Ep. 314 – An Exercise in Spiritual Awakening

Now, whether or not that the trauma of the loss of a guru caused that person to hallucinate, or whether they went into a plane of consciousness where they saw how it is, from where I'm sitting, I suspect it was the latter. I think we tend to get very caught in our Our egocentric predicament about our plane of reality as being more real than it appears to be. Finally, it's just moving from one dream plane to another. But it's very clear that the moments, the approach of death, can be a profound Condition for Spiritual Work.

Welcome to Here and Now with Ram Dass. This is episode 314, An Exercise in Spiritual Awakening. This was recorded at a retreat on June 17th, 1976, so relative early days, and Ram Dass is telling us stories, something he does so well. There's stories about his beloved guru, Maharaji, about his encounters with people facing death. And there's some brilliant wisdom in here from his old friend, Aldous Huxley, that offers a perspective that may shift how you see dying. I mean, it's one of these things we all will eventually do, and we're so afraid to talk about it. And so this is such an important talk. So if this episode stirs something in you, we have an offering we'd like to share. There are a few thousand people right now gathering around this fire, their stories of Ram Dass and Maharaji and this legacy of love. It is our Fall Immersion, and it's 4 weeks. It's all of the old Satsang telling stories. It's the people that were there. It's the people whose lives were changed, and it helps us carry this ember forward. So come gather in community, open your heart, bask in this spirit of loving awareness. It's free, it's nourishing, and it's the kind of gathering Ram Dass would've loved. Check it out, ramdass.org/fire. And with that, here is this week's episode. Here's Ram Dass, here and now.

This is Ram Dass, and the show is called Here and Now with Ram Dass. Maharaji was sitting with a group of people and a man appeared very excitedly at the gate, and Maharaji screamed before the man even came into sight. I know what you want. I know he's dying. Tell him I won't come. And the man came in and he was the servant of one of Maharaji's devotees, a wealthy devotee, I guess. And he said, but Maharaji, how did you know? He said, the man just had a heart attack and the doctor says he's near death. And he just sent me running over here. They always underestimate Maharaji. And he said, and he said he just wants to see, have you with him. You know, Maharaj says, no, tell him I won't come. Tell him I won't come. Maharaj, if you would just come, I'm sure it would be all right. Yeah. And Maharaj said, here, give him this banana. So it was like the mango, you know, everybody figured The banana will heal a man. And they rushed back and they mashed up the banana and they pushed it in between his lips and he ate the entire banana and he died. I neglected to say the line that Maharaj said, give him this banana and he'll be all right. Okay? Which he was. Maharaj was walking with one of his devotees And suddenly he looked up in the— up and he said, oh, Ma, so-and-so just died. This old devotee woman in a little village many miles away. He said, oh, she just died. And he laughed and laughed and laughed. And the man said to him, who was a very old friend, been with Maharaji for maybe 40 years as a devotee, said, you butcher, what are you laughing about if she just died? And Maharaj said to him, what would you like me to do? Make believe I'm one of the puppets? All right. Do you really want me to get lost into the drama? Is that what you want? You want me to play? Right. Some years ago, I had a student who He's a very beautiful boy. And he, he just come to me now and then to sort of do sadhana. And everything I taught him, he did better than I did. And he went off into a cave in Arizona. And the next thing I heard, he had died. And I was a little confused about what had happened, whether I had taught him wrong or I had not perceived some danger. But later it turned out that he had taken some LSD and gotten very paranoid about something that had come up in his relationships, and he had gone into his cabin and done very intensive pranayama, which, plus the LSD, was an ego trip the way he did it. And he burst his blood vessels of his heart and he died. So when I heard that, I thought, well, that's like suicide. Now, his mother didn't know how he had died, and she came to me with his diary, and he had written a letter to her at the end, the last time before he did that final pranayama. See, they found him with blood on the wall from his nose and all. And I assumed that that wasn't— didn't sound like samadhi to me. But his mother came to me and she said, my son left his body. He went into mahasamadhi. I mean, he got completely enlightened and he had written a diary and he had said, dear Mother, though I'm leaving you in the body now, I won't leave you. I am now with Christ. Christ is here with me. I'm going into Christ. I will always be with you. Don't ever worry. Signed, Love, Tony. So the mother and I talked for a while and she was pretty hysterical about the whole thing, but strongly believed that. And she knew nothing about the LSD. And so then she said to me, you're going to India in a few months. This was in 1970. Would you ask your guru about my son? Sure. So I took a picture with me of Tony, and at the appropriate moment I took out the picture and I handed it to Maharaj. Maharaj said it was a high school graduation picture. Maharaj looked at it and he said, Oh, he's— he left his body. I said, yeah. He said he took medicine, meaning the LSD. I said, yeah. I said, that's what I thought. Like, it's an ego trip and suicide. My whole mind. He said, nay. He said he finished his work. He said, "He's with Christ." He said his mother shouldn't worry. He's always with her. If you ever go to Banaras, Varanasi, Kashi. Different names. It's a very awesome experience because there are literally thousands and thousands of beings in the, in the streets who are nothing more than skin and bones. Many of them are lepers. They are cancerous in various ways. They are deformed and they sit with their begging bowls in rows near the burning ghat. And most of them have affixed to their loincloth a little few rupees, which is enough for the wood for the funeral fire, for their funeral fire. And at the ghat or at the at the river edge of the Ganges, there is a platform where for thousands of years there have been continuous fire and there are— the bodies are being burned and then the remains are thrown into the Ganges River, bones and all. And all of these people have come to Benares to, to drop their bodies because it's a very auspicious place to do that. And their eyes have a very great radiance about them. And when I first went to India, before I understood or had a sense of the spiritual significance of this place, I went through the streets full of pity for all these people, and I got very disoriented because they were looking at me with what I experienced as pity. And that seemed unbelievable to me because I was healthy and wealthy and, you know, they were sick and weak, and yet they were looking at me with pity. And they were right here. They were so right here that I couldn't handle their right-here-ness. And I went home to the hotel and I hid. This— I was taking a lot of drugs at that time, and I was high on something, and that might have exacerbated the paranoia. But I suddenly felt definitely confronted by their intense presence. And later, after I'd been in the temple for a while and I began to understand what that was about, I went back and I began to understand what their pity was about. Here I was roaming around the world, Lost in samsara. Samsara. And they were people who were clear. They knew that they had spent their whole life getting ready for the moment of death. And at the moment of death, they knew that if they were burned on that ghat with the purity of their own heart, that would call forth Shiva, who would come and who would breathe the name Ram into their ear. And they would be liberated at that moment. And beings that had third eye vision can see that whole process going on around the ghat. They can see these beings. When Maharaji died, when he left his body, there was a fire in the temple compound. And one of the devotees All the rest of them were very distraught, having lost their guru in the physical form. One of the devotees all night long was in ecstasy, singing at the top of his lungs right by the fire. Sita Ram, Shri Ram, Jai Ram, Jai Jai Ram. Just in ecstasy. And everybody felt that the emotion had been too much for him and he had flipped out. And the next day, when when they asked him what happened, he said, well, didn't you see it? He said Maharaj was sitting up smiling, laughing, and Ram was pouring ghee, clarified butter, over his body so it would burn faster. And all the devas and angels were raining flowers down from above. Right. And his vision was clear and he saw that no one else— others One old lady saw Maharaji get up on his elbow and look at her and go like that, you know? Right. Now, whether or not that the trauma of the loss of a guru caused that person to hallucinate, or whether they went into a plane of consciousness where they saw how it is from where I'm sitting, I suspect it was the latter. I think we tend to get very caught in our, our egocentric predicament about our plane of reality as being more real than it appears to be. Finally, it's just moving from one dream plane to another. But it's very clear that the moments The approach of death can be a profound condition for spiritual work. In fact, looked at from one point of view, one's entire life is a preparation for dying. And the way— the work you've done in this lifetime will determine How conscious you are at the moment of death, at the moment when you cannot cling back to Earth, but to go forward, leave your body, let it go, and just go towards and into the light. In Huxley's book Island, there's a very beautiful description in which the doctor is sitting with his wife. Aldous— this was Aldous's blueprint for his own death that he wrote in this book. And actually, when he died, Laura sat by his bedside and Aldous took LSD. And then Aldous wrote on his pad, I don't feel any feeling in my thighs. I don't feel— And he just watched himself leave his body just very consciously. Aldous had this kind of delight in the play of God. Aldous once said to me in Copenhagen, we were at a conference together, and he said, don't you appreciate that the reason people are so attracted to diamonds and rubies is because they remember the astral planes where those were all pebbles? All right. And that's what the planes were like. And it's just the memory that's pulling them that makes those things so precious. But he wrote this beautiful way in which the doctor was helping his wife at the final moments of her life. And he said, lightly, my darling, lightly. Even when it comes to dying, nothing ponderous or portentous or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, No self-conscious persons putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Goethe or Little Nell. And of course, no theology and no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. Throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you sucking at your feet. Trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. The light, came the hoarse whisper. The clear light. It's here, along with the pain, in spite of the pain. And where are you? Over there in the corner. I can see myself there. Brighter, brighter. A smile of happiness, intense almost to the point of elation, transfigured her face. Through his tears, Dr. Roberts smiled back at her. So now you can let go, my darling. He stroked her gray hair. Now you can let go, he insisted. Let go of this poor old body. You don't need it anymore. Let it fall away from you. Leave it there like a pile of worn-out clothes. Go on. Go on into the light, into the peace, into the living peace of the clear light. Now, the karma that we have accrued over many lifetimes. As we start to awaken in the middle of a lifetime, not after death, but in the middle of a lifetime like we are doing here, then we start to live our lives consciously in such a way that we don't create new karma, but the old karma keeps running off. And it may run off for many lifetimes. Right. And even though you've prepared yourself right up to the moment of death so that you're ready to keep God in mind as you die, at the moment when the ego structure starts to disintegrate and there is what is called the review, or seeing your life flash before you, and all the events that have happened in your life and the way in which you have loved or hurt or whatever you've done and past births, all of it, there is whatever karma is left will grab at that point and that grabbing will start to determine what your next work is in your next breath. So that you can anticipate that although you get yourself very clear and very ready and very open and very flowing, you don't necessarily wipe out all your karma. You may still have more work to do. But the difference is that when you die consciously, openly, Going towards it. There is no karma created by the death process itself, for the clinging to life at the moment of death. That yearning keeps creating life after life after life after life. And it's at the point where you let go of physical plane existence that you can start to get on with it in terms of other work you have to do. When Mahatma Gandhi was dying, he walked out into his yard. An assassin shot him 3 times. Our images of assassins in America— think of Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King— and always there's horror and violence connected with it. And we see, we imagine, if we can, the moment that somebody's shot, That they are stunned or confused. Gandhi had just as much time as any of the others when he's shot. And as he's shot, as he falls over, he just says, Ram. Just— he goes out on the name of God. He's ready for his death because every moment of life is the moment of death. And when you are deep enough into, like, vipassana meditation, And you see thought being created, preserved, and destroyed. You see the universe being born and dying over and over again with all your thoughts. And you see that life is a series of mini deaths and rebirths. The whole process you see as death and birth, not only seasons but thought forms and the universe as you create it. It's just a week ago that— or a week ago last Monday— that one of the students that we, we've been working together in New York died. And I was by his bedside as he died. And I came away from that so enriched. The moment was so beautiful. The release was so easy. He just kept letting go and letting go and letting go. There was no grabbing, no holding, no panic, no fear. We're just holding hands, rubbing his brow, just whispering to him, go to the light. Let go. We're here. It's okay. You can let go. This body isn't going to be much use to you now. Go ahead, Raymond. It's okay. And the trust was complete and he just flowed out, Raymond. And you could feel the being leaving the body. Then there was this body here, and for a little while there are some pulses in the neck and so on, and then it just quieted and it was over. And Raymond was free and we were free. There was no grabbing, no clinging, no panic, no pain, nothing. It was just floating outward. And the nurses stood around and they were very touched by that moment. One of the nurses said, I hope when I die, I'm surrounded by that kind of love. Right. The process you are involved in here is the process of dying, not necessarily at this moment your physical death, though some of you may be dying physically, ready, getting ready to drop your bodies. But you are in the process of having the way in which you know yourself die. Lest ye die and be reborn, you cannot know the kingdom of heaven. This is a death seminar in a strange way. And a lot of the anxiety and panic and symptoms and tension a lot of you are feeling is because it's very hard to die. Because there is much clinging to who you know yourself to be. Many of you come up to me and say, I'm confused, I don't know who I am. And I say, wonderful, right? Because you are in the process of dying. And what appears to me obvious now is that our relationship with physical dying must become much more intimate, for the culture is now ready, it seems to me, to begin to bring the process of physical death out from under wraps and to treat it more consciously as it's beginning to do the process of birth. For these in India, these are all natural processes. Most of them, they happen in the homes. You are born and you die at home. And perhaps we are starting— there are movements in America now to make dying much more humane. And that's the beginning of this process. The work of hospitals like hospice or gathering groups like hospice. There is a tremendous interest now in the process of dying. And a great deal of it is due to the work of one woman, Dr. Elisabeth Ross, whose books have described the stages and processes people go through in dying. From the moment you find out that you're going to die and there is denial, and then there is Anger. And then there is bargaining. You try to bargain for it. If I take the medicine, will I get better? And then there's depression. And then either a person lets go and accepts, or they go into a state of sort of resignation. And it's that acceptance that opens them in a certain way. That makes it possible for them to do the kind of work you are doing now. Death is the trauma for most people that allows them to be sitting in this room at this moment. And you're sitting in here without having to have a trauma to do it. That's because of the nature of your incarnation. Recently, I had the opportunity to spend an evening on death row at San Quentin, talking to each of these men one at a time and then leading a meditation. The meditations were no less high than the meditations we are sharing this week. On a death row in which they're all in segregated cells, But the imminence of death created the conditions that allowed them all to be innocent once again. And we got so clear and so high that at one moment we were sending out loving kindness, metta, blessings of peace and light to all beings who suffer. from San Quentin death row. And at that moment, we forgot we were on death row because we were just a group of souls gathered together to share the light. And visiting them was like visiting monks in a Tibetan monastery in their cells. And on the walls were pictures of Jesus and mandalas, and they had books by Alan Watts and yoga books and the Bible, and they were getting ready. And we have yoga teachers teaching in San Quentin. Steve's involved in that work right here. And a lot of what the Hanuman Foundation does that's sponsoring this retreat is connected with prisons. Try to say, use your time to become more conscious. Use your dying to become more conscious, says the Hanuman Foundation's Project on Dying. And there may come a time when we will have a place, a space where people can come to die Intentionally, consciously surrounded by people like you who aren't so freaked by death that you don't surround the person with an ocean of denial. There are many meditations on death. The most vivid one is the Buddhist meditation on death. In which in the old days, when the bodies were left in the cemetery unburied, the monks would go into the cemetery and meditate, and they would meditate on the corpses in different states of decomposition and realize that that was their body. The swollen corpse, the bloated corpse, the fly-infested corpse, The bleeding, the broken corpse, the skeleton, and they would sit before it and meditate upon it. When you can sit with somebody that's dying and not be so preoccupied with their dying— tell you a very beautiful image that you get a feeling for. A few weeks ago, I was with Elisabeth Ross at a workshop she was giving on dying in Colorado Springs. And there was one woman there who presented the following image. I don't have it exact, but it's close enough. She said, imagine that you came to visit a woman in the hospital. She was 28 years old and she had 3 children and she was dying of leukemia. What would you feel? As you walked into the hospital room? Huh? What? Pity. Pity. Pity of all the people around her. Pity of the people around her. Sorrow. Just say it. Anger. Anger, worry. Helplessness. Helplessness. What? Injustice. Injustice. Sadness, misunderstanding, love, compassion. Okay. Now imagine that you are the 28-year-old woman and everybody that walks into the hospital room is full of these reactions. There's nobody there with you. Everybody's reacting to your condition. Do you hear that? Beautiful. Very, very powerful image. Everybody's reacting to your condition. Nobody hears you. And to be able to say to somebody, right, your body is decaying, you're going to drop your body. And here we are. Here we are. I remember when my mother was dying, I said to her— she said, what do you think death's about, Rich? I said, well, I don't know. I said, obviously your body is decaying. It's on its way. But you and I seem to be in the same space we always were. I don't think it has much to do with your body. I said, I think you're going to drop your body, but I don't think you and I are going anywhere. I think we're going to be together. And we certainly were at her funeral. She was certainly present and enjoyed it thoroughly. I had to keep shutting her up. I've got to tell you one story. She did just one really very rascally thing, I think. There's such black humor in it. Incredibly black humor. Every anniversary, my mother and father exchanged one red rose along with whatever gifts they gave. But it was a token of their love. They had been married 40, 40-odd years, 41 or 42 years. So on the casket was a blanket of red roses, which is common. As the casket was being wheeled down the aisle of the temple, when it came abreast of the front row in which the family mourners were, which was my brother, my father, my 2 brothers, sister-in-laws, and me, one red rose fell off the blanket and fell at my father's feet. The man pushing the casket didn't notice it, and he kept right on going. That's a beautiful story. And our eyes were all glued on this rose because we all knew the story. Nobody said a word, of course. And ceremony is over. My father bent over and picked up the rose. We went out, we sat in the limousine, people coming to the window, and he held the rose. Nobody would say anything. Now, my father is a very a person who has primarily been concerned with material things. He's a— in other words, his world has been when you're dead, you're dead. My older brother is a stockbroker, and that's his world also. So with my sister-in-law's. But I had a brother who had gone into other planes of consciousness, and he was convinced that he was Christ. So He was in the car. And then there was me. A peculiar lot for a limousine, you might say. An odd, odd lot of beings to be incarnated together in a limousine with a rose. And of course, it was my brother Christ who said, I guess Mother sent you a final message. And everybody agreed. That's far out. Everybody in the car agreed. You see, they wouldn't have agreed to that, you know, ever, except the emotions of the moment opened them all and they all agreed. And my father's next words were, we've got to save the rose. Right? So then became a desperate issue of how to preserve this rose. Right. And people had to be called long distance. And there was a whole production to get this process where they put it in a liquid glass thing so the rose would be preserved forever. That's the material part of it, right? The problem was that the process didn't quite work. And slowly the coloring came out of the rose and the water all turned this kind of muddy, dark water. And this thing was on the mantelpiece, right? This, this rose. And after a few years, my father met this wonderful woman and I gave the bride away and helped carry her across the threshold. We each took a leg, right? And now what to do with this thing? You see, I mean, this rose, which this actually was a ball of dark, muddy water by then, right? You couldn't throw away Mother's last message at this point. So it went into a case in the back of the garage, which you hold for important things of great significance that you— Right. And it's still being put away. It's interesting. It's being always put away. To me, the humor of the way in which one clings, one clings rather than letting go, the clinging rather than the letting go, and how macabre, macabre, macabre the clinging gets. Right. All the time. I can imagine a I wouldn't create it with my mind because then it'll have to happen. Yeah. Not like Martin Luther King. I have a dream. But I could imagine just— I could imagine an ashram in which this kind of process that we're involved in goes on every day. Okay. And in which included right in it is a large center for people to come in order to leave their bodies. And that you people, part of your livelihood and part of your work is in caring for these beings, and they're feeding you and you're feeding them. And everybody's in the process of going to God, and dying is merely one of the vehicles of doing it, just as chanting is. And chanting is no bigger deal than dying is. These are all exercises for becoming more conscious. And I think that it's important in thinking about dying to put it into perspective of spiritual work, not to elevate it so much into dying, but to see it as merely processes of spiritual— an exercise in spiritual awakening. Okay. Okay. That's enough of that. Just read you a delightful thing. A lot of people ask about heaven and hell. A soldier named Nobushige came to Hakuin and asked, do heaven and hell really exist? Who are you? inquired the master. I am a samurai, the warrior replied. You, a samurai? Hakuin exclaimed. What kind of ruler would have you as his guard? You have the face of a beggar. Nobushige became so angry that he reached for his sword, but Hakuin continued. So you have a sword. Well, your weapon is probably much too dull to cut off my head. As Nobushige drew his sword, Hakuin looked right at him and exclaimed, That is hell. Sheathing his sword, the samurai bowed with great humility and respect. And this, Haku announced, is heaven. Now that you are watching your minds and seeing a little bit about how your mind keeps creating your stuff, you begin to understand what the creation of hells and heavens are about. Even the plane which is called eternal damnation is a plane in which your mind creates a model that you are in eternal damnation. And as long as you try to get out of it, push against it, it goes on. And the minute you say, okay, I'm damned for eternity, and here I am. As long as you put space around it and be mindful of eternal damnation, it's just another trip. All right? As long as you denied it, it clung. So it is with all the rest of your stuff. Planes, dying, living, it's all the same stuff.

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