Best of Ram Dass: Love and Relationships

00:00:07 - 00:00:58
Miami seems like a good place to reflect upon greed is watching a baby feed and a very young infant feed. Now, that's pure greed. Pure greed. It's just there is no self-consciousness about it at all. And then we get socialized and we mix greed with a liberal dosage of guilt and shame to control our greed. Then later, we mix it with rational rationalizations, a rational structure to control our greed, using our intellect. So when we are a controlled greed instrument, we are called socialized.


00:01:48 - 00:02:37
We still have the greed. We still want what we want when we want it. Because when we're getting just what we want, when we want it, we have a certain feeling of, Yeah. Oh, right on. You know, when you're really thirsty and there's no water and you've got a long distance to go and you finally get to a point where there's a cool glass of water. Ooh. Or you need to go to the bathroom and you're on a long bus trip. Oh, yeah? Mm hmm. That moment of getting just what it is that you wanted.


00:02:54 - 00:03:35
It's the moment when you merge. You were somebody wanting the water. It's like with sex. It's very clear. You want the orgasm. You think? Here it comes. Here it comes. Here it comes. And then there it goes. There it goes. There it goes. But at the moment, at the moment, nobody's thinking anything. Nobody's thinking. This is it. There isn't anybody there to think anything. But that lasts about that long, unless you're can get it out of there. So, Master of the selfless moment,


00:03:47 - 00:04:23
the moment when you're not busy being somebody doing something. The moment of flow now in the culture has been changing, and we're throwing off a lot of our guilt and shame. So what happens then? Everybody tries to come back to basic greed to get what they want when they want it. When you're hungry, you eat. Then you see people swelling bigger and bigger and bigger. Just out of pure greed. More and more ease, more and more comfort, more luxury, more, more. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.


00:04:44 - 00:05:35
If I get just a little bit more, it'll be just enough. And for those moments, it is. It is not. The problem is that those are moments in time and a moment later they're gone. You're all masters of going up and coming down. You know how to get up there and you also know how to get down. And most of you, no matter how hard you push, come down. You buy a new car. You get behind the driver's. We'll get that rush. Oh, just the fantasy I had. Here it is. $4,000 later. I got it. You zoom down the road, the moment


00:06:08 - 00:06:48
a few days later, this is squeak New dance. The moment is passed. People who are designing their lives around, getting more, try to get those moments in closer and closer together. Because if you can get them in close enough, you may not notice the space between them. So right in the middle of dinner. Like, what's for dessert? You're in dessert. Nicolson Coffee. Let's bring the coffee. Let's go to the movies in the middle of the movies. Why don't we do after the movie? It's going to ice cream soda.


00:07:01 - 00:07:36
Ice cream soda. Let's take a walk. Taking the walk. What do you say? This is great. Let's go to bed and go to bed. What's in the refrigerator? And so it goes on and on and on. Always just getting ready for the next one to make sure there's not going to be a space between the one you're in now because God forbid, there should be a space. And the fantasy of the society is if you have enough money and enough power, you'll be able to do it. You'll be able to bring it on.


00:07:41 - 00:08:20
You get them in so tight, it'll just be one wish. It'll just be jetting to Tokyo for breakfast all the way. Right. That's it. But television, as the obvious media medium, has not somewhat of a hole in that fantasy because it confronts you on the screen, right in your own right between your feet, your own bedroom, with faces of those people who made it. And if you look in close, the vibration often isn't one you want. As if I made it by everything society said I should do to make it.


00:08:48 - 00:09:37
And where is the pot of gold? What's wrong? But why worry? The sun will be up tomorrow. It'll be warm and toasty. I'll just worry about how to earn a living. Keep my kids alive, get a little sun, have a little leisure. Smoke little grass. It's okay. I'll fill. I'll fill. But there is a moment when you don't want to fill any more. When the futility of your predicament of grabbing at things that are in time becomes too apparent. When that happens for an individual. He experiences despair,


00:10:12 - 00:10:59
and in the midst of that despair is the seed of the next stage of his growth of awareness. You are here in this room, almost without exception, because you recognize what I am talking about, that even if you are in the midst of collecting it all, of having good home, good family, good insurance policies, good security, good fun, good sun, good nature, good social responsibility, good political activism, good health food, good clothes, good friends. Back inside of you is saying, What is it back in here that's yearning for something else?


00:11:17 - 00:12:06
Is it? Is this just neurosis? And we just a collective group of neurotics? We may well be. By the way, this may be the dissatisfaction of an affluent society, grasping at straws or it may be that we are part we are sort of pods. We are those things that go out from the amoeba. We are the leading edge of a shift of consciousness in which we are now reaching for something more profound, deeper in our own beings, deeper in the universe. Obvious shifts. For example, in this group. Many of you are shifting from


00:12:18 - 00:13:02
identifying with that feeling towards the universe of my job is to master and control my environment. Shifting to my work is to hear and flow with and be a part of my universe. Now that's an entirely different ego structure. That is a shift in consciousness. That is the answer to the ecological imbalances that come from man's intellect. Attempting to control nature. That's called in Chinese philosophy. The down the flow, the harmony being in tune with being an instrument of the universe


00:13:31 - 00:14:12
instead of a master of it. But what a humble ego to be willing to do that. If that were Henry Kissinger, he would have to listen instead of just sending. That's the difference between a politician and a statesman. That's the difference between a knowledgeable person and a wise man. We are collectively in training to become wise persons, a wisdom that is going to be reflected in our beings. Our actions are going to reflect the shifts in consciousness that we are about at this moment. Now, actually, who you are


00:14:38 - 00:15:19
has another level of significance that some of you will find difficult to hear, others will hear comfortably. And it concerns issues of reincarnation and karma of who you are. See, at one level, you think you are somebody sitting in North Miami Beach High School and you think you are a man or a woman or a boy or a girl or some mixture. But you have so many levels of identity, so many levels of identity. Why do you pick that particular reality to cling to? Because it's being fed by your senses


00:15:37 - 00:16:13
and by your thinking mind. Until your I be single, until you only see with the third eye, you are hooked on these eyes. These there is this nose, this mouth, this skin, these thoughts. And that creates which reality. And they're all tuned with certain frequency. And on that frequency you are sitting in North Miami Beach High School. But who I see you to be is, for the most part, very different than who you think you are. I've been through the example many times, and many of you have heard the example,


00:16:28 - 00:17:03
but it's such a vivid image that we can repeat it and work with it. It's a good one. So one of the flipping of the switch by the eyes, the your perceptual apparatus you are receiving step. See if you tune in to channel a channel, let's say channel two on your television set your eyes. What you see when you look out at the world is the physical reality. You see, man, woman, big little old, young, dark light, bald, hairy, develop, undeveloped muscle bent knows this, that whatever. Right.


00:17:09 - 00:17:46
If you're preoccupied with that in yourself, that's what you see in everybody else. If you think you've got a funny looking nose, what you noticed when you walk down the street is everybody's knows it's bizarre, right? If you think you don't have the right clothes or you notice the people's clothes and the physical reality, if you are horny, once you notice in all people are who is makeable? Who is a competitor with you for who is makeable and who is irrelevant. And that's the reality.


00:17:58 - 00:18:41
That's what you see. That's watching all the girls go by on the street corner or the boys go by in this magazine. One more and let now, when you look at another person, once you see that is as if two mirrors were placed facing each other with nothing in between. You see itself looking at itself, looking at itself, looking at itself infinitely. For you have moved the plane of the ancient one of the one where there's only one of us here. In that reality, there is one of us here talking to itself.


00:18:55 - 00:19:39
We are making believe we are the many. We are playing as if we're many. So we can play out this dance. We are all in drag because when you rip off, the mask is only one of it. Right? And I am talking to myself. The now, the minute you left the psychological, the minute you left that second channel went to the astral plane, you immediately left North Miami Beach High School right, Right. Which of these realities is you? Who are you? Who do you think you are in? Are we just to complete the game?


00:19:50 - 00:20:39
We'll just go one more, one more flip. You disappear, I disappear. The television receiver disappeared. We have just entered into the formless called the Void. Not nothing. That's something. These are all relative realities. Physical, psychological, astral, soul, one. All of those are relative realities in form. But they are all relatively real. No one of them is absolutely real. And if you try to stand in one of them, you're going to have to deny all the rest of them. And if you are standing in one of them and saying who I am


00:20:53 - 00:21:42
is my psychological self, and then suddenly you have a dream or a vision or your consciousness offers, you say, I was out of my mind or I had a hallucination. In the New York Times last year, there was an article in the Sunday supplement, a study done on Mysticism in America, and it said 2/5 of the population of the United States have had a transcendent, mystical experience. That's an enormous number of people who have gone outside of their ego structure. A sampling of those 2/5, 85% said it was the most profound


00:21:55 - 00:22:30
experience of my life, and I never want to have another one. Can you hear that? Because it upset the apple cart? Because if you want to hold on here, neurosis and suddenly you've been catapult it out to where you are experiencing oneness with the universe, what happened to your neurosis? And if you built a whole game plan around your neurosis, you are left with nothing, nowhere to stand. So it is true that most people in society are pushing away experiences that indicate that they have an identity on other planes of reality


00:22:46 - 00:23:33
in order to hold tightly to the plane they are comfortable with. Now, what is liberation within that context? A liberated being is somebody who has moved out of the reality that they thought was absolute initially in their life into another reality and another reality and another reality. And they are liberated from being stuck in any single reality. Somebody we call psychotic is in a reality other than the one that, say, three psychiatrists agree to say. Like the example I gave, I think in the only dance there is where I visited my brother


00:23:45 - 00:24:27
who was thinking he was Christ and the psychiatrist who thought he was a psychiatrist. Right. And they both were in a room together, convinced the other one was insane. They and but the insanity is clinging to any reality. I didn't stay functioning in any reality, I said, clinging to any reality. A conscious being functions in all realities. And you have your astral identity in your physical identity and your psychological identity and your spiritual identity. And your identity is the one. And you are beyond identity all here and now.


00:24:35 - 00:25:30
That's what the game is. What John Morley call his house. Please, who you are in an evolutionary sense is somebody who in this very lifetime has begun to awaken to your predicament of a limited reality. That's it. If you think of the image of a clock, 12:00. Perfect harmony in the universe, perfect flow metaphor you can work with about 12:00 Garden of Eden. Everything is in relation to everything else. There is no separateness within that perfection. God has said man has choice. That's part of the perfection


00:26:09 - 00:26:57
choice to do what? Choice to act in opposition to the will of God, in opposition to the flow, to the harmony. If you cannot get into an emotional reaction of the Garden of Eden story, it will teach you a great deal at this moment before eating the apple, which is the apple of knowledge in which man goes into duality dualism in which he then knows but no longer is. He has separated himself in order to know he wants to be God. He wants to know not just be following eating of the apple. God finds him covering his genitals with a fig leaf


00:27:07 - 00:27:55
and God says to him, and to Eve, Who told you you were naked? Where did separateness come from? Where did shame come from? Why do you even think your separate? Because the minute you start to think about something, you have separated yourself from the flow. Now be careful, because I'm not knocking intellect. I'm merely doing what Vivekananda talked about shifting the intellect from being a master to being a servant. Okay. 1201 You ate the apple. You at the apple, by the way, right now you suddenly look around


00:28:06 - 00:28:55
and you see it all, but you are no longer part of it. You are experiencing your own separateness, the beginning of alienation and you are cast out of the Garden of Eden, out of the flow, out of the self conscious. Let's flow from 1201 to 559 birth after birth after birth after birth. You are born into your separateness again and again and again. And each time you spend your life trying to opt demise the control with your separateness in order to re-experience what you had at 12:00 but still keep your own sense of separateness.


00:29:06 - 00:29:46
In other words, you want to be God and have your own heaven. That's what somebody in Miami Beach wants, is to be God and have his own heaven where he wants. 559 Everything you have done birth after birth, after birth after birth, and you know how many births we're talking about. I mean, I can't do enough after births, the Buddha gives the example. Remember this story? Buddha said, if you took a mountain that was the width, the length that it would take an oxygen to walk in one day, which is about six miles.


00:30:02 - 00:30:41
It's six miles long, six miles wide and six miles high. And every hundred years, a bird flies by the mountain with a silk scarf in its beak, and it runs the scarf over the top of the mountain in the length of time it would take for the silk scarf to wear down the mountain. That's how long birth? Yeah. Birth. Death. Birth? Yeah. If you want to get a little sense of the time, just look at how many times you blink your eyes since you walked in here. Those are like, lifetimes. It's just the time change.


00:30:52 - 00:31:41
Time shift. This whole thing you're involved in this is the big one. All right. You've said that for the last 10,000 of them. Okay, This is the one. I'm going to do it right. Just one more pizza. Right? And there it is. Another birth, another pizza. And we start another dimension of this evening. For those of you that know these words, words of birds. Sit straight and just breathe into your heart and keep rising on the energy in this room. All right. Let the words flowing out. You don't have to turn off that reality to do the other thing.


00:31:44 - 00:32:32
But you can go beyond the words here to the words are to keep the intellect calm so another process can go on and then 6:00 to spare. I have tried every strategy I know in order to master the universe and be in control of it and recreate the Garden of Eden. And I can't do it. Despair. Despair is the prerequisite for awakening. 601 Right in the middle of a birth, you began to awaken. Now, why do I say in the middle of a birth? Because between birth you have awaken each time, only to go to sleep again.


00:32:56 - 00:33:29
As you took birth. But often you resisted the awakening between birth. So your person would say It's 730 or 8:00 who's already awakening during a birth is different than somebody at 4:00 who didn't awaken at all during the birth, who denied all the awakening was the 85% who said, I never want to have that experience again. The person at 430 dies. They're dying. They say, Save me, save me. I don't want to die. I don't want to die. I don't want to die. Do whatever you need to do. Keep me from dying.


00:33:39 - 00:34:15
And then they're dead. And a moment later, a voice says to them, Welcome. And they say, If I'm hearing a voice saying, Welcome, I guess I didn't die. And the voice is, No, you did die for a person at 430, I hear confusion. That confusion can last until the next birth. It's called purgatory. 830. However, you're dying. You're dying. I don't want to die. I don't want to die. You still don't want to die at 830? You know, not give a damn. Still around 1115 at 830.


00:34:25 - 00:35:10
I want to die. I want to die. Save me, save me, save me. You're dead. Welcome. I guess I didn't die. No, you did die. At that moments, those moments of awakening you had during your previous birth suddenly look over into figure instead of in the background. And you say far out and all that stuff that happened to me was real. And then you're wide open. And then you are a collaborator in the preparation for your next round. You work with the Cosmic Karmic Council in the in the realm of the astral Sugars


00:35:19 - 00:36:12
in planning the next dance. But there are more surprises in store yet for as you get up near 11:00, you're working out all of your karma and you're awake during most of your birth. Get to 1159 No choice. 1159 at that points you can merge back in to give up the last vestige of separateness that's left which is merely the thought of I. That's all that's left the thought of mine. Or you can push against the final merge and stay in form. And why would you stay in form? Not because of your personal desires any longer.


00:36:32 - 00:37:20
Because you don't have any. You stay in form because of what? In Tibetan Buddhism is called the Bodhisattva, but you stay in form because of the suffering of all sentient beings. That's what a guru is. It's a being who is staying in form in order to relieve the suffering of other beings. 1159 Where are you? 3:00 5:00 You're at least past 6:00. You wouldn't be in this room. Seven 3930 quarter. Well, are these moments on the clock births and deaths? Could you go through the entire clock in one birth?


00:37:37 - 00:38:24
There is no fixed time. No time units. It's the karmic clock and the final realization at 1159 is that the entire clock was an illusion. For that moment, path and pilgrim and goal merge into one. And you see that the entire clock was within the illusion of time. When Buddha says you already are the Buddha, meaning you already are fully enlightened, you're merely busy thinking you are not. And the entire sadhana, the entire path is the path of awakening you out of your illusion of separateness,


00:38:41 - 00:39:47
to acknowledge who you already are. Thus nobody teaches you anything. They merely remind you and that what you are seeking is not out there. It doesn't lie in me, as opposed to lying in you. The only difference is that I'm not as attached to who I think I am as you are. The act of meditation is the act of transcending models or models of who you are. To recognize yourself. So what is it you want this lifetime? What is it you want? Somebody at 430 wants more pleasure. Somebody at 830 wants


00:40:34 - 00:41:32
to return to the source, wants to know God wants to become enlightened, wants to be free, wants to be realized. Who wants to be liberated from suffering? A person at 830 recognizes Buddha's four knowable truths that the cause of suffering is clinging or attachment and says, Help me free myself from clinging and attachment so that I might end suffering. Let me be free. At 430, you try to optimize pleasure and minimize pain. You try to get high and avoid the low. At 830, you say Everything in my life, the highs and the lows


00:41:45 - 00:42:28
are all grist for the mill of going home. I will eat it all and it's even farther out than that because at that points you are suffering becomes functional for your awakening. You are suffering literally becomes grace. That's a heavy one. At that point, when you get caught in anger, far out, it's showing you where you're clinging and you are more interested in getting done with clinging than you are just getting high. Again. Then you are ready to take life as it comes towards you


00:42:38 - 00:43:39
without defining this, but not that I want a new Cadillac, but I don't want cancer. Hey, by 10:00 you're ready to say new Cadillac? Oh, cancer. Oh, life, death. Oh, pleasure. I decay because all of it is seen only in relation to that television channel in which the soul is going home and everything on all the plains is grist for the mill of the process of awakening. You use it all and your life at this moment is an absolutely perfect statement. Perfect. Most of you sit around saying, If only


00:43:52 - 00:44:30
whatever. If only if only. I was 20 years younger, 20 years older, richer or more beautiful. A different sex, whatever. If only by around 9:00, that's all over. You're looking at just how it is the same furrow. Well, what am I going do with this one? Now? This is where it becomes very delicate, because as you keep flipping these real is this too heavy or are you can you hear me? I'm sorry it's so heavy, but it'll be there. Okay. I'll get lighter after a while. It's just.


00:44:44 - 00:45:22
I don't know why it's. Whatever this vibration. When you are busy identifying with your suffering, you are a tremendously socially concerned human being because you look around and you think of all the suffering, and your empathy is very great. When you shift these channels a little bit and you ultimately look up, it's and you begin to see all of the forms of the universe in perfect harmony with one another, and you begin to experience the perfection of the flow, including the suffering,


00:45:35 - 00:46:29
the violence, the starvation, etc.. At that moment you look at the universe and you say from your great hide, I am the human is. You say it all perfect. Now, if you stop in that reality, you can be very, very high in the Buddha mind. But you forgot the bleeding heart of the Christ. The liberated being is the being who simultaneously is looking up and seeing the perfection of it all and looking down and seeing the blood on the snow and seeing the suffering. The balance is that you as an incarnate of being in North Miami


00:46:50 - 00:47:37
High School, North Miami Beach High School, you must honor your incarnation in order to be free. You cannot deny it, and your incarnation is as a human being, living among many human beings, most of whom are suffering unbearable. That balance the balance of the Buddha mind of seeing the emptiness of forms and the perfection and at the same moment, keeping your heart wide open to the suffering in the universe around you, and using your incarnation to alleviate suffering. That is the balance. That is the statement of liberation.


00:47:48 - 00:48:31
If you get so high, if you're walking down the streets so high that somebody trips and falls and you don't bother to help them up because after all is perfect, you forgot God in form. If you're so busy helping the person up on the street that you forget at that moment, the perfection of the entire dance, including the fall and the helping you forgot God in the formless that it's a tough path to have the strength to keep it together in form and forms, to relieve suffering and to work with suffering.


00:48:44 - 00:49:14
See how you deal with suffering depends on the level of consciousness of the example that I use before. If somebody comes to you and says I am a yogi, I would like to do a fast and I am healthy. And I say, All right, fast for nine days. And they come to me, it's seven days and they say, I'm doing fine. I say, Great, go right ahead, fast. Some more. If I then walk out on the street and somebody comes up to me and says, Hey, man, I haven't eaten in seven days, you've got a quarter.


00:49:18 - 00:49:58
I don't say to him, You're doing fine. Proceed right. And there's the quarter because his level of consciousness, he's busy suffering. The other being is using the suffering to awaken. It's the same thing. They both the need for seven days. One person is busy being the person who didn't eat for seven days. The other person's being the person who's going to God. No judgment. One person's of for 31 persons at 9:00, you don't judge that. A person that's 40 is better than a person that's 20.


00:50:03 - 00:50:47
They're just 20 years older. The beings around you represent different ages of incarnation your parents, your children, your brothers and sisters, your friends all different, all different. For a moment you might meet in the journey and then spread apart no matter how hard you try to grab the hand, it can happen because you are at different levels of the dance. You have different work to do. You held by Freedom to Live are to love me and all this, and I picture that happening. It is felt very good


00:50:54 - 00:51:46
back then and it was so funny this morning. The next minute I picture myself going home from here and trying to make that happen and not being able to have with my father. I hated him. It was instant hate recognizing your feeling of wanting to be understood and loved and held by him. And his ability to do that are quite different things that you are a denial of that feeling of wanting that that's what blocks you. Once you know you have that feeling, then you can begin to hear who he is and experience with some compassion.


00:51:56 - 00:52:31
His predicament of being unable to express his love or to be unable to be the kind of father that you might want. It's as if once you know that you are beautiful, acceptable, then when other people don't like you, it begins to see you see it as their problem, not yours anymore. Until you have allowed your own beauty to be, you never see it as their problem. You always see it as yours. In all paranoia, you take back in on yourself. So the first step of the game is what you started with, which is acknowledging your desire for love.


00:52:38 - 00:53:11
As long as you are straight with your feelings, then if people can fulfill them, sure. Go through self pity and anger and you have to be honest with those too. But you'll begin to appreciate that they're just doing their karma. They're stuck in what they're stuck in, and you sit with your feelings and allow them to be who they have to be and your life will be that of somebody who needs love and doesn't get it. And you go through self-pity and then you say, Well, that's the way it is, and here we are now.


00:53:14 - 00:53:51
But to make believe you don't want it because you're not getting it, this is where the trap is. Can you hear that? Yeah. One dies as one lives. Mahatma Gandhi walks into his garden for a press conference. He gets shot, and at the moment he shot it. All he says is Ram just the name of God. He just has time, which is the name of Ram as he goes, because he's so already with God through his life's work that the moment of transition of body to not body is just another moment in which he's with gun.


00:54:07 - 00:54:46
So once, once that starts to fall into place and feel right to us, then really the essence of a dying retreat becomes the essence of a living retreat. And then the question is how you use the experiences, the moment to moment experiences of your life as a way to become optimally conscious, to be optimally in the spirit or with God. And so then you start to examine the various components of life in order to bring them into this same awareness that we're just talking about now. Because what you find is that you can agree with everything


00:54:50 - 00:55:25
I've said, but the big chunks of life I totally unconscious that you say, Oh, yes, I understand this. I understand what my life is about, but I'm really angry at so-and-so. And somehow that anger in that relationship never comes into the rest of it. It just stays in this little compartment. And what happens to a relationship when you understand that the meaning of the events and the experiences of your life is to awaken or to live in the spirit, for it to be fully conscious or with God, or your own true being.


00:55:31 - 00:56:01
And you say, Yes, but I have this relationship because I need love, or I have this relationship because. But if you push this, if you push this and push it and push it, you see that ultimately everything must go into this same stew. And you have relationships in order to awaken and you have relationships in order to live in the spirit and to be with God and to awaken out of the illusion of your own separateness. And that's the real essence of relationship. It's the vehicle for awakening


00:56:08 - 00:56:50
out of the illusion of separateness. And when you understand these, the integration of this higher wisdom with the daily life events, you begin to see how relationships are a form of devotional or dualistic. They're a form of yoga they're a form of coming into union, which is what yoga means. Now, what you see in other human beings is very, very much affected by your motivation and by your perception of yourself and by your own preoccupations. Now, if you are busy, if I say to you, who are you?


00:56:55 - 00:57:32
When you say, I am somebody who is dying, then you will tend to see other people in terms of who's living and who's dying. If you are somebody who doesn't like your body image, you are inclined to look at other people's body image. If you are somebody who is preoccupied with your own personality, with your own depression, for example, you're inclined to look at other people in terms of their happiness. Why can't I be happy like she is? If you have a very judging mind in which you are judging yourself continually,


00:57:47 - 00:58:24
then you see other people as judging you all the time. You tend to project outward what is familiar to you, which is the way you look at the universe. You assume other people are looking at the universe the same way, so that if you are preoccupied with your sexual desire system and that colors your perception because it locks you in all the time, you will see other people as thinking that to. And by the same token, if you think that you are God and you see God in yourself, that's what you'll see in other people.


00:58:43 - 00:59:12
I recall when I was with Morarji, I felt so inadequate and so unworthy that I would continually to him, How can you send me away? How can you send me back to the United States where people are going to want things of me and I can't fulfill them? I'm not a dharmic person. I'm a totally impure person. I've got all these this lust and this power tripping us and this insecurity. And what are you doing? You just sending me into the lion's mouth and you're giving me no protection.


00:59:15 - 00:59:47
You don't give me anything to protect myself from my own impurities. I said the worst thing can imagine is that I can do damage to another human beings, that I can do stuff that will create karma by creating something. And I said, I'm just too impure. Maharaj You know, and Morarji at that moment looked at me and he looked at me like he was looking at a specimen. And he looked at my hair and my head, and he looked at my eyes and he looked and he came up really close and he looked like this.


00:59:53 - 01:00:25
And then he he had me turn around and I turned around. He looked in my ears and he looked and he looked and he looked. And he did this whole routine. It was a marx Brothers routine. And he did the whole thing. And when I got all the way back around, he looked and he looked very surprised. And he said I don't see any impurities. No. And of course, my first reaction was that silly old man, you know, because I obviously any fool can see my impurities, but you see, any fool sees their own foolishness


01:00:32 - 01:01:04
and what he saw was his own godless. Now he didn't see the impurities was my preoccupation with my impurities, which was feeding the whole situation, not his. He was saying, you know, maybe there's another way to look at who you are. That seemed to be the met, the essence of the message. And if you are preoccupied with power, as I have been most of my life, then you will see relationships in power terms and you'll be afraid of being controlled in every relationship or being suppressed of the independent.


01:01:15 - 01:01:52
Those are all power related things, and that's because your preoccupation is with power, because of your own feelings of inadequacy or impotence or whatever. The way the mind works is often to develop concepts and then to live within the concepts rather than in the immediate experience, so that you develop a concept of who you are and who another person is. And then you live in terms of the relationship between the concepts rather than in the immediate experience that exists between two human beings.


01:02:02 - 01:02:38
So, for example, if you experience yourself as being a wise person and somebody else is being unwise and you are caught in that label, then even if they say something wise, you can't hear it because you're so caught in your labeling. We've got to find behind all the symbology that there are living, breathing incarnations of God. We've got to see through the symbology. We can only see through the symbology when our attachments to those symbology is are cut through. When we've gotten rid of those attachments in ourselves.


01:02:49 - 01:03:25
And if you need those things, then you're attached to them. For example, if you need to be a nurse, if you're a nurse and you need to be a nurse, then you need to have patients and then you load somebody into that symbolic package of patient in order to satisfy your need to be a nurse. If you need to be helpful, then you need people who are helpless. If you need to be sadistic, you need people who are masochistic to the extent that you identify with any social role whatsoever, then you will seek out somebody


01:03:40 - 01:04:17
to enter into a symbiotic relationship. So you scratch my neurosis and I'll scratch yours. You let me be holy because you be profane. I am somebody who needs to love but be rejected. So you need to be somebody. I am somebody who needs to love but be rejected. So you've got to be somebody who needs to be loved and reject me. So that honing device, it's so incredible how subtle the whole game works. People say, I don't know. I always end up with the same kind of lover here, and they're always surprised.


01:04:26 - 01:05:16
Every bit of information about all of us is written so large on our foreheads that I am somebody who will screw you, count on it, and then you say, Oh, your eyes are so beautiful. I just want to be with you, you see, and you just seemingly ignore this. And then when they screw you, you say, Oh God, I got screwed again. So if and when you look at the world in terms of this kind of symbiosis at the personality level, you see this incredible game going on, conscious, unconscious human relationships.


01:05:28 - 01:05:54
There's a comic book called The Doctor Strange Series, and in the Doctor Strange series, the way you see it in the comic books section is people come down the street and they have these huge nits coming out of their head. And these nets are full of statements like, This is who I am, This is who you are, This is how it is. This is who I am. This to you. So somebody goes down the street like this, this is who I am. This is who you are. This is how it is. Somebody else goes down. This is who I am.


01:05:55 - 01:06:26
This is who you are. This is how it is. Somebody else goes down the street like this. This is who I am. This is who you are. This is how it is. And and the game was to knit everybody all the time, see? And the nets would come and they would surround other people and everybody would climb into it. And and it's extremely interesting to be around people who have so much symbolic value that they are used to netting everybody around them. And then they really need somebody who isn't netted by it.


01:06:33 - 01:07:06
If everybody gets caught in your game, you lose. Do you hear that one? If you win, you lose. And that's the horror of it. That's the horror of the way the mind creates these models and then seduces everybody into them because you feel secure in the model, but it's secure in your prison room. And that's the horror. When the door is open and you don't walk out because you too secure in the prison room. Yeah, well, how might you see other people, how much you see individual differences and other people?


01:07:19 - 01:08:11
There is the matrix of individual differences of the body. So when you look at another person, you see man, woman, tall, short, old, young, fat, thin. You see physical characteristics, you see walls, you see pretty, you see weird looking, you see whatever you see. Those are all the qualities of the physical body. If you look at a matrix of individual differences in terms of personality, you see a sad, happy, achieving, depressed, lonely, dependent, joyful seeking, God intelligent acting. You see a whole set of into another set of individual differences


01:08:18 - 01:08:49
that within the personality matrix of an individual, that's two matrices. Then there's a third matrix in which you look out and you see other individuals in terms of there's a Leo or there's a Taurus or there's a Sagittarius. That's another individual difference matrix based on your your astral body. And those are all the ways in which you can say I am different from you, is different from her, is different from him. And you can make the whole matrix of individual difference.


01:08:55 - 01:09:27
Those are three matrices and individual differences when you live only in the realm of individual differences, then you get stuck again and again. In the world of judgment, Better or worse, it's better to be young than old. It's better to be fat and thin, or it's better to be thin than fat. And it's very weird when you move from culture to culture, and it's all shifting. But if you see other beings, when you look into someone else's eyes and you see that there is just another being looking back at you, another entity,


01:09:33 - 01:10:08
another soul, another patterning, another thing, another ray of God and what you can call it, whatever you will. Another bit of awareness and that bit of awareness has around it all of this stuff, which is the packaging or the karmic manifestation or its predicament. And all these individual differences are like packaging around it, just like and you don't confuse the contents with the container or the containers as this case maybe. But if you confuse yourself with your containers, you you're going to confuse other people with their container.


01:10:19 - 01:10:49
If you are busy thinking that you are primarily man or woman, if you primarily think you are sick or well, if you primarily think you're old or young, if you primarily think you are a mother or a child, then you are by. That's the reality in which your mind is working and that's what you create for everybody else around you. And that ends up in judging This person is a better mother or better or this, or a less good or taller, a shorter or a darker or a lighter or a good or evil or whatever your polarities are


01:10:55 - 01:11:38
to look and see in another person. That other thing that's just like you means that you can look at the individual matrices as the karmic unfolding, and then you can get into a space where you do not judge another being. You may judge their actions, but you don't judge the being. And that is the realm in which unconditional love can exist. I love you because you are God in form. So what is the essence of conscious human relationships? If you look at any relationship, is like a pyramid in which there are two points down here and there is one at the top.


01:11:50 - 01:12:28
Take a marriage, the vehicle of marriage. When you use marriage as a side, as a spiritual practice, the way in which you use it is to work through the relationship in order to arrive at the place where there is one awareness. But there are two bodies, two personalities, two astrology is In other words, you work. The relationship exists where there is simultaneously the one and the two, and you use the two to arrive at the one. And it gets so that just as these two hands are clapping and there is one mind and these two hands


01:12:37 - 01:13:17
and this hand is busy being the left hand and this busy being the right hand, they are just two hands doing their part to make the clap occur. So there is one awareness and two people now to use a relationship that way. That is the process of what I started the lecture by saying using relationships in order to awaken to God, to see who the other person is, see who you are, you yourself are through the relationship. For a relationship to do that requires a tremendous amount of consciousness and space and meditation and intent.


01:13:25 - 01:14:10
And it is hard work. As most of you who have ever been in intense interpersonal relationships have found out, because in that one, in order to realize the oneness of the two, every bit of identification you have with the two has to be given up. You've got to give up the two into the one, and then from the one you will be the two. It's the difference between I am a man versus I am God. That is being a man. You go from an identity with a two into an identity with the one and part of the identity


01:14:19 - 01:14:59
with the one comes the manifestation into the two is a cycle. It has to go in. But what happens is, as the two go towards the one you are literally dying in to love, you are dying into awareness, you are dying into the oneness of it. And that oneness is called love or it's called awareness or it's called truth. And because of our attachment, our karmic attachment to our separateness, when a marriage or a relationship starts to work too well, we freak out. And what you usually see in relationships is they end up


01:15:04 - 01:15:30
being one person is running away, pulling back, and the other person is opening. I love you. Why aren't you there for me and the other person pulling back? Then after the other person's been like this for a while, they say, Well, screw you, and they start to pull back and the minute they pull back, the other person starts to remember how much they love them and they start to go and you see the dance going like this and it doesn't really matter who's playing what part. It's just so that they will.


01:15:31 - 01:16:05
It's a conspiracy to keep from falling into love. Because when you fall into love, you cease to be. And so a conscious relationship has to energy and very slowly and very consciously. And it's why one needs so much meditative space in a good relationship to keep at living truth. Because usually when the fire gets hot, what happens? Everybody starts to get singed a little bit, ego gets burned, ego burns, soul doesn't burn, ego burns, The ego starts to burn. The minute it starts to burn, it immediately pulls back into kind of mechanical habits.


01:16:19 - 01:16:47
Hello. Good morning. I love you all. Do you know how much I love you? It's all can be done. All the rituals can be done. But there's no juice in it anymore. The living truth went out of it because everybody got scared. And I'd say most of the couples that ever come to see me that are having a hard time. They have the potential of incredible living truth. But they got frightened and they pulled back. And then they both felt hurt and frustrated. And the whole process is opening it up once again.


01:16:55 - 01:17:28
And the way it is opened up is by wanting to have it open so bad that the two of you are willing to deal with the truth of the pain and the truth of, the confusion and the truth of it all and stay in it and be able to sit with another person and say what you feel and what you think and not say, I won't tell her because it would hurt her. That's the one that corrodes relationships. The result is I will keep it to myself and. The minute you have something in yourself, you will not share it with me.


01:17:36 - 01:18:13
I become him. I am no longer us. If you and I agree, we will be us together. We're going towards the one we are us. But then I start to have, say, sexual desires for someone else. And I don't want to tell you that because it might hurt you, it would hurt you, and you get furious. So I say, Well, I won't tell you that the minute I do that, I have set up a part of my mind which is now closed off to you. And every time I am that part of that mind, you must become an object. You are no longer us.


01:18:19 - 01:18:47
You must be her or him. And if there is nothing that I cannot share with you, then you and I are us. Like somebody is taking care of you and you really are a little angry at the way they're doing it. Or you wish they would stop or you wish they do something, or you'd like to ask them to do it, but you don't want to tell them because your fear you would be an imposition. And so the result is you say, Oh, well, I won't tell them that. I'll just keep it inside myself. And the other


01:18:58 - 01:19:28
person, if they are sensitive, just feels like when I sit with another human being, I can watch, I can look into their eyes and I can see. I'll tell you what I see. I see that when their mind is in a place where everything is wide open, there is a liquid luminous doorway in their eyes. And I can look in and in and in and I can see Maharaj. And the minute the thoughts come into their mind, which they can't tell me because they're about me or about them or something, that is that place that locks in where I become object.


01:19:29 - 01:20:04
I see an opaqueness and. It's just as if a door closed and I with in a big sign says keep out and I get this cold feeling and the result is I get paranoid. I mean that's what people they get paranoid, You feel unloved. People don't understand how sensitive relationships are and how much living spirit demands living truth and how volatile living truth is, and what price you are paying for keeping it nice. The niceness between somebody who is being a patient and somebody who's being a nurse,


01:20:08 - 01:20:44
the niceness between a husband and a wife, the niceness between a parent the child. And I'll tell you, we cannot afford so much niceness because we are dying in it and most of you, if you are like me, starve to death in that environment because you are so hungry for a living. Truth and human relationships, it's so when you are ready, what you offer, when you want to be out of your own prison cell, what you offer other human beings is the work you do on yourself. And the work you do on yourself is to come to the point where you are


01:20:53 - 01:21:21
no longer identified with your individual differences. So all of your stuff and all of your stuff, of your fears and aggressions and sexuality and embarrassments and all that, that's your stuff which is connected with those matrices of individual differences. You are no longer identified with them. So you want them, you can have them. You want the fact that I mean, I'm perfectly willing to tell you that I have hangups, that I'm insecure, that I'm paranoid, that I've got perversions, that I go to every


01:21:23 - 01:21:54
that you want them, you can have them because I'm I can't afford to keep them from you because I need that flow with everybody around. Me because that's the way I can live in the spirit. Because the spirit is that flow. And the minute I turn off that flow in order to protect myself, because I, with my perversion or my anxiety or my anger or my insecurity, I just turned off the world. I stopped the flow, I froze it. It all turns it calcified. It becomes an institution. And suddenly we are just bumping against each other.


01:21:58 - 01:22:31
Don't get too close, Don't come in, don't play. So what do you offer someone else? You offer them your truth. You offer them the irrelevance of your stuff. You can imagine how refreshing truth is when you are working with somebody and you're taking care of them and you are begrudging that time to them. Are you begrudging because they're taking too much space and you keep it in all you're doing is creating your own ulcer, your own early death. And you're also you're also destroying the living truth


01:22:34 - 01:23:01
that exists between people and you're cutting off the from real human contact. And you just did it again. It takes a little bit longer and it's a little more painful and it's kind of volatile to deal with truth. And the thing is that you cannot deal with truth with other people who don't want to deal with truth. That's the problem. The distinction isn't that you have to tell everybody everything. The important thing is that you have to be able to tell everybody everything.


01:23:07 - 01:23:40
Okay? And that's the key one. You may meet other people with whom you've entered into a contract where you are willing to share everything because it's a living marriage, a living truth, a living relationship. Then you share everything. But otherwise you merely have to have the capacity to be able to share in far as you're concerned, the stuff isn't there. Then you are an open, free environment and the other person can come and play if they choose. And can you imagine what it is like to be nursing b


01:23:46 - 01:24:12
b being a nurse in relation to someone in which you are merely right here and you're free and you're flowing and you get your stuff and you get angry and you get all that stuff which you acknowledge and it's right here. And if the other person says, How are you feeling about taking care of me? You can say how you're feeling if they're really asking, but you don't have to go out and say, you know, I really can't stand taking care of you. You don't have to do it. That's a psychological thing to have to.


01:24:14 - 01:24:49
You've got to listen to hear who other people are. And each person has to get what they got to get. If somebody wants to stay in their prison, you have the moral obligation to leave them in their prison. You have no right to force somebody out of that prison and destroys prison walls. I'd like to go through the aspects of this retreat and reflect about how they fit into a daily life practice or what we mean by daily life practice. Yesterday, we talked about relationships and what it means to work


01:25:19 - 01:25:50
with a relationship to become conscious through it and just to clarify any misconceptions, we're talking about truth in marriages and so on. The implication is not that you have to be truthful with somebody who doesn't want to be truthful. The implication is that you are capable of being truthful. That's the important thing, that you could be truthful, not that you need to be. It doesn't mean you lie. It just means that you don't have to say at all unless the contract with another human being is that we will share truth.


01:26:00 - 01:26:33
And some marriages are vehicles for awakening and some are not. Some are marriages that are marriages that are going fine. They were based originally on passion or on psychological compatibility or on economics, economic facility or cultural expectation. There are a number of reasons why people get married and those motives come and go. Often the passion leaves and people don't quite know why they're married anymore. Now, some marriages are convertible into living truth and living spirit,


01:26:40 - 01:27:11
and then the marriage becomes that aspect of your life, which becomes your major vehicle for awakening. But it may not be it may be a nice marriage and a comfortable marriage. And then, you know, meditation becomes your major vehicle for awakening. And the marriage isn't that for everything in your life? I ultimately will be affected and colored by your spiritual work, but you start out working with what is workable. You don't start out demanding that everything be used immediately because it isn't all usable immediately.


01:27:17 - 01:27:57
All the ultimately every tiny bit of your life is touched, but let it happen slowly and naturally in its own time rather than it too quickly. Like what you eat, who you're with, how you spend your money, how you earn your money, what you wear, what you think about, where you go, why you go there, how you get there. All of these are aspects that can awaken or not. You may have a job that is right live or that gives livelihood, but it's a job among very unconscious beings, relatively unconscious beings,


01:28:00 - 01:28:27
good beings, but relatively unconscious in which you don't experience. Some support for that awakening and you're ready when you come into a sudden sun, into a community of more conscious beings, you're ready to say, Well, I'm going to split my job because it's not conscious enough. But maybe that job at this time gives you the economic wherewithal to be able to do other kinds of work. And maybe what you need to do is learn how to use weekends and your evenings and your early mornings


01:28:31 - 01:29:10
and it isn't clear that you have to melodramatically shift your whole life plan just because you start to sense that there is awakening possible. In fact, let me caution you against the melodrama of the spiritual journey. We have an incredible capacity to romanticize our lives. You know, who will I marry, who I love, who loves me? Am I happy? Am I getting enough or I'm dying too young? Ooh, and all this kind of romance about life and, we just buy it. And we are such tragic, romantic figures.


01:29:14 - 01:29:45
Every one of us, you know? If only if only, if only. And it's all so dramat. And then suddenly we've awakened. And it's a whole new drama and oh, I've awaken. And you go tell all your friends and you I'm awakened and you have a certain smile and you're very romantic about your awakening, and you had to dramatically change everything. I don't do that anymore. I'm awakened and you'll pay karmically for all you romanticism, I will tell you, because the spiritual journey ultimately


01:29:46 - 01:30:18
is really not very romantic at all. It's a very humdrum just cleaning up your act, quieting down, not getting caught in the drama, even of enlightenment, even to be attached to getting enlightenment, getting enlightened turns out to be just another melodrama. Okay, so one one doesn't have to make splashy, dramatic front page changes in one's life in order to be awakening. You can do just in the kind of stuff you've already got going. Now, it's always an interesting question of whether you have to


01:30:25 - 01:30:58
miss a step in the dance in order to awaken. And what I'm always impressed with is people who can make the transformations externally. There's continuity and internally there is tremendous change of me because every act you are doing, you could be doing from the consciousness you've got now, from the consciousness you used to, or the consciousness you will have. The same act may come out the same way, but its effects will be entirely different. You can feed human being, you can say hello to another human being,


01:31:02 - 01:31:32
you can do any human act, and it will have an entirely different depending on who's doing it and where they're doing it from. I've visited Ananda, my mother, many times in India. She's an absolutely beautiful woman, Saint, just such an incredible thing. And the times I visited her each time she has been singing once she sings before, a lot of people just sitting up there singing and they are all just kind of looking at her and she talks to people and it gets them fed and all that.


01:31:36 - 01:32:38
But she just sort of sings either as a large to a large group or she's just sort of crooning it and she's just singing to Bhagwan, to God, Jai Ohm, Bhagwan China. Bhagwan Jai owned by one tune Love on child, Love one child by one child. Love, love, child, Love one John who? Child You love one child one child one just is just such a sweet love song to God in his As if they're just she just whispering to a lover. And I've crossed the I have in my Dodge Ram a cruise control happening.


01:33:01 - 01:33:38
Cruise control allows you to set a certain speed and then the car just runs so I get to do is hold the steering wheel. And when I'm crossing the country, sometimes I'm sitting cross-legged in the driver's seat and I'm just staring across the country. And I'm just day after day seeing Jai on bloodline. John And move on. CHILD One child one line. And very slowly, those words which are just words and it's just that little tune, but the levels and the play and the feelings. Pretty soon you look at the gas station attendant as you stop every so many hours


01:33:43 - 01:34:16
for gas inside your I'll plug one and his bag one and you just taking the whole country And that is the first time when I started to do those things with this cruise control. It was the first time I ran out of country before I got bored. So I got to the ocean too soon though, dammit, I'm here. I just wanted more of it. Now. That's just the simple thing of driving to work. Now. Is it driving to work or is it doing your sadhana in which during your sudden you happen to be moving from one space to another?


01:34:18 - 01:34:55
I'm trying to give you a sense of the flow of spiritual at work that it doesn't have to be. I do spiritual work. It just sort of creeps into your life like fog creeping in on, you know, these silent, silent fingers of stuff just creeping into the way in which you live your life, the kinds of things you want to read. That's like going from reading things that give you a rush or fasten you or collect stuff to things that keep quieting your mind or simplifying your mind, or are tuning your mind tuning


01:34:58 - 01:35:44
mind. Yeah, yeah, I, I work a great deal with was the third Chinese patriarch and it's a little thing called the since and Ming which means the heart mind sutra and I just carry this little book with me all the time and it's just it's 48 pages long. It's everything that he wrote. And there's enough work in here for me for this lifetime. Just these two lines. The great way, meaning coming into the flow of things, the harmony coming into the universe, the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. I


01:36:07 - 01:36:54
have great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. Just look at your life and think of how many preferences you have. You prefer pleasure over pain, prefer life over death, Prefer friends over aloneness, prefer freedom over imprisonment. Where are your attachments? Where are you claims you prefer love over hate? Do you prefer any? Are you stuck in polarities is what it's asking. But make the smallest distinction and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart the slightest distinction


01:37:02 - 01:37:37
and you already create hell if you wish to see the truth and hold no opinions for or against anything, just set up what you like against. What you dislike is the disease of the mind. Boy, you live by that you realize how spacious you have to be to live by that kind of philosophy. That's the fiercest kind of philosophy that I can find. And I like to have that kind of fierce friend who hangs out with me, who keeps reminding me how much I have opinions. This should be this and this should be this.


01:37:46 - 01:38:17
And I want everybody to be this. And wouldn't it be better if this instead of just being spacious with that, you do what, You do. It doesn't mean you don't have opinions. It means you are not attached to your opinions. It doesn't mean you don't have preferences. It means you're not attached to your preferences. You can prefer blue or green and deciding when you go in. When there's a choice, you pick blue of a green. But if you end up with green also remember the ISO during


01:38:29 - 01:39:03
ISO story of the monk who lived in a monastery and the local girl down in the village got pregnant by the fisherman, she didn't want to lay it on the fisherman, so she said it was the monk up in the monastery. So when the baby was born, the townspeople all took the baby up to the monastery and they knocked on the gate and the monk opened the door and they said to the monk, This is your baby, and you got to raise the baby. And he said, Ah, So we took the baby and closed the gates. I mean, his the guy's whole life just changed that second.


01:39:05 - 01:39:29
And his first reaction is, ah, so nine years later the girl was dying and she didn't want to die without admitting what had happened. And she said to the people, Look, it really wasn't the market, it was the fishermen. And they were horrified. And they went up to the monastery and they knocked on the door to open the gate. And that was his nine year old child next to him. And they said, We made a terrible mistake. This isn't your child. And from now on, we'd like to help raise him.


01:39:32 - 01:40:09
And you're free now to go back to your monastic life. Oh, Oh, So he was so much right here that whatever new change comes in so how much are you ready to flow with life and how much you pressing against it? And that's the business of letting go, of controls, letting go of models, the models you have of who you think you are, keeping travel like you can travel me all the time and they keep turning me off from the living space, the living truth that I can live in every setting. And the beauty of having these books.


01:40:16 - 01:40:52
What happens is this is part of what's called sun. Sun or sun set. Sun is a Sanskrit and sangha is the is the Buddhist term. This is being around the community of people who realize that there is an awakening and you finally sort of want to hang out more and more with those beings. But maybe your job doesn't have those beings and and maybe your family doesn't have those beings. And it's nice to have like get into a little ritual or regimen so that every morning, for example, you get up and before the game gets going in life,


01:40:56 - 01:41:26
so it gets so locked in, you start with some quieting down. You start with some meditation, you start with a reading, just one little reading and try. I just have a usually approaches space, a little space where I have some holy pictures. I have a non to my mind I Christ and I'm Buddha and I have Maharaj and just a few old buddies, friends I hang out with and I just have them there and I light a candle and I light little incense in the morning and I sit down there and then next to me I have just a few books,


01:41:28 - 01:41:59
the Ramayana, and I have Lao Tzu and the Third Patriarch and this and that, maybe five or six books. And I'll sit quietly for a little while and I'll look at the pictures and say Good morning to all these beings. Just kind of open my heart to that space, kind of feel their lives. And then I might just pick up one of these books and read maybe just a few lines, sit down of think about it for a while, and then maybe meditate for 15 or 20 minutes. And as simple as that. And I'm just ready to face the day


01:42:05 - 01:42:41
and that begins me on the right track. And then during the day, I may use a dozen or a hundred different techniques. If I'm driving, I may be singing John by one. I may be working with my beads and doing Shri Ram Jerome and JJ or she or Jail. When you sit in the subway extreme and junior and junior year Ranji and pretty soon all of the forms you're seeing and all of this comforts of your body and all of it is as if it's coming out of the mantra. And the mantra is becomes the figure and the life experiences become the background


01:42:44 - 01:43:16
as opposed to the life experience as being the figure and the spiritual practice is becoming the background, just a simple transformation. And there is a way of shifting consciousness so that you look around and you see that what we are is a collection of souls in all these individual difference packages. And you can look further than that and see that we are all one in the form of many. Now, if you have seen that plane of reality, how does it affect this plane? The When you come into this plane,


01:43:21 - 01:43:52
you have the traces of that plane and how do you live in this plane with the recognition that that plane is true During the acid days, a lot of people would go up and they come down and they couldn't figure out why they kept coming down. The reason they came down is because the life they lived on this plane was a denial of what they knew from these other planes. They, in effect, turned off the other planes. And now I'm talking about social action. I'm talking about the places you get to


01:43:58 - 01:44:44
where you start to become able to live your life in a way that is harmonious with what you know and all these other plane. You literally die into service. You die into the plane of reality we you see that a starving person or a dying person or a hungry person or a frightened person is you. It's not her or him or them. You die in your separateness. The whole trip of what's good for me, what do I want? What do I need or do I want just becomes less interesting. And the minute that becomes surrender just given up, it falls away.


01:44:54 - 01:45:29
It falls away from this deeper wisdom. And then you really become an instrument of the flow of the universe. You become part of the Dow, part of the way of things and the serving. And that which is served is all part of it. It's all part of at that moment, there's no coming down or going up anymore. Just all these. That's when you become not mind with I will. That's when you become an instrument of Christ. Consciousness. You just become the flow. And at that moment, that's where the power is.


01:45:37 - 01:46:18
That's where the power is. The changes, the universe. When you can make yourself into zero, then your power is unbelievable. You are an it resist of all force where there is no high and there is no law and there's no judgments, there's no opinions, there's no good and there's no bad. You merely are part of it. And then by the very you are the commandments, you are the precepts, you are the morality, you don't do it because you ought to do it. You are that which cannot hurt another human beings.


01:46:27 - 01:47:19
You just are. It's no big deal. My question is, how can we maintain our own integrity and identity in a relationship with the person without compromising the integrity of others? Okay. Which you do you want to preserve? Okay. If you so okay. We play with a little bit. When I look at relationships, my own and others, I see a wide range of reasons for people to be together and ways in which they are together and I see ways in which relationship, which means something that exists between two, two


01:47:36 - 01:48:21
or more people, just for the most part reinforces people's separateness as as individual entities. And it doesn't just honor it. It treats it as the of it. When I perform or I used to perform, I don't anymore, but I used to perform weddings. I was a married. I had a license for a while. It was revoked by the temple here, kind of like that before his was too. We used to be able to perform weddings and I do a lot under the table. But the image I always have when I'm performing a wedding is the image of a triangle


01:48:36 - 01:49:23
in which there is the the two partners. And then there is this third force, the third being that emerges out of the interaction of these two. And the third one is the one that is the shared awareness that lies behind the two of them, and that the two people in the yoga relationship come together in order to find that shared awareness that exists behind them, in order to then dance, as to so that the two ness brings them into one and the Oneness dances as two, and that that's a kind of a vibrating relationship between the one and the two


01:49:29 - 01:50:06
so that people are both separate and yet they are not separate and they are experiencing that the relationship is feeding both their uniqueness as individuals and their unit of consciousness. Now that's extremely delicate because it's so easy to get entrenched in your own. I need I want this. You are not fulfilling this for me and seeing the other as object, but the delight which all of you have experienced of. Being with somebody where you are sharing an awareness of the predicament you are both in


01:50:10 - 01:50:34
and you're sharing an awareness of the predicament. Even when you're having an argument with each other, there's an awareness that you're both almost delighting in the horrible beauty of it. I don't know whether any of you had that I've had it quite often, you know, because I'm around pretty conscious people a lot of the time and we fight, you know, we have differences, but we're enjoying, we're hating it and enjoying it both because there's these levels that we're playing it all the time


01:50:38 - 01:51:18
and yeah, but we come into relationship often, very much identified with our needs. I need this, I need security, I need refuge, I need friendship, I need this. And all of relationships are symbiotic in that sense. We come together because we fulfill each other's needs at some level or other. The problem is that when you identify with those needs, you always stay at the level where the other person is her or him. That was satisfying that need. And it really only gets extraordinarily beautiful when it becomes us


01:51:26 - 01:52:05
and then when it goes behind us and becomes I and so when I ask you which person are you saving or protecting or whose integrity you're protecting, I can, for example, that I enter into relationships. I understand that you enter into the yoga of relationship is an extremely difficult thing to do. It's the hardest yoga that I know of, actually, because your ego is so vulnerable. When you start to open up to another human being, you feel so tender and so vulnerable. And before that one place gets going strong enough,


01:52:14 - 01:52:41
the you get frightened and you pull back and, you get entrenched. And that happens all the time in relationships, people that come together with the greatest meaning of being feeling love. And then they get caught in their needs and their frustrations and they separate. One of the problems is that we tend to put relationships a little bit on the back burner in life. We get a relationship and then we go out to a job and we go out to other things and we sort of now we've got that together. We'll go do life.


01:52:45 - 01:53:30
And for relationship to be a yoga of relationship is like a full time operation for years. I mean, for me one of my examples is Stephen and Andre Levine. Stephen and Andre used to be really nice, friendly, sociable people before they met, but was to take to Apple and then they met. I used to like Stephen and then and then they met and they really started to be together and the amount of energy that had to go into staying clear with each other because what happens is so much goes down so fast in relationships.


01:53:37 - 01:54:08
It's really hard to process it fast enough to keep clear. So you keep getting this kind of residual of old stuff that isn't quite digested enough and you end up separate from the person because you didn't have time to stop and kind of work it through, clear it and so on. So what they did was they moved onto land with no telephone and put up a big sign, no trespassing, and they just started to work with one another. And after some years during which you really felt like you were cut off as a friend.


01:54:14 - 01:54:45
And it was hard for me because I can't go on. Stephen a lot for sharing consciousness. And then after a while I began to be they began to open up to me and allow me in. And then I began to see the effect of that. I began to see what happens when people learn how to really open trust, meditate together, keep emptying, keep clearing, work until they are a shared awareness. And if you watch them when they're teaching together, when they're on the platform or when they're together, they are really


01:54:45 - 01:55:17
they've done some extraordinary work they still have a lot of work to do. I mean, not cooked by any means, but they have done some really good stuff together and that's hard. And it's rare. It's rare. I, on the other hand, have gone into relationships and realized that I can't hear my own truth in the relationship, and I've had to stop it because I didn't wasn't willing to surrender the life games that I was in for that relationship. It just wasn't worth the effort.


01:55:19 - 01:55:51
I treasured what I was doing in my life too much to invest in that relationship that deeply. So I've heard it both ways to hear that the answer is it's not fair to say that any relationship that isn't involved in the yoga, a relationship is not useful and fulfilling to people is. A lot of people come together because it's just really comfortable living with another person. And there's a wonderful kind of sweet intimacy and it's fun to cook with each other and fun to sleep together.


01:55:58 - 01:56:28
And it's fun, too, to just live life together without to get too deep in is a spiritual practice. And many of those people have other spiritual practices. They go off and meditate and one else one does something else or teaching or something else. And that seems fine to me. I don't think you should make believe that a relationship is really yoga unless you're willing to really put the effort into making it such. And if you are, it really fills all of space for a long time and am I hearing the issue clearly or do you


01:56:32 - 01:57:24
somebody want to say something? The when I'm in a relationship with somebody else and what they do upsets me because I understand that my life experiences are the gift of my guru in order to bring me to God, that if somebody upsets me, that's my problem. This is a hard one because we don't usually think these ways in this culture. But I see other people is as I see them as like trees in the forest. You go into the woods and you see gnarled trees and live oaks and pines and hemlocks and elms and


01:57:40 - 01:58:19
things like that. And you're not inclined to say, I don't like you because you are a pine and not an elm. You appreciate trees the way they are, but the minute you get near humans, you notice how quick it changes. There's a way in which you don't allow humans to just manifest the way they are. You take it personally. You keep taking other people personally. All they are are mechanical runoffs of old karma. Really is what they are, I mean, they look real and they think they're real, but really what they are is mechanical run off.


01:58:24 - 01:59:02
So they say or so. And you karmically go it and then one of you says, We've got to work this out. And the other says, Yes, we must. And then you start to work it out. It's all mechanical, it's all conditions stop. I mean, I'm really being the last one so that if somebody I mean, somebody comes along and to me, they get me angry or uptight or they awaken some desire and wow, a my delighted they got me. And that's my work on myself. If I'm angry with you because your behavior


01:59:20 - 01:59:55
doesn't fill my model of how you should be, That's my problem for having models. No expectations, no upset. If you're a liar and a cheat, that's your karma. If I'm cheated, that's my work on myself, my attempting to change you, that's a whole other ballgame. What I'm saying is I will only be happy if you are different than you are. You're asking for it. Really asking for it. Think of how many relationships you say I really don't like that person's this.


02:00:05 - 02:00:43
If they would only be this if I can only manipulate them to be this, I can happy. So that weird. Why can't I be happy with them the way they are? You're a liar, a cheat and a scoundrel. And I love you. I won't play games, you, but I love you. It's interesting to move to the level where you can appreciate love and allow in the same way you would in the woods instead of constantly bringing in that judging component which is really rooted out of your own feelings of lack of power. Judging comes out of your own fear.


02:00:52 - 02:01:39
Now I fall trap to it all the time, but every time I do, I catch myself. Okay, that's a beginning. Let's go. You are bored yet? Are you still here? Yes. No, that's okay. You don't give me feedback. I'm going home now with you. Okay, Let's go. Improvise. Basically, we had a relationship In the beginning. Everything is exactly like that. If you marry that personal side of the judgments as well. And that's a problem. Which leads to my question. All of my clients I have some relationships are my nature and


02:01:52 - 02:02:41
you marry your wife and I'm searching for something special, something I've been told is common. So me Do you believe in such a relationship and what would that mean? How do you not know that I got it? Oh, keep looking. I mean, I'll give you the farthest out answer, first of all, and then we'll come back to something that everybody handle in the farthest out answer. We have all been around so many times that every one of us has been everything with everybody else. So when I look at you, you and I have been in


02:03:06 - 02:03:34
so many relationships together, it's just we don't remember. Do you know how many times we've been born and died? Remember that story? Voodoo says if you take a mile, mountains, six miles long, six miles wide, six miles high. That's the distance a bullet walks in a day and a bird flies over the mountain once every hundred years with a silk scarf. It's big in the length of time it takes the scarf to wear away the mountain. Right. That's how long you've been doing this.


02:03:42 - 02:04:18
I just think that once every hundred years, the scarf over a scarf and a mountain goes on and on and on and on. I mean, in India there are yogis and culpas of hundreds of thousands of years of and then they just start cycles all over again. And we've been through all of them again and again and again and again now, behind all of it is the one. And that's all there is. This is all all of us here are one in drag appearing to be many. And so we are all soul mate. There's only one of it.


02:04:24 - 02:05:06
It's not, mate, because it's not even two. It's just one. There's only one of us. So what you're really doing is constantly marrying yourself at the deepest level of God, marrying God. Right now you come down into song and each soul has a unique karmic predicament. You can call it a psychic DNA code that in a way guides which way its life will go. And it is entirely possible that souls, when they take birth in parents into parents that are part of their karma will, at some point meet a being and they have agreed in advance


02:05:18 - 02:05:53
to come down and do this together and meet. And that's what we usually call soul mates. What you have found from your past marriages. Is that what you are attracted to in a person isn't what you ultimately live with that what the after the they say the honeymoon is over and it's after the desire systems that were dormant, the relationship that have the attraction that it has and all of that passes, then you're left with the work to do. And it's the same work when you trade in one partner for another,


02:06:18 - 02:06:51
you still have the same work you're going to have to do so later when the pizzazz is over and it just keeps going over. And you can't you can't milk the romanticism of relationship too long as you become more conscious. It's more interesting than that. It really is. And people keep wanting a romantic size their lives all the time. Culture is part of the culture, but the awakening process starts to show you the emptiness of that form and you start to go for something deeper. You start to go to meet another human being in truth.


02:06:53 - 02:07:26
And truth is scary. Truth has bad breath at times, is boring. Truth, you know, burns the food truth is all the stuff. Truth has anger, truth has all of it. And you stay in it and you keep working with it and keep opening to it and keep deepening it. And every time you trade in a partner, you realize that's it's not there's no good or bad about them the time, good or bad about this, but you begin to see how you keep coming to the same place in relationships. And then you can't stop


02:07:29 - 02:07:58
because it gets too heavy, because your your identity gets threatened too much for the relationship to move to the next level of truth requires an opening and a vulnerability that you're not quite ready to make. And so you entrench, retrench, and you pull back and then you start to judge and push away, and then you move to the next one, and then you have the rush of the openness. And then the same starts to happen. And so you keep saying, where am I going to find the one where this doesn't happen?


02:08:02 - 02:08:32
And it'll only happen when it doesn't happen in you, when you start to take and watch this stuff and get quiet enough inside yourself so you can take that process as it's happening and start to work with it and keep coming back to living truth in yourself with the other person. Even though it's scary and hard. You hear what I'm talking about. So the other person has to work with you. Well, that's interesting. The ideal, of course, is where two people work together. But in like in


02:08:35 - 02:09:07
where many marriages are arranged and you don't even see your wife until after the wedding. I mean, they wear masks at wedding in some color in some villages. I don't know what they do in southern India, in North Krishna and Radha, they wear masks and then they take off the mask. And there they are for life because there's no divorce. I mean, you just don't divorce in a village. If if, if the husband dies, the wife goes on the funeral pyre. And so this is it. This is it for life.


02:09:12 - 02:09:51
It's got its benefits. But what's interesting about that is that when they understand dharma of relationship, there is a way in which it's like what the Marines say, that if you can change it, you can you change it. If you can't painted and when you can't change a marriage, you start to work with it. I thought it was the standstill pain. It was the same. You can't move it. Yeah the the when you have something that you're in like I couldn't trade my father in front of the father, he was given to me.


02:09:57 - 02:10:34
That's the given. I can't divorce my father. I can go away from him, but I can't divorce him. And what I found was because I had to keep dealing with my father, who called me random and who, you know, he loved me a lot. And he was very sweet and well-meaning and and we were buddies. And but it was weird because he didn't really understand what I was doing. And he attended a gathering in New York on the Central Park West, where Judith works, also in a church. They have Christ washing the feet of the disciples in the mirror on the back wall.


02:10:36 - 02:11:15
He was back there with my stepmother to be, and I was up there in a white robe with beads and a he whispered stories as I feel like the Virgin Mary, which for a Jew is pretty good. But she was. So it's okay. We forget that that. But that was interesting work for me because he was a given that I couldn't trade in. And the last year I was with him a lot and, and I began to see that that was work on myself to not judge him, not to try to change him. He was what he was he was a perfect statement of that.


02:11:23 - 02:11:56
He was absolutely perfect who he was. It was only when I had a model of how I would like my father to be that there was trouble. I wanted him not to suffer when that. So I wanted to understand what I understood about dying. And he didn't want to understand. And I was frustrated because I met well, I knew if he understood it, he wouldn't suffer. The worst problem was trying to take the suffering away from people you love. That's the stinker. You keep wanting to take away their son and you don't even know why it's there in the first place.


02:12:02 - 02:12:34
It's so interesting to allow people to be who they are. Finally, I think in relationships you create an environment with own work on yourself, which you offer to another human being to use to grow in the way they need to grow. Parents are an environment for their children. Lovers are an environment for their partners. Children are an environment for their parents. And you keep working. You become the soil moist and soft and receptive so the person can grow the way they need to grow. Because how do you know how they should grow?


02:12:39 - 02:13:08
People have two children. One of them is a very old incarnation of old mama who just dropped down to bless everybody, and the other one is immediately the end result, you know, and they're their siblings and they were my children, you know, and they are two entirely different, two being. So you've just got to listen to hear what a human being needs, who they need to be in a lifetime. So when you work with a situation where you don't change it, you just work on yourself a different way.


02:13:16 - 02:13:43
The idea of manipulating the universe in order for you to be happy is just one model. The other model is manipulate your own mind to be happy with what you got, which is probably the only way to do it. Finally, that's the only way to do it. Because if you keep manipulating the environment, it's never right. But she never noticed that thing. I mean, I've got to I'll go to Kauai, you know, in Hawaii, rent a house, get a car, have a lover, get art supplies, get fish. But do you notice


02:13:48 - 02:14:21
the weather is a little clammy today? Dammit, The jeep they gave us, it's not running on all the cylinders. That damn restaurant was closed tonight. I mean, I can watch how you can create an absolute hell out of the whole thing. That was to be heaven in paradise. And then you just laugh at yourself. And then finally, the image I have, which I've told so many times of being in Bali at the railway station in India, when I realized the train was going to be two days late and the station was full of


02:14:24 - 02:15:08
people who were living there and these were families with kids that were peeing everywhere and goats and chickens and vendors selling everything. I mean, it's life. It's real life in the Bali railway station and I didn't have much money at that time. And I had I was barefoot because I was a yogi in those days. And the latrine I had dysentery. And so the train hadn't it had stopped up maybe or a few weeks before. And so the fecal matter was sort of everywhere. And there were flies, I mean, millions of flies.


02:15:12 - 02:15:50
And I had to go about every 15 minutes. Now, my mother raised me. She she had very definite models of toilet training. And she taught me she taught me what hell was and the closest to hell her mind was the Bali railway station, the train she had ever seen it. That would be she would realize she she had met her fantasy right. And there I was. It was interesting because I found myself sitting there knowing I had to go to the bathroom, feeling it coming, and knowing I had to go in there and then coming back and then sitting.


02:16:01 - 02:16:37
It's got toilet paper. But does it go to see Claire has a roll of toilet paper? And there was a moment when I realized in the midst of all that that I was happy and I thought, This is impossible. Everything my training prepared me for was to not be happy. At this moment, I and I am happy. And it was interesting. I was happy because there was there was light force, there was openness, there were people, there was realness, was softness. It was alive. And also because I was really at peace and myself.


02:17:00 - 02:17:31
And this was just the stuff to deal with. And in a way, that experience shifted my consciousness about manipulating the universe to be happy. I'll still make it as nice as I can for me. But then where it isn't, I don't sit around being preoccupied with what isn't flowing. It's just open to it also. And here we go. Here we go. Because the amount of time you create a hell with your own mind because of your attachments to your models of how it should be that are different from the way it is.


02:17:38 - 02:18:19
You can see it in this culture about growing old. You see the model that a person develops about themselves and then as their body changes, which is inevitably part of nature, how it this confirms their model and how they suffer. Because I used to do 100 push ups and now I can only do 70. And there's a deep depression. And interesting, I can't do one and I'm not depressed. You should be the next question. And I find that when I'm dealing with pain or anger or fear, or especially when I'm sharing it with somebody,


02:18:30 - 02:19:12
I do a manipulation thing where I think I'm facing, I'm facing it, but a lot of it gets pushed down. So and I so my question, I guess, is how to really keep open to those things and and explain that to you tell talking about manipulating them yourself, how do you feel you're selling out to be with them or do you feel you're trying to manipulate them? So what are you telling me? It's no, it's not a real conscious thing. And at its it's an ego. Well, most everything we do is on this plane.


02:19:37 - 02:20:06
It's hard not to be. I mean, the spirit is mediated through ego. It's just the question of how identified you are with it. To tell me these things in yourself is acknowledging the fact that you see them some level. And when you're with another partner that you're really trying to work with by acknowledging that stuff with each other, it doesn't mean that you have to extract something from them. It's just that the relationships that are the most exciting are where the contract is to share truth.


02:20:11 - 02:20:51
Many don't have that kind of a contract. They have a contract of You will threaten my ego and I won't threaten yours. We'll both feel comfortable. But if the relationship is designed where you agree and agree, let us when I say to you, will you help me awaken by sharing your truth with me? It may be difficult for me to hear it well, but that's the work I will do with myself. And then you say to me, Would you help me awaken through sharing your truth with me? Sometimes it'll be hard for me, but I'll work on myself with it.


02:20:56 - 02:21:26
That relationship gets very exciting. That gets loaded. That's that's juicy. I mean, Giant. I have been friends for many years and we have that contract and sometimes it's been hard. There have been moments when his truth to me has been painful for me to work with as mine has been to him. But we trust each other because we're both committed to awakening because we love Maharaj so much that we take that truth and we keep working it and working with it. Or that's the same in my relation with Judith,


02:21:28 - 02:21:58
who I've been with for many years, same way now. Those kinds of truth relationships are very precious. They're very delicate. But you anything less than the truth. So what you do is when you see that stuff in yourself, you can say to the other person, I see how I am manipulating. And you keep bringing it out and the two of you bring it out and examine it with good faith. You keep doing that. You keep working and get as close as you can with it, and a progression ship doesn't allow that.


02:22:04 - 02:22:33
Then the work has got to be in yourself of bringing it up and seeing the way you're doing it. I mean, I have a very manipulative quality in me that I have had to work with a lot over the years to the point when I see myself, it either somebody points it out to me or I begin to see myself doing it. And then the interesting question is what do you do with that moment? Do you get into, oh, you're a no good bum because you're doing that again, or you just kind of let it go and let it flow by us.


02:22:36 - 02:23:24
So there I am again, Manildra, who was one of my wonderful meditation teachers once I came home and I was so upset about something and he says, Ram Dass, don't you see it's just old karma running off? And I really heard that it's just all stuff out of us running off and bring it up. Look it and let it go. Hey, Yes. My question how how is unheard of a word I with the relationship to spiritual teacher and it has to do with one view is the student should never accept blindly what the teacher


02:23:31 - 02:24:15
puts on them or tells that one teacher that almost sounds one of both, but no one should totally surrender. It is being a teacher now. If you are a student in this kind of situation, which way you go, I want to. I think you surrender only to truth and your intuitive heart has to be the final arbiter of where the truth lies. The final judgment, where the truth lies, and you're surrendering to what you surrender to. Is God in the form of the other person. And there are often times where because most of the beings that we call gurus


02:24:35 - 02:25:13
are really teachers, the likelihood of finding somebody that's a cooked goose is reasonably slim. Since they're not cook geese, they have their own carnival, they have their own stuff, and so they become somebody through whom a teaching comes. But they themselves, not truth. They are merely a vehicle through which there is a purity in your heart in the way you seek truth. You will take as the as the swan is able to separate milk from water, you separate the purity of their message from the stuff of their karma,


02:25:17 - 02:25:50
and you take the truth and you work with it. So my like some teachers will say, I've given you so much, you know, you've got to do this for me. I would say the only thing you would teach her is for you to get enlightened or free. And so you owe them because they're doing it out of the grace and good fortune that they're able to do it. And that should be enough for them. You don't owe them to take care of them. You may want to out of your love for them, but there's not an obligation in that sense.


02:25:52 - 02:26:28
My sense is that that when we surrender to a teacher and then end up feeling burned by their impurities, there was a conspiracy between teacher and you for everybody to do themselves in through each other and everybody's getting their tar muffins. I have watched this again and again because there a whole panoply of impurity in the teaching scenes. What if you don't do that now? What if you feel that no matter what happens, what you talk about might come? What if you don't feel that the teacher themselves is very


02:26:31 - 02:27:02
far from your lack of knowledge and you don't feel that? If you intuitively feel that, then you listen. You go as close to surrender as you can go. But you've got to hear that the the final spiritual surrender is no surrender. It's a surrender where there's nothing to surrender because you already guilty because the highest thing and the other person is the same as the highest thing in you. But I don't know that you know, but you are surrendering constantly into the highest part of your truth.


02:27:03 - 02:27:39
And intuitively, there's a place in you that does know that even though you don't know, you know it so that you're making approximations and what you may do is fall on your face. Well, I figured wonderful surrender for 194. And the fact is that you can't really decide to surrender because that's just another trip of power. I'm surrendering to you, you know, Give me the truth. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way. The relationship between a pure master and a charmer


02:27:45 - 02:28:22
is a matter that has nothing to do with the intellect whatsoever. There's no choice involved at all that is such deep karmic unfolding that you are drawn to the master when the moment is right and the unfolding happens totally at a level where it when it's right. You just are and all the should I shouldn't be. You know, I recall I was traveling with a swami who was a very beautiful man, and we traveled around the world together. And then I came to his ashram and it was a very big ashram.


02:28:30 - 02:28:59
And he, he, he he sat on a throne and he had many wealthy devotees and many poor devotees. And he created a little throne for me next to his throne. And thousands people came to see him. And he made all of these people touch my feet that were judges and wealthy people, and they gave me coconuts and they put flowers around my neck and and he had me have attendants and he gave me special rooms. And it was really lovely. People came up to me and they said, you know, he's never treated anybody like this before.


02:29:07 - 02:29:46
You had the guru up in the mountains and him. But, you know, he was nice to start you going, but this is clearly your master. And I thought about my grew up in the mountains who had a blanket that kept falling off, run deeper into that relationship until you experienced the one that lies behind the two and that is the the yoga or union meaning union of relationship. So that, for example, when I start out with my guru, I meet this being and he loves me and my heart opens. And when my heart opens, I feel very safe.


02:29:50 - 02:30:29
And I, I experienced love towards him. And then he's in my mind and we, I start to keep him more in my consciousness. And at first he's a separate entity. And then I begin to experience him more like a presence around me. And then I start to experience some inside myself. And that's a yoga or coming into union with another being. Now, in most relationships, the relationships are based on a conspiracy to stay separate. It's based on the idea you're you and I'm me, and we will interact, we won't merge, we will interact.


02:30:34 - 02:31:09
So the merging is a whole other game that is not part of the usual social contract at all. And when you come together in a marriage or a relationship with a partner, even that isn't based on merging. Usually it's based on a partnership of egos of I won't threaten your ego and you