TRANSCRIPT
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[Music] be here [Applause] now I like to let the um Bell take me into the silence so that's part of the silence the silence nobody said the silence was quiet cuz if you're pushing away the noise your mind isn't silent the artist to get the Mind quiet [Applause] just so that we can watch the words without getting too lost in them because the words are like birds that are flying through this wonderful [Applause] Hall and usually these days I always start by introducing myself as Ram do do
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means servant and Rah means it's name for God uh one of the names of the nameless one of the thousand names that can't be spoken but I say I also use the name Rah as an acronym for rent a mouth and in effect you have rented my mouth to tell you what you already know see and I know that because when I say the wisest thing that comes into my being you nod so if you nod how did you know and if you already know what do you need me to tell you so we're dealing with this peculiar situation in which this meeting is
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totally irrelevant or if we're looking for motivation it's that we keep needing to say it to ourselves over and over again until we hear it [Music] [Applause] I've been um asked over the years many many times is this the onset of Armageddon or is this the Aquarian age the new age is it all opening up is it all shutting down where are we in the yugas and culpas in the um in the vast time spans in India there are periods where it's all being created there's periods where it's all stable
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and then there are periods where it all decays and you can look at civilizations even in recorded history and you can see that civilizations arise exist and decay so it's reasonable to ask as you look [Applause] at the state of our insensitivity to the Earth as you look at our insensitivity to one another to the animals as our as we live with our fascination with technology and spiritual materialism or scientific materialism [Music] as the shopping malls become our temples I mean it's a little like Brave
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New World it has a little bit of that kind of horish show quality about it it's all being cemented over it's those kinds of [Applause] feelings when you look at all that it's not hard to see the model for it's all coming unglued and this experiment we will write off it just didn't work because humans were too greedy the quarterly report was more interest more important than the sustainability of the rainforest they made that decision that Civilization do you remember that's us that's one take and
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things are going to get worse and worse and worse and inner cities are going to become from all of it and guns are going to be on everybody's back and [Applause] shelf and the prisons will have what a third of the population now they only have maybe over about a million now I mean could a civilization or a society be working if we have that many people in prison doesn't isn't that a clue that something isn't working and that that's becoming one of our biggest industries certainly I find that
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fascinating and when such a large percentage are in there for nonviolent crimes isn't that something about political a political issue isn't there something about and this is what fascinates me about Armageddon or the Aquarian age first let me say that whichever one is happening whether it is all blossoming the information AG is with us we're democratizing communication and information there are all kinds of reasons we are getting smarter about environment more and more uh play like Robert Mueller who used to be
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assistant head of the United Nations for 35 years said to me I said aren't you worried about the future of the environment because you have he's the head of the Peace University in Costa Rica and he said well when I went to the Stockholm conference on the environment in the guess ' 70s he said there was no government that had an environmental Ministry he said when I went to the Rio conference 118 or 138 did he said that's the way things sh change things are changing now if you just St stood back and said
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well this is going through a transformation it's all going to be beautiful I ask myself if it's Armageddon or Aquarian age what difference does it make to me now what will I do different what will I do differently if I think it's all going to go to hell in a hand basket versus what will I do if I think it's just about to happen happen and about 10 or 15 years ago I realized that it didn't make a hell of a lot of difference to me because what I had to do if it was going to be the new age what did I
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personally want to bring to the new age I wanted to bring a quiet mind that had wisdom I wanted to bring an open heart that had compassion and what did I want to do with my time I wanted to do whatever I could to relieve suffering in the [Music] universe if it was going to be the dark end the best way I could prepare for my own death since that would be part of it would be to quiet my mind open my heart and relieve the suffering around me so at that point it didn't really matter which one it was going to be it
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was more like that was all astral fun and games yeah it was a way to juice up your actions but actually your actions are determined by what you call Dharma that is what do you do which relieves suffering in the universe since we're all there the suffering exists and we are part of it we're inter beings as tikn H Han talks about it and you begin to see after you have seen the suffering some suffering and you get horrified and you want to do something about it you try to do something about it and you find out to
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your surprise that you're very doing creates more suffering and that really horrifies you you even wanted to be good and it screwed up I mean I was part of a foundation or I am part of a foundation that does work in Central America and we ran into a situation where in our Zeal to help these people rebuild their communities after the violence in the'80s we were coming in and you know like Father Christmas and mother mother DGA Lakshmi and surprisingly enough the people we were dealing with were seen as
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a threat to the government and the government started to disappear them and here in our Zeal to do good we were creating this suffering in these people and we meant to do good so you begin to realize that the only if you really want to relieve suffering you have to work on yourself to extricate your awareness from the limiting conditions that would make your actions distorted because they represent your desires it's like if you're horny you see what's makeable if you're hungry you see what's
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edible if your car doesn't work you notice repair stations your motivation affects your perception so the question is how do you extricate yourself from identification with your desires does it mean you don't have desires no it just means you're not busy Desiring it like many of you drive cars and I bet you hurdle through space in a huge metallic thing making incredibly complex decisions about centrifugal and centri force and rates of acceleration and deceleration and during all that you're probably tuning
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the radio or looking for the cops or not inhaling or whatever you do in cars [Music] you work on yourself so that your awareness can be quiet enough so that you can hear the gal you can hear the total existential moment you can hear it because you be it the boundaries between self and other dissolve in awareness and you are one with what is and out of that comes action and that's really compassionate action and I'm going to go into a little more detail about all that so if it passed you by don't worry it passes Me
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by too the interesting observation I'm now ready to see cuz all I've said over these many years is when people said is that Armageddon or the Aquarian age I said I don't know and really I don't think it matters cuz I will still become an instrument for the best of what can be and what will happen will happen it's not in my hands but now what I see is more and more clearly that what we are involved in is a transformation in the in the nature of reality in the paradigms by which we
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play let me put it in very specific terms we are seeing a shift in in power so that Consciousness becomes a dominant dimension of reality as well as physical social psychological [Music] reality this Consciousness shift is extremely extremely interesting if you look at what's happening in this Society in terms of meditation I mean I have friends going into Monsanto Chemical Company one of the truly evil Giants in the universe and teaching their top Executives meditation now you say well that's great
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they'll meditate their way into being more destructive but they're willing to say look we know we are destructive we are employing a huge number of people in our labor force let's figure out how to transform this game but let's do it at a rate that doesn't destroy the whole game in the process of doing it in other words I'm finding there is a hearing even in the business community that says I know I am caught in a game that is not does not have integrity with my deepest values I know it I'm willing to
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recognize that predicament and just recognizing that that dissonance I mean when you have people from the 60s who were part of the ah the flowers the We Are One the love the Consciousness explosion all of that and now these people with insurance policies and IRAs and children and school boards and stuff where did that Consciousness go to interesting it didn't go anywhere except sort of underground a little bit because it wasn't practical and now when I sit down with people who are the I mean they're exceptions like I sit
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down with Ben of Ben Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's you know and Ben is working now almost full-time to reduce the military budget by a small amount to cover health education and Welfare and he's doing it using his power base of being a part of an Empire which by its very nature is destructive to a lot of values cuz the ice cream's so rich and so good I mean it's real evil [Applause] now what I see that's different between somebody like Ben and other people in business is that Ben
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appreciates his predicament he sees it from a place where he realizes he's part of the problem he's not rationalizing his way out of existence to explain a CEO's salary that's 200 times the whatever of his employees I don't know what percentage but it's absurd it's obscene it's [Applause] obscene I really see the the way in which the shift in reality that happened in the 60s and you saw it reflected in civil rights you saw it in anti Vietnam you saw it in sexual Freedom you saw the
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Psychedelic movement you saw it in women's rights in the beginning of the environmental movement I mean this was a major major explosion of something or other if you'll pardon the humor it mushroomed when I tried to figure out what I would say it was I would say what happened was we went from a culture that I grew up in that saw the reality of our senses and our thinking mind as absolutely real and we went through some changes where we then suddenly saw that the reality we thought was absolutely real
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was in fact relatively real that's a big change that's a major change I mean when I grew up at high school I was taught Newtonian physics as if it was absolutely real and then Einstein came along and said you know it depends on where you're standing that's what I mean it now makes that relatively real it's real I mean I was a psychologist and I really thought I was a psychologist and I thought Psychology was real and when people walked into my office because I was a Freudian all I saw were
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their psychosexual stages of development cuz I had a model of what that reality was and then suddenly because of my own experiences I with mushrooms actually I saw that what was absolutely real was only relatively real and what's interesting to me now is that that understanding of relative reality has mainstreamed in the society and what it does is take the vertical patriarchal power structures and it really shakes the hell out of them to me the symbol was back in the' 60s when when uh a lot of uh people
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surrounded the uh Pentagon Enchanted M now only a few people saw it rise actually but it wasn't whether it Rose or not it was just the fact that they were saying there are other powers besides the power you think you have they were showing that it was just it was just cardboard it was cardboard and illusion they were showing that the institutions that we gave such sanctity to as these monolithic institutions were just those institutions they were just the creation of the human mind and they weren't very
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functional at that and if you watch our history of the way religion dominated and then education never really dominated but religion dominated then government took over and government nation states big thing now we have multinationals multinationals make B make are making the nation states bankrupt basically they're reshuffling the deck the shift involved basically a re-empowerment of the individual human heart it basically was [Applause] saying like I go into a church and I see that often the Church feels
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bankrupt because everybody came to get something and everybody took it away so all you're left with is the external rituals then you go into other churches and they are swinging they are really alive spiritually and you see it's because the individuals bring to the church spirit and they feed it because basically the spiritual basic spiritual instit tion is the individual human heart and you can juice up institutions or get trapped in the institutional [Applause] calcification what I'm pointing
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[Applause] to is that you and I hold The Secret inside of ourselves as to whether this is Armageddon or the Aquarian age because the basic secret has to do with human consciousness and it has to do with what used to be called non-ordinary states of awareness William James one of the great philosophers said at one point our normal waking consciousness is but one type of consciousness whilst all about it parted from it by the fiest of veils they light other types of Consciousness we may pass our entire lives without knowing of their
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existence but apply the requisite stimulus and there they are in their completeness whatever they're meaning they forbid our premature closing of our accounts with reality specifically you took birth you went into training you got socialized you got acculturated you got you went into somebody training you went you were trained to become somebody Peter or Rose or darus or Fred or whatever Dawn or and everybody said hi Dawn you said hi and you knew who you were and everybody had a they all they all had
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their thing their identity you went in you became somebody in the minute you they were sure you as somebody they Is Us by the way so don't get paranoid the minute they saw that you were somebody then you went into somebody special training to become somebody really special I'm so proud of you you're special how are you special well I make things with three notches in them Aha and everybody was special but then and it's why I can talk comfortably with this group because of what I assume you're doing here in a
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whole life Expo is you awaken and you realize you've been had you realize that your somebody is just a somebody it's a trip of the mind you got caught in who you think you are and you were trained by people who thought they were real I mean didn't your parents think they were real and they made you think you were real I mean the whole thing is this incredible conspiracy of Consciousness and you buy in and you're glooming along thinking you're real and then you awaken now what are you awaken
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into and what did you awaken from well here's where language gets really funny to play with and I've really reflected about this because there are so many maps of so many planes of Consciousness in so many Traditions I mean you can have heavens and hells and mansions you you can have Locas you can have PLS of Consciousness I mean I can do it in so many ways electromagnetic the laws of seven I mean we can go on and on and on well I decided for my own purposes I was going to simplify it and I decided I would settle on three
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planes the first I would call ego that's who you got trained to be that is your software for living on this plane that's the conceptual structure you have in your mind that tells you where to go to the bathroom where to eat where to get sustenance Etc it tells you who you are and who you think I am it is the it's this the program for you as a SE entity to ward off the disaster of the fact that you are this tiny little thing and the forces around you are vast I mean first your parents' knees
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were up here then you grew up but now you've got bombs and you've got violence and you've got hunger and you've got disease and you've got so the ego has an incredibly I mean I'm misus I'm using the word ego in a way that ego purist would be upset but that's okay I had to use some word now what it is you awaken out of or into you awaken into what you might call the witness or in one system or mindfulness in another system or um an alter State of Consciousness in another
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system or spiritual awakened person in another system now this second one I am choosing to call by a very very uh complex word because it has so much excess meaning in this Society the word Soul now Buddhists are always horrified when I use the word Soul because they have a a law a rule it's called anata which means there is no self and so what are you doing using another self when we just got rid of a self what I'm doing it for I know that and I agree with it but what I see is I'm giving you a step on the step ladder
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and then all of this is within what happens when you finally surrender your identity exclusive identity with your separateness then the boundaries dissolve and you are in now we got a new word we can play with which one would you like how about love want awareness I use awareness it's neutral I mean awareness is like the sky it Embraces and everything in the sky you see there's clouds there's airplanes there's birds there's flying saucers there's kinds of stuff hang gliders they're all in the sky but
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somehow it doesn't affect the sky the sky is just there the sky has all of these in it these are like phenomena that come and go in the sky including your body your personality your identity the whole shtick the interesting thing about your sky and my sky is there only one sky there's only one awareness in other words at that point you is a separate entity are no longer the pl the base camp from which you're looking at the universe did I lose everybody or is anybody here may okay you got to give me
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reassurance cuz you all look like this and I don't know Delia thank you that was my not only my ego needing that that was Soul wisdom to pull that one off so what I see is that if you ask me what I'm doing on Earth what is my business what is the meaning of The Game of Life I will answer I am in the business of Awakening into my soul identity and Awakening out of my exclusive identity with ego now this does not mean you are destroying the ego don't be silly why would you destroy such good
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software you need it to function here what you are going to learn to do and this is inevitable and it is part of what is happening in the world at this moment as we approach the Millennium is we are moving into a domain where Consciousness is the currency and what you are going to learn to do is to live simultaneously on two planes of Consciousness I mean at first for some of you the metaphor is appropriate and for others it's it's like dirty words but first you get high and then you come down some of
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you are familiar with that conent getting high coming down [Applause] you have sex you get high you have a fight you come down you cook booy base you go up get in digestion you come down you can feel the whole rhythm of it all and you say I want to maximize my highs I want to say hi all the time I did that from 1961 until 1974 basically I just wanted to get as high as I could and stay there and first it was psychedelics and then it was gurus and it was a whole all the sticks I could find to keep me high
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all the time because when you go into this plane of Soul awareness which is so tasty you are suddenly in a home in a way that you wonder where the hell have I been all this time being caught in my ego thinking who I thought I was was real it's what Plato's Cave is about it's what gief talking about escaping from the prison of the mind this is all the same room we're talking about and most of us most of the time in all of what we call education and growing are basically rearranging the
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furniture in our prison cell we don't seem to be interested in opening the door and walking out [Music] but the fact was every time I went up I came down and then I really saw that that polarity was the problem and that my aversion to coming down was where the trouble lay I now knew how to get high as well as anybody in the society the question was why wasn't I high all the time and the pro the answer was because I was pushing away the low and it changed my game I turned around and looked at Earth and my Incarnation
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and my humanity and my neurosis and all of my stuff and I started to reach out to embrace it into my being and it's a very interesting work because when you look at earth when you turn around when you've been looking at the heavens and I'm coming and holy holy holy and here I come and ROM Ram rum and off we go and you look down it's there is suffering everywhere and it's horrendous even the people that aren't suffering a suffering I mean you don't take have to take gross sufferings like violence
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starvation and uh poverty and all of the hor horrendous things that are happening to billions of us in this wonderful system we've all figured [Music] out but you look at the people who made it who got it who won and you look at the lines in the face and you look at the sleeping pill prescriptions and the proac prescriptions and the whole thing and you say who wins in this game where are the winners where are the people that aren't suffering and when you look at the root of the suffering the root of the
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suffering is the ignorance in which a person thinks they are only their separate self they've cut themselves off completely from any nutrition from from the food of being part of the universe everything's them I mean I was part of it I was a behavioral psychologist that treats everything as them including [Music] yourself now [Music] [Music] The Awakening and so once you have tasted of high which we'll Now call Soul even though soul is only part High because you haven't gone into pure
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awareness yet but let's just say soul is among the high it's the spiritual Realms you've gone you've gotten high then you look at another person who's busy saying I'm not high I'm responsible and what you see is a high person who thinks there's somebody else because as you begin to see as you begin to learn how to live in two planes of Consciousness at once where you're both high and down you're both in the world and you're not in the world you understand you become a Karma Yogi you
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are using you're transforming your in the worldness to get high and you're using your highness to dance in the world this this kind of a celebratory Divine dance when you experience that in yourself you look and you realize everybody else has got that too why is everybody short shifting themselves so much why are they busy thinking they're real what can you do about it can you shake them and say you're not real I mean I work with I work a lot with dying people people people with
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AIDS or cancer to help them die to be with them to hang out with them while they're dying on the telephone or in person it's the most exciting thing I do in my life it's the highest thing I do in my life because there is a way in which people after it's all hit the fan are ready for a little truth a little presence they're vulnerable they're open again somehow their whole willful ego structure hasn't worked you get them at the moment it hasn't worked and you don't come on because what
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immoral right of you to come on to somebody they can die their own way but what you can do is you can work on your own Consciousness and you become an environment for them that doesn't trap them in who they thought they were in case they would like to come up for air [Applause] [Music] I go into somebody who is in the final states of um the AIDS virus infection with tremendous opportunistic illnesses social stigma family rejection economic hardship I mean it is as harsh as Society can do basically and I walk into the room and
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my heart breaks for that human being young person whose dreams are gone who's not going to live their [Applause] life as long as I stay in that space in myself what I what my mind is mirroring back to them is their [Music] pitifulness but if I can not be so entrapped by the symbolic power of their identity to be able to shift my Consciousness just enough to come back into my mindfulness of saying person with AIDS person helping person with AIDS here we are I can become an environment with my
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Consciousness now we're talking about Consciousness where if that person would like to come up for air into their own soul identity there's nothing in me that will keep them stuck being an AIDS patient who's dying it's like if I look at you and many of you have heard me do this but I can do it quickly and we have a little television channel selector right here and we Channel select it on one and you look up here and you see a uh 65-year-old um decaying attractive man now you shift gears once more to
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Channel 2 and you see a lecturer spiritual Seeker teacher neurotic BL you see my whole psychosocial shtick Jew from Boston middle class white da da you see the whole thing that's all my psychosocial identity channel two that's As the World Turns okay now shift the channel again for this crowd will appreciate that I'm an Aries in other words we've just moved into a domain we can call it the astral domain we can call it Arch types we can mythology whatever it is it's bigger than life but it's
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still where we're somebody's well I'm a I'm in search of the Grail well good because I'm the Divine mother everybody's got their part to play on that plane you shift the channels once more and you look into another human being eyes and what you see is another being looking out at you you in there I'm in here far out how did you get into that one and you see another Soul just like you in drag you see them in their personalities their astrology their bodies they're
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busy being somebody and they really think they're real you know but yet when you looked into their eyes they looked back at you and said hey I'm in here too far out how did we get caught in this thing what a incredible dance and that's where Soul Consciousness starts to be fun and I've had the privilege in life of finding many many many Soul Associates Soul friends people who we can meet in Soul awareness and Delight in the dance of our egos with all their neurosis and all their shtick and all
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the suffering and dying and all of the stuff the minute you identify with the soul not to the exclusion of the ego but at least equally balanced with it your whole attitude towards death and suffering changes because I'd like to ask you which of those two planes clearly do you know dies and I'll tell you it's the physical ego stage dies and there's another part of you now that's what's interesting about the quality of this other part this [Applause] [Music] Soul when you meet a
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person and you can get up to the channel where you you meet them as a fellow soul delighting in the universe the play of the universe or scared by it or whatever but they wouldn't be scared cuz they'd see it if they were really resting in Soul awareness the medium that you meet in this is complicated I I I hesitate to well the medium you meet in you could call shared presence it's like are you here I'm here here we are be here now there's another word you could call it though you could call it
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love you could say we are meeting in love I'm not talking about romantic love not I love you but here we are in this place of enoughness a place of fulfillment of fullness of presence of appreciation of the way it is why it is of looking at the laws of karma the laws of the universe and saying yeah right AO and saying AO to cancer and saying ASO to anything saying ah so that's the way it is a so I understand from that place of Consciousness your ability to hear how to play the ego dance changes
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considerably cuz you're no longer so identified it's like PL Monopoly do you think you're the iron or the top hat or do you think you're the person throwing the dice and playing or do you think you're the person that created the game which includes you the fact is these three planes are you are the player you are the you are the piece on the board that's getting Marvin Gardens you are the player the soul is the player and you are awareness in that the board and the players and you and all of it is
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all part of it's an internal matter it's nothing personal it's an internal matter it's the way it all is our journey in life has to do with extricating ourself from exclusive ego identity to live simultaneously on Soul awareness and on ego plane so you're impeccable on the ego plane but you're not trapped in it you're not trapped in birth or death or suffering or sickness it is all there and you feel it and your heart's breaking but another part of you is saying a
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so it's what the da says when it says one does nothing and nothing is left undone that's two planes of Consciousness you're resting inside just like when you're driving you weren't driving you were doing something else you could be at rest and your whole life would be lived out like driving is ah driving ah depression I mean the difference between I'm depressed and look at that depression those are two different planes of Consciousness one shows you a way out and one doesn't somebody says I'm depressed I
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said are you a away you press they said yes I said well then it's your problem when you're tired of it you'll give it up now what that seems to be doing is profaning personality and I think it could use a little of that in this Society this Society seems absolutely obsessed with personality what do I want what do I need what do I desire who should I be with will I make it did I achieve am I successful it's all fun but it's really really like children's toys it isn't that interesting and I'm
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saying that as an old psychotherapist and somebody trained in personality who taught that stuff as if it was real at Stanford even you know so they thought it was real too and then at Harvard where they thought it was real till they began to suspect I didn't think it was as real as they thought it was it's fun to be thrown out of an institution as AUST as Harvard and to know you're right I mean that can you realize how bizarre that is there was a press conference after I got thrown out cu I
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was the first professor in the 20th century to be thrown out and I mean I was the person that was going to now go to the gym and sweep it you know I mean had lost the big fight I mean you take on harvit it's like harv and Stanford and Yale and inside me as I was looking around at all these television and radio people all of whom had that look of it's too bad what's happened I felt inside of myself my god I've won and then I thought because I'm a psychologist there is psychosis when you think
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what you think is true and nobody else does you're nuts and then I thought okay then I'll be nuts and what I've turned out is there are a lot of other nutty people and if I don't scare people too much most people would like to be nuts the same way I'm nuts which is really far out I mean do you realize how what a mind-blowing years this these have been [Applause] [Music] so the sequence is for some way in some way you awaken out of your subl and it doesn't you don't have to blow yourself away to do
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it it is really as the conceptual structures are available you can recognize the different levels of your Consciousness cuz all of it is available to everybody all the time you're just busy not seeing it it's as if your highest being you're busy not acknowledging is real because you're so busy thinking who you think you are is real that you treat all that as static or something I was out of my mind I didn't know what I was doing good stay out of it I mean when Tim said turn on tune in and
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drop out the Dropout had a revolutionary quality to it and I think this game is actually more interesting than a revolution I think this is consciousness Evolution and that we are part of an evolutionary process I don't think we have to push against the system the system slowly if you don't make the polarity will slowly transform itself I was with a a wonderful wonderful gentleman a very unusual gentleman his name is Lawrence Rockefeller and he's 86 and he's a he's a the Elder of the
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Rockefeller Clan and he was busy setting up professorships of Consciousness at different universities because Consciousness is the word that is the word that gets you in between where science goes and where the muguna people go Consciousness is the legitimate word they're trying to save now because you don't know how I mean they got to deal with mind they finally have to deal with the fact that everything that goes on in US does not have a biochemical equivalent in the frequencies they're
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measuring okay so I said well you know they'll they'll pervert whatever you do with setting up a pestor ship like uh Mrs Stanford down at Stanford left a lot of her money for occult studies you think much of it's been used by Stanford for that purpose you should imagine they take lawyers to figure out how to do what Mrs Stanford wanted without doing it isn't that bizarre so he said I said they'll probably pervert it he said well he said I gave the what I wanted this course and
00:52:25 - 00:53:25
Consciousness to the pro to the president of I don't remember Princeton or one of those placees and he thought about it overnight he came back with another title which was already part of the way they were doing it I said well aren't you concerned that they're changing the title he says no you've got to understand the new paradigm has happened they're already losing you've got to allow them to save face isn't that a bizarre statement for an 86y old I mean that is really
00:52:54 - 00:54:29
interesting to me extraordinary [Applause] I mean Lawrence is one of the backers of prop 215 that's pretty interesting isn't it it's pretty interesting now I I think I probably instead of continuing I should take some questions um would that be appropriate cuz I can talk forever as you can see and I'm fascinating [Applause] [Music] so yes yes good now I become Oprah Winfrey we can go on I mean I'll answer this I'll say the same thing whether I'm answering a question or not so it
00:53:53 - 00:55:31
doesn't matter questions yeah do you think I'll repeat the question for every do you think it really makes to wake up whether or not they meditate does it matter in waking up whether you do all these things like meditation and all of this spiritual rigar [Laughter] [Music] roll no however [Applause] once you see that Awakening is possible you'd be a damn fool to stay to walk away from it and when you don't want to walk away from it you start to look around at what you can do in life to stabilize yourself in this
00:54:45 - 00:55:52
kind of Consciousness and a lot of these practices become useful for doing that and that attracts you to doing them because and ultimately while you may use meditation as a practice or devotion or church or whatever ultimately you will see as the pull gets stronger and the realization of the truth of your identity gets deeper Every Act in your life becomes a vehicle for the process it all becomes method everything your fights your horiness your laziness your achievement your fear it all becomes the
00:55:19 - 00:56:24
Grist for the mill of the process of Awakening okay and I'd say that every method is a trap because it traps you in being somebody using a method and for method to work ultimately it should self-destruct you don't want to end up being a meditator you want to end up being the Buddha or a free being you know and it's true with psychedelics it's true with meditation it's true with service it's true with Christianity it's true across the board you don't want to be a Christian you
00:55:51 - 00:57:21
want to be Christ and that's the one this is the heresy this is the heresy and I might as well just say it out front because we are all awareness in Drag and what awareness is is what awareness is it's the nonform it's the universe the unmanifest universe it is why g- D is the unspoken word it's all the names our fingers pointing at the moon and it turns out this is the moon questions yeah say it once [Music] louder what extent do I think technology will play a role in the evolution of
00:56:39 - 00:57:53
Consciousness uh I would say a profound role I mean uh LSD God bless it that's that's technology I mean uh I you know but uh I mean what I'm seeing is as I get on the internet and you know my email correspondence gets more diverse and all this stuff I can feel the way in which the collective Consciousness is starting to meet in I mean virtual reality is not just a play thing virtual reality is a statement of these other planes of Consciousness and we will at first use it in the oldfashioned way in the way we
00:57:16 - 00:58:20
thought we were but slowly it starts to work its magic and you start to become I mean we've been very concerned about the imbalance that happened ever since really the industrial re I don't know where it started Industrial Revolution is a good place I used to say the 60s but I was faulted for that of an obsession with individualism you know another ISM individualism and me and me sorry folks can't be with the family got to go because I've got my thing to do and what we did in the process of doing that as
00:57:48 - 00:58:56
I'm seeing very clearly in the work I'm doing with aging now is that we threw the baby out with a bath we we lost our sense of network or web or interdependency or Community or however whatever metaphor you want for that I think um any Tech any technology can be unuseful I mean television people say is it unuseful you know is it bad what it's doing is burning out something in a lot of people I mean it might take a generation of couch potatoes but something else comes I mean they still
00:58:22 - 00:59:41
reproduce you know and then something else happens so I'm I'm optim istic yes questions [Music] yeah on the path how do you differentiate between ego awareness or ego Consciousness and soul Consciousness it's very very subtle tricky stuff and you'll fall in your face many times just like I do oh I'm a soul I'm so aware says my ego so that's where you learn how to not not not give elevate your thoughts that much about I think I'm a soul or I think I'm an ego just go back to whatever you're
00:59:10 - 01:00:13
like for me my beads or my breath just Rising falling just staying with my breath Cuts me out of the thinking mind of where I think I'm going and who I think I am and why I think I'm become just brings me back to breathing in breathing out breathing in in breathing out not I think I'm breathing in or I'm watching myself breathe in but breathing in breathing out I mean it's you keep you learn the the techniques they're not religious they're just techniques for concentration of mind to show you the
00:59:43 - 01:01:09
way in which certain thoughts are trapping you into seeing its [Music] reality yeah [Music] what are my current thoughts about the role of psychedelics in what on a mindful path well I'll tell you uh first of all I would be a terrible hypocrite and phony if I didn't honor the role they played in my life because it's been extremely profound I am also aware as I said earlier that a lot of the profound things that I understood in the 60s through psychedelics are now mainstream Consciousness in other words
01:00:29 - 01:01:21
you don't need to use that to get there because there is a there is a much more supportive environment for acknowledging the reality of these planes which everybody has but people are busy not having it because every time you took psychedelics you opened up and you say well I'm here again I know this place this is familiar well it's familiar to everybody it's just they're busy not knowing it and once you give them a setting where it's all right to know it they start to allow themselves to
01:00:55 - 01:02:04
recognize so the first thing is the culture has changed and using psychedelics as a spiritual path I still think is very profound however in a society where there is this much drug paranoia and the illegality is so strong you've got to realize as we found out in the 60s in our research that set and setting are critical factors in the nature of the experience you have when you alter your Consciousness and the setting in this culture for using this is tricky business because it comes with a lot of
01:01:29 - 01:02:36
paranoia and you've got to find a way to extricate yourself from that paranoid setting otherwise it pre-programs the the trip here on all right is that a fair statement sir I can hear you go ahead absolutely if you're already in Detroit you don't have to take a bus to Detroit that's true for all spiritual methods the method is only there to extricate yourself from the illusion that you thought the ego was the only thing that was real once you're out of that as you're pointing out then you you're not
01:02:29 - 01:03:36
using methods to get there because you're already there what you're using methods for then is to just stabilize yourself in that space But there is no particular reason I mean uh once you are you're stabilized with faith in that space of Soul awareness [Music] uh everything is you use methods entirely differently I mean you would only use methods that would be harmonious with the whole game you wouldn't use methods that would you wouldn't feel you you wouldn't have the desperateness of being cut off you would
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already feel like you were home and then it becomes more of a celebratory use like my Guru used to go ram ram ram ram ram all day and I he wasn't doing it to get High I mean he was doing it because what else to do other than just keep remembering it's I haven't talked much about the real fun place which was when you when you fin finish with all this kind of ego Obsession and you're resting in Soul then the pull towards awareness the pull of the separateness to be one with the one becomes more and
01:03:36 - 01:04:45
more powerful this is the Poetry of roomi and haiz and Kabir and all of the Mystic poets the Psalms and the songs and all of these wonderful things that are really the Soul's yearning to be with God the the lover and the Beloved merging I mean that's what that part is about that's the higher quality of devotional yoga and that's really what our business is when we finish this other business we got to clean up first which is our egos yes uh let me explain she says whether these planes of Consciousness exist
01:04:22 - 01:05:26
within like the soul level for example higher souls and lower I'm sure they do I just reduced it because the whole game of judging bores the bores me you know higher lower I don't know I'll do it I'll collect I'll develop my mindfulness so that I can say ah so look at this there's pain there's suffering there's joy there's birth there's death there's aging there's spots you know I mean I like I look at my hand that it's got wrinkles and blood vessels and aging
01:04:53 - 01:06:15
spots it's far out the porcelana ad says they call these aging spots I call them ugly and I look at this and I say they call these ugly I call them aging spots and they're I mean I think that's beautiful it's a nice old beautiful hand you know what did I want so yes questions yes [Music] I would say that uh the candidates are um they are both good people trying to do good basically I don't think they're evil people all right I think that they there is a certain degree of
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stupidity in them I don't think the conversation we're having About Soul awareness is relevant to them I do not experience and I really wanted to experience with Bill Clinton uh that he was aware I think he's incredibly intelligent and very clever I think he's sort of as good as the mind game gets but I think it is an old-fashioned game and I don't think you should look to a political candidate at this moment for where the social change is going to come from you've got to realize that they are locked into a
01:06:25 - 01:07:34
web forces that you're just looking at the front person for a whole system of which we are all part so where I start changing is me because I see that as I change every energy I put out to everybody keeps changing and that they meet and they change and that's the way once you understand the information web and realize that information is the grossest form of it that there is also energetic webs and all kinds of levels of webs you realize that everybody is equally powerful which is a bizarre
01:06:59 - 01:08:05
thought and then you realize that as you work on yourself you change the world and then doesn't mean you don't be a social activist but use your social activism to work on yourself when I do a protest or something like that I am protesting against what I determine as inappropriate or or behavior that's creating suffering but if I do it in a way that closes my heart towards the people I'm opposing forget it I've just created more suffering and [Applause] that's and that's the kind of
01:07:34 - 01:08:57
idealism yeah okay question is integrity a practice to go grow to bring about integrity or is it a a clever Roose of the ego I would say that until the very last moment of Enlightenment of Freedom it's all ego I mean until you dissolve till you aren't and then you are but you're not but you you are resting and not until that happens it all is an ego trip so I'd say everything I'd say is an ego trip all practices are ego trips all right but what they are is the ego that's saying I can do this practice
01:08:26 - 01:09:36
because it'll never amount to anything and the fact is the practices are powerful then they do do something and we do change we do change and I um and as we create a setting of Consciousness that is our Collective Consciousness that allows for the reality of these other planes of awareness other people can change much more readily and then it becomes sort of like the 100th monkey thing or something like that but the change is basically the intention to change is an ego statement am I dealing with your
01:09:03 - 01:10:17
question yeah yes I think you're uh he asked if you dichotomize human being into a mind and a body how is one to achieve Oneness um that dichotomy what you're doing is at a stage of the process of Awakening you're acknowledging the dichotomy in order to balance the dichotomy in order to eat it alive to bring about the unity these are stages in the process I agree but you see like when body was the only reality then you bring in mind now the fact is mind is not separate from body but you
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bring it in in order to bring it attention to it you work to cultivate resting in mind and if in doing that you pushed away body you don't you're not free then you Embrace body as mind and then mind and body become one thing and the full embracing of it so these are just stages in the game am I dealing with your question yeah yes what' you say yeah yeah what do you mean by acceptance accepting your own being you mean yeah he's asking two questions the second one is when you're trying to
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focus on one thing and some other thought comes in and says think me think me I'm real what do you do first of all if you get upset about it it's got you if you try to push it away it's got you I mean it's just waiting to get you you know like you sit out and meditate and you're all comfortable and you think I'm hungry see and then you think of a particularly good piece of tofu in the refrigerator you know and you're right there and so it's a thought at that moment you would sat down you sat down
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to follow your breath say so what you do when another thought comes up is you acknowledge it sort of bow to it allow it and then as quickly as you can comfortably go back to your primary object you keep coming back to your primary object again and again and again a million times and a million in one you'll be distracted and you keep coming back coming back coming back okay that's the answer to your second question terms of the and some of them are very powerful that come along you know to say um think me I'm real
01:11:56 - 01:13:15
and the other question is um acceptance how do we accept or acknowledge our our true being oh Embrace whatever is dark I'll tell you it's hard to embrace whatever is dark when you're busy being just an ego because it's very threatening to the ego for the soul it's a lot easier because the soul the relation of ego to Soul which I was hoping avoid but I can't is that and I'm just going to say it out and then you can disagree CU I don't even know that I agree but it
01:12:38 - 01:13:52
seems right somebody's thinking it here um the soul has Karma the soul is unique the soul is a unique entity working through a unique set of psychic DNA that is going to manifest it manifests on many planes some of which you're in at this moment like body Incarnation it manifests in your dreams it manifest on many many planes all of these are working out the karma of the Soul when you're resting in the soul you appreciate how your karma is working out so that if you if you have some disease or if you
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have some great success instead of getting ah success and oh disease the pist says Ah success ah disease I mean I'll tell tell you the heaviest statements about it like one to me is loss and gain like that one try one to me is Fame and shame that was fun I've worked with that one to me is loss is Pleasure and Pain that's interesting I mean can you really imagine getting to a place in your awareness where you can say ah pleasure ah pain enjoy the pleasure work with the pain without getting completely lost and
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I'm pain or I'm in pleasure if you buy one you got the other let me tell you you can't buy one of a polarity without having the other you want good you got evil it's the way it is try one to me is life and death ready that changes the whole culture right there just that one thought when you live as if that were true your fear of death changes when your fear of death changes the way you live your life changes the whole structure of the society is based on titillating and playing with and
01:14:29 - 01:15:57
Awakening the fear of death it's deep deep in the culture deep deep in the culture and our job is to escape that's what we are doing and as we escape so everyone escapes you work on yourself as your gift to the whole game that's the way you [Applause] work yes istion [Music] is addiction just another thought demanding attention or is it something else um well it all depends I mean if it's a psychological addiction it's probably just another thought but it could be a biochemical Addiction in
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which what you're experiencing is pain and discomfort and and suffering or pain from like hunger contractions or the need or a hunger a strong it's very hard not to get identified with that desire at that moment but it's still just a desire system and people that go cold turkey find that out I mean but it's hard because those are very compelling desires and people that are dying you can say well dying is the most compelling thing to stay alive but you can see I work with a lot of people who
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come into Soul awareness and say ah dropping my body a so here we go and then we look at it as death is a moment in which you face the adventure the mystery you face the mystery of the non-conceptual universe because all of the concepts about what happens after death are just Concepts they're the concepts of mind trying to speak about the Unspeakable and you're right at the edge of the mystery going into the the just right at the edge going into the mystery right there and wouldn't you
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like at that moment of death to be surrounded by people saying wow yeah here we are we're supporting you go baby go ver says no don't leave here let's pump you you know feed you do something don't let you go isn't that interesting that's a major cultural shift that will occur by the way in these this Millennium period sir what is reality I think it be a um it would be I I probably on thin ice but I'll say it's really a map that you hold of what exists and you call that reality and I'd
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say that what happened we're talking about shifting map shifting Paradigm shifting perspectives okay and so like if you go to sleep and you dream in your dream you are in another reality then you awaken and you say oh it was just a dream here you've come into this reality this model this definition of the phenomena you're experiencing later you wake up out of this one and saying it was a dream my God I could have sworn I was at the Fashion Center and I was hearing RDA speak it seems so real I
01:17:58 - 01:19:10
mean I could he you looked like you could go up and touch him am I dealing with the question that's absolutely right everyone has their own reality and if you watch people come down the street each person is telling you who they think they are and who they think you are within their reality so somebody comes up to me and says ramdas what an honor to meet you yes see that's playing in their reality somebody else comes up and says hi Dick hi you know another reality and what you learn the art form of Awakening
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is not to get sucked into other people's projections because they're projecting their reality all the time and they're saying and what we have in a culture is a conspiracy to see reality a certain way so when you're going to awaken which is what our work is we are Awakening out of our own culturation we've been had we're Awakening out of being had it's a very yum yum yum okay I have to stop everybody uh it's the time to stop thank you very much
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