Ram Dass – Here and Now – Ep. 155 – Astral Fun and Games Pt. 2: Doorways to the Divine

Ram Dass explores devotional yoga through his lived relationship with Neem Karoli Baba. He shows how love for the Divine begins with human emotions, then becomes a doorway into higher planes of consciousness. The episode examines the dynamic between karma and grace, the function of the guru, and the importance of starting exactly where you are.

• Devotional yoga begins as a human relationship and redirects emotion toward the Divine
• The guru functions as a doorway rather than an idol
• Most seekers approach the guru for worldly desires, missing the deeper offering
• Grace appears as a speeding-up of the return to the Divine
• Unconditional love dissolves shame, fear, and self-image
• Each plane of experience must be consumed and released
• “Guru knows you. You don’t need to know who your guru is.”

• Devotion is dualistic at first; it matures into identification with the Divine presence.
• Karma and grace interpenetrate; grace activates when yearning becomes pure.
• The guru mirrors the true Self by stripping projection and identity.
• Spiritual experiences—visions, astral forms, siddhis—are frames, not the destination.
• Love is the primary accelerator of transformation.
• Awakening triggers orientation from subtle beings toward the seeker.

Ram Dass deconstructs the mythology around the guru. Through stories with Maharaji, he demonstrates that the guru “plays” with the devotee’s attachments: comfort, pride, spiritual ambition, romanticized devotion. The apple-throwing, teasing, and mundane conversations act as a field that exposes projection and clinging.

The deeper teaching: the guru is not an entity within karma. The guru is a manifestation of the One, appearing in form solely to accelerate the return of those who are ready. The moment a seeker reaches upward, the timeless field of grace responds. The guru does not interrupt a downward trajectory; grace activates only when the heart turns toward truth.

Ram Dass also reframes mystical experiences. Astral visions, deities, past-life impressions, and symbolic forms appear as the seeker passes through planes. The task is to notice, honor, release, and keep going. No experience is the point. The point is liberation.

Devotional yoga begins with relationship and ends with realization. The guru’s love reveals the formless nature of the Self. Karma and grace converge in the moment a being sincerely reaches for the Divine. Everything else—visions, stories, miracles—is secondary.

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the game is to be where you are be it honestly and as consciously as you know how watch the latest ramdas documentary film becoming nobody on gaya.com of course there was fear in losing that familiar identity but there was always also wonder the guy.com library supports you with transformational content see it for yourself and go to guy.com be here now and check out the be here now playlist curated just for you visit gaia.com be here now and start your free trial today [Music] ram ram everyone this is raghu marcus


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and this is ramdas here and now and glad to be here with you i'm just back from uh maui actually in our winter retreat with ram dawson krishnas and jack cornfield and trudy goodman and nearby bush and me and svaboda hopefully some of you were able to tune in because we live streamed or at least delayed live streamed uh over last weekend from maui uh it will be available later on or in sometime next year in some fashion it was uh all around becoming nobody you know the film that we've been talking about so much and has


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been out in theaters is now going to be available mid january 2020 and uh make sure you're on the ramdas.org mailing list if you're not put your email in and if you have put it in check and see if stuff is going to the spam bucket okay because that happens a lot and uh just want to make sure you'll get informed of uh the pre-release of it or what are we doing no you can pre-order it that's it you can pre-order it before christmas and it'll get shipped to you in mid-january so look out for all of that uh what


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else before i get into this episode we want to shout out to 1440.org our erstwhile supporters for the last couple of years on the network be here now network dot com and uh i saw something that they're doing that they do these wonderful weekend workshops near santa cruz just beautiful campus 1440 multiversity and this one's called neurosculpting to manage stress anxiety and depression and uh we all got a lot of that going on individually and in this culture these days and lisa wimberger is going to


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take people through a five-step process of meditation and mental training designed to enhance the brain's natural neural plasticity while helping to heal and rewrite deep stress patterns seems i don't know her i want to have her on a podcast on mind rolling because this looks uh you know i'm completely into whatever help we all can get day-to-day to re-sculpt our neuro uh receptors right just re-form our habitual pattern so what we can do this sounds great so go to 1440.org and check that out it's


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in january and and don't forget our other sponsor not really a sponsor because we're it's a non-profit so it's more of a supporter is follow your heart and they have that great vegenaise which uh i don't know if anybody laughed at me last time i was touting this i was saying how great that vegan mayo is i'm i made a wonderful egg salad sandwich with my vegan mayo and people looked at me like are you nuts you're using vegan mayo on egg anything anyhow i love it and i don't care so


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there you go this this vegenaise is absolutely fabulous so all right that's it from the announcements today this is part two ram das here of uh astral fun and games but really this talk he gives is around what devotional yoga is what the guru is his own experiences with neem karoli baba maharaji and uh again as you all know i say this all the time i've heard of these lectures i mean there's a not a billion but there's a lot of them over these last what 50 years of ram das and uh i still get engrossed i couldn't


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stop listening and i need to because time is so short um but he talks about falling in love with the divine presence in whatever form and that what these beings are are doorways through the divine of course uh starting where you're at is so important not trying to be somewhere uh you are not we are not it's it's uh to be able to have the capacity to really absorb into the devotional path starts with the capacity that we have to in any kind of relationship with another being you know that we're not completely


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projecting for instance projecting onto a being that it's love light compassion but we don't really want to deal with the scary parts which is the shiva part in the hinduism thing and then just the fact of course it's dualistic devotional yoga and you know it starts with our emotions our human emotions and and redirects them to the divine um and he talks about how most people who came to neem karolyibaba to maharaji they came for worldly concerns they needed a job a wife a baby a new house


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or protect from this that the other um and i remember i went down to kenshi one day to see maharaji with a friend of mine we actually walked over the hills it was like a half day well a few hour walk uh from nenetal to kinchi and i met this uh indian devotee that i knew and he was sat us down and he started talking about all the people that came to maharaji strictly for worldly concerns and he said now there are people and that do come for the spiritual brass ring sure he didn't say that and that the worldly concerns he gives


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freely the secrets of the heart that is something that is not given so freely that is very precious now he himself maharaji we were sitting around uh with some indian devotees one day and he looked at others a few westerners and a few indians and he looked at us and he said to them in which we're hearing through the translator these people came all the way from america or the west to get the secrets of the divine i uh i'm going to give it all to them okay you i give nothing because all you


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want is stuff and he actually said that and he was very uh as usual critical he'd be critical of all the indians around him in some ways and so absolutely sweet to these young westerners who came all the way from them from america and canada and europe um there's so many great stories in here that he's telling of his personal experience with maharanji and you know some of it was his also his understanding of this dualistic path and how it one day he he decided he was just going to uh become it and go inside and not pay


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attention to the apples being thrown around and the talk about local village politics or whatever maharaji was talking about with the indians and um you know got into this whole thing around um understanding the level of duality that happens with a guru because you are worshiping this divine form that has manifested itself and at some time ramadas figured okay i gotta be that now. and so then the conversation goes into uh karma our karma and grace one taking action and receiving um the grace of the divine through a guru


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or or through circumstances however which way it comes and pretty much ramadas figured that they were one and uh but maharaji would said to him this is not something to talk about in public so he figured there was a twist there that uh he thought he understood but he said now i'm not quite sure now i uh went and asked siddima one day who is the saint that when maharaji left who appeared although she had been sort of not public while we were there with maharaji that later she was and she said yes they are one but it is


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not a rational there is no way to understand it rationally how they are won so this is this is you know maybe a discussion take a whole about five podcasts right to get to to any kind of understanding but ramdas makes some great great points in here and anybody who still by the way write to us at info would be here now network dot com or through any of the info at ramdas.org it will eventually get to me we can have a further dialogue about this might be cool to see what people understand about what


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grace is and what the law is in terms of karma and see if we can get any under further understanding of this so to understand the guru ramdas says to realize that whatever it is that is manifesting through that being is a outside of time and be above law he's on the other side of karma for it is actually the one which means the one is is another word for we can't name what it all is god buddha mind whatever the universal divine presence intelligence that's the best way i can get to it


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that manifests from from that plane of consciousness into form and that's where ramdas talk about all this carmen and grace being one so i think that's a a good thing to deep down dig into for sure deep down dig into the minute you start to awaken so this is a great thing for for everyone listening the minute you start to reach out you start to awaken all kinds of beings on different planes of consciousness including the guru and everyone's got the guru and he says it's not important


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for you to know who you guru guru is it's important that they know you right that makes sense uh all these beings orient themselves towards you and grace comes down and what is grace of one nice description of grace grace is speeding up of the return to the divine so i like that one so another great talk it's really around devotional yoga and the guru but i guess we'll call it astro fun and games part two from ram das and um yeah as i said he he tells some wonderful stories in in this


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uh in this talk wonderful stories around him being with mahara you really get a feeling um yeah it's so good so good so good so great to be here with you again as i said i just got back from our thing with and ramdas is hanging in there believe it or not it's going to be 89 in a few months okay and uh he has so much willpower i can't tell you all to be here to share with people that he did cuts through all you know he's got all kinds of stuff going on uh with his body and it just cuts


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through all that i mean he just absolutely somehow digs into a deep well and and uses that will to be here so uh pretty amazing and talk about grace so this is ramdas here and now on behrnownetwork.com go to be here now network dot com and pick up on all the great podcasts david nickterns doing some guest stuff for us david plays plays guitar for krsnadas and also is a wonderful buddhist teacher who just has a new book and creativity and uh making a buck and spirituality uh yeah take a listen to that it's really quite


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good also my mind rolling that i that i do just to tip you i just did something with elizabeth mattis namgel who's married to a a rinpoche a westerner it's a fascinating story and she wrote a great book uh that might help with with our day-to-day in terms of understanding the interconnectedness of everything see you next week now you see starting from where you start from you're a human being you're involved in interpersonal relationships complicated life you've got a good intellect you've been studying and


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training it to to do a lot of discriminative thinking how do you start from where you are and get free well if you were going to use your heart one of the things you would do is start to have relationships with things that are closer to that are either on other planes or that will take you through to other planes rather than having relationships which things which are very bound to this plane and thus you start to fall in love with christ or you start to fall in love with krishna or you start to fall in love with your


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guru and these beings are like doorways through and they're a doorway based on what you got to start with which is your capacity to have a relationship with another human being right and you project christ as this nice guy with a with soft hair and a soft eyes and a warm smile and very kindly person and and when he says i come with a sword you say oh well you know that's just a metaphor that's initially later on as you get deeper into this work you start to love and deal with aspects of


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relationships with aspects that scare you the sword part of christ's message the shiva part in hinduism but devotional yoga at the lower level of bhakti is dualistic it is dualistic i love you krishna and the stories about radha and krishna and the gopis are exquisite because and if you read the mahabharata or any of the holy books that are devotional texts they are all these incredibly sound like a marriage court or something like that there are these incredible convoluted emotional dynamics of


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love and fear and trust and hope and all of the human emotions jealousy jealousy possessiveness rada keeps wanting to possess krishna she says look i'm the top gopi i mean and krishna carries her around on his shoulders and says you know you're the one and then just as she gets arrogant with an ego he disappears and then she freaks but it's all interpersonal it's all interpersonal at that level what it does is it starts with your human emotions and it works with them and it just keeps


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allowing you to take that kind of energy and redirect it that's really what the initial devotional process is prayer which is the most common vehicle in the west is talking to a being that you anthropomorphize you imagine to be another human being and you talk to it like another human being and it's often characterized as a jealous god or an angry god or a righteous god or a kindly god or a compassionate being you talk to christ you talk to mary or you talk to god and most people aren't ready to go


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beyond the interpersonal level of devotional yoga and they stay at that level and in india almost all of it is that level and their relation to maharaji the people that are around maharaji are primarily around a very kindly grandfather that has the power to give you make christmas every day if he chooses and you're constantly dealing with this thing of my good or my bad and loving him and opening to him and so on and 99 of the people that come to maharaji come to him for worldly concerns give me a son give me a


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new home make get me a new job right it's incredible it's like going to a king who has all the riches of the universe and asking for pineapple you know it's very humble and beautiful but it's also kind of stupid because you could get the whole ball of wax and i used to have to discipline myself a great deal when i was with maharaji not to be sucked in on the worldly level because he was so seductive he was this great i'm going to show you slides tonight of him i think and he was


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heavy you can have his darshan directly and he was absolutely this great teddy bear of a being who you just wanted to rub his feet and cuddle up and get under his blanket and all kinds of things i mean it brought out all the childlike qualities in you when they just oh god just sit at his feet he'd get into timeless space but that's later at first all you'd get is he'd throw you apples you know people would bring him apples and he'd pick him up and throw them at people and everybody would laugh


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and he'd ask things like do you have cinnamon in america and uh will you take me to america and uh it was all totally mickey mouse you know he pulled your beard he'd laugh at you it was like totally hanging out in the most trivial sense drink your tea you haven't drunk your tea drink your tea bring food eat drink eat drink eat drink all we got was fed all this crap all the time poori's cooked in grease tea made with white sugar potatoes the main staple was potatoes and puris cooked in grease


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right for a vegetarian i mean you know for health food addicts it was and here's being handed to you by the guru you know by by god itself is handing you it's like and the you know that's incredible and the leela i mean it was all leela it was all lila and you'd be caught in that's the leela the maya the illusory quality and you get completely lost in it and at the same moment you were cleaning up your game just by being around him because the love and the simplicity and the purity and


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the talking about god and the whole thing was creating a space which was affecting the thousands of lives of people around us being but then there were other levels and if you went to if you went to maharaji like i go to maharaji sometimes i plan see i'm not going to get sucked in so i'd sit down in a meditative stance i'm going to fight the illusion and i focus on my third eye and i close my eyes and he throw apples i feel apples hitting my chest and i just ignore the whole thing like


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screw you baby i'm not being sucked in this time you can go to hell and i just sit there and i and i just focus on my third eye and suddenly my whole body would start to get filled with shakti because i was demanding and i was getting overloaded for where i was at and i'd start to shake like this you know and he would then sort of i remember a couple of times he'd lie down he pulled his blanket over his head and he'd snore very loudly and then he and all the time i would start to see him in all these


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different forms it was just like the 11th chapter of the bhagavad-gita i was starting to move through planes of reality in which he existed because it turns out he's also hanuman and he's also shiva and he's also padmasambhava i mean it goes on and on and on in terms of the astral lineage right i'll explain that in a minute and then he'd sit up and he'd say to the translator ask ramdas how much money stephen makes and i'd be like zonked way out here you know and the man


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say oh i maharaji i can't bother ram does he's meditating his body stiffs bother him bother him ask him how much money stephen makes and the guy would come a very apologetic ramdas and i'd hear it from like miles away i was sitting up there with on the top of mount kailash with shiva in perfect meditation just about to be fully enlightened and this jerk is calling me down to ask me how much how much money stephen makes and i would hate him oh god the hate you know and i feel myself have to being pulled


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and pulled like a rope pulling me down and i come back down to the physical plane and i'd say 30 000 and then i try to go back up again see and he wouldn't let me do it he kept bringing me down all the time because he knew i wasn't ready in that sense or he was greedy and he wanted to keep it all for himself but what i began to see was that maharaji was like a set of doorways and that if i focused on one i was actually focusing i was worshiping the frame see and i rub it and oil it and worship it and write letters to it


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and think of it and have pictures of the door frame on my pooja table you know and then after a while i would see that it was just the door frame and i would see that there was a this is what the seven inner temples are talking about or the seven lights of the menorah or the seven chakras or the seven plane i mean it's all the same imagery the octaves the game goes on and on and on about planes of consciousness and i would go through the doorway and i'd meet maharaji in a new way see and very pure beings would see him


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almost immediately like one old train conductor came to visit maharaja he was a very pure man very high and he had his third eye open and he walked in and he walked over to maharaja he wasn't he passed out cold and when they revived him he said all he saw was this 15-foot monkey standing there he didn't see the body of maharaji at all he saw his astral identity right and there are dozens and dozens of stories of people who were very close to maharaji who would like they'd see him suddenly leave them


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and rush into a room and as but before the door would close they'd see a tail going in behind them you know i mean there would just be these little ways in which these astral people would keep flipping from physical to astral imagery because the love of the guru is the way to go through the doorways that is the vehicle the devotion the pure love keeps opening the door for you like that story of um that uh about hanuman and the temple the little fujari there was a an old pujari a temple keeper


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and what happens when you go to a little temple they're just like um consecrated statues by the side of the road in a little niche and there's a curtain across them it's in a little room sort of there's a pujari there and you go and you bring some sweets usually and he takes the sweets and he goes behind the curtain and he rings a bell and he calls the morty the being that inhabits the morty to take some of the food they feed the morty they bring it and then the pujari takes some of the


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food off the tray and keeps it and gives it out to the poor or eats it himself later on and then the rest of it he brings back and that is the gift that comes back from the morty and the pujari's merely played the part of the intermediary if you will and he brings back the food and the people take the food and it's now consecrated food it's been offered to god that's what consecrated means and by the way you get into this game and you ultimately only eat consecrated food only food that's been offered


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you learn how to consecrate your food that's what you begin to use everything like even eating as a vehicle for getting you tuned to god all the time and realizing your whole life is one of coming to god of offering to god okay so this old man had to go away somebody in his family died and he had to go back to his village and there was nobody around to be the pujari but there was this very pure young boy of i don't know 14 or 15 who always hung around him never go away so he said all right i'll


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leave him as the pooja and he said all you have to do is when they bring the sweets you go behind and you ring the bell and then um hanuman the morty you feed hanuman and then you bring the rest of the sweets back out and give it to the people so the man left and the boy stood there this extremely pure boy no guile at all and people came and they brought sweets and he took them and he went behind the curtain and he rang the bell and hanuman didn't take anything and he didn't know that because he had


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never gone behind the curtain so he rang the bell again and he got very angry because he was ashamed that hanuman wouldn't take from him and he picked up a stick and he said to hanuman you take these sweets see and the whole dish disappeared right so he came back out with the empty dish and he said to the people he took it all and they beat him because they didn't believe either say they figured he had stolen it right and he kept it all and when the old pujari came back he said all my life


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i waited for something like this to happen to me it never happened but this being was pure enough that it happened to him it's that kind of a space right that kind of love or purity allows you to see more and more and more but the game is you have to keep consuming what you see you have to keep consuming all of the new levels planes images you can't get stuck in them you can get stuck for a little while but then you've got to go on because who you are is incredible you've been around again and again and


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again you have previous incarnations by the hundreds you were lots of interesting people people come up and say who was i in my last birth i don't give a damn not only who you were but who i was what difference does it make it's not going to liberate me i only want to know what's going to free me i'm not really interested in my own melodramatic storyline that's like when don juan says give a personal history he means that astrally as well as physically give it all up don't even bother the


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only value of it is if it is your particular sadhana to use these other plans to keep loosening holes on one plane so that you begin to know you were also an indian princess and you were also a yogi and you were also with this it puts this one into perspective so you say well now i am also a a lawyer in memphis or whatever right it just keeps putting it all into perspective there came a day when i was sitting opposite maharaji in the temple and um sitting across the courtyard from him and all the people were over there


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including many of the westerners they were rubbing his feet and they were apples being thrown back and forth and much talking and laughter and frivolity and i was sitting across the way watching this and i had been meditating and i began to see i've really been stuck on the doorposts and really i want to be free i really do want to be free i really just don't want more fun and games and what am i doing hanging out around this guy he's in my heart i obviously can't get rid of him who he is


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i am also isn't it time that i begin to know him in my own heart and stop with this externalization so much and it was wasn't intellectual the way i'm telling it to you now it was the feeling that i am done because there's nowhere my raji used to say i am always in communion with you or i'll be with you in america did you think i'd let you do anything wrong or he'd say these little things which you could take as just sort of nice sayings unless you understood the level of the game in which it meant


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something entirely different and i was sitting thinking you know i'm not going to run over and touch his feet i love him from i love him more than i love any other human being i've ever known and still that level of love isn't what it's about and i was just sitting there reflecting on this with almost a feeling of being a um heretic i mean it's kind of heresy in a devotional temple to think that thought and at that moment an old devotee of maharaji maharaji whispered to the man the man


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ran over to see me and he came over and he touched my feet and that always used to freak me all the time and i'd say oh babaji and i try to touch his feet and i'd say well why did you just do that they'd say well maharaji sent me over he said go over and touch ramdas's feet he and i understand each other perfectly and it was at that moment that he did it and what he was saying to me by that act was go baby go you're doing fine that was the way in which he was freeing me to start to know him


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inside myself rather than to be lost in the form and it's very interesting because in my relation with maharaji which led to be here now which led to all of the except for about five of the western devotees well no i'd say maybe about 20 of the western devotees but of the hundreds of western devotees that had anything to do with maharaja they all came through my meeting with maharaji in 1967 at least that was the impetus that was the connection the public connection during that five months i saw maharaji


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in total over four or five times the total of it wasn't more than an hour and a half or two hours okay and what he constantly did was i would come and i just settled in because he let everybody else sit with him for hours and i would come and i would come up and i'd bring my fruit and i'd put it down like i'd bring a dozen oranges and he grabbed the oranges like he hadn't seen food for weeks and he'd rip them apart and he eat eight of them just like i watched him eat eight


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oranges just like that i said what is he doing you know and they were stuffing oranges in my mouth and i was crying and he was crying i didn't know what the hell was going on and they said he's eating your karma i thought that was nice right because that was one of his yogic thing things he ate people's karma and he ate them by physically the women of india would prepare food for the guru that's a big thing to do and he would eat the food and somebody followed him around one day this was far


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out because in nanital it's a very the villages the houses are very tiny and you got to go up these very steep stairways and over roofs to get into other kitchens and the whole thing is in very tight from about four in the morning until about 11 at night he went from house to house each ma had prepared an entire feast for maharaji knowing he'd be in town in the hopes he might come by and the indian feasts are really heavy i mean big quarries greece lots of grease and mounds of kedgeree rice


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with um stuff in them dal and rice lentils and he went and he ate 49 meals in one day now he was vast but it wasn't at those days he wasn't vast and it had nothing to do with because these beings can play with all this stuff they maharaji this is far out maharaji would people would give him blankets and then when he didn't want a blanket anymore he'd make it too small he'd just shrink it and he'd say what are you doing to me you give me a blanket that doesn't go around me


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and then they give him a new blank that was when somebody had a blanket to give to him i'll just sneak in one digression since you're going to see slides i'm just and i'm showing you the devotional quality by conveying these stories i think that's as good a way as all my intellectual wherewithal let me tell you the blanket story see i was the oldest western devotee of the current crop there might have been some he was supposedly 147 when he died so he may have had dozens of crops


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before this one but i was the recent crop and all we brought him were apples and we'd sing sriram to him because our hari krishna because that's all you could do for him because he didn't have anything he had a water pot and a blanket that was it and people would build temples and stuff for him and he dropped by but he owned nothing and there was no way you could give him anything was absurd but the inner inner indian devotees would give him blankets and i was traveling around the world


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with swami muktananda i was on tour and we were in australia we were doing singapore australia and hawaii on that part of our tour and we were at a little house in melbourne australia and everybody was bringing muktananda gifts and i so wanted to get something for maharaji because i was just this yearning and i thought why don't i get him a blanket i mean it's presumptuous of me that i would be high enough to bring him a blanket but i'll risk it what the hell i'll buy a blanket right


00:37:12 - 00:38:10
so i went in and i bought the most beautiful mohair blanket in the fanciest department store in melbourne and it was in a big plastic case and i came back bearing it into the house in melbourne and looked ananda was standing on the steps and he thought i didn't think he thought it was for him because he knows he says oh what's that i said it's for my guru oh and i've made a big thing of it this is the blanket for my guru and i carried it on the airplane with me and i wouldn't


00:37:41 - 00:38:51
put it in a bag and i wouldn't send it on on the underneath in the plane because it and i worshipped it every night and i rubbed it and i rubbed it with sandalwood stuff and you know i mean i was doing the thing getting it ready to give to my group i mean when you're a real lover you know i mean you've all been in love probably you know how much sugar you get so i um came to uh nanital which was funny because um i came to ganesh puri where much to nanda's ashram is and i stayed eight


00:38:17 - 00:39:22
days which was sort of proper and then i said now i've got to go see my guru and they said oh don't be silly stay on i said no i gotta go and i was very willful and i left and they were all telling me not to go and i took the train north from bombay to delhi the night i left maharaji appears in bombay calls up the head of the muktananda ashram and says where's ramdas maharaji had never been in bombay in his life as far as i know i mean i never would have thought of him there and they said well he's going to


00:38:48 - 00:39:47
look for you and he said he's a fool he has no faith didn't he think i'd come for him which they loved you know that ramadas was this faithless person you know i wouldn't have thought in a million years he would have come for me you know the whole thing was just a hype a put on so i went north and there was no maharaji because he was in bombay supposedly that's phony too because he used to appear in two places all the time which was freaking everybody somebody say i just saw maharaja in


00:39:18 - 00:40:31
delhi you couldn't have i just saw him in nanital it was that kind of it was all leela it's all play so i had the blanket put in a safe right well i went off to do vipassana meditation for three months two months three months then i went on a yatra of all shiva temples in southern india with muftananda and a tour and i didn't then i went into a rent a cave for seclusion for a long time and then finally many months later i came back to nanital and i came up into the village maharaji was in town


00:39:57 - 00:41:10
and there was krishnadas and rameshwadas and jagannath and juggernaut's new girlfriend who he picked up at the vipassana course and um me and dwarkanath you know that was the group and um beca the day came when the blanket was going to be presented and everybody you know the thing had been built up so it was like this was the moment when the transfer of the blanket right and uh there was this little room maharaji would interview people in or see them it was called humorously his office it just had a


00:40:41 - 00:41:41
wooden table and he'd lie on it and you'd come in and you'd kneel at his feet you know you'd kneel by the bed and rub his foot if he extended it to you um and usually you'd get in you'd kneel down you'd offer an apple and you'd say jiao which means get out and in a way the word he said most often was zhao zhao go go go go and at first i used to be you know why doesn't he let me stay and then i realized the word zhao had the way he was using it it was very far


00:41:13 - 00:42:27
out because most of us can't say to somebody go away without feeling withdrawing love and what he was doing was saying go i am with you go go it's okay you can go go jiao he did it in such a way that it became like a caress see so um we came in and i had taken the blanket out of the plastic case and i came in bearing the blanket and we all sat down there was me and dwarkanath and krishnadas and rameshwadas and jaganath and jagannatha's new girlfriend and i put the blanket next to maharaji


00:41:50 - 00:42:49
and then sat back and we all waited for the leela now what we all expected was he would pick it up and he'd look surprised see and he put it around him and we had cameras and we take pictures and it'll be all cut late he might even throw give us the old blanket right which you have a thread of by the way he might give us the old blanket he'd been wearing we'd have his blanket and then he'd be surrounded in this one and we'd and he'd be wearing my blanket what an ego trip oh my blanket i could say that's my


00:42:19 - 00:43:40
blanket and he talked to us for a while and we were waiting for the next you know nothing was happening finally he turned slowly this huge head turned and he looked and he reached over and as if he were picking up a dead rat he picked up the blanket and he moved it across the field and he gave it to juggernaut's new girlfriend and i freaked completely right i just and then he turned to me and he said to me was that the right thing to do and after i swallowed i said perfect since that time juggernaut married


00:43:15 - 00:44:20
anasuya they have two children the blanket has lived with them all the time it's one of the closest parts of our whole satsang the babies have all been wrapped in it it's a tremendously loved blanket in our community but the perfection of not clinging of not clinging to the giving of a gift and the ego trip about giving and wanting to be appreciated and all of that you see the beauty of a simple teaching exquisiteness of it and you see how all that teaching is made possible by love by that love of this being and the flow


00:43:49 - 00:45:13
that exists between how open you are to those teachings if i didn't love him and he had done that i would have sit around judging him for doing that but the love made me immediately look for the teaching in it for myself perhaps the most powerful component of my relation with maharaji was the depth with which he loved me and how contradictory that was with the image i had of who i was because i was certainly not lovable in the way he was loving me and i had never been loved unconditionally before


00:44:37 - 00:45:54
because there are very few human beings that exist that can love another being unconditionally and i knew that maharaji knew everything about my life there was nothing shameful disgusting embarrassing horrible that i could possibly hide from him there was nowhere to hide and he would look at me with such incredible love sometimes i want to look behind me to see who he was looking at because it was so inconceivable that he could be looking at me and for years that was something i couldn't understand at all and it's only


00:45:20 - 00:46:36
recently when a lot of my own attachment has fallen away like yesterday when i was handing out the beads to you people what i was seeing was so incredibly beautiful it was like i was seeing a succession of um of saints and devas and angels and holy men each of you i was seeing who you are i was in another space and i was just seeing who you are not who you think you are or i was seeing let's say another plane of who you are because who you are has no form i was seeing other forms of you more


00:45:58 - 00:47:09
divine forms if you were more spiritual form and i was asking maharaji and hanuman to let you know who you are through these beats and the feeling i was feeling as i looked at you and as i look at you is such incredible love it isn't personal it isn't love for you with who you're busy thinking you are but that's all just your stuff and there's no judgment about that that just is your karma that's the way it is it's the way it is i don't love that tree better than that tree


00:46:39 - 00:47:53
because that's a different kind of tree than that that's different and that's equally as beautiful i just honor them and the love flows and what i've been learning how to do is to say to people give me all your because it doesn't bother me goes right through me because all i see is that thing which is totally clear and luminous in you and that's what i appreciate now was how maharaji touched me he touched me because there was no way i could convince him how corrupt i was


00:47:18 - 00:48:39
there was no way i could get him to reject me to experience unconditional love liberates you simple as that because there's nowhere to hold on to your paranoia it's just no way to do it in the course of the journey through the plains if that is your path through planes as you let go of each plane you meet maharaji you let go of that of the body in this incarnation you meet hanuman you let go you meet shiva you let go you keep letting go of form after form loka after loka experience after


00:48:06 - 00:49:06
experience you do not get hooked on experiences you get up into planes of causal planes where there's just thought forms and just light you're still separate you're still separate but you are totally light there's no personality there's no heaviness you can dance through every plane every incarnation you can see that you have an existence on all of them and they're all going along fine and they're like ball bearing wheels every now and then you just touch it with a bit of consciousness and it keeps


00:48:40 - 00:49:33
going takes very little consciousness to keep this whole act going you're involved in now you are thinking you have to be full-time behind it but you don't like your heart's going pretty much without you thinking about it making it beat and it's that same level it can get to the point where your thoughts are thinking without you making them think and the whole thing goes on automatic it all goes on base brain it's like when you drive a car for most of you now you don't sit thinking now i'll press on


00:49:06 - 00:50:04
the brake now i'll press on the accelerator now i must compute the centrifugal and centripetal force of the next curve so i will make sure it's all happening and all the time you're busy talking making love smoking a joint looking out the window talking about holy books listening to rock and roll music whatever it is you do all the time this inc you're driving a monster 70 miles an hour making these incredibly complex decisions well ultimately your whole life and when you you're around a person like maharaji


00:49:36 - 00:50:50
you see that at that level it's all on automatic and what happens is often i can feel when i'm on s'more on automatic that what you when you come up to me what you present in your vibratory rate in your projection of who you think you are and who you think i am is what elicits what comes out of me it's all an automatic thing it doesn't have anything to do with somebody in here doing it well if it has nothing to do with anybody inside that's doing it is the guru just your karma


00:50:17 - 00:51:49
just your projection is there such a thing as grace guru's grace is it whimsy when you are on the devotional path and you are around the guru you often feel that it's grace and that he is he can do it or not and you're saying oh maharaji do it for me look how pure i am do it for me please but then you understand the laws of karma the other day i talked about the reality sandwich to even begin to understand the guru you must understand first of all that whoever is whatever it is that is manifesting through that being


00:51:19 - 00:52:32
is a outside of time and be above law he's on the other side of karma for it's actually the one that manifests through the siddhiloka into forms when i was with maharaji one day i couldn't help asking this question i was just being bugged to the wall by it with my mind and i said to maharaji aren't karma and grace the same thing that was as close as i could get into asking the question maharaji's answer was that's not a question i'll answer in public that was all you ever said


00:52:09 - 00:53:16
so i concluded well i hit a very critical spot but all the rest of these people they're all different kinds of devotees and he doesn't want to upset their apple cart because they think it's grace well i know it's karma you understand what i'm saying i know it's law and that he's just a function of the law just like everything else is so it's no big deal so you know it's silly the whole game is silly and he just doesn't want to blow it here he'll tell me later that i was right


00:52:45 - 00:54:01
so i went around for years telling everybody carm and grace are the same thing but now i'm not at all sure about that the closest i could come to cons the way i could say it in the moment is that um beings that are outside of the law that have chosen to manifest on earth take form the only motivation they do it for since they have no more personal karma they do it in order because of collective karma because of your suffering not theirs and you're even meeting them or reading about them or knowing about them


00:53:34 - 00:54:40
is the way in which they are manifesting to relieve your suffering you won't even notice them until you are ready to awaken or if you notice them you will notice them in a trivial sense like the army will stop in front of the temple in india the ashram the temple and uh the army trucks will stop and 200 men will get out of the army trucks which you wouldn't see in america with the lieutenants and the colonels and all and they all go into the temple take off their shoes go up touch maharaji's feet get his blessing


00:54:10 - 00:55:19
go back get in the army trucks and go on to war okay now most of them are merely involved in a ritual which is it's a tradition to have the darshan of any saint you find in the area making pilgrimages it they're not expecting much to happen they're not particularly awakened they're just going through a thing it's a ritual it's like when you eat the communion the uh the uh consecrated wafer for some people they are eating the flesh of christ and for others they're eating a rather uh


00:54:44 - 00:55:59
papery wafer for most of the beings that come around such a being there is no business and the guru does nothing he's merely a form that just keeps manifesting doing its thing but there is some kind of contract or contact or activating process that is made when you reach towards god when you reach towards freedom when you it's like they said in the buddha every night the buddha would sit in meditation and somewhere between i don't know two and three or three and four or four and five


00:55:23 - 00:56:37
he would look out over all of the realms all of the buddha fields not just this plane but all the planes to see who was ready and that person the beings that were ready he would reach he would send meta or he would he would do something okay now what is that something that something is a speeding up the only thing that i can figure out that a guru does is change the time dimension of the whole game because you are coming back to god no matter how long it takes and because the guru isn't in time the


00:56:01 - 00:57:11
guru doesn't care it's only you that care because you're the one that's stuck in time you're the one that's suffering the guru isn't suffering so when you reach out and start to go back that reaching out is what draws it says the pure heart of a devotee is what draws the guru's grace the grace isn't given arbitrarily the guru's not just walking down the street saying i'll give grace to that one and not to that one because i like the color of his hair it isn't that game at all


00:56:38 - 00:57:59
you're the catalyst that activates the fact that that guru that presence speeds up your journey see the thing a guru never does is if you are headed towards the world the guru doesn't turn you around and head you towards god guru lets you go in that sense a guru is very very um tough but once you start to awaken and start to reach up the minute you start to reach it's very far out all kinds of beings on the astral planes including yours your guru start to be oriented towards you and the grace starts to pour down and a


00:57:21 - 00:58:28
process starts to speed up and this is all almost um now if your method doesn't involve noticing any of that stuff it doesn't matter they don't don't need to be noticed right like it's not necessary you know who your guru is the only thing that's important is that you guru know who you are and what a guru sees is the pure your pure heart it sees your yearning the truth of your being not any phony things not blankets that are done phony none of that sees the purity of your heart


00:57:57 - 00:59:25
and what grace is then is the speeding up of the return and that is done in response to the purity of your yearning simple as that so in that way since the grace is still to be given by a being who is outside of law it is not the same as karma and at the same moment it is your karma that leads you to urine for god to reach and yearn for god so that it is not totally independent of karma either such a being when such a being exists on earth they are like a mirror in which there is no dust but when you meet them there's nothing


00:58:49 - 00:59:55
they want from you other than your liberation because that's all they're doing here and they're not even attached to when that happens since they don't live in time they are merely an environment you can use in order to get to god they make themselves available as a pure reflector of who you really are and if you look clearly into them as a mirror you see first yourself on the physical plane then you might see yourself on the astral plane and plane after plane after plane until finally when you were looking at


00:59:24 - 01:00:26
them you see yourself looking at yourself looking at yourself and if you keep looking they disappear and you disappear and those are merely planes or locus of consciousness and you will find when you look into someone else's eyes and there is love and trust you will begin to go through the shift in planes of consciousness often it will frighten you because some of them are very ugly and you can't stand you get attached to your ten thousand horrible visions or your ten thousand beautiful vision


00:59:55 - 01:01:35
as the tibetan book of the dead talks about the bardo photo notice it acknowledge it enjoy it and let it go and keep going go beyond the beyond beyond the beyond go beyond anything beyond dualism beyond yourself going beyond trying beyond faith beyond hope beyond belief beyond gurus beyond seekers sramana maharshi says ultimately you realize god guru and self are exactly the same thing and then buddha points out they're all an illusion anyway this podcast is brought to you by the love serve remember foundation


01:00:47 - 01:01:34
and ramdas.org we appreciate you listening and we appreciate all the support that you've given us please continue that support and donate at ramadas.org we can then continue to share what ramdas has been sharing for all of these years thank you