https://www.listennotes.com/e/efff5314df2e4767abfffe0b2f060551

This.

Show is sponsored by BetterHelp. 6 million men in the US experience depression each year, often without even realizing it. Struggling doesn't make you weak. Real strength comes from facing what's weighing you down. Therapy can help you release the pressure, develop healthy coping tools, and feel more in control of your life. With the convenience of joining therapy sessions at the click of a button, BetterHelp fits seamlessly into busy lives. Plus, you can switch therapists at any time. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/ramdass. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com/ramdass. In these uncertain times, when the world feels divided and restless, Where do you turn for refuge? This summer, step into wisdom, community, and love at the Ram Dass Legacy Summer Mountain Retreat, August 14-18 at the breathtaking Art of Living Retreat Center in Boone, North Carolina. Join us as we explore intimacy with all things, learning to deepen our connection with ourselves, each other, and the world around us. Experience four nights of soul-stirring kirtan with Krishna Das, profound teachings from Ram Dass, and an extraordinary lineup of spiritual luminaries, including Acharya Surya, Dr. Robert Thurman, East Forest, Nina Rao, and many more. If you're seeking insight, healing, or simply a sacred pause from the world, this is your invitation to return. Spaces are limited. Register now at ramdass.org/boon.

It's just us human beings together.

In.

The shelter of each other. This is what satsang or sangha is.

This is it.

This is the community of beings who are acknowledging that dual intention. You work on yourself as an offering to others. You work on others as a way of working on yourself. Circle is complete and everything is part of that circle.

Welcome to another here and now episode with Ram Dass. I'm your host, Jackie Dobrinska, and whether this is your very first time listening or you have tuned in 279 times times three, you are part of the Ram Dass community, the Ram Dass Satsang, which is exactly what we are here to talk about today. So a few episodes ago, we did a spanning the decades compilation, and we got such great feedback. feedback that we are going to revisit that style over and over again. So this time we are spanning five decades of Ram Dass speaking about the power and mystery of spiritual community. So the Buddhists call it sangha. In India they call it satsang. And sat means truth. It's pure, real, Being, it refers to the ultimate unchanging reality. And Sang means association or gathering or coming together. So satsang is an experience of truth through presence, whether that be with a teacher or a sacred text or with one another. It is a gathering of beings who come together in the name of truth. And Ram Das was steeped in satsang and In his understanding of community, it ripened over time, starting from Harvard to the ashrams and guides in India, to his father's farm, to the many, many, many lecture halls across the US, from very long solo retreats to intimate celebrations on Maui. And before he died, he made a few things really clear. And one was that he wanted satsang to continue, which is why we are here. Yes, we have these incredible episodes, but we also have a gathering a week after each episode so we can discuss them and meet each other and dive deeper. We hold spaces for practice. We hold affinity circles. We have specialty clubs, including the Explorers Club, looking at the intersection of psychedelics and spirituality, and he refers to it in this episode. And we have twice a year retreats and over 200 local meetups around the world. And these are places where people meet in truth and walk the path together and remember who they truly are. We remember who we truly are. And I cannot tell you how often on one of our virtual gatherings, someone ends up in tears. And it's not because they're sad, but because there is relief. There is a place they can go to talk about the things they typically don't talk about. And you know, Ram Dass, he speaks to us so deeply in so many ways, but he also speaks poignantly about the loneliness that is baked into Western life. And we all know it, right? We can be surrounded by people, we can be in a deep relationship with someone and just feel utterly and desperately alone. And whatever that comes from, from not being reflected properly, it aches. You know, Father Greg Boyle, he talks about gang members in LA, how they're used to being watched, but they're not used to being seen. And we all want to be seen for the brilliance that we are. And so here, through stories and laughter and radical honesty, Ram Dass reminds us of who we are. He reminds us that we have soul friends, and some of them are embodied and some of them aren't. But all of them, all of them, they are rooting for our awakening. So this compilation, it spans from 1969 to 2017, and it follows Ram Dass's evolving relationship with satsang, with spiritual community, one that exists both within and beyond space and time, grounded in presence and form. So speaking of relationships, you might have heard me gush about this relationship I'm currently in with Magic Mind, which is this green little shot. And about a year ago, they sent me their original formula. and I fell pretty hard. And now they have sent me their Magic Mind Free, which is zero caffeine, and Magic Mind Max, which has extra caffeine and nootropic kick. And so I keep starting my day with the original because I love it. And then in the afternoon I get to reach for the free and not have any caffeine. So I've been riding this adaptogen train for many years, and this is hands down the most delicious and effortless way I have found to support clarity and calm and mood. And here's the sweet part. You get 60% off your first subscription with the code ROMDOS60. So check it out, magicmind.com/romdossmf. And they have 100% money back guarantee. And if you're craving some in-person community, check out our friends in Costa Rica. reunion. So I was just talking to Raghu the other day and he's planning on going down there soon for a personal retreat and to see the new Hanuman temple. Probably get some really good fresh food and some mana from the land and all the goodness. So you too can do this and you can get $250 off your first visit when you use the code BEHERE250. So check it out, reunionexperience.org. okay, so let's dive in. It is 1969, a year of both hope and hardship. Political tensions were high. The Vietnam War was raging. The Stonewall riots had erupted. The civil rights movement was pressing forward. And it was the year of the Apollo 11 landing. And Woodstock. And Ram Dass had just returned from India, fresh from meeting his guru, and he was on fire, and he was speaking to a generation that was searching for their way after the highs of the early '60s. And so in this clip, he is reminding us how community can shape us for better or worse.

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This is Darshan. This is a gathering of people who are sharing a journey together. We are the Sangha. We are the body of monks on the path. And the Buddha said, seek three refuges: Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. I take refuge in the Buddha, the incomparable one. That is, I take refuge in the fact that a being who starts out like us makes it. Keep that in mind, take refuge. And in pure, I take refuge in fact that Buddha consciousness is pure awareness. Dharma, I take refuge in the Dharma, in the wheel of the law, in the methods, in the eightfold path, in the way. And Fanga, Fanga, I take refuge in the Sangha, in the spiritual community, in the community of monks. We're hanging out together because we need to hang out together. For many of us, the seed has been planted inside. We have had an experience somewhere in our lives created by something or other, by falling in love or by religion or by drugs or chemicals or by childbirth or by by trauma, for some reason or other, we've had some experience that has shown us the possibility. For one brief moment, though brief is meaningless since the moment is eternal, we see through a doorway and we appreciate that it isn't at all how we thought it was. Once you have touched that place, once you have seen that possibility, once you have had that vision, the seed is planted. You have started to awake. Awake from a long, long, long, A long, long sleep of so many, many rounds, birth and death, all designed to bring you to the critical moment when you started to awake. But when you start to awake, you are like Ramakrishna says, you're like a very, very young very vulnerable. And in India, since the cows are sacred and they walk on the streets, anytime there is a young tree, they put a little fence of stones around it. And that's so that the cows won't walk over it and crush it. And then later on, when the tree gets big. Then the cows can rub against it and they can get out of the sun under it. And Ramakrishna says, somebody who is at the beginning of their sadhana, their spiritual path, is like a young tree and it has to be protected by a fence. And the fence is Satsang, the spiritual community, that Sanskrit or sangha, sangha, holy. The community of monks, that's why we hang out together, because we need one another. When I was a psychologist, I hung out with psychologists. When I was a psychadelicist, I hung out with psychadelicists. At Harvard, when I was a psychologist, every now and then I would go, I was a tutor at a place called Quincy House, which was a big humanities stronghold. and every now and then I would go out down there for dinner and I would hang out with all the romance language and philosophy and literature faculty. We'd drink sherry in the senior commons room. And they thought psychology was kind of a scurvy disease. I then rush back to my psychology friends and hang out with them. We reassure each other that we were really the masters of the scene. You know when I took psychedelics, if I hung out with people who thought chemical ingestion was immoral or evil.

I.

Lived in a world of my own paranoia all the time. So I'd hang out with people who understood.

And now.

Now pretty much I'm alone, or else I hang out with you. Who are us? New frame of reference, new us group, new reference group. The only thing that's interesting about this reference group is this reference group doesn't have any physical form. This is like a reference group of it's a psychic reference group, if you will. It's a consciousness reference group.

Group.

When I was in the temple in India, I was alone at one point for about 45 days. My teacher Haridas Baba was away and my guru brother Bhagwan Das was away and I was alone and they would leave my food, the Kunidasa Baba, the hook, would leave my plate of kachoris and my two chapatis outside my door every day. so for 45 days, I didn't converse with anyone at all. Now, most of you have not had the opportunity to do that. First of all, I was on silence. I had been on silence already for three and a half months by then. That is, I spoke with my chalkboard.

Which is this.

And my guru, my teacher, had been silent, mouna, for 15 years and he used the chalkboard. He made this for me. So all the teaching he gave me was on the chalkboard. And evenings as we sat together around the little Charcoal, great. All you would hear at night was, and I'd answer him and send the next message. And sitting at his knee with my head resting on his knee, watching him write this out, would allow me to absorb what was being said and the most profound was to slow the whole process down. See in India when you're mouna and you're on the street and you take your chalkboard, everybody says, oh, mouna! Oh, mouna! Good, good! In the West when you pick up the chalkboard they feel pity like you're mute and there's something that should feel very sad for you and you're unfortunate. In India when you do it they feel you're lucky. You can do it they say, I can't. I'm not strong enough to go on the trip you're going on. I worship you. I honor you for doing it. So in that sense the group in India are helping you with your work. see this word, this subtle sort of help. While in the West there is a kind of a very gentle undercutting going on. So I was alone in the temple for 45 days and at the end of the time when my teacher came.

Back.

It was quite a relief to be back with one person. not because I was lonely, but because there has been too big a crowd in my room. Because my head was so full of all of the beings are this satsang or sangha. There was Ramakrishna. I had his thoughts. Ramana Maharshi and Buddha and Christ. I found out that once I started to dwell in this world of people who were either seeking enlightenment or who had already become enlightened, realized beings, it was like a huge crowd that I was hanging out with. And my guru brother had said.

When.

You center, Center in your spiritual heart, center here, and he said think of it as a cave. Think of it as a very, very beautiful cave. And you live in this cave. That who is truly you lives in this cave. And in this cave with you are all of the other beings.

Who have.

Been enlightened, who are seeking enlightenment. So in this cave are all of these people I've mentioned and we're all hanging out together. Suddenly being alone is no longer the psychological experience of being lonely because the universe that is Satsang is an inner universe, not an outer universe.

So now we jump to 1975, and it too was a time of cultural upheaval and change. So it was the year of the Watergate Scandal. It was the year of disco, and it was the Early sparks of the computer revolution. By this point, Ram Dass had helped form the Hanuman Foundation, which had launched the Prison Ashram Project, which was encouraging incarcerated people to transform their sentence into a spiritual practice. And that work lives on today. It was the same year that he delivered a talk called the continuity of consciousness. And he articulates with, oh my gosh, almost like unsettling precision, the unique suffering of the Western world and psyche. It rings so true still today, and it reminds me of, you know, even first world problems, they break our hearts in their own unique meek and particular way. So here, Ram Das is describing satsang, not just a gathering in time, but a connection across dimensions that this soul family includes more than those just in the room. And just last month, I was sitting with many of the community in a temple, Tibetan Buddhist temple, that was lined around the ceiling with bodhisattvas. And the monk reminded us that they're part of your satsang too. They use the word sanga. But every great being wishes for your awakening, whether you remember or not. They are here and they are reflecting our brilliance, especially when we forget it.

But rather than spend the remainder of the tape talking about the externals of communities, I'd rather focus in on exactly what spiritual function communities play or what is the spiritual community or why is it that people do band together out of a sense of spiritual urgency or need or purpose. In the past, Oh, 15 years, there has been an increasing malaise or sort of mild depression in this culture. What the determinants of that are are probably much too complicated for us to consider at this moment. They were things like the imminence of total destruction through the development of the atomic and then the hydrogen bomb. the affluence in the culture which showed people that even when you got what you wanted, it wasn't enough. And the media which projected that image in huge color all over the world. The realization that education and technology was not a path to happiness and fulfillment by itself. the increasing discomfort with the morality of the government in terms of its foreign policies and more recently, of course, its domestic policies. In the early 60s we had the God is Dead, this kind of cynicism that goes along with the hierarchy of the priest class composed of scientists and psychiatrists. and adjustment became a valued commodity, coping and adjustment. The despair or the depression attendant to this state of affairs, which is kind.

Of.

The obvious outcome of philosophical materialism, in which when you're dead, you're dead, and so get it all while you can, and then getting it all, and then having it not be enough so that the justification for your life is empty. A kind of despair drove a lot of people in a lot of different directions in the 60s. And for a significant, though small, number of people, it drove them into psychedelics. and into other kinds of drugs, the opiates and so on, trying to seek more either more gratification and more intense experience or more meaning to human existence. Others travel to other cultures such as the Far East, Middle East, Europe, South America. Others left the highly technological society and moved back into the backlands where they could find justification for their existence within a kind of frontier mentality where they could justify their lives merely by survival, which is getting enough wood and food and shelter.

Clothing.

Somewhere in the midst of this, a.

Process.

Is involved in which the external forms of gratification start to lose their meaning a little bit and people turn within. And they start to look at deeper places in themselves, either through despair.

Or.

Through some form of awakening or opening. The literature of the late 60s and early 70s started to abound with concerns for mysticism. In the East, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Middle East, the Hasid movement has started to come back into flower. Esoteric Christianity has become noticeable along with fundamental Christianity, which is not esoteric at all. This turning within to a deeper or higher connection or reference group, the spiritual community, occurred through all of the different vehicles I mentioned: through travels to the East, through drugs, through dropping out. There wasn't any single path that determined that. At first it was a few and then more and more of the cultural media started to take over the transmission of a new reference group. So that the Beatles first and Bob Dylan and followed by many, many people in the rock movement and in the folk music movement. started to make statements concerning this alternative reference group, which was not based on the physical plane particularly. It was a community of the Spirit. Now in order to understand what this community of the Spirit is.

If you.

Just think of a cross and think that all of the reference groups we talked about up until now family, bowling club, nation, religion, etc. are on a horizontal axis of the cross. And now we're starting to deal with the vertical axis. To understand how far out that is and how much you must stretch your definition of what constitutes a group, Let me say that the spiritual group, reference group, exists over time and space in all directions, so that one begins to recognize members of one's group quite independent of geography and quite independent of time. That is, whether that being is living in the present or not. so that one begins to experience a more intimate identity or family membership with, say, a Socrates or Plato or Heraclitus or Chung-tzu or Lao-tzu or Buddha or Krishna or Hanuman. Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi, Hazrat Inayat Khan, Rumi, Kabir, the Bauls, Saint John, Brother Lawrence, the Pilgrim, and so on and so on and so on. a more intimate relationship with these people than with people in one's own time and space locus. It furthermore occurs that as one focuses into a deeper place in oneself, one perceives a deeper place in another individual. And this depth of perception leads to quite a shift in what would be called figure and ground. For example, When, if you are preoccupied with your physical body, like either into weightlifting or beauty or ugliness or deformity or something, you will be very preoccupied with other people's physical form. If on the other hand your primary concern is personality and you are aware of your own personality dynamics, you'll be inclined to see other people in terms of their personalities as the dominant theme. If you are primarily into astrology in yourself and you think of yourself as a Leo or Sagittarius or an Aries, you're being inclined to see other people as that way. In other words, which individual differences you focus upon. Like if you're balding like I am years ago, I was very aware of who had hair and who didn't. Now that I look at a different place in other people, it is totally irrelevant whether they have hair or don't have hair or what color it is or and as I've found a place in myself that has nothing to do with age, I'm not even noticing any longer whether people are old or young. And as I've gotten into a place that isn't involved with whether I'm depressed or related or joyful or sad, I'm less inclined to label other people as manic depressive or paranoid schizophrenic or psychopathic or what have you. As one goes deeper into oneself, one comes to the soul, one comes to the essence, one comes to the doorway through to a much different kind of identity than the one on which one has been functioning from the time of birth and which was transmitted through one's parents. and when you begin to recognize this new identity in yourself simultaneously you begin to perceive it in other people. So that when you look into the eyes of another person from this space you often, not often, but now and then look into the eyes of another being who is experiencing that same identity with soul and it's as if you meet as soul mates or at least a soul meeting in which all of the packaging of personality, of astrology, of body is merely packaging and one.

As.

It were looks through the veil of this package from one to another and.

There is the.

Rather delightful interchange of are you in there? Yeah, are you in there? Far out, here we are. We're both inside here and it's as if it's like a Martian takeover. It's as if you're meeting another being who is almost masquerading as a human being but is in fact not terribly identified with their physical plane envelope, if you will, or temple or package. And those that contact through the eyes defines now the spiritual community because it is really a community of souls. It is not a community of men and women because in the world of souls there are no men's souls and women's souls. There are just soul souls.

So by the mid 1980s, Ram Dass was no longer the wild bearded mystic returning from the Himalayans. There's sort of this new tone that emerges. He's grounded and wise and has this tinge of humor and this urgency to get enlightened by Tuesday has softened. And in its place, the quiet, Miracle of simply showing up again and again to the practice, to the community, to our own hearts and our deep inner knowing. As a reminder, these were the Reagan years. It was big hair, big promises, and even bigger disconnection. Beneath the surface of material success, there was a quiet spiritual hunger that persisted. In this clip, Ram Dass reminds us that satsang isn't just about the teachings, it's about mirroring. And it's like poo and piglet, right? Each of us is a little quirky, a little wounded, but we're all devoted in our own way. And we strengthen our remembrance by simply being with each other again and again.

Every other evening I do this in a different city. This is the eighth. There are 52 more. And each night it's such an interesting moment to come out and open to what this is about. First of all, the task is impossible at one level because what I'm here to share with you is not conceptual and yet all I have is words. And probably if we were a little more evolved, we could just sit here in silence for three hours and we'd all be fed and go home. But our minds still need to think we know something. So we make believe we have something to say to each other. And the words are like fingers pointing at the moon. They're not the moon, they're just the finger. But as long as you don't take them too seriously, it's fun to play with words. And it quiets our minds so our hearts can be together, which is rather nice. The audiences are changing. We seem to be getting on with it. There's much less spiritual hysteria than there used to be. I remember back in the back in.

The.

Many incarnations back, I remember at one point we used to have a chart Tim Leary and I used to have a chart in the wall as to when we'd all get enlightened. And I guess we've stopped counting, which is a very good sign, because those kinds of models are tremendous traps of mind. How am I doing? Where am I at? It's a constant judging quality of mind. And the judging quality of mind doesn't finally really do it for us. I've got one favorite story that I just really love to share because it's such an exquisite awakening for me. Back in the early 70s, everybody that came to my lectures always, they were between the ages of 15 and 25. They all wore white and they smiled a lot and they had flowers and they knew we all know. Do you know? Yes, I know. Do you know? And we all have been through some kind of an initiation rite, either spiritual readings or meditation or chemicals or something. and so I would meet with this Explorers Club night after night, and we'd, we, we'd compare notes of, like, it's going to the North Pole. Do you remember that place we got to where, you know, you ran out of water and, oh, yeah, but did you hear about the time I, it was that kind of thing. And one night I was doing this sharing. maps for fellow explorers. And everybody was these young, smiley people. And over there was a woman in her 70s, and she was wearing a print dress and a little hat with strawberries and cherries on it. And she had a black patent leather bag and responsible looking Oxfords and her hair in a net and I thought, what is she doing here? I thought, Somebody just brought their mother or their grandmother and said, you,'ve got to hear this guy. He's far out. And she was just going to put up with it. So I started telling stories and my eyes moved and there she was and she was nodding like this. And I thought, How does she know? so I told another story, and I looked, and she was nodding like this. So I began to think maybe she has a neck problem, you know, and she just nods, you know, but I watched carefully, and she just nodded in appropriate moments. And I got outrageous that evening in my Zeal to get her to stop, really. And she kept nodding, you know, and I thought, this is impossible. Who could this being be? So at the end, I smiled at her and I kind of egged her up to come up here. She's came up and she said, oh, thank you for that. She says, that's just the way I understand the universe to be. Said, that makes perfect sense to me. How do you know? I asked. What have you done that has. What is your practice? What have you done that's brought you to that kind of understanding? She leaned forward very conspiratorially and she said, I crochet. At that moment I knew the game wasn't the one I thought it was. And that's turned out to be a reasonable perception because if you would sample this audience, we have come to this place where it's reasonable for us to sit down and share this material together of the evening. And we've come from almost through as many different paths as there are people in this room. And obviously, no path is the only way because all the various paths are feeding all of us and bringing us together. We must know something or why would you come to hear a flake named Ram Dass doesn't make any sense. You go to a movie, so you must know something. And what we do is we come together as what in Sanskrit is called satsang or in Buddhism is called sangha or the fellowship or the community in Western religions. It's the family of people who are sharing an appreciation of something. and by reflecting back and forth between our hearts, we strengthen our connection. We reassure each other through our presence for each other. We mirror back and forth because very often the world you live in, the people you deal with all the time are so caught in the, the, what they call the real world, which they mean the material world, that you don't get mirrored back from them these other qualities of your being. And if you're not at the level where it is so completely secure inside and you're so rooted in the power of your faith or that connection, you flicker a little bit because you are looking in and saying, is what I'm experiencing real? And everybody's saying, no. I mean, I used to get extraordinarily far into these other Realms of Consciousness, and then I come back to my family's home. and my father would say, you got a job? And I. I. He didn't understand. I just say, but let me explain. And you couldn't. He couldn't hear. And I'd say, he brings me down. Actually, I brought myself down. He didn't do it. He was just being who he was. He was just being an essence of Father. But I was using him to bring myself down. And that turns out to be the way it is with our relations with other people. They're just being who they are. We use them to do in ourselves continuously. And after a while you see that and you don't lay things on other people. You did this to me. You're causing me trouble. You're making my life difficult. No, only I make my life difficult. You may be a complete stinker, but that's your essence stinker. That's your karmic predicament. If I buy it, then it's mine. Two quotes let me play with for a moment. One is from Blake, beautiful mystic poet Blake, to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. How light is your mind. How much can you play with these relationships to time and space? To see that in everything is everything and a grain of sand is the universe. To see that who you are is not in time. the other quote is from the great book of great liberation, the writings of Padma Sambhava who brought Buddhism to Tibet. And it's describing what we are coming together here to recognize. In its true state, mind is naked, immaculate, not made of anything, being of the voidness, clear, vacuous, without duality, transparent, Timeless, uncompounded, unimpeded, colorless, not realizable as a separate thing, but as the unity of all things, yet not composed of them, of one taste, and transcendent over-differentiation.

So now we move to 1994, and this is the year that friends debuted and Forrest Gump hit the theaters and Kirk Cobain's death shook a generation. It was the year of the NAFTA trade agreement that shaped our economy. And for Ram Dass, it was a very busy year. and you can hear some of that in his opening dialogue. But he comes back to remind us that we are not here to fix one another. We're here to listen to each other from a deeper place, to remember and act from that deeper place, one that's not so entangled in this sense of separate I-ness. He reminds us that any kind of coercion both for ourselves and for others, is a kind of violence. And it sort of reminds me of this 12-step prayer. It goes like this. It says, God, grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know that one is me. So we are invited to do our inner work, to get to the place in ourselves that is not so separate. a place where we recognize the essence in ourselves and in each other, and that presence becomes the true teacher and the true healer of all of our ills.

I've been off duty for seven months, meaning not doing this. This is the first one of these. So it's always interesting, what level do.

You want to play it?

I mean, it's really hard to get out of the entertainer. The you paid all this money to come, overpaid to come to this thing, you know, and you're all a little pissed off at it and you didn't.

Really want something out of it and.

I got to produce or somehow we'll all be in hell together. And then you'll want to come again and then I won't have any income and then oh, God, my life will change and then on and on and on and on. And that whole set of models is what does end the scene actually. It's just us human beings together.

In.

The shelter of each other. This is what satsang or sangha is. This is it. This is the community of beings who are acknowledging that dual intention. You work on yourself as an offering to others. You work on others as a way of working on yourself. Circle is complete. And everything is part of that circle. and you don't try and you enjoy the process, because it may be an unending one. There's no well I've done that. So let's sound our sound. Let's just each of us find your own sound quietly. And then let's just for about.

Two.

Full minutes together make our sound. And at first make your sound and then listen your way into the collective sound. At the same time you're making your sound, listen your way. Become the listener of the collective sound and the tuning to it.

And let's do that for a couple of minutes. Is that all right with everybody?

Our art form is to cultivate this space and recognize that we are meeting in it and share the essence space behind the form. Not the words, not the bodies, not the hotel, not the time. a just presence. I'll read you something from E.H. Lawrence. The common denominator of attaining harmony of the individual and the community.

Is their.

Universal aspect, their more fundamental being. At the level of deepest self.

People.

Can relate to one another without mutual destruction or loss of individuality. But trying to impose unity upon diverse people at the more superficial at an.

Official level.

Whether by love, coercion or group process, is to do violence, to make anthills or beehives. Lawrence is reminding us that unless we meet in the deeper place of our beings together. The acts we do with one another will involve violence and thus exacerbate suffering. It's as if at the level of personality, at the level at which You say, I need satsang or I need community or I want. Whatever comes out of that identification with that desire, in some subtle way does violence the minute it acts out of that to the universe. I would like you to be more compassionate. Therefore, I will do something to you to try to make you more compassionate. What presumption of me? What presumption?

And finally, we arrive in 2017. This was the year that Trump was first inaugurated. It's the year of the Me Too movement. It's the year the NFL players began to take a knee. It's a world that feels fractured. And here on Maui, something soft is still unfolding. Ramdas has been living with his stroke for nearly two decades, and he's been in community most of his life. And in this final clip, he is joined by two old and dear friends who are part of that original satsang, Raghu, Marcus, and Ramesh. and they are reflecting on lineage and friendship. And the people who helped create this thread that we are all riding on today, they speak of KK Sa, who is an often unsung hero who welcomed Brahmdas into his family in India. And without KK, this whole web of satsang in the West, it may not have taken root. And there's a film coming out about his life soon, so stay tuned. But this clip, it has a really sweet truth. It talks about Ram Das discovering that he had a son much later in life. And still, and still, he said that Satsang, his soul family, was his deepest home. And when I hear this conversation again, I jump back to Winnie the Pooh. You know, I think of like Rabbit who was controlling and Eeyore who was gloomy and Piglet who was anxious and Tigger who bounced off walls and Pooh who was just always making a mess of everything. And they still all loved each other. They still invited each and everyone on the journey. They didn't have to be perfect. They were just walking each other home, like we all are. So enjoy this last clip.

I wanted to talk a little bit.

About.

The idea of satsang. Sangha, spiritual community. And the first thing that strikes me is, you know, what our Buddhist friends tell us, that when the Buddha was asked about the three refuge, refuges, refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, they said, which is the most important? And he said, Sangha. that always resonated with me over all these years. So that's a beginning premise that I think is really important. But for us, and Ramdass, when you first went to India, you were taken in to KK's family. You've talked a lot about that over the years. And then when we followed you when you went back, the same exact experience was had by all of us. That immersion in the family, which is.

So.

It'S so been passed forward in such a way to this very day. We are experiencing this in so many different ways. Of course, in Maui, when we get together with you, at these retreats, it's to the nth degree. Can you talk just a little bit about how that family became the source of the kind of satsangs that you have been part of and given over these many, many years?

Well, I agree with the Buddha. Satsang is beautiful. We are in the satsang of Maharaji. And then I have satsang. And I'm really, I treasure it. I treasure it. my treasure. It's family. And then now that I have a son and he said he wanted to.

Learn.

About the family. I couldn't help but think that because Satsang.

Is.

People pointed at truth.

That's the literal translation.

Yeah.

It's the community of seekers after truth.

And.

My family certainly doesn't... Yeah.

So.

Finally, Father's Day, My son called me from North Carolina and he said, Namaste. I felt, God, we've made an inroad.

He's learning about family. It certainly felt like we were taken into Maharaji's family of the heart. when we arrived there. And that feeling of being at home, I think part of that feeling was just the way Maharaji took us into our own hearts, but it was also being surrounded by that love that.

He.

Radiated, but was reflected off all the people around him all the time.

Yeah. Yeah.

Of course, our Western satsang was kind of a mixed bag at times. I think when, like that time when we were up in Kosani at that ashram up for the monsoon, it seemed like a little more like the inmates were running the asylum for a while.

Yeah, that was more bizarro satsang, you might say. like Bizarro Superman.

We're a mixed bunch.

But it was still family and it was still satsang, you know, as crazy as it got at different times. But, you know, I'm just reminded of like walking into KK's house and just walking into his house, going up that narrow stairway that Maharaji somehow maneuvered up to get to his door on three levels up and then have his sister come and take care of. It was the taking care of. I've never felt quite taken care of, so dispassionately taken care of. There was no reason whatsoever. What was your experience, Ramesh, when you first especially you. We had a lot more. We had you to go on. You had nothing to go on. You just were sent over there. What's, you know?

Well, Maharaji, first of all, he told KK to take me to his house.

Yeah.

And he said, feed him double Roti. which is bread, white bread toast.

To this day. To this day we're still getting toast from that first.

Yeah, we go to his house. It must have been, you know, for KK too, because his description of you when he first saw you, he saw.

This.

Guy with his hands in his jeans pocket looking very uptight. And then Maharaji sends this guy to his house and to take someone into your home in India is really because the guest is God in India. So it's a big thing. And he did that with incredible affection and grace for all of us.

Yes.

I've never felt.

Family.

As poignantly as Jay's.

Yeah. Yeah.

But how that informed us for so long since then, Right? I mean, how that's informed, it informed you. I mean, you created all of, you created that whole satsang in the first satsang in America, which was at Bill and Rika at your father's farm. I mean, that, can you recall thinking about, okay, I think we're gonna have some satsang here. Can you recall any kind of thought process of, taking from what you had gotten and offering it out, or it was just without, you were just doing without thought. I mean, the idea of, what motivated you to have gather these people together?

Well.

They were coming from New York and Boston, where I had speeches. lectures.

And.

I guess the grapevine has because we just, cars come up and people.

Were just showing up.

You didn't decide anything.

And Ram Dass' father, George, was like KK. He just, you know, it's amazing because he's, you know, was had been a CEO of a railroad. And here he is allowing these hippies to come and camp on his land.

Right.

And, you know, walking around on his golf course. And we helped out to the extent we could, you know, There's a great photo of Danny Gollman riding the tractor lawn mower. He really made us like family.

And my brother said, Get those damn fools off the greens, off the greens. and what are these people coming for? And I said, be with me.

And on the weekends when people knew that Ram Dass was going to speak, sometimes there'd be, you know, two or three hundred people coming. There were maybe 20 or 30 camping on the land, which George allowed us to do, and he let us put up some tent platforms. And we built this Darshan house up in the woods. And we were doing Sufi dancing out on the meadow by the barn. It was like, you know, if you think about home invasion, that's kind of it. and he was really just very open-hearted with us. And you see in, I think it's the Hartley movie where they asked him about how, what he thought was going on. And he said, oh, it's great.

George, yeah.

Yeah.

It was very generous.

Very generous.

Yeah.

So this is what we are doing here through podcasts and practice groups and Retreats and community spaces. we are carrying this thread of sacred community forward. Because even when we forget, which we always do, even when we are in those dark tangles of our own obscurations, we are never truly alone. And so we honor Ram Dass's call to keep gathering, to keep pointing at the moon for each other, and to remember in every season there is the power of satsang. So if you feel called, go to ramdass.org/fellowship, check out the ways that you can dive into satsang. Keep remembering these teachings. And as always, we give thanks for the privilege we have to be here with you, and we dedicate whatever good comes from what we do, that it is dedicated to all beings everywhere. Namaste and blessings.

This podcast is brought to you by the Love Serve Remember Foundation and ramdass.org We appreciate you listening and we appreciate all the support that you've given us. Please continue that support and donate@ramdass.org .org, we can then continue to share what Ram Dass has been sharing for all of these years.

Thank you.

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