Ep. 312 – Soul Perception

Meditation practice doesn't just help us find more calm, openness, and perspective. It can also bring us face to face with fear, anger, shame, and the parts of ourselves we would rather not see. Learning to meet both the light and the shadow is essential for deepening our practice, especially for anyone who hopes to become a meditation teacher. Join renowned Buddhist teachers David Nichtern and Andrew Holacek for a free online talk on Wednesday, September 16th at 6 PM Eastern Time. Together, they'll explore why transformation requires more than focusing only on the light, how avoiding our shadow can keep us stuck, and what becomes possible when we learn to meet our darkness with awareness. You'll also learn about Dharma Moon's 100-hour Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training and have a chance to meet the teaching team, ask questions, and find out whether the program is right for you. Visit dharmamoon.com/light to learn more and reserve your spot for the free event on September 16th.

You can scratch this culture, and you will find that the culture is reaching for their connection to the beloved. Every church is full. People call me and say. What do you think of September 11th? What do you feel about it? I say, well, why don't you go to the tip-top tip of your insides, and then you can have the answer, because that's where I'm going. The trauma pushed me up into All I ask of everybody is that they go inside to find the answer.

Welcome to Ram Dass Here and Now. This is episode 312, Soul Perception. This talk was recorded in Yonkers, New York on September 29th, 2001. So just a few weeks after the attacks of September 11th. So before we begin, just a note, this recording includes discussion from 9/11 and some raw responses from people who were living through its immediate aftermath. We're sharing it not to reopen old wounds, but because the questions Ram Dass was willing to sit with in that moment, and some of them are really difficult questions. What happens to our spiritual understanding when something comes along that we cannot explain, fix, or fit neatly into our ideas about how life is supposed to work? Ram Dass knew something about that by this point. In his own life, he'd been radically changed by a stroke 5 years earlier. And in this talk, you can hear him wrestling with it. He's still challenged by words, affected by the aphasia. It's not this distant philosophical perch, but he's inside this body that is in pain and doesn't work, and a life That was nothing like he expected it to go. So it's really intimate to listen to him here, and he doesn't resolve the contradictions for us. He asks us to look more deeply at who we think we are and what we trust when the ground is moving beneath us, and whether there might be another way to see things. But for now, here is Ram Dass, here and now.

This is Ram Dass, and the show is called Here and Now with Ram Dass. I had a stroke about 5 years ago. And I feel stroked. And the stroke was traumatic for me. It affected my body, spasticity and pain. And then there were other things. I was used to being independent, and now I was dependent. Paul Gorman and I wrote a book, How Can I Help? And now I'd write the book, How Can You Help Me? And I suffered, I suffered spiritually. Because I followed the sadhana of guru kripa, the guru's grace, I felt myself having my guru, Neem Karoli Baba, I felt graceful. Ever since I'd known him, my life graced. So the stroke was spiritually disappointing because if I was under his grace, This stroke. And I spent the first month or so in the hospital. Maharaji's grace, the stroke. Grace, stroke.

Grace, stroke.

But the stroke, what's it doing here? It's grace. I was having a good time showing how the stroke was graceful. These two were trying to get together because I wasn't Using other people's minds because they were all, oh, you poor person, you were stroked. And I'd get this, poor me. And then the whole business became So too much between the physical and the psychological and the spiritual.

Ah.

It forced me to go from my ego to my soul. I forced my perception, I was looking From ego perception, which, oh, this is a drag, ooh, this pain, ah, my body, eee, ooh, ooh. Soul perception is sort of watching it all happen. So I began to be a watcher. I watched him who had the stroke. I was watching the stroke melodrama, and I noticed that the stroke had pushed me, my consciousness, to the witness. That's pretty graceful. There were graceful things about the stroke. I mean, before I had the stroke, I had to You know, I'd have little bits of grace. You must have them. You know, a parking space, you say, come on, Maharaji, come on, you can give me that one parking space. And sometimes it works, but pretty good. It's pretty good. And then this stroke is graceful. I mean, look. And I started to bring the two things together. This stroke I called tough grace. And the therapists, they came to me. They were souls, and I was a soul, and we interacted with others, with other— they did their therapy, but we were souls together. Because what the stroke forced me into was seeing myself as a soul, and it takes one to know one. So I look at you and I see all souls, souls in an incarnation. And most of you, you souls, Are, like I have been many times, identified with the incarnations. See, I, um, you all probably know that I've, I've taken many paths. What I didn't learn from one, I learned from another. Always I kept learning. And then Then I followed Buddha, and then I followed Hindu things. But now I'm making up my own model. I've culled it from perennial philosophy and Buddhism and— It sounds like this. We are 3-planed beings, 3-plane beings. The first plane is ego. The second plane is soul. The third plane is the third plane. That'll save enough arguments to— Now, what's interesting is the ego tends to die at the end of an incarnation and take with it all its personality. The soul goes on. And it sees death as merely the end of the chapter. After enough chapters, when it has learned the lessons of love and suffering, then it comes to the end of the cycle and we disappear into the beloved. Souls have karma from past lives and from this life, and you find an incarnation. It fits you. It fits you. And when it doesn't fit, you make it around. It's a creative matter. Your soul creates your Your incarnation. Now, I am a motivational psychologist.

Hmm.

The ego has hundreds of motives, hundreds of things it pulls to and pulls away from. But the soul has only one motive, and that is to meld with the beloved. With the One. My body is this way, and my personality is this way, and I can identify with those things, or I can pull back to the soul and see what this has to do with my motive of getting to the Beloved. Krishna says to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, do what you do in life, but dedicate it to me, God. In other words, live a dharmic life. In other words, live on 2 levels at once. Your living as souls in this setting, this incarnation. Now, when you identify with the incarnation, you get frightened of death. So I am an ego and I get scared. And then I'm a soul and I say, isn't that interesting? The soul just experiences the incarnation by witnessing it. Now, this is all mind garbage. I am giving you one of my mind Moments. If you can use it, fine, but you can forget it. I mean, everybody can make these up. These— the mind, because the mind is— the mind down in the ego stuff Where'd that come from? That came from— the soul created that. Where'd the soul come from? The Creator. The Creator uses my mind for its creation. Your awareness is part of number 3, when you say, I am.

The awareness.

And that, that number 3 has a very mystical part because your number 3 and my number 3 and 1 are all the same. Not part of, there is 1. Number 3 is also called the Atman in Hinduism. It's called the still small voice of God in the Quakers.

Hmm.

See, I've been thinking whether my Little storyline. For one person, my trauma started me to wake up to other realms of consciousness. Do you suppose that our culture can do it? I mean, I can see that the culture, at September 11th, got its stroke. And then stroke, grace.

Right.

Grace. A Castaneda's teacher kept death over the left shoulder. Boy, death. You can scratch this culture And you will find that the culture is reaching for their connection to the beloved. Every church is full. People call me and say, what do you think of September 11th? What do you feel about it? I say, well, why don't you go to the tip-top tip of your insides, and then you can have the answer, because that's where I'm going. The trauma pushed me up into.

Hmm.

All I ask— of everybody is that they go inside to find the answer. I know I've been, um, I've been rascally a little bit, but like, I have— I've studied Shiva. Shiva, who is God— could you imagine Shiva piloting a plane? Something will happen where the souls will remember. They will remember. We are becoming human. Human the way we are concerned about our families. We are living in community. But Let's not forget, human is 1, 2, 3. I, I, I. You see, I used to sit bedside for dying people, and the person would be Lying in bed, and I would be Mr. Death. I mean, Mr.— you know, Ram Dass will come and he'll make all right, so I got nothing else to do. And I, I feature sitting by dying people because that's the best way you get high. They got nothing to lose, so it's not like egos. I took care of my father, and he was such a beautiful soul, and for all those years, I never once noticed his ego was rawr. And mine was, rah! And we, father and son. I used to come to people's bedrooms. So I'd be outside and I'd say, here I go, Mr. Death, and I'm going to, you know, become the role.

Yes.

Become the role. Black bag and— Hello, yes. Nothing to be worried—

no.

And even at that time, they felt better because of my visit. But then I got to the point where I was Outside the room, I would say, who am I? Who am I? I'm a soul. And I'd open the door, and there on the bed would be a fellow soul. I used to go in and say, There is a cancer patient, or there is an AIDS patient, and I am visiting the moribund. We were our roles. We were our roles. Like, you're my mother, you're my lover. These are all roles. But I forgot the roles. There was a soul, and here's a soul. A soul friend. Then you say, how's your incarnation going these days? And they might say, well, it's probably going to spread from my liver to my— We were talking as souls. We were not experiencing anxiety. We were talking about the weather, the weather of our bodies. And we were 2 souls who came from God. When 2 souls meet, it's like heart-to-heart resuscitation. It was what my guru showed me. He mirrored my soul. He mirrored me as a spiritual being. These 3 I's, all of us have them, but what you do is you identify with one of the 3. And identifying with some, you change your perception. Like if I put my eye on the I, identify with my soul. We are a group of souls trying to figure out what we're doing here. There's a spiritual master who was a great, great master named Ramana Maharshi, and he said, lectures are for entertainment. Silence is for deepening. So my lectures for the past few weeks have been silence until one of us has a question. We will silence and then somebody will have a question. Now, don't waste the silence waiting. The question can be about anything. It can be the world. It can be anything about you or me. So, After you surf the silence, let it go into you until you identify with number 3, the silence, the silent space in you, the peaceful space in you. Peaceful space in you. But anytime you have a question, just raise your hand.

I, I would like you to help me understand, where were all the souls before humanity was created? Where will all the souls be after humanity ceases to exist? And in our arrogance, how do we— help me understand how we relate to who we are, what we are, and where our souls are in an infinite concept of the universe which is beyond our comprehension.

There are many, many more souls than people, and the souls Look around for incarnations, and some of them find in here, and some of them find in other planes. We tend to think this is a plane of highly valued. This is like the 3rd grade. I want to go back to the 3rd grade. I want the teacher there. Please, please don't make me go into the 4th grade. You know, what is happening is happening. I don't second-guess God, the Creator, who's not a separate being, but It's all of this. See, if I said, that's a terrible thing in Lower Manhattan, terrible. I wouldn't have done it that way if I was God.

Hmm.

And I'm tired of all of criticizing God.

Hmm.

So therefore, I make things as nice as my— for other people and myself, as my limited compassion allows, and then I don't question. I live this moment. This moment It's like baklava. You know, there is honey and there's nuts. But like that, that's all this moment. Now, sir, now what was your question?

I think you've given me the answer.

What? I think you've given me the answer. Thank you. He's a shill. Yes.

Okay. Ram Dass?

Yes.

I noticed you said during your talk that the souls keep coming back until it learns all it can learn about love. And I said, ah. Then you waited a pause and you go, and suffering. And I said, ah. What I wanted to know was, How much does love and suffering overlap? How much are they one and the same, and how much are they polar opposites? And if they are polar opposites, do we have to really learn that much about suffering? Can we go more over to the love side?

I can't hear this. This isn't— Yeah. If they are, can we avoid the suffering and just do the love?

Okay.

Thank you. My guru made a statement once. There was a young girl at the darshan, a young Indian girl, And she said, Maharaji, I've had so much suffering in my life. And Maharaji said, you know, he said, suffering gets me so close to God. Suffering gets me so close to God. That's one of the lessons you have to learn. I don't see any suffering in love. I don't see any. Did I miss something?

Amen.

I just can't see any. Love cements things, relationships. Love brings you so close to God. So do you now feel that these are only same?

Yeah?

You feel love and—

I would have to say from what you said that I feel that they're one and the same and they're also mutually exclusive. You need both, that the suffering maybe is just an illusion for love, that behind it there is love on a soul level.

It is. That's true. Yes.

Yes.

Nice. Yes. Yes. The ego suffers The soul does nothing but love. But love. It loves other souls, but that takes to the beloved. The love that we have for one another is a royal road. To loving the beloved. You've read all this, but let me say it again. I came in a car to him, and the night before, I was 100 kilometers away, and I needed to go to the bathroom, and I went outside, and the stars were like Van Gogh. And I stopped, and I thought of my mother, who had died just a month earlier. I just felt her presence. And then I went to the bathroom. Of course, I'm a Freudian, so the fact that I'm— Well, and the next day we went for kilometers up to the mountains and we stopped at this temple. The fellow I was with stopped. He wanted to see his guru to get his visa extended. And I sat in the car. I didn't want to— I didn't want to— Hindu gurus. Hinduism, Day-Glo paint and fluorescent lights. Oh, Jesus. I was a nice, clean Buddhist. And so the Indians around the car said to me, go, go see him. So I got out of the car and I went up the hill, this rocky hill, and I stood apart from the scene. And this fat old gentleman with a few people around him, And this fellow I had come with, he's in danda pranam. He's on his belly touching this man's feet. So I didn't look the light— look, I didn't want to touch his feet. I mean, no, no. Why? My hands were in the pockets. And they gave us food. And then he said, will you buy one of those cars you come in and give it to me? This was a car I had borrowed from another friend. First he goes, will you give me that car? And this fellow who was with Maharaji, if you want it, you can have it. You know, and I got very agitated. So he said, what's the matter? I said, well, you can't get that car. So this fat man says, you buy me— for me one like that? I have a family that— Jewish fundraisers, and I have never seen— I've never seen anything like this. I mean, it's just— This guy asking to— a Land Rover? And I was getting more uptight. And then he said, come sit. And then he said, you were out under the stars last night, thinking about your mother. Now, I was a Western psychologist. We can't do that. And I was desperately thinking, how does he do it? I mean, maybe he's got my file underground or something like that. And my mind was going, oh, because Wow, if he knows that, ooh. And I couldn't look at him because of all the stuff he knew about me. And then I looked. And he was looking at me with unconditional love. He just looked at me with love. Up to that moment, I had always thought that if somebody really knew me, they would never love me. And he knew me. And he loved me. I didn't even know him. And that, that was the love that drew me in, drew me in, the unconditional love. And now, as a soul, I Look at each person as a soul, as a lovable being with their incarnations here and there. Before I met him, I was identified with my ego.

Hmm.

I sit in my home and I look out a big window and the San Francisco, the bay, the mountains, the trees, the birds, and I go up the mountains and I blend with the sky. And I, thinking about this, I'm an old fart sitting by a window, looking out a window. That's what somebody would say. I'm 70. That's old, I suppose. But what I'm doing is blending those 3 things, identifying with that quiet, peaceful totality. So now I've got the conundrum. Doing that, Or doing this. This is what I do before the stroke, but now I could just sit out the— sit, sit, look out the window. And I thought those 2 actions, what would be compassion compassionate, which one for this culture? I bring silence to the culture by my silence, or I bring words.

Excuse me.

On all these levels that you talked to us about, do you think that there's a universal healing, like on the level of a stroke, that one day there may be some kind of cure for it, and on the level of the bombing of September 11th, that there will be some kind of healing that will take place? I find the term healing Like people said, why don't you heal? And I feel healing is becoming one with the beloved. Curing is something else. September 11th, this culture will never be the same. Never. So it won't be cured, but it will be healed.

Ram Dass, thank you so much for coming here. We really appreciate it. You had asked before that when people were calling you, and many people also called me about September 11th and asked, you know, what I felt about it. And I thought maybe if I shared with you what I, you know, came to in my own level 3, or whatever you call it, you might share a little bit of yours. What I— I went down there recently just to see it because I've just been in my head seeing newspapers or TV, and I wanted to feel it and not deny what actually happened and pretend that everything's the same. And what I came to was like boiling water, that water when it boils, all the impurities rise to the top and boil off, and that— As much hatred and anger as I have in myself, or others have collectively, this is boiling up. And I've seen in the streets of Manhattan an outpouring of light. Last— 2 Friday nights ago, right at the time of the Sabbath, everyone in the city was out in the streets with candles and being in silence. And it was very, very moving for me. And I just felt like this hatred and anger within each of us is being shown to us. And it's not bad or wrong that we have to see it now. And I was just wondering, in your own level 3, you know, you said your ego, your soul, and the nameless 3rd level, what you've come to for yourself in terms of what happened to us September 11th, how we can integrate it.

I see it, as I've told you, I've seen September 11th as fierce grace. And it is graceful. What did Ram Dass say? He said the— boy, that's going to sell in New York.

That's right.

Yeah. I have anger towards the people that did these things because they took life, they took happiness, they took our— Naiveness. But that's the mind.

Yeah.

The heart feels, it feels compassion for the people who lost somebody. I'm compassionate for the way they are seeing it. It's too bad, because you can lose somebody somebody that you loved, and love is a soul thing, so they're not lost, all you're doing is changing form. If I could tell them that, I would.

Yeah.

I've spent so much time in India where they live as souls. They are thinking of themselves as souls, and they are thinking of reincarnation. And that's the way I live.

Hi. Earlier when you had first talked about September 11th, you said if you were God, you would have done things differently. Um, I, I get— I, unlike most of the people here, I've never really heard of you before, and I haven't read any of your books. Um, I've heard your name, but I didn't know who you were or what you were going to talk about. But do you really believe God was responsible for what happens when something bad happens? Like, I died of a heart attack last year and they brought me back. You had a stroke. But I don't blame God. Did you say you blamed God?

Yeah.

Wow.

There's one at the top and there's two— there's two is good and evil down there. That's another plane of consciousness. I don't want to put God is good and leave him out of bad. Him, him.

Whew.

Us, it, the one. The one includes the bad. The one includes the bad. My one is one. It includes all of it. And this is all of it.

Oh, hi. Good evening. As everybody's talking about September 11th, I wanted to share my own personal feelings. Like the lady who just spoke, I've never heard of you until my husband told me a few days about you. To be— and the one thing he knew about you was to be here now.

Oh.

Right? That's the only thing he knew.

Yeah.

So I said, OK.

Be here now.

If someone could be that enlightened, I would like to meet that man. So he brought me along. I've always had my own consciousness of what my God is all about, because I feel that if someone was responsible for my being, I had to have my own personal relationship with him.

Yes.

And I've developed one over the years. Sometimes in my own self, I— it doesn't always go with the norm. So I keep it to myself because it's like a secret. I know a secret, what I know.

Secret, yes.

So with anything, with anything, I always look at myself as a child, and he's my father.

Child, yes.

So in myself, I ran to him when this thing happened. And I said, what?

How?

What happened here? And then he didn't answer me right away because he's wise, you know, and he knew that he had to take his time to give me such an answer that I could understand it. So days later, I pondered it and I said, what? I need an answer now. But he wanted me to wait because it has to be an answer that I could understand. So when the answer came to me, he says, Molly, because he likes to call me Molly. It says, look, 6,000 people died that day. And I don't know really the number of people that live in America. Maybe somebody else here knows. And look at the whole entire United States, not only United States, but the world that have come together in that moment. of 2 planes crashing, one, you know, in the World Trade Center. It affected the whole entire world and brought us to a place that we had to go to him for all the answers that we needed. Now when I walk down the street, I see love that you just spoke about in the eyes of everyone. I feel love towards— because I'm afraid that I may not have the money moment to express it. So out of it come this bonding, this love that we had forgotten, this place that we have forgotten, the moment that we have forgotten, that to be here now, love one another, share with one another, give to one another. And you know what? Everything else is secondary. I am so sorry that it happened, but the gift that we have gotten out of it, hallelujah to that.

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