Ep. 311 – Allowing Space for Individual Differences

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 Nichtern 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 U.S., 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.

So who you are, in effect, From where I'm sitting, are beings who have taken birth on this plane because you still have stuff in your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd chakra. There's still energy that pours out of those chakras and defines reality. But in addition, you have awakened at least to the 4th chakra, and some of you to the 5th chakra. So you actually want God. But to the fourth chakra, where you actually want to live in a compassionate universe—not just intellectual liberalism, but real compassion of acceptance and allowing space for individual differences.

Welcome to Ram Dass Here and Now. This is episode. 311, and the conclusion of the talk we started last time, recorded at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island in June of 1976. So start with episode 310 if you haven't. It's called The Mainline Reality Trip. And it seems to me there's this question underneath this lecture, which is, once we begin to see through the conditioning we've been given through our identities and assumptions, how do we actually live in this world? And Ram Dass is always so poignant because he lived through it. He lived through the pitfalls. He saw how easy it was to turn our waking up into its own identity. We leave behind the fractured ego self, and then we start performing this other self, the spiritual person, the holy person, the one who has got it all figured out and beyond the human stuff. But he reminds us, like, no, the body's still here. The personality's still here. Sex and desire, relationships, roles, quirks, unfinished business. None of it disappears because we've glimpsed something beyond our normal waking selves. So what do we do? And that's what he talks to us about. By the end, as he so often does, he brings it back to the heart. There's a great kirtan practice at the end. We're also going to be meeting in the heart in our gathering August 27th through 30th at the Ram Dass Legacy Summer Mountain Retreat in Boone, North Carolina. If you can't join us in person, the weekend will be livestreamed for free with kirtan, meditation, teaching, and conversation. Conversations exploring where Bhakti and Buddhism meet. So sign up, go to ramdass.org/events. That's ramdass.org/events. And check out the virtual retreat. So here is Ram Dass, Here and Now.

This is Ram Dass, and the show is called Here and Now with Ram Dass. It's like when my mother was dying. I remember she was under morphine and I was under mescaline, and we spent a day together in the hospital, zonked out of our skulls. Just floating around. There was no mother and child. We were just in ecstasy together, just floating. I mean, she was totally stoned out of her skull and we were just floating, just in ecstasy together. And I was so pleased to have broken through with my mother. And the next day the morphine had worn off and I said, wasn't that a beautiful day? She said, it was terrible. I was out of my mind. And you could see that ego structure grab back hold again.

Right.

And so it is for most people that they have experiences like in traumatic moments, they have experiences when they flip into other planes of consciousness and then their mind grabs hold and they go right back in and they may never awaken again that lifetime. And the beautiful description of all of this given by William James, the philosopher that all we mystics like to refer to all the time, our tame philosopher, in 1906. I almost learned it. I forgot it. I knew it once. It was something like, our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of veils, there lie other types of consciousness, each complete. This is not exact, this is paraphrasing. You may spend an entire life without knowing of their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus and they are there in their totality in a moment. Okay, that's roughly it. And then he says his last line of that paragraph is, it behooves us not to prematurely close our accounts with reality.

Okay.

Which everybody treated as William James' slight deviation, right? His slight pathology. It was like the— one of the founders of experimental psychology who made— who did a lot of the original measurements, psychophysical measurements. He, he was looking into the sun doing an experiment. He became blinded in such a way that he had to be in a dark room for 2 years. And during the time he was in the darkroom, he had all these mystic experiences which he wrote about in a little book, which— and it was interesting that the major tome that covers experimental psychology, in carrying his bibliography, carried that book for some years and then embarrassedly sort of dropped it out of the literature because it didn't— although from my point of view, it was the most profound book he ever wrote. Right. It just wasn't relevant anymore to supporting the model of him as a Western rationalist. It's the same way that people don't know what to do about Einstein's statement, I didn't arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind. I mean, how could that be? You know, don't all good things come from the rational mind? Well, in actuality, only Analytic things come out of the rational mind. The synthetic stuff, the synthesis and the leaps come completely outside of the rational mind. What is called in a kind of a pejorative sense, the intuitive mind in this culture, which we call the buddhi or the higher mind. Okay. So what I've done is said to you, that the times were right out of a certain kind of despair and so on, and seeing through an affluence for certain kinds of incarnates to happen. And so the humor for me is somebody has a baby and you pick up the baby and you look at it, and if you've even got a little bit of third eye open, you get a sense of this being's previous incarnations. And you see you're holding like some old Tibetan lama, see? But Tibet isn't a groovy place for old lamas to be born these days. So, or maybe an old American Indian chief, see? And it's this little baby acting like a little baby, see? But as you look at this baby, You know that somewhere it knows, but it may take it years— you years. It's who you are. I mean, you're not here by chance. I hate to tell you, you may have thought you made choices to get here, but that's all just folderol. We'll talk about that later, about the free will and determinism and all that stuff. But that's literally who you are. You are these old beings from, from times and times and times who have done work. And now it's auspicious that you take birth in this place because this is the place where you can get a support system for doing your work, because ultimately you can't get up that stairway all by yourself because the force going against it is too great. And you need some kind of a supportive system, because if you're all alone, you either get beheaded as a witch or burned as a witch, or you get in some way crucified by the society. If you remember Plato's image of the cave is the perfect one of they're all chained inside the cave looking at the fire, the reflections made by the fire on the wall, and they built a whole reality out of that. And one of them gets free of the chains and goes out to the edge of the cave and comes back and sees the sunlight and comes back in and says, hey, fellas, I hate to tell you, but the reality you thought, you know, like down the end of the stairway, there's a sign, you know, it's the same thing. And they stone him to death because he couldn't possibly— what is he doing? He's disrupting the whole social structure. Right. And I had this peculiar moment, which I have described before, of standing in front of the television and the radio business at my moment of glory. When I had just been thrown out of Harvard, right? When all these guys looked at me and I was the bad guy and I was the loser and I was the one that was going to go into ignominy, right? It's like somebody that's fought Muhammad Ali and lost for the 3rd time. And you know, he's going to end up sort of a training instructor in a gym on the Lower East Side or something like that.

Right.

And they're saying a final goodbye, you know, he just lost the $100 million purse and he's just going down and the debts and the, you know, it's all horrible. His woman's left him and it's all terrible. And I remember standing there and having that look in all of their eyes, you know, and I was sitting there and this thing had happened inside of me which was so valid that I was feeling free. Suddenly I was free of this incredible cultural burden of being somebody who I didn't think I was anymore. And— but my mind was enough of a psychologist still, my rational mind, that I was saying to myself, look, when you think one reality and everybody else thinks another, you're enough of a psychologist to know you are psychotic, baby, because that's the only way it could be. Isn't that what the game is? Because psychosis is consensus of reality about reality. You know, all the psychiatrists agree. You need 3 psychiatrists to say you're crazy and you're crazy, even though they may be and you may not be. And this confrontation of realities and this space to entertain realities other than the dominant theme of the culture is very, very important. For spiritual growth, because spiritual growth is the transcending of any limiting conditions or definitions of reality. That's what it's about. It's really what it's about. And if the lid's kept too heavily on and the punishment is too severe for deviants, that's what happened in England. And the Bible had to be read in secret. And then there was the movement that started this country 200 years ago. But you have to understand further your distinction from other beings that are, quote, on the spiritual path. Because this retreat just exists in a moment in time and then it's gone. There's no way you can join. This is not for groupies. There's no institutional identity. You can't get very much social power out of this one. And it's brahmacharya, so you can't get much sexual gratification. And the food is good, but it's not, you know, going to take you— you're not going to run here just for that. I mean, it's good, but it's not going to do it, you know. Because really, the only people that I want to be around, if I had a choice— I'll be around who I have to be around, but when I have a choice, I want to be around the people who are in truth awakening, not merely taking the spiritual journey and recasting it, their power needs in a way, using the spiritual journey as a vehicle for gaining more power. Because the horror of the scene is that when too many people start up the thing together and the mass movements start, many, many people— that's where the power is in the society. And then a lot of people are attracted for power, not for awakening. And that's one of the horrors of the spiritual scene happening in America at all, is that suddenly it's attractive to people who want power, who don't want enlightenment or don't want awakening. And you'd say, well, but isn't there the story of the thief in India who spent 12 years making believe he was a saint to hustle people out of money, but he was really a thief? But at the end of 12 years, he had done it so well he became a saint.

Right.

That if you imitate something long enough, don't you become it? Again, it all depends on your level of evolution. It's interesting that in psychology, which has attempted to characterize individual differences based on environment and heredity, they have never done a very good job, to tell you the truth. They can account for about— the correlations run about 40 or 50. They're accounting for about 20% or 16% of the variability of individual difference. 85%, they have to call, well, those are errors of measurement. That 85% leaves ample space for reincarnation. I'd like you to know there is nothing in science statistically that precludes reincarnation that I can find yet.

Okay.

It's just a whole different slice of the pie. So who you are, in effect, from where I'm sitting, are beings who have taken birth on this plane because you still have stuff in your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd chakra. There's still energy that pours out of those chakras and defines reality. But in addition, you have awakened at least to the 4th chakra and some of you to the 5th chakra. So you actually want God, but to the 4th chakra where you actually want to live in a compassionate universe, not just intellectual liberalism, but real compassion of acceptance and allowing space for individual differences. Now, the predicament is that you can't— once you are in this peculiar mutant transitional space, you can't make believe you're a 4th chakra being and push the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd chakra under the rug. A lot of you tried to do that. That's my Zumbach, the tailor story, and the phony holy business. You just can't do it. You can't make believe that you're holy. I mean, I did it and it was so horrible to me because I saw with my intellect— since we're into an intellectual overkill all the time, since we are these intellectual achievers— I saw exactly where it was that we were going. I could read all the holy books and say, far out, that's what a realized being is like. See, he wears white, so I'll wear white. He's got beads and he looks a certain kind of a way. He has soft, milky eyes, so I'll have soft, milky, but slightly firm. So I'll practice being slightly firm. And he has a few holy accoutrements, so I'll have a few beads and malas and I'll say foreign prayers. That'll be helpful.

See?

And I'll be very good. That'll be important. I'll be good. But a little bit of a rascal. That's important, right? I mean, I could define the whole game perfectly and I could mold myself into being it. The only thing was there was still a lot of me that didn't fit into that particular mold that kept slurping out over the edges. You know, you keep trying to push it back in, see? But you can't handle that hypocrisy. It's too ugly. I mean, the minor ones were, you know, going to a lecture in all my white and stuff like that and then rushing home and changing into these clothes to sneak out just to get a pizza because you couldn't— yogis don't eat pizza— and being caught, you know. Yeah. Or I recall I was in Chicago once lecturing and I decided in an afternoon to go to a pornographic movie. It was called Deep Throat, I believe. And I was standing in line with my $5, and there was a line of about 5 people in front of me before the box office. And walking down the street was this young, beautiful guy who was obviously very spiritual and light and, and just spaced. And he came drifting down the street. And he came up to me and I was just busy standing in line, see, I mean, I was like— and he came up to me and he looked, he just— his eye caught mine, he said, Ram Dass? Eh? Eh? And I found myself palming my $5, see, because I realized I was the last one in line and what I could say is, yeah, hi, you walking this way? And just keep walking and then I could go around the block, see, and come back and do it later. Because I saw his eyes go from me down the row to the box office, up to the marquee and back. And I could see his eyes were like cash registers or like a pinball machine, a one-armed bandit going through oranges, bananas, and coming up because it was blowing his mind that who he thought I was could be standing in front of a pornographic movie.

Right.

And the line moved forward at that moment. And I had a choice. See, I'm standing here and there's an empty space. And I said to him, excuse me, I'm in line. And I lost him to the extent he wanted what I was supposed to be. I lost him at that moment. Right. Great tantric teaching. I just wanted to see the movie, actually.

Hmm.

Hmm. That's a far-out issue. Well, we'll play with that later. Are they just tantric teachings? Are there tantric teachers as well? Careful, careful. Keep it general. It's only the first day. We'll be nice for a few days. As you awaken to your predicament, then you are faced with— just because you awaken, just because you have realized that the reality you thought was real that defined who you were is only another reality, and you're beginning to understand that there are other realities as well, and that you may be much more interesting than you were thinking you were, and that maybe the schlock, unworthy, inadequate, guilt-ridden achiever that you were busy being isn't necessarily who you have to be for the rest of your life. And as you have a sense of a different being in yourself, which is really what happened to me in psychedelics in '61. Because I had a sense of my own existence quite independent of my social roles. And most people don't have that. Most people are very identified with their social role, and if not with their social role as mother or son or responsible citizen or whatever, Or as vamp, or as explorer of the future, or whatever social role you think of yourself in. Most people are very identified with their bodies. I am 45. I am bald. I am man. I da da da da da. And it's interesting. I can just watch the. The, the things that changed in my life. I can remember 10 years ago where I had long— I let the hair grow very long on this side so I could comb it over here so I wouldn't look, you know, it's like bringing that up over if I could do it, so I wouldn't look bald because I was busy being identified with the body. And then I began to notice when it didn't matter anymore. It just stopped being that relevant. And it wasn't just a function of age, because there are plenty of people like Frank Sinatra who have hair transplants. But when you sense that you don't have to identify, that you aren't just your social roles nor even your body, then who you are There are still many levels for dispute and confusion from then on, because the first thing you experience is you are a soul, an entity. Then later Buddha points out with anatta that that turns out to be a hype too. But for the moment, you break identification with your body and with your personality and with your sociology. In order to become a spiritual entity, then that spiritual entity has to do its work later on. And that's the transformation that we're having. The problem is that you are at this point both, or simultaneously, a spiritual entity, a psychological entity, and a physical entity. And you can't get rid of any of them quite yet. And there's a horror show in that predicament. That you just get incredibly high in the spiritual sense, and then suddenly your physical identity reasserts itself, and there you are, a lusting animal. And you say, that's not me, says the soul. And the body says, you want to bet?

See?

And the dialogue— and then there's the dialogue between the psychological entity and the spiritual entity. That's what the Bhagavad Gita is about. When Krishna and Arjuna are talking in the line between the battlegrounds the night before the war, and Arjuna looks over at the enemies, the cousins he's going to take on in battle, and their whole side, and he says, how can I kill all my old teachers, my old friends, my relatives, and all that? What kind of a battle would it be? What would I win if I won this battle? And Krishna says, you've just got to do it. It's in the way of things. It's the dharmic thing. You're going to have to do it. And that's exactly what you face, because what you are in the process of doing is literally killing not the physical body and not the personality. You are killing your identification with them. That's what you're killing. You're not killing your desire systems. You're killing your identification with your desire systems. And what we are doing here is producing a situation for you to allow these things, these identifications, to be loosened in their hold by creating other spaces. That's what the game is about. And you, as a transitional being who started out your life with models in your head about careers, about achievements, fantasies provided by the culture, about family, suddenly awaken to another identity in which you don't have any ground. You can't figure out who you're supposed to be in this new dance.

Right.

And that confusion is what has characterized the past 10 years, roughly, for many, many, many people. And what many people did was they grabbed at an Indian or a Buddhist or a Japanese or whatever model that was based on an awareness of these higher planes of consciousness to define who they must be, to try to figure out a game for themselves, play. But we are in a unique position, and ultimately you have to find your part to play in your body, in your personality, in your soul, and beyond all of it. And your every action must be harmonious and true across all those levels. The mistake of the late '60s for many of us was trying to push away the earth to get to heaven. The wisdom now is the understanding that liberation exists with an acknowledgment of both heaven and earth, of both form and formless, of all these things together, and that you don't make believe you don't have a body to go to God. You honor your body to go to God. You honor your sexuality. You honor your social roles. And what I'm talking about now is that what our game is and why there's no groupiness and no identification and you can't wear a badge and a funny hat and a set of beads is because this is a much farther out dance than you thought it was. If you thought that was what the game was, because this is nothing less than what I call a Martian takeover. That is, a being who truly knows who they aren't can be anybody. You are free to be anybody. Now you can be a lawyer. Now you can be a doctor. Now you can be a mother. Now you can— you can just flow into the society, into whatever is needed, and what you bring to whatever is needed is consciousness. And you suddenly feed the society its life-sustaining juices, which is awareness. You feed that awareness into the society, not through necessarily new social institutions. New social institutions must be few and carefully understood as to why they have to be. We did a lot of stuff in the '60s And even into the '70s, of alternative culture, economics, politics, and social structures, the whole commune movement. And I was very involved in that, and I can talk for days about that one. And it's very interesting how much of an impact all of that had on this society in terms of diets, in terms of lifestyles, In terms of art, the whole psychedelic art movement came out of the drugs of the '60s. I remember being on an airplane and a stewardess was making a woman in her, I'd say, middle 70s in front of me feel comfortable in her chair because it was her first airplane flight. And she said to her, what a pretty dress you're wearing. And the woman leaned up in a very conspiratorial way, said, It's psychedelic. Which was far out, since I remember when the word was coined, you know, and when it entered the culture by a couple of nuts. And there it was 3 years later, you know, it had added— come into the culture. But the thing is more interesting than a group of people dropping out and creating. And that's what the problem is With physical time-space meetings at all. And that's why this whole game, from my point of view, is merely an intermediate process, and it's ultimately anachronistic. It ultimately is a decadent institution, these gatherings. Because at this moment, that little camera right there makes a statement, and those tapes do something which— exactly what this does, ultimately. When people are ready and when people aren't ready, it doesn't give them a phony place to stand. If you can hear what I'm saying, this is a tough one because we are awakening at a time when the media are available. They're not not available. I was at a retreat in Buffalo. We did a retreat in Buffalo a few weeks ago, and there was a minister and his wife. They must have been in their, I'd say, early 50s. And the wife came up to me and said, you know, you sleep with us every night. You know, it took me a moment to get it, you know. And then I realized that instead of Johnny Carson, you know, between their toes on the television set at the end of the bed, they put on earphones every night and they listen to my tapes. Right. And in a way, that's the new ashram. That's the process, and that's the genuine ashram, because in your own home you're not, you're not doing it to impress anybody, and there's no point. Because ultimately what the community of the spirit is about has nothing necessarily to do with physical time and space. That's why when people say, don't leave me, can I see you again, and all that, I see that as what stage we're at.

No.

Because when I go on tour every day, I get off at a different airport and I meet people. Oh, Ram Dass, you've come. And then the next day, don't leave us. And they cry. And every day I had these partings and these welcomings and partings and welcomings and partings until finally the elastic band just is stretched as far as it'll stretch. And everybody's like everybody else. And it's like you're saying it to the same person every day. You know, it's— they got different clothing, faces, and stuff like that, but it's the same person. Till finally you begin to look behind the masks of individual differences, and you see we just keep talking to ourselves, and we're still holding on to old models of who we are and how we're supposed to do it and how we're going to lose it if we don't hold on to it in time and space. And that isn't true at all. That will all come up patently obvious to you as the week wears on. Enough. Our dance is a dance of balance and mixed in with the work with the energy which you've started this morning with the pranayama. And the hatha yoga, with the philosophy that will come forward in the lectures, and the meditative practices that will quiet the mind. We work with the heart on many different levels. We start working with the heart just where the heart is, and where the heart is is in. Interpersonal relationship. So the initial work in devotional yoga involves love affairs with God, just like real human love affairs, except your beloved in this case is all of it, is everything you wanted a lover to be ever. And various people can turn on to various kind of love relationships. For somebody, the perfect love relationship is the love that Mary felt for Jesus. For someone else, it's the love that John felt for Jesus. With someone else, it's the love of husband and wife, Sita and Ram. For another, it is the young maiden, the gopi, the milkmaid, and her love for Krishna. Krishna is the beautiful cowherd boy. And he's blue and he plays the flute. And when he plays the flute, all the milkmaids' hearts just go aflutter and they forget everything in their lives but that flute. It's such a haunting flute. That relationship between Krishna and the gopis Is a very intense part of the love affair with God. We're going to be singing a lot of songs for Krishna this week because Krishna is such a, a lush bhakti space, devotional space. The one we'll just play with for a few minutes now concerns Krishna as a baby called Gopāla. Gopāla. And Gopāla is the, the child of Devaki. Devaki. Devaki Nandana. So the words are very simply, Gopāla, Gopāla, Devaki Nandana, Gopāla. Each, each sequence is sung twice, but we'll do it all together instead of call and response. All together.

Gopāla, gopāla, devaki-nandana, gopāla. Gopāla, gopāla, devaki-nandana, gopāla. Devaki Nandan Gopala. Devaki Nandan Gopala. Devaki Nandan Gopala. Devaki Nandan Gopala.

Gopala, Gopala.

Devaki Nandana Gopala.

Gopala, Gopala.

Devaki Nandana Gopala. Devaki Nandana Gopala. देवकीनंदन गोपाला, देवकीनंदन गोपाला, देवकीनंदन गोपाला, गोपाला, गोपाला, देवकीनंदन गोपाला, गोपाला, गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला। देवकी नंदन गोपाला, दोपाला, दोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला, दोपाला, दोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला देवकी नंदन गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला, गोपाला गोपाला देवकी नंदन गोपाला, गोपाला, गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला, देवकी From the heart, soft, light. देवकिनंदन गोपाला, देवकिनंदन गोपाला, देवकिनंदन गोपाला, देवकिनंदन गोपाला, देवकिनंदन गोपाला, गोपाला, गोपाला. देवकी नंदन गोपाला, गोपाला, गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला, देवकी नंदन गोपाला देवकी नंदन गोपाला, गोपाला, गोपाला। देवकी नंदन गोपाला, गोपाला, गोपाला। देवकी नंदन गोपाला। The Ram Dass Here and Now podcast is brought to you by Be Here Now Network and ramdass.org.

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