The Advanced Course - Ram Dass Full Lecture 1993

Further Myth Transitions and Social Observations

The speaker continues to list myths breaking down and emerging:
• Material Acquisition: Temples replaced by shopping malls symbolize a culture obsessed with consumption.
• Voluntary Simplicity: An emerging myth responding to resource limitations advocates living simply, recognizing that accumulation does not guarantee happiness.
• Separation and Protection of Self: Rational minds often serve to protect a sense of separateness rather than promote genuine connection.
• Aging and Social Value: Examples from Indian life stages contrast with Western fear and isolation of elders.
• Separation of Church and State: The assumed balance between institutions based on greed and those based on compassion has failed, as both have proven flawed.
• Ethical Dilemmas in Medicine: The speaker references Dr. Kevorkian to illustrate evolving moral issues around life and death, highlighting societal struggle with these topics.
The speaker reflects on personal anecdotes about aging, such as an experience with a senior citizen train ticket and a talk at a luxury cosmetics event on aging, illustrating the cultural contradictions between acceptance of natural change and commercialized fear of aging.

• Advanced Course: A hypothetical next-level teaching focused on deep experiential insight rather than conceptual explanation.

• Maharaji: Spiritual figure referenced as a model of integration between compassion and awareness.

• Dharma: The path and teachings aimed at ending ignorance and suffering.

• Basic Ignorance: Misidentification with separateness causing suffering.

• Samsara and Nirvana: Represent the unity of form and formless existence.

• Voluntary Simplicity: Lifestyle choice responding to ecological and societal limits.

• Collective Denial: Social phenomenon of ignoring uncomfortable truths to maintain status quo.

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one of the women in this group yesterday said to me are you ever going to give the advaned course or is this all you have to [Music] offer can't but admire that I must say that's good as you can get wish I'd said it I will from now on and so I mumbled all of the usual things I say about why most of the people that come to be with me come to be with me and with the group that I gather and so on I guess I teach at the level that is resonant with Collective Consciousness that's why I do what I


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do but I don't quite believe that seems to me it has to do with love like when artha Frank would sing or people like that the person would play the audience until the audience opened and then the audience created this incredible wave of energy and then the singer sang singer sang the voice of that energy and you can feel that in great rock music I mean in these great rock concerts like a Grateful Dead concert is basically like a religious Church experience for me it's it's an incredible


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experience in which the audience is as much a player as the players are player and everybody realizes it's a group experience that everybody's having together and all the people up front are doing are steering the ship they're not necessarily play on the ship well I asked myself if I was going to give the advanced course what would it be like would I just be silent since I understand that words are a hype that here we are trying to get out of the addiction to our conceptual mind and all


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I'm having to you is concept I'm inviting you to see them the way I see them which are like birds flying through the air and see the concepts from a place of absolute emptiness words are just the stuff they're like the paintbrush to paint canvases and the Zen monk who keeps painting canvases and then throwing them over his shoulder into the river as he's floating Downstream I thought there are a number of things I would do if I were giving an advanced course I wouldn't demand


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linearity of myself because when you talking to yourself you don't have to complete all your thoughts you sort of see where they're going and you go on but when you're talking to other people but are there any other people here I mean are you them or are you us or even if you're us that's not very interesting are you me am I talking to myself if I'm talking to myself I don't have to explain it all am I ever going to get to the point where I assume I am talking to myself or I act as if I were


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or whatever that level that is so you can hear that part of the way in which you and I are dancing together and then I examine the way in which I love other people that would come into my Advanced course because that's the place I'm playing with now because I realized that if I expressed all the love I felt for other people I wouldn't be able to get rid of them and I'm much too smart for that so if I were giving the advanced course I'd be talking only to myself and whether you got it or not


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would be your problem not mine whether you were busy being who you think you are or being ourself if you want to be separate blessings we'll wait it's 100,000 incarnations this is the advanced course see like in the advanced course I'd read things like this quote from the praga paramita all all this fleeting World a star at [Music] dawn a bubble in a [Music] stream a flash of light in a summer Cloud a flickering lamp a phantom a dream all this fleeting World a bubble a dream a phantom if I were giving the advanced


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course this is the place I give it from I give it as fellow connoisseurs and appreciators of the bubbles a shared awareness delighting in the play of the Lord the play of the forms of the universe not so afraid to look at what is because you're afraid you'll melt being made of tougher stuff that you can look at kie and Shiva and their work and you can look at change without freaking because your awareness is not identified with that which changes you and I are living in a culture that is paralyzed by


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fear its Creative Juice is almost totally drained out of it by its fear this fear is the fear of change the fear of the unknown and yet at this moment in history we are in a a moment in which we are like a snake shedding a mythological structure in order to grow a new one recently I made a list of myths that you and I were in the middle of Shifting we are caught between stories and that's the ground for incredible anxiety because who you were was defined by the the myth where you fit in the scheme of


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things just let me run through this list and get a feeling for how it Embraces you many of us grew up with the American dream myth and we saw the GMP rising and Rising before our very eye and every next generation was better off than the last one new moment new myth this generation is not as well off your money doesn't buy as much security and safety and luxury and life and they have more endangered resources to live with that's what we are giving not the Seventh Generation but the Next


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Generation so we have a shifting myth we're still holding on to the old one in each case you'll see how much we hold on to the old one because we don't want to face the new one we are a youth culture our values are in youth our world Mastery Etc however the Baby Boomers will be 50 in [Music] 1996 so not only is that the power realm age of the society but it's just over the edge the Baby Boomers are starting to go out by the cultural values because when you're old if you're a hunt


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in a part of a hunting tribe they just leave you behind if you're part of a gathering tribe they have jobs for you within the social structure you're part of the system you care for the children you're an elder you are the holder of the wisdom of the tribe but the what our culture has done to aging people is fear Panic loss Lo isolation irrelevance irrelevance a kind of a burden to the social system and yet all of us are on that path to Aging in India they have ashrams of stages of life in the first stage you're


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a student and then after about 20 you with family and your job is to work in the world and do very very well very successful in terms of resources and those resources there's a formula for how you use them during that period you use them for your family you use them for children and old people you use them for holy people and then in the third stage of your life your children are grown they take over the business and you start your studies your spiritual studies your pilgrimages things like that alone or


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with a partner or with a community and then comes when you're 60 the son stage when you are free of all structures and the society just says Go baby go society's there to support you because it needs what you have to offer and it's a mature enough Society to recognize this fact that that's the interesting shifting myths of Youth we grew up many of us with the myth that humans were the stewards of nature or humans or nature even worse nature was there for humans stewards at least was a nice


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rationalization copout but the game that you're afraid of is that you are just part of it all you are part of a biotic Community you are part of many many social structures and that's as much your identity as you're being busy being an individual and there's the next myth that's in transition I remember participating in the support of a number of myths that are now dysfunctional by the way I thought the atom splitting the atom was great I was wrong but I thought that individualism was wonderful because it


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was Liberation from social institutions and it was empowering the individual to think for themselves and feel for themselves and that's what the 60s seemed to be in large part about feeling and thinking for yourself so that if you went into a community it was an intentional act on your part to be part of a community it wasn't you weren't locked into system and the 60s were far out in that sense because all of the vertical systems all the vertical power structures turned into Paper Tigers oh they could sting but they were


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still Paper Tigers I mean the image that I love is of all of the hippies surrounding the Pentagon and holding hands and oming to make it rise I mean doesn't it change the image of the Pentagon now not the Pentagon yes the Pentagon oh now it is true only a few people saw it [Laughter] rise but it wasn't the issue of whether you saw it rise they gave Credence to that it was the issue of the symbolic statement that was being made and that break from vertical patriarchal Authority institutions that


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preserved incredible discriminations and oppressions and so on started to crumble Civil Rights sexual Freedom environmental Consciousness women's [Music] movement and anti-vietnam movement about the immorality of economic Wars and once you take Humpty Dumpty apart it's really hard to put Humpty Dumpty back together again no matter how hard George Bush tries or Ronald Reagan or Bob Dole or whoever they all happen to be Republicans but they could be Democrats uh but you can see that creative government


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is that tension by the way between the force of preservation and the force of change and the art is not to get so carried away with change you lose the baby with the bath and not to get so caught in inertia that you miss the opport Unity for survival basically because you don't adapt then there was the myth of material acquisition in which the temples become the shopping malls and you watch thousands of people going through with eyes fixed their whole culture centered around the shopping mall social


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institutions there are the old men counting beads there's the whole structure and it's a social institution that represents some of our highest aspirations and emerging is another myth that is demanded by the limitation of the resources we have available is that voluntary Simplicity is going to in that living simply not collecting stuff is going to be in not just using up resources in order to because you're not under the illusion that's going to make you happy any longer I've told


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about collecting boxes that every time I move I I carry the boxes with me I had rent a truck and these boxes are all my memorabilia and after a while I thought why am I carrying these with me they cost me money I got to put them in storage I never open them they're all the important papers that I can't that I'll want later but why will I want them later that's the assumption that later will be less interesting than now is because now is so interesting I never open the boxes have a


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round that would be a later thing yeah much later baby much later the art is to uh leave no Footprints but all of this is a selection from the vast formless Universe of creating a reality called a news story it creates reality for all of our consciousnesses and it creates the sustaining of a certain kind of value system that is not just and the rational mind is in the service of protecting your separateness first then you can use it for play and Sport and technological advance but it's to make your you more comfortable and feel


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safer in a basically unsafe situation because your separateness is part of that which is changing and when you're when you're it's like trying to stand on sand that's in the ocean where it's all constantly giving way beneath your feet I was in New Haven going to New York and I had to take the Late Night Train where you bought the ticket on the train and so I had just become 60 and the conductor came along and I said um senior citizen please and he immediately gave me a ticket that cost half of what I would


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have paid if I hadn't said that and I said to him don't you want to see any identification and he said no that was a story I didn't tell you before cuz I was puning but now we now value what we really put down before and what our Native American friends have always valued is the intuitive heart mind a deep deep wisdom in people we have gotten fascinated with knowledge and we forgot wisdom so that our Mythic heroes are people like Henry Kissinger we're going from a myth that the separation of the church and the


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state is therefore licensed for the state to be immoral and have no values and lie and cheat and do whatever it needs to do and that reflects the separation between business and church as well that was based on the assumption that the church had the power to balance the system that we'd have some social institutions that would be based on Greed and some social institutions which would be based on compassion I would say both of those things prove false doesn't work system doesn't work


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it's just like doctors who say my job is only to save lives as technology makes it possible to keep a life going longer and longer they have to face the ethical situation Dr kavorkian is just saying hey fellas you can you can deny it as long as you want but this is the way the universe is and you will watch all the laws have to struggle with this and he may go to jail just like Gandhi went to jail just like anybody goes to jail I mean I think he's a creepy guy but at the same moment I think what he's doing is extraordinary


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I wish he'd smile a little more I wish he saw the humor of his own predicament so he could really enjoy it he is enjoying it but he's enjoying it a little bit from somebody somebody's enjoying it instead of nobody enjoying it I work a lot with nobody in my from my own mind and wavy is very helpful to me with his nobody for president campaign because he has all these slogans like nobody can solve our economic problems his best one is nobody cares that's the one I like see to me that's a statement of


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compassion nobody cares see I'd say that in the advanced course oh I went through one that I think is not one that we're in the transition of at the moment but I was passed through the moment when scheduled feeding was in remember that so I could cry my little eyes out and nothing happened and I've been disempowered ever since that's changed we now have demand feeding within reason we had monogamy remember that by 1975 over 50% of the marriages of the people getting married at that point would end in divorce not


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that we're married then would divorce cuz that's people from previous generation we basically now are living in a culture of Serial monogamy now is that bad or good that's your mind that determines that it just is what is do people have any less opportunity to come to God in serial monogamy than in monogamy depends on your spiritual practice if you practice his relationship and you want to use your marriage wow one marriage can take you a long way you can dig a mighty deep well so it's not a a Good and Evil issue


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and you say well is it good for the children well you know I have a number of friends who got divorced and they remarried and all four of the family are really good friends everybody just married for the wrong reasons the first time and they're all doing very well and the kids end up having two households and four parents and I've thought about that and I've experienced jealousy in myself I was stuck with the complete Neurosis of two people you know I couldn't play anybody off against


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anybody you know and they were neurotic just the same way that's why they got married so the fun of having four see I mean I'm just shifting Consciousness a little bit to say let's just stay open to what's happening and find whether we can be peaceful in the process of change rather than in always resisting the change is this too weird no you say no say thank you you reassure me that I can go on because every now and then I look at somebody's face that's going like this and I oh Jesus I gone too far out I


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but I don't care see in the advanced course I don't care it's interesting to have that kind of up on a stage with a microphone and then watch somebody go to sleep about the third row you know and you are talking odd and odd and odd but that that Consciousness has gone somewhere else it's it's not a but that's my problem I mean you're just doing what you do what business is it of me if you want to sleep how do I know that the greatest Spiritual Awakening won't happen in the


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sleep in the space that's so sacred to us all at this moment maybe that's what you need a sleep in a spiritual place what okay how about the myth be fruitful and multiplying seems to have gotten us into a little difficulty I'd say I think that's open for revision by demand popular demand we have a wonderful one called equal opportunity for all that's tasty isn't it you think that's coming into Vogue or going out of Vogue see that depends on whether you are hopeful or


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hopeless trunk piche said a wise thing to me he said stand right in between them because if you cling to hope there's fear you won't get what you expect if you cling to hopelessness you kind of close down the whole possibility it's the same thing in working with people that are dealing with cancer or with AIDS or with any illness that is potentially going to kill them it's living with the presence of death and yet living life fully it's always that balance incredible balance it's having people work to keep


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their Temple healthy and alive without being attached to whether it stays that way and if indeed the whole process is one of leaving their bodies aome and if it's one of regenerating their bodies and having a healthy body to go on in life aome and the attachment to which it is is just your attachment to which it is it's all it is how do you know how do you really know you may have a set of beliefs and that's stuff you're holding on to but that's just stuff you're holding on to


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because you're afraid of jumping with no concept isms are certainly suspect as our myths change communism capitalism nationalism all the isms look like big egos that are crumbling before our very eye like the Berlin Wall we're very suspicious of isms because we saw how Business Without government is piracy saw that in our country and in Russia we saw saw how government without business is tyranny changing myths from the separation of the mind and the body to holistic or the Consciousness


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that our minds and our bodies and our Spirits are all of a piece and that all of our healing processes and all have got to reflect that wisdom because that's now an accepted and a being forced to be accepted wisdom and you don't have to say it's the body not the mind or the body is the most important forget most important anymore these are just interactive processes and you get at them different ways so I said we've gone from individualism to a beginning sense of the common good of the recognition we


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are part of systems it's been in the scientific and philosophical literature I mean it's Bates and it's all these people but that we could collectively I mean if you think of the collective the German Collective Consciousness that dealt with through much denial what was being done to the Jews and others is that different from our Collective denial that allowed us to idolize and place on our altars people like Donald Trump Trump when we knew that the permanent underclass was being created because we could see it


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around us but we were busy denying what we were seeing we had Dynasty and we had Dallas and then we had an increasing number of people who are the ocean that spreads out into the world over that Mexican border and elsewhere of those who haven't and how much denial how much closing of your Compassionate Heart must it take to continue to play the game of King of the mountain what's in it for me and each of us gets the most we can for ourself trickling down of course is the assumption that once we have enough for


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ourselves we will then create ways to share it with everybody out of our bicent or out of Our obligation perhaps that's another level of kind and it's why Shuck's involvement with social Venture Network his creation of it is an absolutely Exquisite moment of Shifting mythology that Ben and Jerry and Anita Rod Wayne Selby from calary fund and all these wonderful people who are playing with the edge of saying business has a social responsibility for the common good wait until television gets that


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kind of group going we're shifting myths from thinking that we were educated for facts to the recognition that we are educated regarding process not knowledge way to find it like computers you don't have to know it anymore you just have to know where to find it but also we are beginning to recognize the value of how our mind works of studying how our mind works which is meditation because it's sneaking into the culture through stress reduction basically and stress is a product of the fear that


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exists in an unstable situation in which everybody in the situation is caught in their own separateness and has lost the balance that they are part of systems we had a myth that you chose your career when you were 12 14 16 and then you saw it through it is now true that the present person in our society should expect to have five career changes in a lifetime so retraining is no longer something for losers it's something for winners it's how quickly you get retrained for your next round because you realize you're in


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an economy that's like a floating crap game and you just got to stay very loose as to how you're going to play it I think we've we're in an interesting transition period because of the bomb from the myth that war is a solution a political solution to recognizing that it is not that diplomacy is the only strategy and that unless you have a win-win situation nobody wins we're seeing how when some somebody wins somebody loses and when somebody loses there they are the croats the


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serbs and the bosnians everybody feels they lost and now they're going to win but really in history there can be no winners and losers because we're all in it together but notice how little compassion there is across those borders between the Muslims and the Christians the Jews and the Arabs palestin the inner city and the suburbs we had an interesting myth that I had in my history books about 1492 and the great benefit of Columbus discovering America I think we have matured with our Mythic


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structures I now feel that we are looking for a way to make an apology for the fact that we built our system on genocide and we are as culpable as Hitler ever was for what we have done as a people and feel how deep the justifications were in the culture John Wayne this is an older one but we had the myth that we were a a moral force in the world and then we had the Vietnam War and we realized how fallible our systems were that our fallible meaning that we were caught in Acts that we're not harmonious


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with our deepest wisdom that's the pain of it the pain for each of you is to be living your life in a way that is not harmonious with your deepest wisdom and I would say that's my pain and that ever since 1961 when I took mushrooms ever since that moment I have recognized that I have a deep deep wisdom a connection to the universe that is at home and true and at one and that my separateness is just my separateness and that the systems I am part of are fallible systems and they are dissonant from the


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way my heart says my heart says there is Justice my heart says there is compassion because that is what my heart is it's a just and compassionate entity and so is yours and we armor them with rationalization to deal with the fact that we are acting in ways that are not just and they are not compassionate and I figure my whole life has been some an attempt to work with the dissonance and the attempt to integrate my inner truth with the way I live and it's very very fascinating as a journey fascinating as a


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journey myths just a few more I won't bore you with the whole list I'm going to write a book about it because it's so good well we're still in the one about rich and famous of who gets in People magazine but Fame is becoming more trivial as time goes on because you see how it's bought used and how how brief it is and how irrelevant it is to the pain of the person bearing it we've gone through mths of the shift of birth coming out of the closet that was my generation now there is death


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coming out of the closet and being recognized as part of life part of the life process and not as some terrible faulty error that has occurred I love that one my God outrageous we have the myth the religious institutions provide the ethical base well depends on what you call the religious institutions and there are new religions occurring all the time like the appreciation and honoring of Mother Earth is an emerging religious institution that has a mark very strong moral code that leads you to collect


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your bottles and papers and Etc that's also motivated by your fear and your rationalization that you're doing good well it's better than nothing but it's not much in terms of the way your lifestyle I mean My Lifestyle I am not living in harmony with what I know and there's a way in which that's a drag it's not a big drag you know it's not a drag I may ever Rectify but it is a drag I'm aware of that dissonance so we are living in times of in interesting times remember the


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Chinese curse may you live in an interesting time the question is whether it's a curse or a blessing see it's a curse if you're afraid of change it's a blessing if you can use change to Free Yourself from your identification with that which changes see I really see it as a blessing I mean I look at this body which is now decaying at a deliciously interesting rate I mean you can almost notice it from day to day you know and there's all these big veins and wrinkles and little marks and spots


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and I mean this is beauty if I look at it as a beautiful old hand if I impose upon that all of my social structures conscious my conceptual things but that's my hand that means I am wrinkles and blood vessels and look at how much I Valu the absence of wrinkles and blood vessels am I ready for this is there going to be anxiety now is this less beautiful I have this just this delicious story that's such fun to tell it's a little irreverent but what the hell I was invited to give a lecture in


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Beverly Hills at saaks Fifth Avenue for La prair Cosmetics now now La Prairie Cosmetics is a an old firm which has a sanor aquarium sort of for health Rejuvenation in Switzerland and now has a lot of Products that come out that are anti-aging creams and such and they were marketing a new anti-aging cream and I the previous year had been a keynote speaker at a conference in New York on Aging so whether it came out of a hat or whatever they invited me to speak to add a little tone to the event so it wouldn't just be


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money so they invited me to speak for 15 minutes about the wisdom of Aging so um I probably would have passed it up except they were offering $122,000 it was actually $112,000 for two gigs 15 minutes each one was at IM magnon and one was at sax but IM magnon didn't have it so I was just left but they had made the contract so I got the 12,000 for 15 minutes so in my more righteous images of myself I thought to myself that's a lot of eyeballs that could be cured through SAA $122,000 and can I make a moral


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statement in which I'm supporting law Prairie so that all those people could see again I mean it's interesting ethical dilemma so then I thought look what does it matter where you teach you teach where the situation presents itself my teachings are my teachings I'm not going to I'm not tailoring the teachings for who I'm teaching I'm going to teach my truth so why not teach I mean they're as deprived as if I go to Guatemala to the you know aren't people in saxs Fifth Avenue


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deprived depends on what you know what value you so I agreed to do it and I got a suit and a tie and I did my thing and and I went there I don't care what costume what Elder to Me costume up for the ball [Laughter] right so I was put it a little these were all there were little tables of maybe 10 or 12 people and there was a uh person from La Prairie at each one to help each other each person with individual consultation about how to keep their skin young and then I was at the table with the people that were going to be


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presenters there were three of us there was the vice president of La Prairie and then there was a nutritional skin expert so she um was telling us what she was going to do in her demonstration cuz what she does is she stands up and says you can all do your own test she says take your skin and pinch it and hold it for five seconds and then you let it go and you see how fast it goes back okay so I did mine we all did put our hands in the middle table I did mine and the 5 Seconds were over and mine


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didn't go back in fact it would it's still there I mean it would be there unless I go like this and that's what wrinkles are they're you know their youth that didn't go back you know so it came my turn to speak and I stood up and I looked out at my audience uh they were serving salad it was a luncheon so what I saw were a number of people with mouths full of lettuce looking up at me with a certain kind of opaque look and what it reminded me of was when you go out in a field and there's a group of


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cows and you sort of disturb them at their buiness and they look up and they're see I told you that's a little irreverent because there are too you know I mean I could be in the audience too of that situation by some bizarre karmic twist so the question is is change beautiful is what changes part of the beauty of Nature and are you part of the beauty of Nature and can you allow the changes and Delight in them and look for the wisdom inherent in each change rather than resisting it can you work to preserve your body


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and at the same time be ready to let it go Rus says the most remarkable thing is to be able to hold death and continue to live to be able to be at peace with the way of things by cultivating the part of yourself that isn't you anymore but is which has nothing to do with time and space birth and death coming and going loss and gain Fame and shame Pleasure and Pain which ones you ready for that would be in the advanced course I mean the Third patriarch will be in the advanced course but as a process of deeper study the one that


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starts the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences I mean you want the advanced course or do you want the beginning course no I'm just telling you what I would teach if I were teaching the advanced course I you're not ready I know that what I said was aging and death are part of the natural way of things and that if you are buying Cosmetics out of fear then it is not going to give you happiness if you are buying them out of Celebration did they pay for it did they pay for it


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I guess so I don't know I'm not in the business in no they never invited me back no I think the 12,000 for 15 minutes stuck in somebody's craw it's interesting for me to just reflect as to where one teaches or what one does with one's energy just like you have to decide same thing or not decide or listen to hear how it comes out I mean it might be that one person in that group is an under my M just waiting living in Los Angeles I don't really know that it matters it's all in the


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metaphor I mean if the truth is in all of us if you can resonate that truth everybody has the potential of hearing that's why I think that when maharaji wanted to punish me he'd say ramdas is very clever when he wanted to reward me he'd say he's so simple I realize how clever I am that's those prefrontal low cities those Powers but I don't know whether I said it to all of you I said it to some of you what maharaji said about Powers very concisely cidies are these Powers these Powers you develop on the


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spiritual path powers of clarity of knowing of being able to do something about something he said cities are pig marah Raji was known at some time in his life as latrine Baba that's the lineage you're learning from [Laughter] so speaking of that somebody gave me this Xerox that says if you are unhappy once upon a time there was a non-conforming sparrow who decided not to fly south for the winter however soon the weather turned so cold that he reluctantly started to fly south in a short time ice began to form on his


00:49:48 - 00:51:27
wings and he fell to Earth in a barnyard almost frozen cow passed by and crap on the Little Sparrow the sparrow thought it was the end but the manure warmed him and defrosted his wings warm and happy able to breathe he started to sing just then a large cat came by and hearing the chirping investigated The Sounds the cat cleared away the manure found the chirping bird and promptly ate him the moral of this story one the three morals everyone who shits on you is not necessarily your [Music] enemy number two everyone who gets you


00:50:40 - 00:52:13
out of the is not necessarily your [Music] [Laughter] friend and number three if you're warm and happy in a pile of keep your mouth shut so partly this decaying body and all of this and the ecological stuff and the trees and the this and the that and the violence and all it's a pile of now are you warm and happy it's interesting as to whether you can be happy and then act or you will only can only act in order to sometime be happy to finally be happy like I can't be happy unless all the loggers starve to


00:51:35 - 00:52:54
death I put it in terms you won't like of course we all understand what that that debate is about I won't be happy until the social systems of which I'm a part are just now the question is is my lack of happiness in the process process a help to the realization of the goal in other words if I would like to live in a happy world maybe what I could contribute is happiness but if I set the condition I can only be happy if I get a happy world I mean I go to truth r i mean peace rallies and I hope there'll be truth


00:52:16 - 00:53:50
rallies sometime but there right [Music] now there are now peace rallies and there are such angry people at them I can't believe it got to have peace now yeah I don't want to know you man I'm going putting up my walls I'm getting my AK my Uzi I'm of the school that if this pile of isn't good enough I'm in trouble I'm in deep and can it be good enough and I can also so work like hell to turn it into what I see as possible a just and compassionate world are those incompatible if you saw it as perfect


00:53:07 - 00:54:15
would you then not do anything what would the Perfection include would it include the truth of your heart the truth of your heart is that when somebody hurts you hurt because we're all us it's interesting how you deal with suffering and that way in which you distinguish between your own suffering and somebody else's suffering so you may get to the point in your spiritual work while where you don't invite suffering when it comes along you work with it because the only reason you're


00:53:42 - 00:54:54
suffering is because your mind has attractions and aversions otherwise it's just change the value imposition has to do with the attachments of mind but if somebody saysi want to be free of suffering then I've got to help them be free of what they experience as their suffering even though I know that when they get free of that suffering they're going to have another suffering and what I would love to be doing is getting free of the source of the issue of suffering itself the basic ignorance which is what the Dharma is


00:54:19 - 00:55:40
about the Dharma is designed to get rid of the basic ignorance from which suffering arises like a seed from which a plant comes up and it's the ignorance basically of separateness not that separateness isn't part of the dance but our identification with our separateness that's where the source of the suffering is sorry next lifetime you'll understand it to me the issue is one of balance the one of balance where the sense of separateness and the basic identity with all that is are perfectly equally balanced in


00:55:11 - 00:56:20
yourself that you're clinging to neither of them but you're celebrating both of them it's what they talk about as samsara and Nirvana are one form and formless are one you are formless and you are form we seem to be relating to each other as forms but basically this isn't relational at all there's only one of it it's just you're so attracted to the fascination of the separateness you lose the balance with the way in which it isn't separate and you don't even hear


00:55:45 - 00:56:57
it it becomes noise in the system the cause of suffering is the clinging of mind and the cling clinging and the suffering that's what you do for yourself what you do for somebody else is you help them get rid of the suffering but how you help them get rid of the suffering can get rid of the suffering just at the plane of like food for a hungry belly or the way it is given or the way it is shared or who you are as you offer the food can be also getting rid of the basic ignorance along with the food but you must be free of


00:56:22 - 00:57:39
the basic ignorance to be able to transmit that message and that's why ultimately you work on yourself so that every human relationship you're in whether it's child or wife or or a competitor or enemy or everything is not a violent one because basically it is one that is rooted in the Oneness that Embraces both beings the art is to be one and dance is two the art is to Delight in the dance so you you are the you are the participant and I am the lecturer and you are the lecturer and I am the


00:57:00 - 00:58:07
participant and we are both lecturer and participant and we're all learning this together that's what the advanced course would be I mean the whole trip of me as somebody who knows and you as somebody who doesn't is a very very violent copout and it's your problem not mine cuz I don't have that image of me in relation to you if you want to have it enjoy it it's beautiful and it's fine and I will bless you but it's not a very interesting path it's a path based on


00:57:34 - 00:59:03
Mula it's a path based on the fact that you aren't enough and what's fun is to meet Menches in life beings who say I am I am affirmation of their own existence and that can be done from as as wise a level as you are every relationship every single one same thing every relationship either does violence it misses the mark it sins meaning missing the mark it misses the mark because it reinforces separateness the whole game that we wrote about in how can I help in compassion and action is how getting


00:58:19 - 00:59:45
caught in the helping professions in doing good the prison of being a helper reinforces is the separateness of the helper and the helps and it isolates the very person you are trying to reassure because you're so busy being nurse doctor healer the the parent something I think the game is to Bear the unbearable with a giggle with your heartbreaking and then do what you do I think you should trust your inner wisdom that out of of you would come actions not out of ought or should but out of the essence of what


00:59:04 - 01:00:11
is if you distrust The Compassion of your heart then you have to get caught in the ODS and shoulds if you don't distrust it you just have to surrender into it and it will take care of it what needs to be taken care of the statement in the Dow one does nothing and nothing is left undone meaning you're getting very tired being somebody doing something and there's a whole other way of being in which you are the thing itself and whatever happens happens it's the compassion that arises out of


00:59:39 - 01:01:04
emptiness it's the discriminating wisdom did you see when you stop trying so hard to be good to be right to be just to be compassionate I mean more violence is done in the name of being compassionate basically everybody thinks they're good in one way or another very few people would think they're evil to live with the uncertainty to live with not knowing with knowing you are living at the edge of the mystery all the time you and I don't really know about death somebody handed me another I'm


01:00:24 - 01:01:37
going to live on people's handouts faith faith is when you have come to the edge of all the light you know and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown faith is knowing one of two things will happen there will be something solid to stand on or you will be taught how to fly under that is a fortune cookie cartoon that says which the fellow's asking the waiter may I have another fortune cookie I'd like a second to opinion see I live with the mystery and with Incredible Faith because I have


01:01:07 - 01:02:19
been in the presence of people like maharaji and I have come to trust the way in which they are in the universe I would even say are the universe but I'll say are in the universe it's like knowing that somebody is a little further up on the mountain that can see further than you can see and saying hey what do you see out there and what they see out there and this is scary what they see out there is perfection not Perfection to be achieved but perfection in what is maharaji keept saying to me ramas


01:01:43 - 01:03:20
don't you see it's all perfect and yet maharaji spent all of his life that form of his life that embodiment being there for people constantly feeding people taking care of people advising people making do for people and I saw the coming together of social action and emptiness the space from which you see the Perfection it's the clear discriminating awareness from which Perfection just spreads before you all the universe of forms from the original particles as they merge together to your own


01:02:33 - 01:03:52
mind to the violence and the death and the pain all of it and that balance that RKA talks about the courage to go on living is the balance of seeing the absolute perfection and also sharing the human Incarnation that's what Christ strip was about out that two levels he shared a human Incarnation which has in it all the fears and all the desires and all the reproduction of the species and all the forces going on in it the only question is where you are in relation to it when you are both human


01:03:14 - 01:04:22
and divine you can't stand anywhere that's the predicament you're not Divine but not human and you're not human but not divine if you try to be divine you're not compassionate you go around saying somebody comes up to you and says hey I'm hungry I haven't eaten you say it's all perfect work with the suffering my lad and the other end if he gets stuck yet you burn out you Sizzle because there's more suffering you can do anything about the information age has presented


01:03:50 - 01:04:57
us with the ocean of suffering in which we are living the rich suffer the poor suffer the have not suffer the have suffer the old suffer the young suffer everybody seems to be suffering you think it's new and when Buddha looked for the root of all of that suffering he saw he saw that the basic root was the way the Mind worked the way we got enamored of that City I was talking about and got trapped in it and we lost our connection to the wisdom that is non-conceptual which is the root of our


01:04:23 - 01:05:34
being from which action it's such an interesting dance it's such an interesting journey of life because at one level you really think you your life is real with your children with your jobs with your body with your coming and you're going and your bills and the car and the environmental issues and the politics and World governments and forces and death and violence and suffering I mean which one gets you and there's another level in which you just are so you're the sky in which the phenomena


01:05:06 - 01:06:23
are rising and at the same moment the phenomena include the pain in your heart empathically about the suffering which leads since both of these are part of the same thing for that which can offer to give to that which needs and it's just an internal m matter it's not America giving to the bosnians it's not me doing something for you it is a process in which we are a part in which who's doing and who isn't doing is just one dimension of reality and behind it here I is and it's interesting when you value


01:05:47 - 01:07:03
enough being part of a system rather than being separate from it because your basic power of intellect which which is separateness you don't understand that you can have it as a vehicle without being trapped in it as a master the intellect is a lousy master and it's a great servant but it's a servant of the part of you that has no identity with separateness then your intellect's available to play with before that it's a tyrannical Master because it sold you bill of goods and your own separateness and all the


01:06:27 - 01:07:30
personality stuff and all the victimization stuff and all that great to work on but it's all digging your hole from a spiritual point of view unless you work on it from the place that sees it as the bubble the Phantom the dream and yet you work within the bubble within the Phantom within the dream on the dream itself then it liberates it's why when people say should I have therapy Sayre ideally it would be wonderful if you have the Buddha as your therapist if you can't have the Buddha


01:07:00 - 01:08:23
or Ananda as your therapist then use them as a process and don't expect them to resonate with all the truths of your being but when you're screwed up psychologically you can go to a Body and Fender repair service for the personality but you aren't the car or you aren't EXP exclusively the car cu the car will go and you'll still be who will you be that's interesting that's what Catherine teaches who am I I'm sorry to go on like this uh I will stop no no I understand that's a cute


01:07:45 - 01:08:28
line that gets you to say oh no no um uh in the advanced course I'd have but this is fun and this is all what I would teach if I had an advanced course but um since we don't we can't teach any of that stuff so have a good day