You have rented my mouth to say something to you. Now. I mean, I don’t have any image that I know anything you don’t, so that cuts me out of that one. So then, what is it you want me to say? Well, the interesting thing I’ve begun to notice over the years is that what you want me to say is something you already know. And how do I know that? Because I say something infinitely wise that only the wisest people would understand, and you nod. So if you nod, you know. And if you know, why did you need to spend twenty dollars to hear me tell you what you already know?

So I’ve thought about this as a reasonable question, since I do this so often. And I realized that what we are is in the predicament of having to say over and over to ourselves—it’s like the old stories—the kind of spiritual essence of our being. We have to just keep reminding ourselves. And we come together for this process, and we all need it. I need it too.

I see in the audience many people who may not be as old as I am, but have memories. And I would just ask you: hasn’t the journey been interesting? Hasn’t it been fascinating? I mean, it actually blows me away to have survived, first of all, and so I survived in this form. And second, to get to the point where I really appreciate and enjoy the whole process. That’s taken years. And it’s been an interesting journey for me from inside my consciousness, not in terms of just the social events on the outside. So that I could watch my mind go from Western psychologist professor with a model of reality that said psychology is real, and I teach it as real. It’s absolutely real. And then there’s the psychedelic period after the mushrooms in 1961, when I then say it’s relatively real. And that, as I see it, is the major thing that happened: that I went from a culture I had grown up in that saw everything as absolutely real. Like, I learned Newtonian physics as if it was real. Then Einstein came along and said it depends on where you’re standing.

So then I went through a lot of interesting stages. After I first got high, saw through the veil of who I thought I was to appreciate who I was, or who I am, or who I will be when I finish being who I thought I was—if I move too fast for you, just raise your hand and tell me. Because either we all go or no one goes, actually. When I found I couldn’t stay high no matter how well I used my technical skills, but that I always came down, and that took years. But then I realized that. And then I went to India to see, because I had been introduced to all of these incredible maps from the East—from Buddhism and Hinduism to Taoism and Zen, and all these different things—that showed me that while we were busy achieving external excellence, there were other people who were cultivating a very exact and articulated description of inner states. And I saw such delicate descriptions of the inner states that I was finding indescribable by Western cultural words and language that I realized that I could read these maps, but something didn’t happen in me when I read them. And I realized maybe I was standing in the wrong place.

That is, if you’ve been acculturated to see reality a certain way, and then you read a book, you impose on that book your acculturation. And so maybe I was standing in the wrong place. So I went to India hoping I could find a map reader; somebody who could decipher the maps for me. And whom I was graced to meet was Neem Karoli Baba. And after he had taken 1200 micrograms of acid and nothing had happened, because when you’re in Detroit, you don’t have to take a bus to Detroit. I realized that what he had done was just shown me that—he had freed me from a method—and he had shown me that it was possible for a human being to simultaneously be aware on all the planes of consciousness at once. Because wherever I went, he was always there. If I got high, he was high. If I was down, he was down. And yet he wouldn’t ever allow me to grab hold of him with my consciousness.

Like at one point, I started to think, “I’ve got a really cool guru. He knows everything. He’s a miracle Baba. Great.” So a friend of mine arrived from Canada, who was a professor. And I said, “Come see my guru,” feeling my guru would snow him. So he came in and my guru who knew everything, said to him, “Hello, you’re from the United States.” The guy said, “No Maharaj-ji, I’m from Canada.” “Oh. And you have three brothers.” “No, Maharaj-ji, I’m an only child.” And it went on like this until I was so mortified. And as the guy left the temple he said, “Very nice guru you’ve got there,” you know. And I went back steamy and Maharaj-ji, he was laughing. So he played with my mind. He played with my mind. It’s delicious to find a playmate to play with your mind. Really, that’s the gift of guru. That’s the gift of wise friend.

You know, my particular path has been one that I have been very reticent to speak about in the West; my spiritual path. And it’s the path of what’s called guru kripa, or grace of the guru. And it just doesn’t sell in the West—for a lot of reasons. First of all, the West is suspicious of gurus, and rightly so. But also, we aren’t comfortable about having spirit in human form. That’s a complicated one for us. And the other thing why I didn’t want to tell people, even if they got through all of that and had sympathetic joy for me, they would also at some level want the same thing. And my guru had left his body. And what could I offer? I had nobody to recommend. I mean, there were a lot of great ones around that other people said were, but I myself had not had an experience that would lead me to send them to another person.

So I didn’t want to hurt people. But then interesting sequences happened. So I just held onto my stories. And then, in 1978, we collected lots of stories and published this book, Miracle of Love, which is a thousand stories about Neem Karoli Baba—which don’t create a human being at all, by the way. It’s like pointless paintings or something. And people read that book and they started to write letters to me with the pictures and the stories, and saying, “Who is that guy? I’ve read these stories and somehow I’ve opened myself and he’s within me. He’s like around me all the time. Is this good?” And I said “Well, as far as I can see from listening to people who are in the same situation as you, they talked to me about their relationship with him the same way as I feel in my relationship with him. Therefore, I must assume they are all my guru brothers or sisters, and they are as connected with him as I am since he’s dead anyway.”

So I began to see that this whole business of, “Do you have a guru? Do you have a teacher in flesh?” was—it was absolutely delicious and wonderful and a great high, but it was not necessary. In India they say God, guru, and self are one and the same. And it certainly seems to turn out to be that case. And some people get it through a devotional path to another form—Hanuman or Ram or Maharaj-ji, or whatever form; Christ, Jesus rather—and some relate through the formless.

I watched in devotional yoga, these stages of devotional yoga, where you start out with a relational love. Like, you love Jesus or you love Mary or you love Krishna or Durga or whoever; Hanuman. You love them in a relational way, and then—especially when you do things like chanting or all-night singing or something like that, and just keep going in, and allow yourself to go into these really trance states—you come into these other planes of consciousness where you’re in a different relationship to that being. Where you and the beloved are just hanging out together. You’re no longer trying to get to the beloved. And then there is a period of just the most exquisite foreplay, where you’re hanging out with God in whatever form your root is, and for a real bhakti, they want to continue the foreplay and they don’t want the orgasm. They don’t want the merging back into, they want to stay separate so they can enjoy loving the beloved. And actually—and there’s one more stage and that’s where you merge in the beloved, and then you are the creation. You are what you are. You just are.

What fascinates me is that we are all these levels at once. What fascinates me is with what short shrift I dealt with myself in the old days. I mean, when I do this old exercise I’ve done many times, where you put a tuner, control knob, next to your eye, and you tune it at level one and you look up here and you see a 65-year-old, paunchy, bald, handsome gentleman, okay? And then you flip at one dial and you see me as teacher, as spiritual seeker, as da-da-da. You see me as Caucasian, you see me as… on and on—all my psychosocial identities. That’s who you see. On channel two, that’s as the world turns. That’s where our personalities hang out. That’s where we think our storylines are real, okay?

Then you go to channel three, where we’re all bigger than life. It’s the astral plane, and we all have our archetypal identities. And I’m an Aries, and you know what that means! And then we go one more channel, and when we look into the eyes of another person—whom we just saw as their physical body, their psychosocial identity, their astral identity—you look in their eyes and you see from behind all that another being looking out at you. Are you in there? I’m in here. How did you get into that one? It’s as if you see—it’s as if you have brought your awareness back into your soul identity, and what you see when you look out are other soul identities. And then, if you flip the dial once more, you see that those souls are all like jivatmans; they’re all little parts of one thing. They’re like holography. And you realize that it’s looking at itself looking at itself looking at itself. There’s only one of us here in drag. See?

Now, it’s interesting: you and I—from my point of view—exist as that one awareness. We also exist as souls who are aware of our predicament as souls. And we also exist as incarnates, as egos. And I’m using the word “ego” now to include your body and your personality and all the psychophysical shtick of channels one and two. So you and I got born, which was in itself an interesting trip. But then (not to get delayed there) you and I went into training, and we went into basically “somebody training.” See, we went into training about how to be somebody.

Now, you were trained by the best kind of people, because they all thought they were somebody. Your mother and father both thought they were real. And therefore they thought their child was real. So you are surrounded by a consciousness in which your separateness is what’s real. And you go into separate training. You’re somebody, and you learn how to be somebody and get what you think you need. Because at first you think it’s all one thing, and then slowly you see it doesn’t always happen.

Most people, when that happens, they get so busy. The sombody-ness is like computer software for functioning on this plane, on this loca. It’s our thinking minds. Once we are somebody, meaning we have a conceptual map of reality that includes who we think we are and who we think everybody else is—so we know a tree is a tree and a rose is a rose—and then we go into “somebody special” training. See? Didn’t you? Didn’t you? Then we get trained how to be somebody special. I was. I was very special. Everybody was special.

And then, for us—certainly us who are gathered in this room—something happened. It may have been lurking all through your life, or it may have just happened. But at one moment, or at some point, you awakened. And you can put those in many terms. You realize you’d been had. You realize you had been trapped in somebody-ness. Just in the same way as Gurdjieff talks about landing in prison. And he said, “If you would escape from prison, the first thing you must realize is you’re in prison. If you think you’re free, no escape is possible.” Far out image. So you awaken. And for me that’s what happened in 1961 with the mushrooms.

And from then on the game changes. Because at that point your awareness has experience from other (what I now call) non-ordinary states of consciousness. You have experienced reality from those planes, and you have known experientially that it’s equally as valid as the plane you thought was real. Is that too weird? Are you here? Okay.

When I first awakened, the feelings I had were: I’m home. This is so familiar. Where have I been all this time? How have I cut myself off from this thing? I’ve been starving to death, and here I was in an ocean of plenty. How bizarre! And then slowly everything would wear off and I’d be back in it. But I’d have the memory of that. And that memory kept compelling me forward to try to get into that state and stabilize it. So Maharaj-ji showed me that that was possible.

And what I have done since that time—which is the last 23 years—is to do the practices and live my life in such a way as to optimize my stabilizing myself in an awakened state. Because, as far as I can understand, that is the most compassionate thing that I can do. Now, that has nothing to do with whether I’m active or not. It’s how I’m active. It’s how I’m active. Because what I have seen in my own horror is a lot of my best intentions as an ego to relieve the suffering of others has ended up increasing the sum-total of suffering in the world—either because I suffered more than they did in trying to, whatever—and I realized out of all that that if I cared about the world, the Earth, the other people, and I saw that I was the instrument—just like you are—I was the basic instrument through which social change would occur. Because as you see the web of interconnected information and consciousness, you see that, as each individual in the system changes, the whole system changes.

So I saw that I had to work on myself as a way of extricating my awareness from the exclusive identification with my ego structures, with my map of reality, with my identification with my desires, with my needs, with my wants. Not stopping any of that or trying to stop it or denying its existence. This is not meshuggena stuff. This is the ability to extricate yourself from exclusive identity with those things. You don’t push them away, because then you just end up a horny celibate. You can’t do that. It’s a process in which you—best characterized for me by Mahatma Gandhi. His autobiography was called Experiments with Truth. And when he was on a train and it was leaving the station and a reporter rushed up and said, “Babaji, Mahatmaji, give me a message to take back to the people in the village.” And Gandhi scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it out the window and it said, “My life is my message.” I assume you’re saying the same thing. I would like to be. I would like to have the integrity that everything I know to be true inside is manifested at all the levels outward. I’m not. But I see that, until I am, every message I send is a mixed message. Every message I send is not only a message of love, but it’s a message of fear.

It’s interesting. I work a lot with people that are dying, so I’m often with people as they approach dying. And often when I walk into the room of somebody that’s suffering immensely—that has a cancer or AIDS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, or whatever; ALS—my first reactions are often reactions in which my empathy for that person and the predicament they find themselves in is so great that I feel my heart being ripped apart by the pain of their situation. What I have learned to do is sit with that. Not deny it, not try to push it away, but just sit with it until I quiet down and I find an inner center in which I then can rest in my own soul awareness, and I look out and I see a fellow soul who is in a different incarnation than I am. And it’s an incarnation in which this person is going through this physical condition. But the soul is not going through the condition, the ego is.

So when you meet a fellow soul, when I go into the room, my job isn’t to say to the person who’s busy suffering and suffering and in pain, “Hey, that’s just your ego. Come on up and be with your soul.” Because I have no moral right to to decide about another person’s karma. They all have their own work to do. What I can do with my consciousness is create an environment where another person could come out and play if they chose—but if they didn’t, blessings. You’re impeccable in the role you’re playing on the ego/psychophysical plane, but you’re also present on another plane.

And I think if I could get the essence of what I have figured out in the simplest early stages of it is that you and I should be living on two planes of consciousness simultaneously. Just two, I don’t ask for the whole shtick. Just two. And you say, “Which two?d And I’d say, “Any two.” Because the minute you can—whether you have lucid dreams, that’s one way of doing it. One way you admit you are in a different reality, and you go from reality to reality, because what that does is it changes the meaning of any single reality.

I’ve just finished a book called Aging Lightly: a Spiritual Paradigm for Conscious Aging, because I’m 65 and the boomers are turning 50. It’s a great market. And I looked—you know what happened to me? I was on a train going from Westport to New York City, and it was a late evening train. It was in autumn. And I had been with my friend Judith Stanton. We had been out looking at the leaves in their height and beauty. And now I was in this dimly lit coach in the evening, sort of glowing from the day. And the station was closed, so you bought your ticket on the train and the conductor came along the aisle and he said, “Tickets, please.” And I said, “I’d like to buy one from you.” And he said, “What kind do you want?” And I said, “Do I have a choice?” And he said, “Regular or senior?” What went on in my mind at that moment will pass for the second. But what I said to him was “Senior?” But I said it the same way as when I was 18 years old, I went into a bar to order a beer in New York state, you know: “Beer?” Like, “Would you serve me a beer?” And he gave me the ticket. I said, “How much is this?” He said, “Four and a half dollars.” And I said, “How much would a regular one be?” He said, “Seven dollars.” And I was very pleased with that. It’s not half bad. I mean, it’s half priced. So he gave me the ticket. He didn’t ask for any identification. So then I held this ticket and I realized that this was going to cost me more than two and a half dollars, you know, because here I had accepted a ticket to find—and it sat on it “Senior,” see? And I never thought of myself being a senior citizen. How absurd.

And it felt weird. And instead of pushing away the weird feeling like I did when I was sixty—see, when I was sixty, I really tried to milk it. I thought, “I’ve been treating birthdays like nothing. I’ll really make something out of this birthday,” because in India sixty is the year when you you’re going into the fourth stage of life; becoming sannyas, giving up everything. So I had three birthday parties. If I was going to give up everything, I was going to go out flying. And I started a plan to how to gear down everything and, you know, turn my life around at sixty. And after about six months, I didn’t feel a thing. I was busier than ever. And I found myself putting it off. So I thought the hell with it. I just won’t do that trip. I’ll just go on being ageless. But the sixty-two ticket got me.

You know, and the way it got me was interesting. It wasn’t that it got me because inside I feel I am any age. But it was because I was entering a new social identity. And when I sensed, as I later found when I did research and read a Friedan’s book, Fountain of Aging, that the media, the whole economy is a youth-oriented one in which aging is treated in our society like some kind of dismal era. I mean, in a non-traditional society you don’t look to old people to pass down the lineage, because what do they know about surfing on the internet? So what you do is you have sort of obsolescence. Because in one of the societies that is focused on technology and scientific materialism, it keeps producing more and better and more and better. And it’s newer, and changes are faster, and it goes to the young. And then, at the other end of the game, as scientific materialists would like, we are figuring out how to lengthen life longer and longer and longer.

So, I mean, you can see the obvious one. If a woman has a third of her life after menopause now, how interesting if the culture defined women—which this one doesn’t—but if it did define them as childbearing, but when you see that the way in which aging is depicted in television or in the media. But what’s happened at this moment and why this conversation is relevant, I think, is because of the demography the game has just changed; that the power now moves. The advertising dollar and the political vote now moves to old people. We can not only have kneeling buses, we can have kneeling senators, you can have anything you want.

See, and the interesting question is: which of the mythology, how—when you look at a dysfunctional mythology about aging in a culture—how do you get rid of it? Well, the way I see to get rid of it is to un-acculturate yourself. That is, the culture isn’t just out there. When you see an old person, you have a certain set of thoughts that are conditioned by your culture—that are in you now. They’re no longer out there, you just have them. You’ve got to get rid of those first. In other words, if you’re going to be free of a dysfunctional mythology that leaves aging as a time of sadness, loss, and fear, and irrelevance, it’s certainly going to color the quality of your life.

So what I saw in doing this book was that what aged in us was one of the planes of reality we exist on. That is our body’s age, and our mind’s age, and our thought process’s age. But there are other planes on which aging is not a relevant variable at all; where you actually have experiences inside yourself of timelessness. You’re living simultaneously in time and not in time. But see how busy the external chronology of days, months, hours, seconds, time, movement, past, future permeates your mind. In fact, when you look at old people’s consciousness since I’ve been doing that, you see that as people get older and their future gets grimmer (from their point of view), they flip into the past. So then they only tell stories about the past to each other. What they missed on the way through (because of their panic) was the present. And the present was their salvation. Because had they been able to come into the present moment, they would have gone right through the doorway into timelessness. Because in a moment, there is no time. Time is the relation between two moments. When you live in one moment, you’re not living in time. Okay, new moment.

There is a way for the soul to be conscious—and once you’ve started to awaken, this is all you’re going to settle for—where you are deeply involved in the storyline of your incarnation, and yet at the same moment you are perfectly mindful and present and clear. It’s a statement in the Tao: “One does nothing and nothing is left undone.” There’s a place in you that’s absolutely quiet and clear, and that doesn’t in any way detract from the part of you outside that’s doing and changing and all that stuff. Those are two different planes of consciousness. And to rest in two of them simultaneously makes you a reflective person rather than a reactive person.

What intrigues me about the sixties to the nineties that I was talking about earlier is that what happened in the sixties, and what happened with civil rights, with anti-Vietnam, with sexual freedom, with the environment, beginning of the women’s movement, with gay rights, with on and on and on—I mean, that all blew up at one moment. It’s as if something happened at that time, and there were many causes of it, I’m sure. Some of these things had been building for years, like the civil rights movement. There’s some time when we shifted into a relative reality frame, and that freed us from being intimidated by the patriarchal, vertical, institutional structures that we had been living under. And they just began to look like paper tigers to us. And we thought at that time: it’s so obvious how people are caught in their minds. Now that we see it, everybody will see it.

It turned out everybody didn’t see it. And that was the naïveté of the sixties. It was the innocence saying: “Oh my God, we have been living in a mind structure. It’s like in a mind prison defining reality this way, like Plato’s cave or something like that.” And you thought, “This is so true! How can I not act according to this truth? And if it is true that I am also the soul, and so is everyone else, and from this place we can clearly see what we’re doing to the world and each other and ourselves and all that, and this all would change.” Now why doesn’t that happen? Because a lot of people had a big investment in their ego structures, in their power and their security—which is what you try to build when you feel like a vulnerable, separate little entity. Somebody didn’t awaken out of their somebody-ness. They are frightened at that moment, because their somebody-ness is up for grabs.

And what happened in the sixties was: it got so close to what they perceived as chaos and anarchy, that they forgot a lot of stuff in order to protect themselves because they felt the siege. And what we had was many years of the pendulum swing with President Reagan and President Bush and the fundamentalists and the far right. And now, in the nineties, the pendulum is starting to quiet down. And the interesting question is: since many of us, for one reason or another, have an appreciation of the two planes of consciousness—soul seeing how it all is unfolding, ego dancing life. If we see that now, is there a way that we can share that kind of wisdom with our fellow human beings without scaring the hell out of them?

I had an interesting conversation with a man who you might have a political reaction to, but it’s a very interesting man. I’ve become a friend of Lawrence Rockefeller. He’s 86 and he’s the elder of that empire. And at one point he was talking—we talk a lot about the change in consciousness and the paradigm shifts in the culture. At one point he said that he was encouraging different universities to make a professorship of consciousness. It’s his way in through, because he’s straight. So that’s his way. So I said, “Well, it’s not going to work, because they’ll pervert it. You’re not going to get a mystic teaching a course in consciousness, were it Harvard, Yale, Stanford. Tell me.” So he said, “Well, I gave it to them, and then the president of, what, Princeton or one of them, came back and said: we could do that, Mr. Rockefeller,”—since he’s like one of their biggest givers—“but could we recall it this?” And he says, “You know,” he said, “you have to let them do that because the new paradigm has happened, and they’ve already lost, and we’ve got to help them save face.”

People always ask me—or they used to; I don’t think they do so much now—but they used to ask me, “Are we about to have—is this the Armageddon?” Or, “Is this the Aquarian Age?” Is this the age when it’s all about to happen? Or is it about to unhappen; destroy itself? And how the hell do I know? And I realized that, if it were going to be the end—that means I was going to die along with everything else—how would I like to prepare for death? The way I’d like to prepare for death is: stay in the present moment as fully as I could for when the moment comes when I meet the mystery of the unknown. Basically, I say death is a mystery. How would I like to meet a mystery?

Well, I’d like to meet a mystery with a sense of adventure. I’d like to meet a mystery with as much clarity of mind as I could muster. I’d like to meet a mystery free of a lot of forces that are pulling me back into the form I’m leaving, like pain and people. So if it were going to be Armageddon, I’d like to prepare for my own death—which is exactly what in the East they understand their life to be about, because they live in a reincarnational model. So what I would do to do that is: I’d quiet my mind as well as I could, so I could hear as clearly as possible. I would open my heart as widely as I could. And I’d do whatever I could in the meantime to relieve suffering. What else was I going to do? But I’d use it all as a preparation for my moment of death.

Now if, on the other hand, this was the Aquarian Age and this was the Great Transformation, and we were about to move into another collective consciousness in which we would live with a new awareness, what could I do to help that happen? How could I become one of those instead of a dragging of the feet? Well, I could quiet my mind, I could open my heart, and I could relieve the suffering around me. So, you know, it didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference. Because I was going to do the same thing now anyway and live fully in this moment, so that when this moment is that mysterious doorway moment, I’ll be right here. “Ah, dropping the body. Ah, so.”

To finish one of the other stories. After Miracle of Love came out and people started to say they were experiencing Maharaj-ji, and I began to see the way that was working about God, Guru, and Self—that people could meet themselves through an imaginary person as well as through a person on this plane, since it was just the imaginary could be invested—so I created a plan saying to people, “You could have an imaginary playmate, too.” See? That if you would like to use a playmate as a vehicle to get free, create your own playmate.

Now, what would you want your playmate to have? Wisdom? Yeah. Humor. How about a little rascality? How about a deep sense of the emptiness of form? How about a true devotional heart? You can put anything you want, and then just hang out with your new playmate. That’s what I do. I hang out with Maharaj-ji. And those are the qualities I hang out with. And you start with this imaginary playmate—which can be in an animal form, or human form; whatever you’d like. But you take it everywhere you go. You don’t have to tell everybody. But it’s somebody that hangs out with you, like sort of right here, that’s saying, “Wow, look at that,” or “You fool,” or whatever. Basically what you’re doing is inventing a soul to awaken you out of your ego trip; to recognize that you, too, are a soul. And as it happens, it turns out, of course, that your imaginary playmate was as real as you were. Because who you thought you were was just who you thought you were anyway.

So now I can talk about Maharaj-ji. Because what we are doing with this between Guru and Self is that we don’t fully know who we are, and that part of us who we are, the deeper truth of who we are, we can’t get to. And so we create it in an external form, and then we hang out with it. And slowly, when you hang out with people, you become more and more tuned to the way they see the world until you’re all hanging out together.

So what I see is our predicament, our position is: that we understand that everybody has to go or nobody goes. We don’t want to start a polarization again. And yet it is very evident to me that there is a shift in collective consciousness—which you could call a new paradigm or a new way of perceiving reality. And it means that people are starting to meet, whether you want to call it by whatever level on other states of consciousness or as soul to soul. Are you here? I’m here. And, in a way, the technology of the Information Age just speeds up the whole process. Because virtual reality and this reality all become just two realities after a while.

I was with a very great lama, who I’m sure many of you knew when he was in his body, Kalu Rinpoche. And I said to Kalu, “What should I do, Kalu?” He said, “Ram Dass, you have three things to do this lifetime. Honor your guru, deepen your emptiness, and deepen your compassion.” That was interesting. And I honor my guru. I do honor my guru. And what blew me away was that the emptier I got, the more real was my compassion.

Let me tell you what I mean. When I have a lot of my separateness, and then I go to deal with somebody who needs something from me (or thinks they need something from me), to the extent that I’m caught in my separateness, I reinforce their sense of separateness and their isolation. To the extent that I’m free of it, I free them, or I am available to help them be free if they would become free. As I rest in two planes of consciousness and just stay there, I keep feeling people beginning to resonate on the soul awareness. Check-out counter at supermarket, going through just the rituals of checking out: a moment look in the eyes of another person. Something listen to as if you are meeting a fellow soul who you’re meeting through being a checkout person, or a customer.

I’ll tell you, it’s very simple. You and I have started to awaken. We are attempting to stabilize what we have tasted and what we know. What we know, originally we had to do traumatic things to get there, but the ideas are mainstreaming in the culture now. The idea of relative reality is mainstreaming. And you can find it anywhere in the most conservative middle west. I’ll say far out things and people will nod. Because if you say them simply and they resonate with their truth, they will nod.

So now I see in the culture is a ripeness for starting to live from more than one level of consciousness. And what I saw was that as I extricated myself more and more and kept working through the boundaries of my consciousness, the way I saw you changed. I went from seeing you on channel one and two and then I kept going and going and going. But I looked at you, and at first I saw you as her or him or them. And then I looked at you and I saw that we were all interdependent—interbeing, as Thích Nhất Hạnh talks about it. And I said, “You are us. We are us.”

And then, flipping the consciousness once more, I look and I see you are me. And then I see that any suffering you have is like a splinter in one hand. And I pull it out with the other finger, and this hand doesn’t say to this hand, “Thank you.” It could, but it doesn’t usually. Because they both recognize they are part of one thing. That’s compassion. See, compassion comes when it’s your suffering. It’s not their suffering. Kindness comes with their suffering—and righteousness, and guilt, and pity, and all the rest of it. But the compassion where you go from “I do a compassionate thing” to “I’m a compassionate person” to—and this is where the emptiness comes in, where that going from soul into awareness comes that ultimate dying—then, at that point, compassion is. Suffering is and compassion is, and there’s nothing personal about it.

It’s interesting. People come up and say, “Thank you for… blah.” I feel like saying, “I’ll tell him if I see him.” You know? It’s interesting. You must have the same predicament. Every human being does. You are walking through a web of projections of other people’s minds as to who you are and who they are, and they are trying to get you to reassure them that their costume is on straight. So you see me as who I think I am, and I’ll try to see you as who you think you are, and we’ll make believe this is real so we won’t frighten ourselves.

When you wake up into soul awareness, you look and you see people coming along deeply mired in their identity with who they think they are—with their role, with their personality, with their needs, fears, hopes, joys, da, da, da, da. And you play with them in the world they live in, but you’re also available if they’d like to say, “Ha, ha, ha! Doin’ well, aren’t I?” See? It’s interesting whether your consciousness allows other human beings to come out and play. You can go into a city and say, “Oh, there’s nobody here that’s spiritual.” All you’re doing is mirroring your own consciousness. When you’re spiritual, it’s all spiritual. When you’re resting in soul, what you see is souls in drag. And you enjoy it. You enjoy the dance. You appreciate the beauty of the manifestation. You look at your own aging as a set of events that are going to be all your curriculum for becoming more conscious. And as you become more conscious, and live less in time, and are more aware, at least in balance to the amount that’s busy aging and losing and everything. Then the fear changes, and then a whole other dimension (which you could call love) is free to come in.

Aging can be an absolute groove in this society, as it is in other societies. It’s too bad we should lose it. And it’s going to be a lot of us that are going to help make that different, I think. And as we do, so will all of the social institutions of which we are a part change. I mean, I work in the business community. I work on the board of a thing called the Social Venture Network, which is a group of people like Ben and Jerry and Calvert Fund and people who are at least—I mean, they may be screwing up left and right, but they are attempting to integrate their concern about justice and compassion and sustainability, and they’re trying to integrate that with the business ethic. And it’s not easy. Most of us walk away from a problem like that and write off business as untrammeled greed. But the fact is that most of the people that are running all those shows have in them an appreciation of their predicament. That’s the other level of consciousness we’re going to work with. We get together, and everybody’s an entrepreneur in doing their business. Behind it all, we are a group of people seeing the predicament we’re all in and figuring out how to, what’s changeable, what isn’t. If you change one thing, you go out of business. You can’t compete. Pay a living wage, you lose all your customers, you lose your business. But you can feel the edge of this kind of awakened consciousness playing itself out in the business world now. Just beginning.

I was talking to a friend who works in the White House, and I said, “Is there anybody in the White House that’s reflective? Is there anybody that’s contemplative?” I mean, I wasn’t looking for a job, but I was, is there… I mean, usually kings have wise persons around them who don’t have any line role, they’re just there to keep the vision, to keep the integration going. And the guy said, “What are you, out of your mind?” He said, “This is like being in a Vietnam foxhole.” He said, “It’s hardly a time to meditate.” I dispute that, but that’s alright.

But I would say that—in watching the recent debates between frick and frack—that the plane of consciousness that politics has been played out is basically over. It’s basically over. People see through it too much. That’s why nobody votes. And that’s a very interesting moment, isn’t it? I find it interesting. I find it interesting that the culture is becoming so obsessed with death, with assisted suicide and Dr. Kavorkian, with suicide, with capital punishment, with abortion, with violence in the streets, murders, the O.J. Simpson trial. It’s an interesting moment when the games that we have been playing about death aren’t working so well.

And I was invited to speak at a kind of a Tony graduate program in California, to speak to a benefit for their organization. So the woman said, “What would you like to speak about?” I said, “Well, I’ve done a lot of work with aging. I’ve just been finishing a book. I’ll speak on aging.” She said, “Oh no.” She said, “The people wouldn’t come to hear you speak about aging at a benefit.” Okay, well, I said, “Well, I do a lot of work with death.” She said, “Oh my God, no! Can you imagine people coming to a dinner party to talk about death?” I said, “Well, I’ve done two books on—I work a lot with suffering.” So she finally titled the lecture Mining the Riches of Life—which got them there, of course, being very successful people. And I talked about suffering, old age, and death.

Because to me they’re the most intriguing situations you and I have in front of us. And until we solve this one, we don’t hear what’s happening anyway. What happened to me was that I tried—once I wanted to get high and I came down, then I figured out I could get high and stay there. But in order to do that, I had to push away down. So I pushed away and became really, really monastic and renunciate. And I got incredible shakti and tej and all that stuff. But the predicament was: I wasn’t free. And I saw that as long as I was pushing away anything, I wasn’t free. Attractions and aversions will get you every time. The clinging of mind. And I saw that I was pushing away life. I was pushing away the passions of life for fear I get lost in them. So I was staying really holy.

So I turned around and I realized that my life was going to be my vehicle to freedom, and that I was going to embrace my life, embrace my ego, embrace that whole structure into myself, into my being. And the first thing that struck me like a cold glass of water in the face was the immensity of the suffering. Because I realized that I had pushed all that away because I didn’t know how to deal with the suffering. And whether we do with denial or rationalization or whatever it is, you and I are just faced with immense presence of suffering.

I’m just thinking of two weeks ago, I was in Washington for the quilt, the AIDS quilt. And there was a mile-long, huge display of these panels for each person of 40,000 people. And the immensity of the suffering that that represented, and the immensity of the love that was represented in all those panels. It was hard to conceive of it. You couldn’t conceive of it. You could just bathe in the immensity of it. So when we turn around and look at the suffering and we say it’s unbearable, so we have to look away, but we can’t look away, we have two choices. One is to change the world so we don’t see the suffering, or so it goes away. Make the suffering go away. The other is to change yourself. That when you say it’s unbearable, I’d say: to whom is it unbearable?

Is the suffering in the universe unbearable to God? If you were who you really are without the veil, would you be able to understand or have a sense of the wisdom of the universe sufficient to allow you to be able to look at suffering, and look at your breaking personal separate emotional heart breaking about that suffering, and at the same moment have another part of your consciousness that dealt with the deep wisdom and mystery that lay just behind what you were seeing and what you were thinking?

My guru used to do an interesting thing which is a really hard one for me. There was a moment when there was a lot of starvation in Bangladesh, and I had a micro van of Volkswagen, and I wanted to take it there, and I went to him for his blessing, and I was very agitated about what was going on in Bangladesh. And Maharaj-ji was a very compassionate being and he didn’t say that I should do it or shouldn’t do it. He just said to me, “Ram Dass, don’t you see it’s all perfect?” And when I heard that it was like an obscenity. You talk about children dying of starvation and say it’s perfect? What I saw in years in reflection was that he was reminding me that I had lost my balance, and that when you lose your balance you put yourself in a position where your actions no longer can relieve the suffering they could if you had that balance.

So what you do is you become that being that can bear the unbearable—not through denial, not through coldness, not through anything else, but through being with what is. Because you can’t live in the moment if you’re busy making believe a lot of stuff doesn’t exist. This society is making believe that the underclass does not exist. We are living as if it doesn’t exist, and we’re hiding it under ethnic stuff and all kinds of stuff. But basically there is an extremely unfair and unjust system we are part of. And when you are more conscious, you see that the game begins with you, and how you live your life, and how you live with each person around you, and you begin to feel the webs that work to change the whole game.

Once you can look at the suffering and be with it as it is, and realize it’s not their suffering in Bosnia, it’s the suffering; it’s not their suffering in Africa, it’s not their suffering in Israel, it’s our suffering. It’s not their suffering in the inner city, it’s our suffering. It’s not their suffering with AIDS, it’s our suffering. And then, when you open to that immensity of the suffering, what arises in absolute equal measure out of you is this quality of compassion, of hearing what part you play in the balance of it. And it doesn’t matter which part you play. You play whichever part is appropriate for you to play in view of your skills, opportunities, situation in life, et cetera. And you realize you are just part of a process of transformation.

Once that emptiness–compassion link is made and you’re at peace with your being, and all of the stuff’s happening, and it’s nothing personal, then you’re quiet enough to be able to see the absolute joy and exquisite awe of the universe. Because you’re not caught in righteous indignation. Not that you won’t oppose and protest. But, as Kabir said: do what you do with another person, but never put them out of your heart. You can oppose somebody and protest, and even incarcerate them under certain conditions, as long as you can love them enough.

What I have seen in this approaching millennium is that I just as soon use the thing of what is going to change. There was a moment I had with John Seed, the deep ecologist—beautiful man who’s done a lot. He’s an Australian. And I said to him, “John, you know so much about the world and the trees. What’s going to happen? Is it too late?” He said, “Yes, Ram Dass. It’s too late. The inertia of the destruction of the rainforest, the balance of values is too one-sided. It’s like beings rushing towards the edge of a cliff.” So we were quiet as I pondered that nice new information. And then he said to me, almost under his breath, “It would take a miracle.” I said, “Aha! What kind of a miracle?” He says, “Well, don’t underestimate us. We came up out of the water onto land.” “Aha, that kind of a miracle.”

I’ll tell you what the miracle is. The miracle is the miracle of consciousness. We have finished our reductio ad absurdum of consciousness into being something of the brain. We have opened to the possibility that there are other frequencies we exist on, there are other identities we have; that we are much richer as those beings that stand between earth and heaven than we give ourselves credit for. And the minute the setting changes enough, then everybody begins to recognize it, because everybody has in us all of the clues we need to acknowledge these planes of existence, were we not busy denying them. In other words, you see yourself as ego, soul, awareness. And as you begin to awaken into soul, you see how much the ego has been denying your own beauty and ignored so much information. And then you get to rest in soul, and then you start to feel the yearning to merge with God. The poetry of Kabir and Rumi and Hafez.

So you and I are here on Earth. The basic game is the game of awakening. The basic game is the game of becoming a free awareness. Because that free awareness is capable of being an instrument for the freedom of others. And that’s where the root suffering is: being trapped. It has nothing to do [Audio cut] Okay. Our job is the work on ourselves. We then use all of our life experiences. At first you just go to church on Sundays and think it’s enough. But once you’ve tasted of what’s possible for the human being, you can’t stop. And it goes from being Sunday morning, to then you’ve suddenly signed yourself sitting quietly now and then, contemplating a tree. And after a while you find yourself more and more and more, until you say, “Why is any part of my life exempt from this? I so want to be free, and I so can taste that that’s who I am, that why don’t I use everything in my life as a vehicle to transform myself?”

So then you help somebody as work on yourself, because the freer you become the more you’re really helping somebody. Feel the circle? So you work on yourself not out of narcissism, not out of screw everybody else, I’m going to work on myself. You work on yourself as an act of compassion. But you realize, when you start to see it, you can’t work on yourself by making believe the rest of the world doesn’t exist. Because that’s going to cost you. So ultimately you have to find a way to make peace. And for me to make peace means to be very much in the world. In it all, and at the same moment be sitting absolutely empty. So you, as Castaneda said, you huff and you puff, and you make believe it matters. Even though you know—now see, he’d say that it doesn’t, but I wouldn’t say that. Because that’s saying it from one plane. I’d say that it’s only relative reality.

And I’ll tell you: once you can rest in soul awareness and understand relative reality, you can take chronic illness, you can take dying of friends, you can take all of the stuff—the loss of this and that, of people, of dreams, of all of it. And all of it can just bring you closer and closer to the truth of your being. And once you see it, you’re a jerk not to do it. See, it’s not like—I don’t give a damn whether you do it. That’s your problem. That’s all I say is: all I can do it is do it.

Boy, this has been heavy! I’m amazed everybody’s here, but—the next section of this thing changes completely, but we’re going to take a break first. But then, so those of you that say, “Who the hell is this? I got to get out of here!” can do that. Say, “Well, the snow is terrible. I better go.” You know? But whatever, the real juice of the evening starts after the intermission, when we start with questions and discussion back and forth, so that we can really talk to ourselves and see where we can deal with specific issues. Okay? So should we take about a ten-minute intermission?

Before we start the questions, let me also express to you how pleased I am that this is a benefit for the Lama Foundation and the Neem Karoli Baba Ashram. Both of those, in my estimation, are part of a gift of spirit that dwells in New Mexico at this moment, and has fed and continues to feed many people in terms of food and spirit. And most of you undoubtedly by now know that Lama suffered that huge fire, but the central buildings continue to exist, and I went up there and it’s like a moonscape, but there was the crew working to stop erosion and to start to prepare. And I thought, “Gee, they should stop for a while and grieve.” But I saw that that wasn’t the message at all for them; that there was this tremendous energy to learn from this fire and start to grow again. So I’m going to teach there next summer as one of my things to honor that. And so that’s where your money is going tonight, and I’m happy for both Hanuman’s home and Lama. And those of you that love Be Here Now should realize that Be Here Now came out of the Lama Foundation. So it’s a New Mexico product that is.

I just want as much of that as I can. That’s fine. Let’s set it down, set it down there. That’s great. Okay. Anything is fair game to ask. You don’t have to clean up anything. And I’ll repeat the questions after I hear them, okay? Yes.

1:17:08

Dass

What is with what? Siddhi Ma. You mean Maharaj-ji’s Siddhi Ma? My current relationship—when Maharaj-ji, my guru, left his body, he had been keeping a diary for years of all the critical things that were happening each day. You wouldn’t think gurus would do that. But when you opened his diary, what he had written two pages of each day was, “Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram.” Because God just kept happening. So he handed those books over to her and then told her she should keep them now. And she’s a beautiful, great village woman; a very, very deep and wise person. So she is my guru sister, I would say. Okay? Questions? Behind me. Yeah.

1:18:40

Dass

Got it. Good question. Do you hear it? You didn’t hear the question. She is substitute teaching and she finds tremendous unbearable tension in herself between representing the system as it exists to honor her contract to fulfill a role, and being there for the children in the way she understands it. And she feels that the kids have already been trained in such a way, so they’re even resistant to that. Okay. There’s a good example.

If you are on the curriculum of awakening, this is a juicy one to work with. Really juicy. Because it’s clear that that tension between the two of those things rips you apart. And to find the place in you where you can hold the values, and then see the reality of what is, and do what you can to bridge that gap by your being, by the work you do on yourself as you’re offering to those kids. And then what happens is in the hands of God. It’s not your business. Okay? So it becomes a vehicle for you, right? When you meet somebody who is busy being in their role, like the kids are, and you want to meet them as a fellow soul. Huh? And they’re what? They’re out to get you. The game is changing a bit. I just get the little buggers.

I’ll tell you, if they’re out to get you, that’s the projection of their minds. And if their minds are clearer than yours, they got you. And if they aren’t, they don’t. So don’t be a lazy slob. Get on with it. Don’t expect gentile responses from me tonight. I’m in a feisty mood. Questions? Yes.

1:21:13

Dass

Okay. She wants to deal with anger. She wants to deal with anger. She’s an angry driver. She’s an angry driver. Well, the interesting question is whether your anger helps anything or not. And if it doesn’t, it’s a lot of bullshit and you’re spending too much time feeding it. The best thing to do is just give it up. You know, when my guru said that to me, he said, “Ram Dass, give up your anger.” Trained as I was as a psychologist, you don’t just give up your anger. You might cathart it. You might work it out. You might punch a pillow. You might punch your teacher. You might do any number of things. You can hate your parents, but you got to work it out. My guru said, “Give it up.” And it was bizarre.

So then he said an interesting thing. He said, “Give a little up each day and I’ll help you.” And what I’ve seen is: every time I get angry, it’s like for me now diving from air into water. It’s like going into a thicker medium. I don’t even know it’s anger yet. It could be lust. They often seem like, you know…! So, but whatever it is, it’s something, and I’m getting caught in identifying with an attitude, an opinion, a desire, an attachment, an aversion, something. And it’s no fun. And I just know now I just want to get out of it. I don’t want to figure out whether I should get out of it. I already did that. Now I’m just going to activate whatever thing I need to get out of it. Okay. Sir?

1:22:52

Dass

How do you deal with the issues of karma and there being no self? This is sort of a technical question. But as I look around, I’m not sure who else is here. So I will answer it technically. In the way in which I’m defining ego, soul, awareness as a Buddhist, I realize that the soul is a transitory thing. I am using it as a stepladder in a vehicle to go from identification with separateness to non-identification with separateness, non-exclusive identification. So the nice thing about soul is: you can go into soul and really realize you’re looking at the universe from a different place without having to give up your separateness. A lot of people are a little frightened about giving up their separateness.

So karma is the soul’s karma. What’s continuous about souls over their time span, whatever that may be, whether it’s just a flick of a thought, however long that is, the uniqueness of it is karma. It’s like a DNA code. And it leads the soul to manifest over and over again in some way or other—in the dream state, in the physical plane, in some place or other. And then the karma gets worked out slowly by the manifestation. The soul, if you get lost in the manifestation, you think you’re working it out. If you’re the soul, you see it’s working it out. Alright? Just like if I have a cut, I watch and watch, then it’s healing. I don’t have to heal it. Am I dealing with your question? That’s karma. And as far as I can see, form and emptiness, form is no other than emptiness, emptiness is no other than form, and in that sense, self is no other than non-self and non-self is no other than self. So I can use illusions to get rid of other illusions knowing I’m going to throw all the illusions away. Okay? Yes?

1:25:16

Dass

The root of all thought? The root of all false mysticism is the desire for experience. Well, I guess all I can go as far as is saying that desire for experience is one of the roots of false mysticism. But I have no idea whether it’s the root or not. I can’t quite go that far because I haven’t really reflected on it. Okay? I don’t question Thomas Merton. Who would dare do that? Yes? Yeah?

1:26:19

Dass

She’s asking about moving towards a holarchy, or sort of equi-power distribution, as opposed to vertical power. And where am I in that? Is that the question? What’s my feeling? What’s my feeling? Well, here’s the thought, and the feeling seems okay. The thought is that when you and I were trained and acculturated, we did that all through relationships with other beings. So we are basically—our ego structure is really totally relational. The way we think of who we are, it’s in relationship to things and people around us. And at some point we threw over our membership in communities because of some model in our minds that, first, a confusion between external freedom and internal freedom. And second, a feeling that individual—that I had to go my own trip. That the journey to enlightenment is for each individual. And what you have to do is throw off membership and things. So there has been breakdown in the extended family. There has been breakdown in a lot of the membership in social structures that gave your ego life meaning. Now, we got so far over, and what do I want? What do I need? You go into another culture—like, I go to India all the time where, in the villages of India, they live with role identity, not personality identity. They fulfill their roles. I’m not arguing from it as whether it’s bad or good. That isn’t the issue. The issue is: these people are identified with role, not personality. They don’t ask: “What do I want?” “What do I need?” They ask: “What’s my part to play?” “What’s my dharma?” What’s my dharma? And then you come back to our culture, and it looks like the back ward of a mental hospital. I mean, everybody is: “I’m not getting enough. I want more.” “I need.” “I had a terrible childhood, you don’t understand. I deserve.” I mean, it’s so painful, it’s so thick! And everybody walks down the street telling you this is who they are. And everybody—I mean, it’s like a victimized society. It’s a bizarre thing. And this is all psychodynamic stuff. And I don’t think that’s interesting enough, basically. I mean, I think personality is kind of fun, you know, to play with, but to get caught in it is such a drag. Really, it’s just not interesting enough.

So I would say that there has been an awakening for me to the fact that I was so caught in individualism that I was losing my sense of community. And when my father was too old—and I took care of him for many years. I wasn’t the primary caretaker, but I made sure everything was alright and gave that whole scene a lot of stability for about ten years. During that time, I watched my own consciousness go from the first thing when I was the one that moved into the house to take care of dad. Everybody said, “Isn’t he good to be doing that?” See, you can hear that and where it comes from. And I milked it. See? I’d say, “Well, somebody has to do it.” See? And I was busy being righteous. Well, I’ll tell you that lasted a few years and they get worn out. See, whatever scenario you think is going just isn’t interesting enough. And so we got to the point where I decided taking care of dad was my yoga. “Dad, you’re my yoga. Turn over.” You know. And we ran out of that one.

And then we got into a place where there was just the shitting and the cleaning up the shit. There was the feeding and the wiping, and there was just the dance being done, and nobody really gave a damn who was doing it. And I suddenly realized I’d come home into something that I had been so busy pushing away. I mean, he was a different generation. How could he understand how I felt about that? Some of you must have experienced that. And what happened was: as I let go of all these models of him and me and what I thought I was doing and just did it, he changed. And he started to be this absolute—I mean, I never really liked him. And he turned into this, really, it was like Buddha. He was just absolutely beautiful. And we’d hold hands and look at the sunset. And he never did that. He never did that.

Once we were sitting out on his farm looking at the sunset, and he was looking out and there it was all—dad had a lot of manicured lawns and stuff like that. And he said, “Isn’t it beautiful, Rich?” And I said, “Yeah, it sure is.” There were purples and oranges. Oh, it was beautiful. He said, “Look at how tightly it’s trimmed.” See, if he couldn’t even get up to the sky, how did I think he was going to get to some other plane? And then there we were. There we were. Unexpected, believe me, to both of us. Just hanging out together. And people would come in and they’d freak because he wasn’t who he used to be. Somebody who didn’t like him came in and said, “Hi.” And my father didn’t answer. He just smiled and the person went out and said, “That bastard still won’t talk to me.” And my aunt came in, who loved my father, her big brother, and she said, “George, how are you?” And he just smiled at her. And she said, “What have they done to you? Where have they taken you?” He was happy. I was happy. She was miserable.

And so what I learned was—in this very natural way of just listening and finding my way through—I found my way back into that kind of whole scene you’re talking about as opposed to vertical; the kind of whole thing. So I feel it like I feel it as I tune in on the Internet. I feel it in a lot of ways in which I feel there is a democratization of energy and power and consciousness, and information is so clearly connected with power, and consciousness is better than information. And to the most conscious being go to spoils. So watch out, Bill Clinton. Questions? Yes.

1:33:42

Dass

Speak about spirituality in the workplace. It always keeps coming back to the same thing. Where are you, by the way? There, okay. It always comes back to the same thing. It’s: you work on yourself. Because the workplace is just a model in your mind for an existential situation in which you are meeting other souls through various skills. Now the question is: do you meet as souls or do you meet only in your roles? You hear what I’m asking? And so your work is to be there in your role and as a soul. And then the other person does whatever they can do. And then you’re bringing into that workplace a level of consciousness that allows the whole scene to become more conscious—without bulldozing anybody, because that’s not going to work. Believe me.

So one of the things we’ve done, for example, is we’ve worked up like about 150 page statement of standards for businesses. Things that say: if I’m an ethical, moral, responsible human being, I really should think a little bit about the community where I’m dumping my waste. You know, it’s just little issues like that. And it’s interesting to start to help businesses re-look at their bottom line in terms of these issues. And I think what is shifting also is the appreciation of the difference between stockholders and stakeholders. And that as we get to look at businesses in terms of stakeholders, we start to appreciate where change can happen much better. Am I dealing with your question? Okay. Sir.

1:35:35

Dass

What’s my perspective on the life of Timothy Leary? How is his journey different than mine? Well, I’ll give you a delicious vignette. In this vignette you’ve got to understand that Timothy and I both had numerable consciousness-expanding experiences. But we responded differently to them, undoubtedly because of our karmic predilections. And so Timothy became fascinated with form and I became more fascinated with formlessness. So you could call me a mystic and you call him a visionary. So we were different. And he loved thought, and I kind of saw thought as something to be a little freer. So now it’s close to his death, and he is downloading his mind into his webpage, because that’s what a scientific materialist would do. He’s also going to freeze his brain as a—that’s the other thing he set up, cryonics, for later when it can be rewired. So I, as a psychologically trained entity, feel that he is caught in his mind, and that when he dies it’s going to be difficult for him because he’s made such an investment in something that’s going to crumble. So he’s ill-prepared because he’s in denial. So I better help him.

So I get down to help Timothy, but nobody there seems to need help. They’re all in virtual reality. I mean, they’re on cyberspace. Everybody in the house is in cyberspace and they’re downloading. And they’re all downloading everything and it’s incredible. Nobody’s dying. So I’m the only one worried about dying. None of them are. But I had my little suspicions. But he and I had this whole lifetime tension between these two views. So now he’s dying. It’s a few days before he’s dying. He calls me around 11:30 at night and he says, “Richard, I think I’m losing my memory.” So I said, “Yeah.” He said, “You know, memory’s just about everything.” I said, “Yeah.” I knew he thought that. He said, “But you know, there’s something more than memory.” I thought, “Aha!” It’s like a deathbed confession, you know? Like, wow! So I said, “Yeah.” He said, “But I forgot.” I can’t ask for a better playmate than that. I want you to know, alright? That’s a real playmate.

And so the last time I was down there, I was with him, and he was signing acid blotter art. He got a hundred dollars for every signature, and he was practically dead, you know, and he was just like—and I was taking them away as he signed them. And I said, “Timothy, we’re doing peace work.” You know, this is great. And I saw that he had this whole game around him, and I looked in his eyes—which he never did that much—I looked in his eyes and who I saw looking back at me was so far behind all of his games. He was so somebody open to the mystery, so much, not even trapped in being the adventurer, which is a trap of mine. He was just aah, ready, there. And it completely—all the thing drained out of me; all my psycho-paranoia. You know? And I just felt absolutely: go, friend, go!

And there was one thing he did with his dying that I really want to applaud. He published daily his drug intake, and it was picked up by CNN and Newsweek. So it would say he had so much coffee, so many [???], so many balloons of nitrous oxide, so many hash cookies, so many scotch and so on. At first I thought, “Well, he’s certainly being showy,” you know. But then I saw that he was saying: when you tailor your own drug needs at the time of dying, the way he was choosing to do it was to stay as pain-free as he could, as alert as he could, and have as much fun as he could. See, now that third one, see how hard that sells in this culture? Have fun dying? Don’t be silly, that’s obscene! Why? And I love the fact that he played that one out. I just think that’s beautiful as just a social statement.

Timothy was, with predispositions, very much of a revolutionary. He was very busy overthrowing the establishment. And I am very much of an evolutionary, in the sense I sneak in and permeate, and it all changes, you know. I mean, I don’t go against. And when we worked together, it was quite exquisite, because we were both—he was very evolutionary, of course, also. But his revolutionary bent of fighting, like the Irish fighting the English, whatever it was that was in him, or the Catholic altar boy, there was a very far out moment. Near the end I came to visit him, and I knew about his diet of all his medicines, and his consciousness, and the pain, and the state of the cancer. And I said to him, “Timothy, this is a really interesting time. What have you found out?” Got anything for me to tell the troops, you know? And he said, “Well, the first thing I found out is”—and I really leaned forward to get this one—he said, “is that I’m a good boy.” Isn’t that tasty? That’s all. I just want to share that. You know? That’s a big one. Let me just make sure I’m getting the round here. Yes, way back. Woman, yes.

1:42:48

Dass

Youth suicide rate? Yeah. Well, I think that, first of all, I think the death and sex are much closer together in cultural consciousness than they ever were before. And I think that kids feel often very, very cut off from the whole structure of the society in which they’re living. Everybody—family, friends, everybody. And I think they’re starving to death in their minds, and then they really want to escape that space, because it’s unbearable to be that cut off, to be that hungry. And most people either try to break their way out of it forward or make do with very little, but some people just say, “I can’t play. I can’t stand it.”

I mean, it may well be that the person is a very evolved being and just dropping their body, and it’s not like they’re dying inappropriately, because since you don’t know really what we’re doing here, it’s hard to figure out whether a child killing himself knows something you don’t, or is making a terrible error. See? And it’s very presumptuous in a way to act as if you do know when you don’t know. I mean, sometimes I look at childhood deaths, and I feel with the culture the pain of a young life not living out its dreams. But then a kind of little rascally part of my mind says: imagine we’re all here in the fourth grade. We’ve all been born into the fourth grade, and somebody comes along and says, “You’re going on to the fifth grade early.” And everybody in the fourth grade says, “No, no, don’t leave us! You’re so young.” And the other person’s only going to the fifth grade. And I get a feeling at times that we are so enamored of where we think we are that it colors our judgment about how long people should live. I really have a sense that—and my guru said this at one point—nobody dies a minute too late, a minute too soon. Now I have to figure out why it could happen to that person at that moment, or feel it and understand it in my heart. But not judge it. Not judge it. Yes?

1:46:07

Dass

I think you change a stigma by not holding it. That’s the first thing you do. And if you’re even against the stigma, it’s got you. So it’s a lot to get beyond stigma; to just be with the person behind the stigma. That’s really what you’re doing. But for you to do that, you’ve got to get beyond the stigma, or your reaction to it. It’s interesting. Questions? Sir?

1:46:54

Dass

Aha! How do you keep your center when everybody around you is losing theirs, or has lost theirs? Well, I’ll tell you, what you usually do is: you pick battles you can win now and then. And you don’t go near the really heavy things unless you have to. And if you have to go near them, you usually drown for a while, and then you sputter to life again and realize you’ve gotten caught in this stuff. And you just barely hold on, and then you start to get stronger again. That’s usually what happens. Once you understand what this process of this curriculum of awakening is about, then that situation is like Kali has come with her tongue dripping blood to purify you. And you say, “Oh wow, instead of being surrounded by satsang or sangha, I’m surrounded by total illusion.”

I remember the moment when I’d been thrown out of Harvard, and there was a press conference because I was the first person in 6,000 years to be thrown out of Harvard. And the press was surrounding me—the television, the radio—and they were all looking at me like I was a loser, because I had taken on Harvard and lost. And I felt like somebody who had lost a big fight and would now be sweeping the gym. But the predicament was that, inside myself, I felt like I’d won. And I said—because I was now connected with this deeper spiritual truth in my being—and I said to myself, the psychologist in me said, “That is psychosis.” When everybody thinks one way and you think another way, you should give yourself a second opinion. And I turned out to be right. I thought, “If it’s psychosis, here we go.” Because you can’t deny your inner truth just because it happens to be psychotic at a cultural moment in history. Because psychosis in one moment is sainthood in another. Not always, but…. Questions? Sir?

1:49:22

Dass

The practice of meditation in my life. The more deeply I became involved in the journey of awakening, the more I began to see the predicament I was in in relation to my own mind, and see that I was incredibly trapped in identification with my thoughts, my desires, my stuff. And it was in that appreciation that I first started to enter into meditation as a practice that promised that, if I would use some discipline in undertaking it, it would help me extricate my awareness from identification with my thought—not to deny the thought, but not to be trapped by it, right?

So I went into, at that time, Theravadan Buddhism, vipassana meditation. Very simple: following your breath rising and falling, following your steps, lifting, pushing, putting you in place. And I developed some samadhi, or concentration. And then you take that concentration and you start to examine your mind with that concentrated mind, and you start to break through into other levels of awareness. And this just happens with discipline pursuing one of these paths.

What happened was: over years I’ve practiced very many different kind of meditation strategies. And I’m a kind of an eclectic dilettante—you know, jerk—but what I found is that every one of them worked with another part of my being and helped me. I could see that each one started to have a payoff for me. And I started to be much more interested in a whole lot of other kinds of meditation practices, many more devotional, a lot of different kinds. Am I dealing with your question? Yes?

1:51:44

Dass

The soul is the ocean that thinks it’s a soul. The thought that it is a soul is what reincarnates. Okay. I mean, it’s still a drop in the ocean, so it’s still whatever it is. It just isn’t—you don’t stand inside of it any longer. You’re the whole ocean. Yes? Oh, I’m sorry. Yes, okay. I didn’t turn. Isn’t that nice?

1:52:38

Dass

Well, who are they u-turns to? I mean, you’re watching it all.

1:52:50

Dass

But that’s their problem. What are you upset about?

1:52:58

Dass

Well, as you do inner work through whatever method you do, you become different. It’s not like you have something, it’s: you are something. Or you open to a deeper part of what you are. And that isn’t exactly takeable away, because it’s what you are. Right? That’s their problem. If you get caught in it, that’s your problem. You’re saying I get caught in their judgments of me, because I’m trying to convince them I’m right. You said—I would say you hold what you believe and be what you believe. One of my friends called from a mental hospital and he said, “You know, I know I’m the Buddha.” He said, “But when I tell my mother that, she’s not the least bit appreciative.” But he said, “When I am the Buddha, she really likes it.” Yes.

1:54:24

Dass

Right. He said that, in talking about the chakras, he’s heard me talk a lot about the lower three and a little bit about the fourth. But he’s heard precious little about the fifth, sixth, and seventh. Well, that’s because I talk from where I am. I’ve only heard tales about those other chakras! No, I’d say that my ability to do this is an example of fifth chakra, the gift of Saraswati. I would say that the wisdom you and I have when we transcend knowledge, the wisdom that we are when you simplify and go into the place where you are connected with the universe, the wisdom you are.

1:55:37

Dass

I love that. What happens is: I start to go the wisdom “you are,” and it just takes me into the wisdom “you are.” And then I’m not the least bit interested in where I was a moment before. Now, it’s interesting. When you’re alone thinking, you don’t mind doing that at all. But we are with each other. We keep feeling we’re supposed to be linear. I get you. And the second point is—and I watch myself being very frustrated with me because I’m not more linear. But yet I don’t think linearly at all. And the fun is since we are recognizing a space of our consciousness by being together, the nonlinear as well as the linear does the whole process. What was the question I was just responding to?

1:56:34

Dass

Aha, the chakras. The wisdom. And then this one is where you aren’t. You disappear. You’re the drop in the ocean. You’re the ocean. You’re beyond ocean. You’re the thousand-petal lotus. So I may drop up there for a second, but I hardly have time to see the view. I’m really quite content being in the fourth chakra, to tell you the truth. It’s been a long, hard struggle to get there. But as you get older it gets easier. Sweet as they may be. Yes?

1:57:29

Dass

Well, the beauty of the Guru Kripa is what I was talking about before with the imaginary playmate. What I have is a being with me all the time who is a mirror showing me what I still have to do, or where I still might be holding. Because I see something when I look at him. And as I get further along in my connection to him, it ceases to be relational anymore. It is more of where we share a presence together. It is not I have become him. I am far from becoming Maharaj-ji. And he’s dead, and I’m alive. I mean, we are not one. And yet there is a way in which that presence is transcending the way in which I am a seeker and he is a guru. And that’s a very delicious stage of my existence at the moment. Yes? Yes.

1:58:42

Dass

There was a moment in 1968 when I had been given the name Ram Dass, which meant a name for Hanuman, the monkey god of Hinduism, and I was living in a temple. And I went to a nearby temple and I sat daily in front of this eight-foot cement orange monkey with his chest ripped open, in which were a male and female form, Ram and Sita. And he had a mace over his shoulder. And I remember thinking about all of my colleagues back at Harvard, and what they would think if they saw me there, let alone all my Jewish relatives—sitting in front of, worshipfully, a large orange cement monkey.

But what I was doing was doing a very ancient spiritual practice, actually, which is the practice of devotion, which uses dualism to go beyond dualism. And so that you go into the essence of Hanuman, and then Hanuman is pointed towards Ram, and then you go through Ram, and then you go beyond. So I just see it as a method. I don’t worship cement monkeys. I am using it as a method to get free, just in the same way as I would use the Halakha law to get free in Judaism. And I hear—like, I have a lot of difficulty in Judaism, for example, because there are ways in the Halakha law, for example, where it says if you have a vision, and that vision isn’t the same vision that the great visionaries had, the prophets, and you articulate that vision, you are a false prophet. And I can’t hear any instruction that tells me to invalidate my own intuitive sense of what is the closest to my truth. I really want to hold in the politics of consciousness the freedom to trust that intuitive thing. So I have a hard time with things like that. So I play with it a lot. I mean, I play with all of these issues a lot. But I don’t see—and that’s why I’m not, I mean, I’m like a hin-boo Jew or something like that, you know. I can’t really see how I can say one way up the mountain is the only way up the mountain. It doesn’t feel that way. Am I dealing with your question or not? Okay. Yes?

2:01:46

Dass

She’s asking about the experience of emptiness, and the comparison between the experience of emptiness you might have with psychedelics (or entheogens, as they’re now called), or meditation. Right? Is that the question? Well, I think the word “emptiness” is probably really not a good word to use. Because it obviously isn’t empty. That’s the first reason why it’s not a good word to use. I mean, it is full of everything. It just isn’t manifest. So it’s like the unmanifest. It’s where it’s all and everything and nothing at the same moment, because it hasn’t taken form yet into something, and yet it is everything.

So, in a way, you would say that one of the ways of thinking about God is as that unmanifest everything or nothing. And, for example, in meditation practice, you can go into nirvikalpa samadhi, formless emptiness, through bringing your concentration in so tight, you can go between two thoughts. You go into the space between two thoughts and there there is no universe. And when you do that, you come into an experience in which—or, see, there’s the way the words fall down, because it is not an experience. It is a moment in which experiencer and experience are no longer in a dualistic relationship to one another. So there is no experience, so there’s nothing. But you are everything. That’s what that emptiness is we’re talking about. Is that coming through?

And then the question of the difference between psychedelics and meditation, in terms of that experience. I don’t know that I’m really clear in my own mind about it. But I’ll tell you what my guru said, which I thought is pretty interesting. He said: your medicine (meaning LSD), he said it would allow you to come into the presence of Christ and have Christ darshan. You could be with him. He said: but you could only stay for two hours, and then you’d have to leave. He said it would be better to become Christ than visit him, but your medicine won’t do that. Okay? So what I heard was that the medicine was an astral analog of emptiness, rather than emptiness. But to me that was still pretty useful along the way. I still like having two hours with Christ. Okay, is that dealing with the question? Yes?

2:04:49

Dass

How psychology, how to work with psychological—psychodynamics, yeah. Well, I now see psychodynamics as structural things of the mind. Where are you? Yeah, yeah. Structural things of the mind. And it seems to me that, to the extent you get a little leg up into some kind of mindful state, or witness, or some kind of spiritual consciousness, then you can see psychodynamics more comfortably because you’re less identified with them. Because your awareness has come up. Like somebody will come up and say, “I’m depressed.” And I’ll say, “Are you really depressed?” They’ll say, “Yeah, I’m really depressed.” I say, “Are you totally depressed?” “Yes, I’m totally depressed.” I say, “Well, is the person that’s telling me you’re depressed, depressed?” And they say, “Well, no, that person is just telling you.” Aha! See? I say, “There’s a part of you that isn’t depressed.” And as you cultivate that part, actually, through practices, you get to the point where you can deal with the psychodynamic stuff much more lightly than when you were totally identified with it.

So my sort of snide comment has been: if you want psychotherapy, be sure you don’t go to somebody who thinks they’re a therapist. See? Because if they think they’re real, then you must be real as the client. And who needs to be a client all their life? So be careful. It’s human being meeting human being through the vehicle of massage, or therapy, or whatever it is. And if you aren’t busy being a therapist, you see the other being as a soul who’s got some psychodynamic stuff they’re working on. It’s like going in for fender and body repair on your old car, you know; something like that. And you’re very compassionate towards it, and you don’t belittle it, but you don’t make a life’s work out of it. Sir?

2:07:00

Dass

Relationships, spirit? Oh, you’re going to tell me the question. Go ahead.

2:07:50

Dass

Another horny celibate, yes. I’ll repeat the question in a second in a paraphrased form. He’s getting to the question.

2:08:42

Dass

Paraphrase the question: his wife—with whom he is very close, and they love each other deeply—she’s going back to India, and he’s horny. That’s part of it. That is part of it. Huh? Is that part of it? Yeah, that is part of it. Okay. I mean, now this is an interesting predicament. I mean, I hear it. There are a number of choices. We can ask Jocelyn Elders—what?

2:09:20

Dass

You can honor her spiritual chastity, but you’ve got to be honoring your own truth as well. There is the conflict. Yes. That becomes the spiritual practice right there, that tension. And your job is to extricate yourself from that tension to the point where you don’t care which way it goes. And that’s using that as a yoga—doesn’t mean you still won’t be horny, but you won’t be busy being horny. Do you hear what I’m saying at all or not?

2:10:03

Dass

What? You know all this stuff. I mean, what I’m hearing is that you and your wife have tasted very deep spiritual truth with one another, and you’ve experienced it in part in a celibate environment in India. And when you came back here, you realized that there was a lot of stuff that had been pushed under the rug that was still around in you. And you were working with it, the two of you were working with all of this as well as you could, but it gets very complicated. And at some point she decided—now, maybe I got it wrong there—she decided to go back to India.

2:10:43

Dass

Okay, well… see, when people come to me—for example, this is in your case—sbut they come to me and they say, “Should I get divorced or not?” I always say, since they came to me as a spiritual person, I say, “It doesn’t matter.” They say, “Well, it matters to me.” I said, “Well, there’s the problem.”

2:11:19

Dass

I’m sure you went through a culture shock. It’s a very horny culture. There’s a lot of stuff arousing prurient interest every way you look, you know. And if you’re going to buy those mind states, you’re going to go the trip. And that’s the predicament. You come back into a culture and everybody’s saying the same stuff, so you think that must be reality. What it is, is a conspiracy of a culture to define reality a certain way. And the game isn’t interesting enough to be caught in those kind of traps. It’s worth working on yourself not to be caught. It doesn’t matter which one you do. Not satisfying you, but we’re working on it. Questions? Yes?

2:12:14

Dass

No. No, the journey of awakening isn’t choice, unfortunately. The question is: is the journey of awakening choice? I’d say no, it isn’t. I would say that the journey of awakening is karma, and that that’s law, and that it unfolds that you decide you’re going to come here tonight. And it unfolds that from this something shifts just a tiny bit, and then you decide you’re going to do that, and then something else goes. And if you stood back far enough, you’d see the kind of lawful unfolding, including your mindset that said, “I think I’ll go and hear Ram Dass.” So where was the choice? Choice is only when you have awareness that’s free. So the desire for freedom is still a programmed thing in you. You’re still conditional, and you’re working for an unconditional awareness. Did I deal with the question? No, do you want to say it again? Hello? What?

2:13:23

Dass

Well, willpower and concentration, like I talk about discipline and all that, I kind of think that’s all kind of bullshit, actually. I really think it’s this horrible thing we got to get behind ourselves and push, or we’ll—it’s an old Freudian thing that, if you don’t have the superego, the id’s going to take over and destroy everything. And I just don’t buy that trip about human beings. I really don’t. I’d rather say to somebody, “Lazy? Be lazy,” and then see what happened. When you need to go to the toilet, you’re not lazy. See? And why shouldn’t life be like going to a toilet? I mean, why shouldn’t it come out of that place? What is all this fraudulence, like we’ve got to convince ourselves that we need to go to the toilet? Yes.

2:14:18

Dass

She’s asking about channeling: whether I think it’s a tool for guidance or is it useful or is it whatever. I wrote a preface for the books of Emmanuel, which are books about a disembodied being that speaks through a woman named Pat Rodegast, who he doesn’t possess, or he just talks to her. Whatever that’s called. And I realized over the years that there had been many times when I had been talked to about various beings from other places sending messages. And as I looked over those messages, I realized that all beings that didn’t have bodies weren’t bright. That there were a lot of schlock astral beings who were losing when they were alive and then say, “Well, I’ll send back messages and send back losing messages now too.” So I realized that she just couldn’t—just because somebody was disembodied, didn’t mean you should elevate them. They should still have the same criteria you’d impose for anybody else. Does it intuitively feel right? Does it fit in with my life?

And what I’ve come to—and I said in that preface—was: I have no idea whether Pat Rodegast, through whom Emmanuel comes, is just a vertical schizophrenic that has no knowledge of this other being at all as herself, or whether Emmanuel is galumphing through the astral something, having pity upon these slobs down there and sending the, like, I said to Emmanuel—I like him because he’s got a sense of humor. I said, “Emmanuel, what should I tell people about dying, since I talk to people about dying all the time?” He said, “Ram Dass, tell them it’s absolutely safe.” I mean, that is a jewel. It’s worth it to accept astral beings just for that one-liner. I mean, he said it’s like taking off a tight shoe. Fascinating! So what I do is I listen to stuff that comes by my consciousness, and if it’s useful, I use it, and if it isn’t, I don’t have to judge it. I just say I don’t have any business with that. Okay? Sir?

2:16:50

Dass

About [Kelly’s suicide]. Well, Kelly was a quadriplegic that I knew for many years, and many of us did and loved and treasured very much. He became quadriplegic when he was before puberty, and I knew him at around 28 or 30 or something like that. And when I met Kelly, Kelly was brought to the hall, and he was in a wheelchair, and he was back, and he had a little box in front of him. And so I went over and I knelt down in front of him, and my reaction to how deeply incapacitated he was was very, very powerful. And he parses out that he wanted help with his anger. So, I mean, it was like the contract was made. And I realized that if I was going to help him with his anger, I had to get through my reactivity to his predicament. Because I was so busy responding to his symbolic value that I couldn’t get to him behind it all.

So that took me about, I’d say, about six months, of seeing Kelly and visiting every few weeks or whenever. And we got to the point where I didn’t even notice—I mean, I didn’t have to notice—that Kelly was quadriplegic at all. We just looked into one of his eyes and he spelled out letter by letter on his little board, his board, the words he wanted to say. And it was just like talking to any of you. It’s just a different rate and a different sort of way of doing it.

And as he and I made contact behind his illness, then we could both look at the anger from a non-angry place. And he really did change tremendously. He showed incredible spiritual growth. And then he got to the point where he said, “I think I’ve had enough of this one.” And the predicament was that he couldn’t move. He was totally dependent on other human beings to keep alive. So none of them could afford to help him die without putting themselves in a tremendously high-risk legal situation. So I said to Kelly, “Well, the only thing you could do”—because the only control he seemed to have was with his throat muscle—“the only thing you could really do is stop eating.” He said, “Could I do that?” I said, “Sure.”

So he did. He stopped eating. And he went for—I mean, I assumed after two weeks he would, but he went like 40 some odd days. And then it turned out that I didn’t know, but he had been eating sucrose and fruit juices and things. He hadn’t been really fasting to death. And so he was getting upset. He said, “Would I be upset with him if he ate?” I said, “Of course I wouldn’t. I want you to stay around. I think you are a precious commodity. I think you are a living saint in my life and I want you here. You’ve got to do what you want and I don’t take away your freedom to do it.” And so then he did two weeks without anything, I think just water. And he got very, very weak. And then he said he really wanted to go, and he had asked somebody to help him and that person agreed to help him, and he died. Is that the question you’re asking? Yeah.

We should stop shortly. Yes.

2:21:03

Dass

Fear, and getting past fear. I’ll tell you, it’s five past eleven. We’ll go ten more minutes to the quarter past eleven and stop, okay? And those of you who need to leave, oh my God, it’s eleven, go. Don’t be afraid. But if you’re afraid, stay, because I’m going to talk about fear.

The root, let’s just go back to the beginnings. The root of fear is ignorance. The ignorance is that you are a separate entity. As long as you identify with your separateness, there will be fear. As long as you extricate yourself from that identification, you will enter a part of your being which has nothing to be afraid of. The separate entity has a lot to be afraid of, because it’s going to cease to exist in practically no time. And it’s also going to go through all its stuff. So there is fear in separateness. And as you awaken from that and balance it—that you are separate and you are not separate—that part of you that is not separate is not in fear. And that is the part that balances and makes you able to be with the fear without making believe it doesn’t exist, or without being taken over by it. So that you can be—it doesn’t mean fear goes away. You may still feel the fear, but the other part of your consciousness will be able to say, “Ah, fear.” So instead of, “I’m afraid,” it’s more like, “I’m afraid” is one level, and “There’s fear” is another level. And as you keep cultivating that other part of your consciousness—at least it does for me—I find that the fears just don’t have the seduction anymore. That there’s a part of me that sees the fear is just my mind grabbed hold again and let go. Am I dealing with your question? Sort of? Yes.

2:23:15

Dass

How about judgment? It’s a terrible question! How about judgment? What I have found is that I was a very, very judging person. It’s interesting, I noticed, that when I go out in the woods and I look at aspens and I look at oak and I look at pinion, I don’t sit around judging them, I just appreciate them. But the minute I come near humans, see—I mean I can even do, with cats I can even appreciate different cats—but humans, I go into a judging mode. And I think that has to do with my own fears as a separate entity, you know? And I’m positioning myself in a comfortable way by making myself the judge. And I would say that every time I find myself judging now, I use it as a technique by saying, “Take the thing you were judging and turn it into appreciation.” See? Just appreciate how it is. It’s like when you meet the worst slimy thief, enjoy the essence of slimy thiefness at the same moment as you’re saying, “I won’t have anything more to do with that guy,” or person; could be a woman. Okay, am I dealing with the question? It’s: flip it around. And I do, I intentionally flip it, because I feel when I get into my judging mind, I get extremely curmudgeony. And I don’t even like me at all. It’s no fun to be a judge. Yes?

2:24:57

Dass

What would I say to young people that want to use drugs? Well, I’ll tell you, that’s a hard one in this culture at this moment. I would say, if they would ask me, I would say a number of things. I would say that there are different stages of life. And there is a stage where you have to get your act together on the ground floor, developing your somebody-ness. And it may be a little premature to go after your nobody-ness until you get your somebody-ness in order. That’s one of the first things I would say. So just get your scenario in order. When you’re busy with your sex life, economic life, family, independence, da, da, da, da, that’s a hard time to be also experimenting on your consciousness. It might not be the optimum moment for that.

And then, if you are going to do that, then I would invite you to get educated as well as you can about what leads to what, and what to not lead to what. And when you’re being educated, you will see that the things that we have realized are that set and setting are terribly important to the nature of the experience—that one has with psychedelics, anyway. And the predicament is that the setting in this culture has a lot of paranoia connected with it. So that when you start to experiment as a young person, you’ve got to realize you’re doing it in a culture that is really hostile to what you’re doing. And that’s going to be something you’re going to take into the session until you’re a real master at not getting caught in stuff. So I would say this may not be the optimum culture for that kind of experimentation at this moment.

If you are, after all that education, you’re going to do it, then I want to help you create a safe and deep and useful space for that experience that you possibly can have. And I hope you would share with me what happens to you, both the pros and the cons, and let’s stay connected. Because my models and judgment about it all can cut me off from you if I’m not careful. Yeah. Yes?

2:28:10

Dass

Nice story. Thank you. Well, everybody, this was a great opportunity for us to be together. I really appreciate us coming together to explore truth together. It feels very sweet. Thank you!