we're honest, maybe within us. Underneath all of it is the question Ram Dass kept returning to throughout his life: What are we doing here? Why have we taken birth at this particular moment? And how might we use this incarnation as fully and consciously as we can? These are the questions at the heart of the work being done by our sponsor today as well, Omega Institute. Omega creates spaces for people to step outside the momentum of ordinary life and listen more deeply to themselves, to one another, and to what this life might be asking of us. So discover their retreats and their incredible workshops, all in the New York Hudson Valley. Go to e- Omegadotorg. But for now, let's just take 40 minutes and dive into these important questions with Ram Dass, Here Now.

This is Ram Dass, and the show is called Here Now with Ram Dass. Those of you that are familiar with a large metropolitan subway system, for example in Manhattan, there are on the corners of streets these long stairways that go down into the bowels of the earth. Where, uh, subways run. And it, um, sometimes when you're— they're a very efficient way to travel most of the time. Uh, they just get very crowded around rush hour, around 5 o'clock. And, um, so if you want to beat rush hour, sometimes you go like a quarter of 5. And, um, I recall a very vivid experience of going down one of these long, long, long stairways that are very dark and full of odors. And you go down and down and down and down and down, and, uh, at quarter of 5, and I was beating the rush, and I was very exhilarated with my shrewdness and planning this maneuver. And I got to the bottom, and there was a sawhorse, a barrier saying, uh, this entrance is closed, use the entrance on the diagonal corner. So I started up the stairs, but at that point, uh, the 5 o'clock rush started and there was this ocean of humanity coming down. And I started up and the first few people attempted to say to them, there's a barrier down there and you got to go around. And they looked at me like I was insane, or they didn't even look at me, or they looked through me because they were with glazed eyes. They were going towards the bowels of the earth. And there was no way that I— and all I could do was hold on to the rail, actually. I mean, it got so powerful, there was no chance that I could go up this, up the stairs at all. I just could hold on to keep from being swept back down into the balls of the earth. And it was only after a certain crisis had occurred, when a few hundred started to come up and several hundred were coming down, that the power structure changed and I could get enough momentum to get up the stairs again. Well, um, for many of us who are on the spiritual path. Uh, life is a little like that, that you seem to know something that somebody else doesn't know, and when you try to tell anybody, you are lucky if you can hold on to the rail at all, because the force of society, the force of most beings towards whatever it is that they are motivated towards is so strong and so one-pointed. It's one-pointed in the same way as you become one-pointed towards getting back up those stairs. Now, um, for the past 15 years or so, um, I've always managed by some quirk of evolutionary unfolding to be at that leading edge where it's— where I'm always thought to be just kind of weird because it's going against the flow of things. And then by the time the flow is going that way, I'm on some other stairway holding on for dear life. And I've begun to feel almost that if I'm not on that stairway holding on, I'm in the wrong place. The— when suddenly everybody's going along with me, I think, oh, I got lazy or I got sloppy or I just blew it. And there are mass movements that are happening in this society at this moment concerned with consciousness, but they aren't necessarily connected with liberation. And I think that distinction makes you— will make you appreciate that what you're doing here is much more holding on to the handrail than you quite understand yet. Because taking a fix on your evolutionary predicament, uh, is extremely useful as long as you don't get caught in your own melodrama. Because this is just another melodramatic storyline I'm presenting to you, right? Since who you are isn't really ultimately that relevant, it's what each moment is about. But it's still useful to get a little bit of a fix about your predicament. It appears that the, the physical plane, the Earth plane on which we are incarnating and which other beings may be incarnating on other planets as well, all of the physical planes where beings incarnate in bodies that are visible physically. Those planes exist specifically for certain entities that have certain kinds of what are called sanskaras, or certain kinds of predispositions, or certain kinds of karmic predicaments. There are many, many more beings that exist in the cosmos than are being incarnated, than are incarnate on the physical plane. No matter how big the population gets of the Earth, I mean, 4 billion is nothing compared to the number of entities that exist, and that's only human entities, let alone trees and rocks and so on, which are all entities also. The complexity and exquisiteness of the cosmos and the, the unfolding of the evolution of each separate entity is— it's— there's no word. You can't say breathtaking or awful or awesome because it's beyond any— it's beyond— it boggles your mind. It blows your mind. There's no way you can handle it. Especially when it begins to— when you come into the plane of consciousness, which is connected with the opening of the third eye, in which you become aware of the design of it and begin to understand that it's all lawful, it's all related in a lawful way, not in a rational, lawful way that is understandable to the rational mind necessarily, but in a lawful way nevertheless. And so it is that there are a certain type of being that is born on this plane, that takes birth, that enters into a body here. Now, what characterizes those beings that take human births on these plane— on this plane? Is that they have certain kinds of attachments or clingings. Now, how can you conceive of these? Well, you could do it through the chakras. For example, if you can just imagine a long, like, worm, which you'll call a spine, but it isn't really the spine. We call it the sushumna. It's a, it's a psychic-like nerve, and that it has these little bulbular projections, 7 of them along it. It's like a snake that ate 7 mice, these little bulbs, bulges along the way. And each of these is a chakra. And each of these chakras has a whole reality connected with it. Each chakra has its own color, its own sound, its own vibratory rate, and its own psychological dynamics. The first chakra is connected with things like survival. And if you characterize it in your body, you find it located— if you wanted to localize it, although that's a little phony, but if you wanted to do it, it would be down at a point going up between the anus and the genitals and in from the tip of the spine, you come to a point and that would be that place. And the second chakra, which is called the Svadhisthana, which translates as her favorite resort, strangely enough. I wonder why. It's like the Riviera, and it's connected primarily with sense gratification, with reproduction, sexuality. The third chakra is connected with Mastery, control, power, um, heat, force, energy, that kind of thing. And that's sort of right below your solar plexus, right in down there. The fourth chakra is, uh, in the middle of your chest. It's called the anahata, and that's connected with compassion, with— I don't know how you call it— brotherhood, or an awareness of otherness, or a feeling of connectedness in a universe outside of yourself. If you want to see those second, third, and fourth ones in terms of psychological theories that have existed in recent years, the second one would be Freud, in which he says it's all second chakra. He doesn't call it second chakra because for him that's reality. He says it's all sex or libidinal energy of that kind, genital energy. Then Adler came along with his superiority complex and power, and that was all third. And he said, no, it's really power. That's the real trip. It's not sex. And then along came Jung and said, no, it's not power, it's a collective unconscious. It's something that connects human beings one to another. And Jung was clearly— his fourth chakra was open. And when Jung and Freud would argue with one another, it was really an argument between the fourth chakra and the second chakra. And they were both being very true to what they were experiencing, because when the energy is primarily located in one chakra or another, that defines your reality. And you're not being a liar or a hypocrite. That is your reality. Freud wasn't making believe. That was true. And he couldn't understand. And people in one chakra preoccupation can't really understand a human being in another chakra. There's no way they can do it, except that people in the higher chakras can usually understand people in the lower chakras because their compassion, once they get into the fourth chakra, allows them to appreciate individual differences. The fifth chakra is a delicate one to describe. It has a number of qualities that are peculiar to it. It has to do with— one is the turning inward and upward towards God in that chakra. And also it has to do with what's called the gift of Saraswati, or the, the ability for God to pour through in sound, through singing or through voice or something like that. That's the fifth chakra. These are very crude descriptions, but sixth chakra, the ajna, is the, what's called the third eye. And it has to do— when that chakra is open, it's like wisdom as opposed to knowledge. It tunes you into the universe in such a way that you begin to understand more than you know. You have a sense of the way in which things are in the universe. And when your sixth chakra is open, you start to have the powers, the siddhis that go with it of seeing, for example, at great distances, hearing at great distances, seeing on other planes of reality. And we'll talk about that another time and all the fascinating powers that come from third eye being open. When thine eye be single, Christ talks about in the, I guess, the Aquarian Gospel. Now, um, and the final bulb or nodule or whatever it is called, the thousand-petal lotus or the Sahasrara, the seventh chakra, the crown of the head, is, um, the place in which you as a separate individual merge into the totality. It's where they call it, where Shakti and Shiva come together in union at the point of the seventh chakra. And that's the, that's the ultimate merging point. Now, it's also very complicated. I mean, I'm not going into the complexity of it, but when you go into— when you play it this way, and this is just one way of playing it, you don't have to know all this stuff, by the way. You won't be tested in the final exam by God, Saint Peter. You can go at it an entirely different way and never have known about the chakra. People have gotten enlightened without knowing about the chakras. Okay. Because actually you are a series of bodies, one you could say one inside the other, but that's a little phony too. And there are actually more chakras beyond those 7. There are 7 more, and there are 7 connected with each of your subtler bodies, your causal body and so on. So that if you were looking at the planes of consciousness going from this physical plane in which you and I are meeting in Rhode Island, back all the way up to the plane in which you and I are one, between that there are all these planes that are connected with each of your chakras. And actually in each of the chakra planes, you and I have a relationship. All right. We may only be conscious of it on one plane or two planes or three planes, but we actually exist with one another across all of these planes. Now, now that I've got that stuff out, you can begin to understand that who incarnates on the physical plane are people whose primary energies are directed in relation only to the first, second, and third chakra. Okay. Primarily first, second, and third chakra people are born onto the physical plane. That means that most of the people that exist in the world today are concerned with survival, security of their separateness as a separate entity, their own reproduction and gratification, sense pleasure, and their own power and mastery and control over the environment to protect their separateness. It's all a trip about protecting themselves as a separate entity, whether they enter into a collectivity which we'll call a nation, or whatever reference group It's still the individual, the protection. Now, that individual protecting that individual, especially in the third chakra, is not primarily just physical protection. I mean, you build a psychological web, a mosaic, a model of who you think you are. We call it ego. And you will protect that ego to your own physical death. If you're a third chakra person, a third chakra person is the, is the captain who goes down with a ship to protect his own psychological identity as being a captain who goes down with a ship. Okay. Rather than jumping into the lifeboat, even though there's space. You understand that? So now if you look at our society, it's fascinating because you can see that there are like— you take Hugh Hefner, for example. Hugh is primarily a third chakra person using second chakra imagery to gratify his power need. All right. I mean, there are some people that are obviously just third chakra people like Richard Nixon. There's no sex— well, now there is apparently, but generally there is no great sexual imagery connected with Richard Nixon. It's pretty much straight power. And there are people such as Brigitte Bardot, or there are other examples who are more primarily second chakra people, there is a very interesting phenomenon occurring when you see the, like, obesity in the society and things like that, that it's connected with people moving up to the second chakra. They've got survival. Their father was preoccupied with survival, and then they incarnated into a scene where that's all taken care of. And they're ready now for a second chakra trip. So they're primarily involved with gratification and they feel that what life is about is to get more of everything. The problem is their bodies can't stand too much more because they're doing their best to get as much of all of it at every moment as they can. I'm describing now the people that are going down the subway at 5:00 because their reality is survival, gratification, which we call pleasure. It's called the pleasure principle. Freud's pleasure principle. There it was. Second chakra again. And mastery and control. Yeah. And we have functioned. That's what happened was we moved from the second chakra when the third chakra— this country is primarily a third chakra country with the model that if we use the power that is available to the third chakra, which is the intellect, it's not the buddhi, which is the higher mind, it's the intellect, which is called the manas, the lower mind. If you use the intellect, you can fulfill, you can get everything you need to give you the thing that, that humankind seeks. Now, that's very ephemeral. What is it that humankind seeks? The closest you can get is a sense of well-being, a sense of right. Yeah. For an achiever, which most of you have dallied with a bit, being achievers, it's in a sense of an accomplishment. You work very hard to make the achievement and you finally get it, and there is the feeling of well-being that comes from having proven yourself, having mastered or controlled the environment or your immediate environment. Your ego gets a boost. It's all connected with ego enhancement. That third chakra. And there are bizarre examples, as bizarre as the fat man getting fatter or the fat woman getting fatter because she's rich enough to be able to satisfy all her second chakra stuff. In the third chakra, the examples are these incredible empire builders who can't stop. They have to keep building more and more empire even though it's gone way beyond gratification for them or even meaningfulness. They can't stop. I recall when I was a younger lad, actually I was 17 at the time, and my father was just starting a university. He used to call it Brandeis. And there was a board of trustees. This is a very funny situation. There was a board of trustees. None of whom had ever gone to college, see. But they were all wealthy Jewish men because this was to be a Jewish-sponsored, non-sectarian university. So they used to hold the board meetings in our living room, and I was a freshman at Tufts College then. But none of them knew quite how to run a college, you see. So they call me in to ask me questions like, is one full professor worth two half professors? And, uh, things like that. And they were very warm, good human beings generally, most part. And I recall being on one of their yachts at one point playing gin rummy with this very wealthy man whose company was listed on the New York Exchange. And he was just moving all of his companies from the north to Tennessee. Where there'd be a better tax break. He had had two coronaries. His wife wanted just to quiet down, and he was driving himself to reorganize this whole company, although he was already making money. And I said to him, why are you doing this? I was just curious as part of my education. Why are you doing this? He said, well, what else could I do? And there was something very poignant in his predicament that it was like a third chakra out of control and he couldn't flip the switch to move to the next chakra, the next level of meaning for himself. Now what happens is that as a, a space on a plane, just as there was a time, like if you were born into Africa at this point, a certain part of Africa, you might have to spend all of your time— or India or Bangladesh, for example— you would probably have to spend most of your time just surviving, right? So that that would be a certain kind of being who would take birth there, who had that particular kind of work to do, should be primarily first chakra work. Right. And so at different periods in history, in even our history, our small history, not— I don't mean America, but the world history, which is still small. At different parts, the environments have been suitable for different kinds of beings to take birth. And this culture at this moment is very interesting in regard to who's taking birth and for what purposes, right? Because there are certain conditions that exist in this society at this moment that make it very, very appropriate for beings with specifically fourth chakra work to take birth, which is a very far-out predicament because I'm sure you're having the experience when you and I meet or when you meet each other, if you ever get to look in each other's eyes, that you will recognize that you know each other in some way or other. That there's something familiar about you with one another, and that familiarity is partly that you're on exactly the same journey. But the familiarity may be even more weird or far out in that you've been through journeys together before, working on different parts of your being over time. Because the conditions that exist in this culture at this moment are not exist, have not existed in other times historically. And it's primarily due to technology. We are the children of a technological age, and that age allows us, along with Einstein's insights and the psychedelic movement, which led into the rock and roll business movement, all that, to have got a whole new set of takes about reality and about time and about space. Because even 30 years ago, if you grew up in a village in this country it was likely that you could anticipate that you'd be spending the rest of your life roughly around that village, even though the song, How You Going to Keep Them Down on the Farm After They've Seen Paris? But still, most people came back to the farm and their aspirations, because this was previous to television, which had in it a kind of vicarious involvement that allowed you to literally burn out roles, social roles, without having lived them out. Prior to television, it was likely that your aspirations and your fantasies involved the social roles that were in that society and were primarily involved with the values that existed within that culture. And that was considered an absolute reality. And when your parents said, face reality, you knew what they meant and you agreed with them. You might have been rebellious, but you never believed that there were any other real choices. Now, that's the environment that I primarily grew up in. And even up until I started taking drugs in the early '60s, my experience was primarily that I was on the main line of reality and that there were all these kind of weird trips on either side, but that I, as a super scientist, rational mind, power, control, house full of antiques, my airplane, my motorcycle, gratification, more and more sex, more better food, more power, more intellect. I was doing the mainline reality trip, right? And I was hired to tell everybody else what reality was. Okay? That's what a Harvard professor does. And there was no doubt in my mind at all that that's what reality was until I took psilocybin. Now, psilocybin or LSD plus the atomic bomb plus television plus transportation, mobility, affluence, da da da da da, on and on and on, changed our whole game in about 15 years. It changed the, the opportunity to conceive of the fact that there were many realities that were equally real and valid. We read them in books, but books didn't have the same compelling vicarious involvement that television does. It did it, and well-read people were still more sophisticated and almost relativistic, but not too much so. But for us suddenly, who were a Beatles generation, we were hearing the Beatles singing of all these different realities, and the teenagers of this culture were being inundated with relative reality, relative reality. And that was the beginning of a lot of the dropout stuff, which was originally, for example, when I was teaching at Harvard, if a student wanted to drop out of college, he had to go to the medical to the psychiatrist and was treated as a psychiatric problem. Right. Because he wanted to leave college because nobody in their right mind left college. Right. That was only in the 1960s. And then Amherst came along with a plan to let people take a semester off. They were considered a little weak at first. Now, that's not the schools that had the systems where you could take a work period. That was different because that's achievement. That isn't it. This was really leaving school. And what are you going to do? Well, I'm going to wander around. You're going to wander around, you know, your parents know, you know. Well, where are you going to wander? And that was only about 10 years ago. Right. And now the whole scene has gone through another loop. Just as it happened with sexuality. We went from a very, very Victorian space about sexuality very quickly through this whole push of another reality of sexual freedom, the height of which, as I've described before, very humorous image for me was giving a lecture in Berkeley, which was the, the leading edge of the sexual freedom movement. and I was lecturing in a small apartment. Actually, it was a large— maybe about 100 people there. And the president of the Sexual Freedom League had come to the lecture and to make his statement right in front of me on the floor. He was making love to his girlfriend and they were reaching climax. And there were— while I was lecturing and there were some ladies in their 50s on the side who were totally delighted. And that was the whole movement of what was called external freedom. And the game was as Tim said it at that time, tune in, turn on, tune in and drop out. And drop out meant dropping out from the main current of society in an external sense, dropping out from, from the definition of reality and achievement and accomplishment and success and society and so on that was held as the myths of the society. And the revolutionary movement, which was at its high point in the Democratic Convention, and which was Abby and Jerry and Allen Ginsberg and Rene and all these people, Künstler and people like that, that was all the same one of pitting one reality against another. The limit of that one— I'm giving you this. I know it's boring to some of you, but I'm giving it to you so you have an understanding of your own predicament at this moment. It comes out right at the end. You will allow the sociological dance for a little while. The predicament with revolution is it's roughly the same value system. It's just a polarization of it. It's pitting the thing against itself. And it has been a case from way, way back that teenagers often would rebel against their parents. Often that rebellion, it's like if the parents are totally focused on good, you can become totally focused on evil, which is still the preoccupation with good and evil. Which is the same reality. It's just the polar opposite of the reality. So that if your parents are conservative, you might be very irresponsible. That's the same game. It's just the flip side of it. Okay. So that what you saw, most of the history of even political movements of the Whigs and Tories and the Democrats and the Republicans and so on, was always that polarization of values, but it was always on the same plane. It's always horizontal. It was always a horizontal confrontation. And as the revolutionary movement got stronger and they got— everybody got what they wanted, which was more and more external freedom so that a kid 15 years old could say to his folks, well, see you around, and leave. And the parents, for the first few years, we had all these police reports of missing children. And everybody was trying to hold on to the game. And then finally, oh well, what the hell, here it goes. And the parents said, well, then they'd start in. The parents would develop a new model saying he's very independent and he's going out to seek— 2 years before the mast and going out to seek his independence. And the whole mobility of the families and the moving with something like, I don't know what the statistics are, statistic is, but it's some bizarre number like a third of the families in America change their living space every 5 years or some bizarre thing like that. It's getting so that everybody's got to live in a mobile home just because you can't afford the time to have land deeds because everybody's moving so fast. That mobility made it possible for lots of stuff to happen. And that came out of affluence, by the way. If you're too poor, you can't move around that fast. Believe me. And the predicament happened that when everybody got what they wanted, it wasn't what they wanted. That's the whole way in which evolution happens, that everybody gets what they want and it isn't what they wanted. And that may be it for this life. And then another lifetime, they're ready for the next thing. You've got to follow the train. You've got to not confuse the fact that there is one evolution that is like Darwinian evolution. There is the transmission that goes from parent to child, and then there is an evolution of soul or an evolution across incarnations. And these are very different matters. You are your parents' children on this plane, but on this plane, this moment, they are your parents and you are their child because it is a karmic necessity that that be that way in terms of both of your karmas. And the last time around, they may have been your child or your lover or your brother or your sister or your capturer or your teacher or whatever. Now let me add in this other interesting statistic that makes the thing even more fascinating. This is something that was— I've reported before. It was reported in the New York Times, uh, Sunday magazine section about a year and a half ago. It was a study done by two Catholic professors about studying mysticism in America, and they came out with the finding that two-fifths of the American population had at some point in their life had a genuine revelatory transcendent mystic experience. Okay, 2/5, that's about— I don't know, what do we have, 200 million people in this country? 40 million people? 80 million? 80 million people. 80 million people have had religious mystical experiences in this culture alone, right? 80 million people have been blown out of a reality into another reality. I mean, they've had the direct experience, not just read about it. They've had the experience, 80 million people. But the interesting thing about that statistic, the additional statistic that's in there, is that this sampling of those 80 million people show that something like, I think, 85% of them said, yes, it was the most profound experience I've ever had in my life, and I never want to have another one. Okay, you hear that? What that is saying, what that's saying is that the conditions in this life situation are such that many people have these experiences, but because of their level of incarnation or their evolutionary stage, most of the people that have these experiences need to deny them or treat them as weird or perverse or deviant or psychotic. And can't use them. They're not ready to use them. Okay. So what we have is the conditions are right for certain experiences to happen and they are happening. But who's incarnating here? Only a small percentage of those people can use it, which means that what the game is, is very elitist. But it's not elitist in the sense that somebody chooses somebody. It's elitist in terms of what— who's interested in what. It's totally democratic in that sense. It's equal opportunity. Everybody's got an equal chance to have a mystic experience, but it's up to you whether or not you want to use it or not, or whether you are at the point where you have despaired enough of all the rest of it to be open to this possibility, or whatever conditions are necessary for you to re-perceive yourself in terms of your new experience.

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.