Ram Dass – Ep. 151 – Entering into the One

Raghu Markus introduces a 1993 Omega Institute Q&A where Ram Dass is asked about his own spiritual practice. Ram Dass responds with a very raw, practical inventory: mindfulness, devotional devices, guru relationship, service to the dying, and the constant work with money, sex, power, and fame. The core thread through all questions is his teaching that a human being can live on more than one plane of consciousness at the same time – doing ordinary life while remaining rooted in spacious awareness, love, and timeless relationship with those who have died.

• Raghu frames the talk around practice, grief, shifting states of awareness, and the dark night of the soul.Ram Dass defines his main practices:
• metaphysical play – experimenting with different planes of reality
• mindfulness and centering devices (mala, mantra, narrative)
• guru kripa – relationship with Maharajji as a living force
• karma yoga – using daily life, power, sex, money as fire of purification
• service to the dying as direct contact with truth
• devotional singing while driving and in everyday momentsStory of noticing anger in a supermarket queue, feeling his mala, hearing the mantra, and the scene turning into lila, a dream.He treats celebrity as purification: people’s projections force him to grow into greater authenticity and love.Deep teaching on relationships after death – love as a unitary space beyond time and form.Explanation of karma and reincarnation as relatively real within the dream, and ultimately seen through when awareness detaches from time.Strong emphasis on dark night of the soul – despair as prerequisite for a deeper relationship with spaciousness.Guidance to a pregnant woman: the greatest gift to a child is the mother’s own inner work and non attachment to role.Reflection on Jewish roots, tikkun olam, and seeing Judaism as a yoga of remembering God in daily life.Closing on methods: different paths are waves on the same ocean of awareness. The key is to commit to a method and let all phenomena, including confusion, be part of the process.

• Practice is not separate from life. Life itself, with all its frictions, is the primary ashram.
• Devices such as beads, mantra, guru image, or breath are not spiritual decorations – they are emergency levers to flip perception from ego-drama to lila.
• Love-based relationships with those who have died do not end. When grief is fully lived, one discovers the quality of presence and love that was always deeper than the form.
• Karma and reincarnation matter only as long as one is identified as a separate somebody. When awareness stands free, they are seen as movements inside the dream.
• Numbness, despair, ego trips, confusion – all are simply states to be met with the same awareness, not treated as special failures.
• The dark night is not a mistake. It strips away immature forms of faith and forces a more direct, unromantic relationship with what is.
• The most powerful teaching on responsibility: the part of you that is awareness is outside time and space and remains untouched by birth and death. That recognition changes how you face dying.
• Lineage and religion are skillful means. Their value lies in how they remind you of God in each moment, not in the outer form.

Raghu’s introduction orients the listener to a central Ram Dass theme: multiple planes of consciousness operating simultaneously. There is the ordinary functional self navigating work, family, grief, and challenges, and at the same time there is a deeper plane – spacious awareness, heart center, connection to the divine. Practice is not about escaping the first plane but learning to inhabit both.

When Ram Dass lists his practices, he immediately dissolves any fantasy of an exotic secret. Metaphysical play is simply the creative use of perception: treating situations as a theater in which he can shift vantage points. The mala and mantra are pattern-interrupters; they snap him out of identification with irritation, fear, or self-importance. Guru kripa is not dependency on a physical man; it is surrender to a field of love and wisdom that shows up through people, events, and even his own projections.

He touches repeatedly the topic you are tracking in your broader work: death before death. Working with people who are dying exposes him to a field where pretenses fall away. Presence becomes unbearably honest. He experiences this as grace, as a direct immersion in truth. In relationships after death, he maps exactly the movement you describe in your own life: from attachment to form, to holding stories and photos, to resting with qualities, then presence, then oneness, until the differentiation between “him” and “me” collapses.

On karma and reincarnation, Ram Dass refuses to cling to metaphysics. For the one who believes they are a separate somebody, karma and reincarnation are entirely real. For awareness, they are patterns inside an ongoing, timeless process. This double register is key for your Quantum Leadership and Quantum Sexuality framings: relative truth for the personality, absolute truth for awareness.

The dark night section is crucial. When intuition seems to fail, when life collapses, when faith breaks, he reframes it as higher teaching. Whatever shakes was shakable. What remains is what cannot be shaken. He uses the Swami Ramdas story about thanking God for the mosquitoes as a practical example of flipping suffering into devotion.

The thread on Judaism shows his respect for embodied, this-world spirituality. He recognizes halachic discipline and ritual as a sophisticated system to remember God moment to moment – essentially a karma yoga of family, money, community, and justice.

Finally, his comments on multiple methods mirror your own integrative approach. Vipassana, bhakti, Sufi practice, psychological work – all are waves in the same ocean. The mature move is not to hunt for the perfect system, but to fully inhabit whichever method is in front of you, while seeing all phenomena as process.

This Q&A is less about techniques and more about posture. Ram Dass models a life where everything is folded into practice: grocery lines, celebrity projections, grief, numbness, parenting, cultural identity, and dying. The unifying principle is living on more than one plane at once – honoring the relative drama while staying rooted in the spacious awareness that has no problem.

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[Music] this is Ramdas here and now I'm Raghu Marcus your host and today we have another wonderful offering from ROM das but first I want to tout somebody I respect very very highly her name is Sally Kempton and she's doing and this is for 1440 dot-org our wonderful partner and Sally is doing a workshop a weekend it's in early October so plenty of time still to to get over to 1440 which is near Santa Cruz in this beautiful campus and Sally is going to be working with people as she's a an


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excellent meditation teacher and working on the inner heart and bringing that out that which connects us to the universe the inner heart so yeah check go to 1440 dot org and check out all of the different offerings that they have wonderful workshops galore so please go there and at the same time we as many of you know our film becoming nobody calm which traces the arc of Ramdas is life and teachings and it's really a primer as well on how to deal with that somebody that we create through our


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identity and roles and is very difficult can cause us a lot of difficulties on a day to day basis a lot of suffering and this is a ROM d'assas wonderful take or perspective how he can help us move into a perspective that is not caught in this somebody Ness and then we can find out what he means by a nobody Ness in the movie also there's some wonderful wonderful footage of him around death and how we deal with that in this culture and so on it's a it's a I mean obviously I as as you all know as well


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was a co-producer of the movie and the directors de Mikado and it it's been a real pleasure to see this movie it just came out this past weekend as I'm doing it which is the beginning of September doing this podcast and it's going to be running through the fall in many different places across the country and you go to be coming nobody dot-com and you'll see a you can link to find a theatre and you can see where it might be playing near you if it is not it may come a little bit later so you got to


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keep checking back put your email address in there and you'll get notifications and also it will be able it will be able to we will be able to get with anybody who would like to show it in their community and that's when you sign up to the email list you you will see a little check box are you interested in bringing it to your community and then people will be in touch with you so very proud of this movie and it's getting a lot of great publicity and at the same time people are coming out to see it and we'd love


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for you not only to come out and see it but to help get the word out about it okay down to the talk so this is a talk from Oh 1993 July at Omega in Rhinebeck New York and it's a it's a Q&A that we pulled and it's got a lot of different really fascinating subjects that people asked Iram das about the first one is as asking wrong does what practice that he what do you do what is your practice so aside from what everyone would consider the huge the usual mean mindfulness using devices like malas so mindfulness


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including meditation and centering devices karma yoga so whatever you do that is part of your the food that helps you to transform the day-to-day vicissitudes shall we say karma yoga and then of course working with attachments sitting with teachers but the one that caught my eye he talked about metaphysical play playing with planes of reality with consciousness and now Ram Dass talks a lot these days about and in this movie I just mentioned by the way that we all can live on more than one plane of consciousness at the same time


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ok we can do the thing that we need to do day to day operating from that eye that we are so very used to which is a you know a major somebody but at the same time we can have this other space that is the obvious connection that we have to the divine however which way you want however the divine manifests for each one of us it's different words and could be a different mystic tradition but there is another plane that we are operating on that we part of the spiritual path is to allow that who we


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are beneath the eye and the ego and the story we tell ourselves and that can be that awareness of that other plane of that shall we say true or self that can operate at the same time as this other plane which is what our normal waking consciousness is it's how we operate in the world so I love what he says metaphysical play so you're kind of playing with all these different planes of reality and allowing for them to coexist it's really quite great a great practice he talks about relationships and most


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specifically relationships with people who we have lost and have gone beyond the body and he talks about a unit of space that is beyond time and space you know because we're so addicted to form and when that form dies of course we have tremendous grief and loss but here's again this this thing of playing with different planes of consciousness because yes there's a plane of consciousness of loss and grief but at the same time we can experience the love that we had for that individual is


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untouched by this it's untouched by loss it's it's the it's a relationship that we start to realize and that's why it is it is really important to live on more and more more than one plane of consciousness at the same time because there that relationship we have with that person touches love an eternal love and we can always be in sync with those people we have lost through just going very deep within ourselves into that as we mentioned before are more true self where that love is beyond form now all


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of this is very difficult but it's our work it's our work and so that's what the the first question was all about what what are the different practices that Ramdas does and you know practice makes perfect if perfect at least it allows us to to move into more of an awareness and Ramadan stocks here also about awareness being beyond time and space there's a question around awareness and it's funny I was doing a podcast with my friend Duncan Trussell just yesterday we go on each


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other's podcast mind of course many of you know I do mind rolling and have Duncan and many other kinds of people like him teachers and all of my Buddhist friends and so many different people it's a pleasure to do and anyhow I was doing something with him just yesterday and we were talking about spaciousness and awareness and being and we're also talking about different planes of consciousness and I said look you can instantly change your state I said let's do it right now and I said okay let's


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take three deep breaths right into the center of our chests and we did it we can do it right now just take three big breaths in and out you can even put your finger in the center of your chest as you breathe in and out and one more and just feel your consciousness going into that place in the center of your chest and maybe a little bit of warmth will happen there a little bit of a buzz a little bit of feeling open a little different and you just let that kind of spread through that whole region and


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then you find yourself in a much more not just spacious but spacious awareness and that awareness has no judgment that's it has no clinging it has no desire it just is so we can move into that space anytime we want it's just intention so some wonderful things from Rome to us around this and it talks about the relation between dualistic practice and non dual but what really my takeaway from this talk he talks about like we're in the world and then some stuff happens that's pretty


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negative everything gets taken away say and our lives kind of turn to [ __ ] and you lose your faith and then you get despair and then that dark night of the soul just overwhelms us you know that Saint John talks about the dark night of the soul and everything seems so black and dark but then here's a little bit you give yourself a little bit of an uplevel and that up level is that this Dark Knight is a prerequisite to be in relationship with the spaciousness of what is and that's I'm identifying that with that


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little meditative exercise breathing into the center of the chest where you start to it what I call to identify with the truer part of ourselves but it's identifying with that the spaciousness of what is is what Ramdas calls it you take that negative experience and you flip it around and the example he gives is somebody I love he says he talks about an example that comes from a man a saint in India who left in the late 50s early 60s and his name is Swami Ramdas he said that's the real Swami Swami


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Ramdas so and it example he gives is Swami Rama das goes to an ashram to to get into you know ask for a room to sleep and be fed and so on but unfortunately he got there after the gate was closed so he had to stay outside the gate on the ground and sleep on the ground and of course in this particular instance it must have been summer and there was a lot of mosquitoes they were biting him up and instead of what most of us would do would be to curse ourselves to death and find where is the mosquito repellent and my


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mosquito net tent I can't stay here for one more second and of course that's kind of our knee jerk place that we go Swami Rhonda says he looks up or within rather and says thank you so much wrong for these mosquitoes that are keeping me awake so I can remember you right that's his flip that's his that's where he goes food for thought huh what else is in this thing so much material it's amazing oh yeah there's stuff around people asking about being a celebrity he talks


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about it being a purification exercise and then there's a neat thing around Jewish lineage which I thought was really interest interesting because that's where my lineage is and my heritage is and many of us who were in front of neem karoli baba in the early day certainly Rahm das me Krishna Das and others and so somebody asked him about this and he said what he gets is is the idea of the one behind the many right and the love of learning which probably is a major reason many of us started studying you know Eastern


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mysticism and a deep feeling for suffering so that's kind of cool stuff too so that's this is a wonderful Q&A from Omega from 93 and it's chock-full of different questions and ideas and responses from around us so it's very great all right well that's it this is Ramdas here and now and go to be here now network.com and you'll find the here now podcast you'll find my mind rolling podcast you'll find jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein and Krishna Das and Lama Sri doesn't on and

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on and on all right and we'll see you next week she would like to know what spiritual practices I practice me him well part of it I've just described to you part of it is metaphysical play it's playing with planes of and playing with consciousness part of it is the mindfulness things that in terms of holding an awareness of moment to moment phenomena and as I get lost into the phenomena and lose my mindfulness then there are devices in me that take over that bring me back into it narrative like this as a device is the


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technique the beads doing a mantra it's a device like I can be standing in a supermarket at the checkout line this is my usual example at the checkout line and there is a person three people up from me it's late in the day and I'm tired person up in front has a huge grocery and it all gets through and they give this total the clerk gives the total and then this person starts to fill out a check now he fill out a check but fill out the other part of the check to you know the the check part you know


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the record part and I am like you know how you turn into something else and at that moment I feel in my finger the beads and I hear ROM ROM and the whole thing turns into a dream it turns into Leela into play and boy that me getting angry is so funny it's like wow I caught myself again taking it as real I play games with my guru because my basic method is guru Kripa or grace of the girl that strange looking gentleman up there and he's got his foot up down there yeah and he and I sort of play


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hide and seek all the time he keeps coming to me as people like I'll bet Ramdas won't see me in this one see and I think I'm meeting you I don't realize you're maharaj e and drag let's come to test me about my practice thing but now I see who you are you can't fool me I know who you think why that's your problem I know who you are you see that's part of my practice you here in my practice is a weave of life this is my practice I mean it's very hard not to get caught in an ego


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trip about this I mean will you love me am I good do I know anything is it adequate is you will the answer please you and you know all that stuff and it's interesting just to work with that it's like a fire it's like a fire of purification so what I often find are the things that are fiery for me I tend to go towards to work with rather than playing safe you can feel the pull for freedom is stronger than opposed to safety for the ego let the pole to get free leads you to the edge of things so


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working with the issues that are on my edge all the time power sex money things like that just a common variety and my guru said in 1973 Rahm does give up sex and money and you'll know God but what does he know I think something was lost in the translation I think he really I think it was translated by a righteous jerk you know so I'm working at it and what I realized he didn't mean give up sex and money he meant give up your attachment to sex and money so I work with it I mean this is the play I have of life you


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know and I used to count how soon I'd get enlightened and I stopped counting because why spend my time with the future this is it and I'm just getting as close to my truth as I know how to get every minute that I can and I have people around me busting me all the time when I don't I mean sweet guy who sings beautiful songs to God he's my colleague we work together and many many different and surprises boy try to get away with anything with him he's big then I'll do things like go and sit with a teacher


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that I that would open me to another method that's very useful and then I bring like teachers here to teach on the staff so I can learn that's part of my practice like working with Danny and Tara about the relation between the psychological and the spiritual and planes of consciousness and the cortex and awareness and all these things these are very profound Yana yoga they using the mind to beat the mind and this is a practice and bringing them here confronts me with these things and forces my work on myself I mean you


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could look at me as an eclectic or you could look at me as a dilettante or I don't know I mean I don't know I find like working with people as they're dying is one of the most profound spiritual practices that I could possibly have it's like being in the presence of truth because the truth of the process of dying and people have nothing to hide and it all opens and there's this incredible opening and we just feel like we've entered into a space of just such presence together often often and I just


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come and I say boy that is grace that was touching the living truth that was touching it that's a spiritual practice songs to Hanuman when I Drive my car you know I'll try the radio but finally even I mean I still love I play the cello and I used to love I love classical music but I'll listen and finally I just want to turn it off and sing to Hanuman single Hanuman Chalisa and I've watched things change over time and I've watched myself be phony holy and then grow into it you know


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grow into where I really do want to sing the Hanuman I just don't think I ought to sing the Hanuman you see the difference it's like sitting down and you want to meditate you don't say okay I'm gonna meditate people say I ought to meditate I'd say don't go out and you know don't meditate promise you you won't meditate for weeks but I want to know you don't want it enough it's that dealing with you question talk about the relationship of keep talked about keeping a relationship with a loved one


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who is no longer living possibilities woman my feeling is that the term relationship short trips what that thing really is that would lead you to ask that question that when you touch somebody in love even for a moment there is a way in which you have come into a unitive space together you are in love you are in the space of love together and that has no time and no space and it has nothing to do with death and what happens is the mind gets so attached to the form through which you touch that place of love that you get in a way


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addicted to the form and if the form dies you feel this incredible grief as if you have lost this this relational this relationship and after some time a person that has grieved openly and honestly and truly with it will in their quiet moments start to experience the existence of that love untouched and it's as if like like maharaja died in 73 and he was the most important thing in my life I mean he had opened my heart he had touched me with unconditional love and it was amazing the sequence I went


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through because first I held on to his pictures and then I held on to the stories about him and I wrote a book about the stories of him and then slowly I started to just be with the qualities of him instead of the historical person and then I started to feel this kind of just presence and this presence started to thrill me and the presence would be outside of me and then inside of me then outside of me than inside of me and I began to lose the differentiation and when Surya das and the meditation says


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may your wisdom mind and mine remain inseparable I started to experience that oneness that is awareness that his love that his presence so in that sense I think that relationships the touch love are eternal when no cuz I'd be a phony I mean he said to me be like Gandhi so I got little glasses but it didn't make me like bland and Gandhi you know I mean it was like you can't phony it you can't imitate it you know I was just hanging out with like his quality of giggle he has a cosmic giggle he laughs he gets


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like that he's very loving he's very silent and deep and bottomless ocean so those qualities so I'm busy and I'm just in the middle of something where I'm very righteous and absolutely right and I hear him giggling I just hear the giggle I feel the cosmic giggle in the air you know like funder or something and I just break up I mean I just see myself is such an absurd poignant entity how can you not love him that's the way I'm time' is that dealing with your question but belief in karma


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and reincarnation well the way I figure about it is if this is real that's real but since this is suspect so is that so if you think you are if you think you existed a separate entity karma and reincarnation are real when you see through you you will see that it was all part of that which you saw through and nothing really happened anyway so where were you gonna go to so it's all like it's all this kind of little dance in time except you aren't in time or a part of you isn't in time or awareness isn't


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in time so it's just the dance of time of karma and reincarnation and that's just like moments flickers eye blinks our lifetimes I mean you could be living lifetimes right now I mean this is a lifetime and this is a lifetime this is a lifetime and they have a lot of similarity do you notice did you carry a lot from one lifetime over to the next one you notice how continuous your sense of yourself is from when you ask the question to now isn't amazing it's like deja vu you see and it's going on and on


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and on and on see and that's what lives are like that's what reincarnation is like they just this bird in which they keep projecting the next the projecting the next projecting the next in this kind of law of dependent origination this kind of just keeps creating itself but in the course of it comes the evolution of awakening of awareness of extra cating identity from that which is in time and as awareness is free then all of reincarnation and karma were part of the dream so I'd say it's real and it's not real


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or it's relatively real I've never had experiences of my reincarnations people have told me they see my reincarnation Zoar you know my MA my guru would say disquieting things like didn't you know Lincoln Jesus you know we're what's going on you know so I don't know I mean I just don't know I don't know this moment is so interesting I don't care that's it that's it I do have a very very profound sense of the [ __ ] of the continuity would be a time term of the existence of


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awareness independent of time and space and that gives me considerable peace and makes the dance of life and death more fascinating I'm fascinated to see what's gonna die you know will I be sorry to leave the world no no and I won't be happy to leave the world either I mean neither I don't really care now I don't really care this is so rich and so beautiful and so graceful and I beginning to love people so much and there is so much suffering and there is so much compassionate heart and the


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whole thing is awash in it reaching for each other and seeing the beauty and the majesty of the process and uh this form is just a part of that dance and it comes and goes I find it fascinating I mean I really you know I I love this you know this my hands are getting that my feet are getting more look like my father's I want to take care of my father when he is 90 you know I look and there's all these veins and wrinkles and spots and it's like it's really a thing of great beauty yeah I


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think it's my hand I'll freak but if I just look at it as an aesthetic experience it's a profound thing you know cause it it is after all just a decaying body what's why why not what's wrong with that so you know I I cherish life but I feel quite ready to die it's true yes how do I see the relation between dualistic practices and non-dualism when I was a teenager and not a great athlete I used to go out on the end of the diving board of the raft at my father's summer home and I


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would stand there to do a back dive I'd stand on the end of the board maybe for 20 30 minutes going up and down saying all right I'm 1 2 3 4 and I would just be because the pain of landing on my back you know and I didn't know whether I would get it over arch it enough and there is a way in which because of the nature of the human incarnation and the the tools that one has is a human being that thinks they are their senses and they're thinking mine dualistic practices are practices of purification


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their practices that lighten a lot of things they extricate you from certain planes that you would deeply stuck at and open you to other planes and what I experienced is that as you move towards the union with the one and get right up to the edge of that between the two and the one which is the ultimate in devotional practice for example it's where you're making love to the beloved and you're just a hair's breadth away from the merging that that's like standing on the edge of the diving board


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and many much of the history of dualistic yoga is that the highest devotees don't want to dive off the board because they are experiencing so much ecstasy of the dualism that will be gone if they enter into non dualism because when you enter into the one there's no one and there's no - when there's no nothing or there's everything or however you want to say it so I see when they say like from my Judaism upbringing Sh'ma Israel I don't know alo hey no I don't know a HUD here o Israel or god


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the lord is one I don't figure it means the Lord is one plus me you know it's the Lord is 1 and this is 1 then 1 is 1 1 isn't 2 1 is 1 and but when you're in 1 it's 0 that's the way I play with it is that dealing with your question oh ok you trust your into it the deepest intuitive wisdom you have and you say what shall I do and it says do this and then you do it and it completely falls apart what do you do then well now what choices do you have I mean what choices do you have at that point it shakes your


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faith then what you can assume there's a higher teaching which I'm trying to do do you think you can try to do something to overcome shaking faith I'm not being a wise guy I'm just going through the exercise with you I'm saying like look at it and say what could I do I mean so my faith shakes whatever that shakes was something that was shakable whatever is true isn't shakable so okay I don't believe in that kind of intuitive voice anymore now what will I do now I got to make another decision


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what will I do I mean you just listen again though I don't know what else doom Aurobindo says you take one step and you fall on your face and you get up and you brush yourself off and you look sheepishly at God and then you take another step and you fall on your face and you get up and he says this is the spiritual journey it's one step it's like those people that do frustrations all the way to you know you feel like you got a bad deal with a used car from a salesman who took you on a ride but


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that salesman wasn't promising you worldly goods and you are talking about worldly things you didn't fall on your face spiritually you just fell on your face worldly ones it's like job I mean everything's taken away it all turns to [ __ ] now what you know when when do you start to go like that or and then you lose your faith and it falls apart and you despair and that despair that dark night is the prerequisite for the next level of being in relationship to the spaciousness of what is so you take it and you take the


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negative experience and you keep flipping it around and you say I mean it's like Swami Rama Das the real one was he was in he came to a temple and it was late at night and the gates were locked in he had a lie out stay outside overnight and the mosquitoes were biting him all night and he said oh thank you ROM for keeping me awake to remember you now most of us would say Jesus with my repellant you know like what am i doing this is terrible it's not and it's interesting just out of flip stuff in


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life flip it say what's my game anyway because you look at people that seemed to be winning everything in life see if you got that and then it led to this and led to that and let and you see them up there and the world and they're in a place where they can't afford to flicker about even questioning it at all they can't question it because they're they're too juiced on the rewards in the worldly system you were saved from that it all fell apart they see the ones that got the car that


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didn't break down that's the lemon that turns out any wisdom from a young woman about to have her first child and how to guide a new infant coming into the world without interfering without interference I would say your work on yourself is the greatest gift you give to your child and that the less you are the less you get caught in the drama underlying that question the more able you will be to be with that other being through the dance of biological dependency and social protection and socialization training


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and so on without trapping that being in their own separateness as long as you are in your own separateness as mother then you see this as child and there's this great image in the devotional literature of Krishna who is an avatar at form who who was born fully conscious and he's born and his mother is rocking him at one point and he opens his mouth and she looks into his mouth and there are the stars and the planets and the universe and she freaks and then it said out of compassion he once again veiled


00:41:00 - 00:42:51
her eyes with Mother Love and it's the beauty of the feeling of the love and the precious protection and also seeing that that's your Dharma to be a mother without being trapped mother Ennis and honor your child without getting lost in the storyline so that the two of you can just share awareness through the whole process that's a gift yeah yeah if I enjoy being a celebrity there was one image that I was in I was lecturing in Miami Beach and somehow the advertising was done something strange and I was walking down


00:41:56 - 00:43:19
the aisle and a number of women who had those kind of bird nest hairdos and they were grabbing at the buttons of my jacket to get a souvenir and I thought I don't think I'm gonna like this I'll tell you there are certain ways in which ROM does this is a good gig it's okay and there are certain ways in which it's it's the fortunate thing is for me is that I am what you'd call a big fish in a little pond that you only have to go about a mile from here and I'm totally


00:42:38 - 00:44:13
irrelevant which is really nice so that I can always get away from myself from from that guy from Ramdas now which is really nice the asset of it is and it's a it's an interesting thing from Assad and a point of view is that the image of this person is somebody who is loving and trustworthy a good person it's a nice karmic image and it's built over many years and because I'm very human it's a constant demand on me to keep growing into this being it's like a purification exercise of the way in


00:43:26 - 00:44:43
which people approach me draws from me those qualities they seek and I often feel like people get from me funny way more than I get from myself because they're the purity of their hearts draws out of me the purity of my being and I really love being trusted and being loved I think it's a wonderful thing I wish it for everybody so and I the kind of celebrity 'no siz n't like Bob Hope type stuff it's it's it's really connected with love I mean the people that I meet in


00:44:05 - 00:45:49
airports or in airplanes or alright there's a great quality of love and I really feel I've gotten you know an incredibly graceful ride this time yeah have I dealt with numbness kind of a deep psychological numbing yes I have and fortunately I have been deep enough into my practices and had enough guidance to see the numbness as merely another experiential state to be worked with in meditation in other words it's like a a comparable statement is I was studying with Joseph Goldstein was a


00:44:57 - 00:46:12
wonderful meditation teacher and I experienced this I was maybe in my tenth day of sitting I experienced this peace that surpasses all understanding you know it was just delicious and I went to Joseph and I said thank you Joseph this is what I've always wanted and it's just so wonderful and I feel so great I just want to thank you I really honor you in it and he said that's absolutely fine now go back and follow your breath see and they have told me the same thing when I feel the numbness or the deadness because


00:45:34 - 00:47:04
experience of any state at all is just another experience and when you sometimes it's so fills the room is these qualities these mental qualities mine states mine states where the hole is like you're in a gray room and it's all gray like a depression a good depression you know it's all gray and somebody says follow your breath and you hear it from within the depression you know and it's hard I mean you know how hard it is to hear and that's where you're trusting your teaches and your


00:46:18 - 00:47:34
methods are very useful you know if everything is illusion why compassion well if everything illusion if everything is illusion compassion is illusion also but as long as everything seems like it's real at all then this compassion and that's real to when things disappear things disappear including anything but compassionate it would be one of the last to go because it is the it's the unity coming into manifestation of form in which it's all still interrelated with one another so


00:47:01 - 00:48:31
that your suffering is the suffering and this heart process is that heart process it's not kindness or pity it's a feeling of it it taking care of itself it relieving its own suffering it's the one compassion is within the one it's the one healing itself or re reorganizing itself into deeper harmony now that's all still dream but within the dream there is compassion and the root of the dream is compassion but at the end of it there's no nothing it's no suffering no compassion so there isn't there isn't or


00:47:43 - 00:49:07
the answer is why not gurus do you need one and if I hadn't met Maharaji I might be free at this very mucky i-i have no idea what that hypothetical how to deal with that hypothetically anal-retentive psychologist with would tenure at Harvard at this point just I would have been a success instead of what I am today I don't know I wouldn't know how to measure that hypothetical one as far as gurus are concerned there are certainly enough examples in history of people that have become free without


00:48:33 - 00:49:59
a physical plane guru somebody that is embodied there are the understanding of the nature of the Guru is a a it's like a doorway into formlessness or a doorway through it's less like the concept like in India my guru kept saying to the Westerners what are you doing here stay home Christ as you grow this is a Hindu saying to you know Christ as you grow what are you doing here and the the concept of Christ I mean when you look at another human being what do you see you get some sensations to your eyes and


00:49:16 - 00:50:30
some conceptual models this is a woman or a man or my guru or something but the consciousness of Christ is does the same thing in terms of its ability to be a symbol of a doorway through to something and can if it's purely connected and awakened something in you which moves your journey it mirrors for you where you're not is one way of saying it but it can happen on the physical plane on the astral plane and ultimately lies Ramana Maharshi said God guru and self are one of the same and many people have


00:49:53 - 00:51:12
found it through just doing the kind of stuff Surya was doing was saying who is aware what's aware of what just going back in and meeting the inner wisdom which is the same thing because when maharaja said something the what had happened was it resonated so with the deepest truth in myself I mean I didn't do it as we already told you but it resonated so deeply in me that was i listening to that inner place or was i listening to if he said something if he if all he represented didn't work inside me I don't think I


00:50:33 - 00:52:52
would have I wouldn't have made that connection so it was some connection between the inner and the outer that happened at that point and I really think a lot of people use the inner to get to the same place I really do sir in the back I am the way the truth and the light well I want the tape recorder turned off so I could publish first I know I certainly not now I I mean yes sure why not I am the truth the way and the light see I always the fun of and I was we may read some Holy stories this week and and I thought I'd


00:51:42 - 00:53:14
try to work with Savitri which is a great story from the Mahabharata perhaps this week but in all these holy books Bibles of different traditions usually they are trying to remind you of the many levels of reality and therefore in the in the in the storyline the question is when you hear the words are you hearing the words of Jesus are you hearing the words of the Christ and if it's written down by a disciple who only sees Jesus but doesn't know the Christ the Christ may say the words of the Christ but it's


00:52:28 - 00:53:51
heard as the words of Jesus and the words of Jesus then are used to persecute other people you don't follow this guy you're you know off with your head or whatever and the Christ is the same thing as Buddha consciousness that's the I am the way I should I mean it's that that and that we all are so in the sense we all are I could write on it you know there was a great moment many years ago when I was I have a brother who's been through a lot of emotional upset and he had a very messianic period


00:53:09 - 00:54:27
which has lasted about 40 years and at one point he was in a hospital and I went to visit him and I just come back from India and I had a beard and I was in a dress and I was barefoot and I had a lot of beads and my brother was in a blue suit with a necktie and he was locked up in a mental hospital and the psychiatrist the psychiatrist wouldn't allow my brother to be seen unless the psychiatrist was present so the three of us were in the room the psychiatrist was in his white coat with his clipboard my


00:53:49 - 00:55:03
brother was in his blue Serge suit and I was in my dress and my beads and my beard and it was a surrealistic moment and my brother and I were trying to assess whether the psychiatrist would ever know he was God and the psychiatrist was having no part of it he was just writing on his clipboard he would not answer into the discussion at all about whether he himself would ever know he was God and so my brother and I were having a very loose that a lovely very far out conversation because my brother's mind is extraordinary he's


00:54:26 - 00:55:44
extraordinary mind and I said so it is a time of the visit to be over he says I don't understand he said look at you look at me and he said it in a minute they're gonna let you and me they're gonna keep locked up he said I I don't understand that and I tried to figure out how to say it to him and I said to him are you Christ and he said yes I said well so am I and he said you don't understand I said that's why they're locking you up the minute you tell somebody they're not


00:55:08 - 00:56:31
Christ and you are watch out but if you see everybody as Christ you're home free you know it's just really when you put other people down they lock you up yes my guru just came in drag again and he said how do you relate your Jewish roots to you a spiritual path well the short form of the story because it's quite a long story and I've got a three-hour tape of a lecture I gave at the University of Judaism in Beverly Hills two years ago called Judaism and spirituality but the short form is that


00:55:57 - 00:57:21
um that I grew up as a social political Jew and with no real spiritual hit from Judaism and after taking drugs and connecting to some spiritual reality at that moment it would have been interesting had I had an entree into Jewish mysticism I would have turned to rabbi nachman - something like that but instead I ended up with the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Gita and the whole eastern trip and knowing that I still had unfinished business somehow to understand what a genetic or what a social cultural historical identity


00:56:39 - 00:58:29
meant what lineage that what that lanes meant and for a long time I answered the question by saying what I got from my Jewish lineage was a feeling that there was one behind the many a love of learning and a deep feeling for suffering I felt that's what I got but when I did this lecture when I got invited to do this lecture I started to delve into Jewish literature and I was approaching it now as a universalist instead of as a fallen Jew trying to figure out where I was I was exploring it as a Universalist to look at it as a


00:57:33 - 00:59:25
set of spiritual practices and I saw the incredible beauty of it as a as a a set of practices to constantly remind you of the presence of the spiritual dimensions of reality and the rituals and I because I had grown up seeing the challah laws as very oppressive patriarchal things and now I saw that if you loved God and you wanted to remember God every minute there was this set of 613 instructions telling you how to do that and I saw that as a very helpful guide at that point so I became I saw the way in which


00:58:30 - 01:00:24
Esso exoteric Judaism had gotten lost into well this is more complicated it's a really hard question for me to answer because Judaism focuses on tikkun olam on the on the making the earth healed into God really and it focuses on community and family and life here and I find that a fascinating yoga that's like Karma Yoga that's it's like Karma Yoga and at one point and I was doing an outline for a book I thought I might do around this topic I just thought I wasn't old enough but I


00:59:25 - 01:00:25
was asking what am i a good Jew somebody called ROM das all this stuff am I good Jew I thought of the different ways you became a good Jew you could live in Israel that's all you have to do because because in the Diaspora you just got to go back to the homeland then the Messiah comes so you covered so if you've done that you've done what you need to do you don't even have to be Jewish you just got to go live there and you've got it covered that's one way then another way


00:59:57 - 01:01:02
is to be a student of the Talmud the Torah and that's certainly a legitimate way to be good Jew then there's a way by being concerned with the community giving charity my father was a good Jew in that sense he didn't study the Talmud but he he was a really good jewel Philanthropies Jewish appeal but I looked at all of them and I looked at what the essence of the game was and the game was to remember and stay in an intimate relationship with God I thought that's what my whole life is about and


01:00:32 - 01:01:48
that's the essence of what it's about so in essence I think I am a very good you even though I got there through Hindu and Buddhist practices do you hear that that's how I play with it okay I'm remembering a moment when I was sitting with Goenka who was a foot pasta teacher and I had been meditating long and hard and I started to get this heat and this incredible of pressure and burning sensation and brilliance of light up in my third eye and I went to him to tell him this and he said it all that's stuff


01:01:10 - 01:02:34
you don't need go out in the garden and hold out your arm and send it down your arm out and then watch it and I want my garden and I did that miss blue light poured out of my fingertips and he treated it like it was a problem I gone to him with pride which is the same situation it's a situation that I had done a lot of hatha yoga and a lot of pranayama and worked very hard to awaken Kundalini and I saw that all of the paths lead to exactly the same place and if your faith in any of the methods is enough you just keep


01:01:52 - 01:03:05
doing the method it will take you there and going back and forth between methods which have different interpretations of phenomena could give you a headache and it takes some I mean like when I go to the pasta course I used to take a picture of Maharaji and I keep it under my pillow which was a no-no and then when nobody was looking I'd sneak it out for a quick bhakti hit see and then I thought what do I want to cheat for I mean when you're doing a method do it and when you're doing it then your guru


01:02:29 - 01:03:32
is nothing but a set of phenomena that are arising in your consciousness and the best thing to do is to not be attached to let it go and yet I love him as much as life itself and so I've learned how when you're doing a method to surrender into that method and trust it because I do understand the way in which at the deepest truth the methods are not in contradiction but they do focus on different parts and so you just do an intuitive process and this is just another part of it the headache the


01:03:00 - 01:04:08
mindfulness the energy all of it is just process just keep on with it I mean it seems like a very dynamic process you're going through and what you may end up is hearing something from your Sufi teacher something from you have a positive teacher and out of it coming into an awareness that just sees all of this Sufi teachers the pasta teachers methods all of it as waves on this ocean of awareness and you just see it including headaches it's all just the phenomena of the universe arising and you just saw


01:03:34 - 01:04:46
there's my confusion there's my wishing it were something there's my hoping my the pasta teacher can save me there's my trusting my Sufi teacher there's my Sufi teachers personality there's my there's that model there goes that model there goes that model here's this headache I mean you just see it as all just a set of phenomena within a process I'm saying it's all process including your indecision are you going back and forth and it doesn't matter which one you do flip a coin and do it


01:04:10 - 01:05:33
you know flip a coin and if it comes up Sufi go be a Sufi and if it comes up for pasta go be of a pasta until something else happens that doesn't satisfy most people it's amazing how this podcast is brought to you by the love serve remember Foundation 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 Ramdas org we can then continue to share what Ramdas has been sharing for all of these years thank you