Seasons of Our Lives - Ram Dass 1978

• Suffering is often a mismatch between expectation and reality, but can be a catalyst for growth.
• Belief systems fundamentally shape the experience and meaning of life and death.
• Death is not an end but part of a continuous process of awakening through reincarnation and karma.
• Multiple layers of identity exist, from physical to ultimate void, each offering different perspectives on self and others.
• Conscious dying involves releasing fear and identification, supported by presence and compassion from caregivers.
• Simple meditative practices focused on breath and heart cultivate spaciousness, compassion, and awareness.
• Creativity arises from higher states of consciousness and presence, not necessarily from neurosis.
• Spiritual development can be approached through various routes including meditation, breathwork, and service.
• Self-work and compassion are foundational to authentic living, dying, and helping others.

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well this is the second of the seasons of Our Lives conferences that I've attended and uh I'm again impressed with um Bill's courage in bringing together such a popery of presenters while my um vehicle is words I don't really believe anything I say because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words rather than the words themselves for I'm dealing with an area a realm of human existence that is basically not conceptual and I'm faced with the predicament of trying to convey a

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non-conceptual realm through concept so I must ask you with the outset to take my words with a grain of salt if you don't like them don't worry about them they will pass quickly in order to understand the stages of life and ultimately the process of dying one has to have a context in which to understand these things and the context usually is defined as what is the meaning of it what am I doing here on Earth because having an understanding of one's function or purpose makes one understand whether

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some process that's going on in transformation is functional or dysfunctional whether or not it's useful or not I mean I think none of us are so naive at this point certainly not in this Gathering of professionals and people related in related fields none of us are so naive as to think that only that which gives pleasure is useful I think most of you now have found through your own experiences that there is incredible growth through suffering that doesn't mean that we would go around programming suffering

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into people's lives we don't give suffering 101 which is electrodes Under And yet when we look back back at our own lives we see that some of the most profound changes occurred at the times of the most intense suffering and the nature of the suffering is that we are confronting a situation which is dissonant or disperate from the model we have of how reality ought to be and that's really what the cause of suffering is the cause of suffering is this place in your mind that's defining

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how you think it ought to be so if you think things should be a certain way and they're not then there's a discomfort and you suffer and a lot of what our suffering has been is not due to the actual characteristics of the situation but to the way in which we perceive the situation and that perception is based on our contextual understanding of who we are and what we're doing here so that I must delve a little bit more into the philosophical underpinnings of your and my existence for us to have an appreciation

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of what the seasons of Our Lives particular reference to dying uh how to perceive them how to understand them in a useful way I'll paint a scenario that uh just give you a little example of what I went through in some of my process processing uh I'm in bonares the uh city of dying in India in the Hindu religion the highest way in which you can die is to die in bernis and when you die in binaris your body gets burned at the burning G and the bones and Ashes get thrown into the ganes river and through that simple act

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you are spiritually freed and we'll talk a minute about what that might be about the result of that belief system is that bonares is full of people dying and most of these people have no money whatsoever they are Beggars at the most extreme states of survival many of them are lepers they have a loin cloth man or woman just a loin cloth and maybe a begging Bowl many of them have advanced states of cancer many of them are just Skin and Bones they had dragging themselves through the streets and often on their

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loin cloth there is a little sack which contains the money necessary for the wood for their funeral p now if you think of yourself as a human being and think of them as a human being and empathize for a moment with their predicament here we are in Orange County having just had a nice lunch and being in comfortable soft chairs it's hard to imagine even identifying and realizing these are fellow human beings but they are they're just like us they're just got a different place in their minds and

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they're in a different life moment when I first came to Bernar when I went out in the streets I was in a very open space and when I looked at these people I experienced such horror I couldn't really handle it at all and I went back to my hotel room and I literally I am somewhat embarrassed to admit I literally climbed under the bed I hid under the bed just in horror of the situation because I walked through the streets with my American Express Travelers checks in my pocket with my security with my ticket

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back to affluent America and I was facing these other human beings in the extreme state of need and poverty and my pity was more than I could handle subsequent to that I met my spiritual teacher and my my whole life took a different turn and I ended up living in a temple studying Hindu philosophy doing deep meditation ha yoga so on and I began to understand a different context about what life and death was about and now several actually about eight months six or eight months later I found myself in bernis again and I

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walked through the street and this time it was an entirely different experience for me for when I looked into the eyes of these people I saw in them not what I expected to see in the past not self-pity not frustration not humiliation not anger not pleading they had a look in their eyes of fulfillment and then I noticed something else in their eyes that I could hardly believe they were looking at me with pity they were pitting me healthy fat solid American me these people in the last stages of Life were pitting

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me and I understood that from their belief system they were pitting me because I was merely this Wanderer wandering through life not knowing where I was going or where I was coming from they knew their place they were secure in their place they were fulfilled in what they were about to do and they knew that I was wandering in Despair and I would never find I mean not probably not find and they just felt sorry that I was so lost and I had trained enough so that I could see it from their point of view

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and I ended up feeling [Music] self-pity now to me that's an example of how a belief system can be so strong that it can take what could be called a sad tune and make it into a Happy tune it can change the entire meaning of a situation in The Villages in India where I live quite a bit of the time there are many beings who make 2 three four rupees a day that's 40 60 cents a day and they have one meal a day and they live maybe under a railroad bridge crowded together not Optimum living conditions but

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sometimes when I look at their faces I experience a being a quality of their being that seems more in tune or in harmony with the universe than I find in the face of somebody who is affluent successful everything in the west and I understand once I get over my arrogance of super race arrogance that we have a great deal to learn about the Dignity of the processes of life and death and the way of understanding them in a way to release us rather than to torment us I have to um digress briefly to just

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share with you my own sequence of perceptual shift a little bit so that you can appreciate the kinds of things I want to talk to you about for I was trained as a social scientist I was a professor I was actually part of a hun at Harvard to protest against the soft and mushy conditions of the clinical social psychology department social relations department I was one of those guys in favor of harder statistics kind of guys you love right I just felt that anybody that didn't know how to do a factor analysis

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in a a Kai Square just hadn't yet awakened and though I played that game as hard as I knew how for all the points I knew how to collect there was in me despite my psychoanalysis there was a very gwing uneasiness that I was missing something a Malala and when we experience a Mala in our culture we tend to treat that mes as if it is our fault and we treat as if it's our neurosis and it's our lack of adaptability to the existing culture which must be right because there's so many of them and I kept trying like

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fitting a square peg into a round hole I kept trying to readapt my being to fit into the gratification patterns that the culture was offering me and it just wasn't working and I started to drink more and I started to get more extreme in my ways of seeking pleasure in order to gain the kind of fulfillment to give me a feeling of well-being well then I got for some years into experimentation with psychotropic chemicals chemicals that alter Consciousness and that changed my head around a great deal I saw through

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those experiments that perhaps my males my discomfort was not just my pathology but it was a deeper something in me attempting to awaken and that maybe instead of treating it as some sickness that ought to be treated as a problem I should see it as something graceful to be honored and maybe it would be useful to allow my life to adapt to tune to those feelings of wrongness or rightness Within Myself and I did that and I just let my life go in the course it would naturally take responding to an inner

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intuitive sense of right okay that's all right and it took me through away from Academia it took me through psychedelic chemicals it took me to India it took me into yoga and it brought me back to America and it took me into a different kind of a perceptual view of the universe and I found much to my surprise that through whatever had happened to me had very profoundly in the real sense of alteration had profoundly altered my feelings about death and as a result my feelings about life it had very profoundly altered the

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definition of who I think I am now I could try to very gently take you into the space translating but instead of doing that I'm going to do a much more shock treatment process I'm just going to tell you how I see the world and many of you will say that is absolute rot and that's perfectly okay it's okay in advance I you have total license to reject it but anything less than that would be dishonest on my part so I'm going to go For Broke we'll let the chips fall where they will okay I mean I've convinced you

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I'm a nice person I speak softly I seem friendly so now maybe we're ready for the for the for the as the blow fall you knew I couldn't sit cross-legged up here and [Applause] not and I'll even be more outrageous by telling you that what I'm presenting to you is not a belief system it's the way things are see already your shackles are up but what can I do I mean anything less would be dishonest I just got to play you just you've got to know people like me exist to the extent that I am anything

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at all and that we can open for question in a little while seriously we could consider me as a separate entity a set of predisposing characteristics you could call it it would be like a DNA code except we'll make it psychic instead of physical I am a set of characteristics a program that is manifesting by taking a human birth at this time I have taken a birth into a body and that body has with it a personality I've taken a birath into a personality and that personality is in a body and I am going through a set of

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experiences which is called living life and these experiences have a certain function these experiences if used consciously and intentionally by me are vehicles through which I can awaken to who I am in truth let me take you through an example I often use just another little metaphorical image and anal analogy imagine for example that you have next to your eyes a little control switch and you look at another human being on channel one and what you see when you look at the other human being is a physical

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body man woman old young fat thin pretty handsome ugly interesting if you're a scientist you might call them mesomorphs ectomorphs and endomorphs okay it's a matrix of individual differences on physical plane it's the plane of standing on the corner watching all the girls go by it's that reality now let's just say you're looking at another person and you flick your television receiver one channel now you look at another person and what you see is their psychology oh you're a manic

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depressive oh you're a happy person person I wish I was happy like you people in Psychotherapy live on this channel usually they see everybody in terms of personalities that just happen to be traveling in bodies they're totally preoccupied with their own depressions Elations fears anxieties loneliness hopes Etc and that's reality that's the real you and the physical body is merely the carrier of that well let's flip it again flip it again and you look at another person and if

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you if you are so trained to be able to see on this channel you would say oh I know who you are you're a Libra I can tell because of the you're a Sagittarius on this channel on channel three there's only 12 beings in the universe in various permutations of them you are now seeing what could be known as the astral identity of an individual you're seeing another plane of reality you're seeing another way of looking at individual differences these are three ways of looking at individual

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differences three matrices if you want but now you flip the dial once more starts to get interesting now if you flip the dial and look into another person's eyes you flip the dial inside your own being and look into another person's eyes what you see is another being looking back at you inside an astral configuration a personality and a body you in there I'm in here how did you get into that one and you see what the Christians call Soul you see another Soul you see another being just like you no different just like you

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just another being and that you see that all the individual differences are all of the stuff in which this being is encased now you could almost be comfortable with that one but we unfortunately must flick the dial a few more times I mean I must take you the whole journey you flick the next dial and what you see when you look into someone else's eyes is you see yourself looking at yourself looking at yourself because on that plane there is only one of it it is one awareness that is in a multiplicity of

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forms and finally if you will allow me to flick the dial just once more if you haven't given up completely yet you flip the dial once more and you disappear and I disappear and the dial disappears and we're dealing with what the Buddhist call void or in the New Testament before the word that is before the vibratory uniqueness or why God is not able to be spelled in the HEB religion it's unspeakable unknowable unseeable unconceivable inconceivable okay now of all of these channels on the television said who are

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you which one do you want to settle for you want to be middle-aged how about that one I mean I'm middle-aged I guess I'm middle-aged I have a 47y old body it's like I have also a a 1974 Dodge van but you say to me who are you and I don't say I'm a Dodge van why do I choose to identify with this well if I don't pick body should I pick personality I'm somebody on the path that's a good one to be I'm a curious person I'm curious about the future that's a good one I'm a

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responsible person well I'm kind of wild I'm lazy I'm working on myself these are all different psychological takes of who one is each plane each turn of the dial has a different statement of your identity and each one is getting into a more and more profound place now when we come back to who am I which channel you talking about if we start from the top and go on down into the grocery grosser Plains I am the void who manifests as the one who becomes the many who has a unique set of factors to

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work out through a unique astral psychological and physical body that's what I'm doing on Earth I have taken a body to do certain work and when I finish that work I will drop that body we are dealing here with the issues of Karma and reincarnation now in the West after the councils of Trent constan Constantinople and NAA anywhere from about 200 to 500 AD these ideas were roughly thrown out of Christianity because they didn't make the church a workable situation because when you had reincarnation in karma every human being

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became their own priest because it was between you and God and for the church to keep its own control it needed to and you and see its function as keeping people morally living properly it had to get rid of those Concepts have I taken birth before I have no experiential knowledge of that but from where I'm sitting undoubtedly thousands and thousands and thousands of times will I take birth again undoubtedly thousands and thousands and thousands of times I have to tax your brain with one more difficult concept as long as we

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were dealing with your body with your personality with your astral Identity or with your soul we were deal in in time time passes things change the minute we got up into the higher plane than that in the one there is no time anymore time is relative now we're dealing with the place where when you know yourself as that you just are you are going nowhere and you are coming from nowhere the CH the Zen master says your going and coming is nowhere but where you are are now if you can start to sense I mean

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you don't have to believe what I'm saying just CU it's the way the universe looks to me but if you could empathize just enough to appreciate how it would be to be looking at the world from this point of view here's a story that will explain that I'll give you an example of it Chinese were coming into Tibet and they were very harsh on the Tibetan Monks who they saw as part of the decadence of Tibet and they were very cruel to the monks and they were disemboweling them and shaming them and

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killing them and one particularly vicious commander of the army came into a village and he said where what is bring all the monks before me and they said they've all fled to the hills except one monk in one Monastery and the general was pleased that they' all fled because he knew that then his power was known and he couldn't understand why this one monk hadn't fled and so he went to see the Monk and the monk was standing in the middle of the courtyard of the monastery and the Army Commander walked

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up to him and he said why didn't you flee don't you know who I am I could take my sword and I could cut through you without blinking an eye and the monk looked him in the eye and said don't you know who I am I am somebody who could be cut through by your sword without blinking an eye and at that point the commander bowed and left could you imagine what space that Monk Is in could you imagine what it's like to see your life as so functional to your Awakening and your death equally

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so that the whole business becomes merely a process of growth and Awakening and opening and deepening and clearing and shifting channels and there is no problem about transition there's no holding on out of fear it's just opening Raman Mahari the Great Indian Saint was dying of cancer and his he had great miraculous powers and his devotees said to him ban Raman Mahari heal yourself and he says no this body is used up and they said don't leave us don't leave us and they started to cry

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and he said to them don't be silly where could I go that's like me saying I'm selling my Dodge van and you saying don't leave don't leave I'm not leaving I'm just selling my Dodge van could you imagine conceiving of death from that point of view I have a project going working with terminally ill people and it's not I I take exception to Dr comfort's uh some of his criticisms this morning of hospice and of Elizabeth Ross and so on but it isn't their work their work

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which I think is extremely admirable which is an attempt to make dying more psychologically Humane to take it out of the clutches of the medical profession which treats each death as a failure and which puts you in a hospital which is a temple to life in which the only way to deal with death is denial and I've had to sit through many horrendous moments in hospitals sitting with somebody who's dying where the doctors come in with a cheerful you looking better and then walk out in the Carter

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and say won't live the night and the person is surrounded by doctors nurses relatives all of whom are so frightened of death ministers rabbis so frightened of death that there is a surrounding hysterical denial of the process leaving the person at the moment when they need most to be able to share what's happening to them a total void of that kind of compassion and I'm sure most of you have seen those situations and many of us have participated in not knowing quite what else to do and the hospice movement has done an

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incredible amount to change the image of dying they are doing for dying what uh home deliveries and so on and bringing the husbands into the uh into the hospital during the deliveries is doing for birth it's bringing it out of the closet suddenly we're getting over a Victorian uptightness it's now suddenly true that human beings do not only eat but they go to the toilet bet you never knew that and they are born and they die in India it's very far out because it's all right out

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front when somebody dies they wrap them in a sheet and sometimes in a Little Village they'll put him in a rickshaw to take him to the burning guard and there's a dead being sitting in a rickshaw on the way to the burning God and everybody salutes as he goes by or she goes by on the way to the burning guard and there's God and there's no where which we have which is the minute the person dies they disappear into the big void beyond the sheet goes over and the whole thing is covered and denial starts

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immediately so hospice is doing a great deal just by training people to be compassionate listeners and psychologically able to hang out with people who were dying without freaking my own work is uh a little further out than that my work is for people who say I would like to use my death as a vehicle for awakening I would actually like to use the process of dying as a vehicle for awakening since I have an understanding of the kinds of things you've been talking about now you've got to understand that

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that tradition of using death in that way is understood by more people in the world today than there are who don't understand that I mean we're talking about China we're talking about India we're talking about Japan we're talking about all of the Eastern countries which population are me many so for such a person one sits down and one is first very straight there's no hiding there's no deception of anything your own fear out in the open we share it very straight but in

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addition in addition we are working on ourselves to create a space an environment in which a person can experience the deeper parts of their beings and when they get to one level of it where time isn't then there's no more death sometimes I just go and I sit in a room with somebody that's dying and I mely sit there quietly with them and they run all of their fear through me and what comes back is peace because I don't have any fear of death that I can touch at the moment to me death is a process of just leaving

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what you thought you were not what you are but what you thought you were they run their fear through and what comes back is peace and they release a little bit and then they run more fear through and they get back peace and they run more fear through and they get back peace until you can just feel them they're just like a flower opening and extending and opening out until again and again you're sitting with somebody who is in incredible pain and suffering and just saying oh it's so beautiful I'm feeling such

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peace and at the same moment the ravages of cancer or extreme heart conditions or whatever hodkin disease I was working with a boy who just died 2 weeks ago and I would come in each time and he would be agitated and irritated he had bed sores and there was a lot of pain and suffering and I was I'd wash him and help change him and just be with him but at the same moment I was just being quiet inside my own being in other words I wasn't coming on to him I wasn't saying you ought to go deeper

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in yourself I wasn't hustling him I was merely working on myself in his presence and the result of that was that very slowly he started to let go of identifying with the body identifying with the pain the psychological part and started to experience just a spaciousness a spaciousness in in which he could see death death comes birth comes life comes growth comes for you to be of any use to someone that is dying for me to be of any use there is one simple rule you work on yourself you don't work on the other

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person we have a model that is so deeply ingrained in US often as Prof professionals you're healing someone else you're doing for the old people you're doing for the young people you're doing for the dying people I have a very simple rule in my life work on myself because all I can offer to you or to a dying person or to a marital problem or to some child I can only offer my being and my being is the result of everything I've done in my life to get to where I am that's all I

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have to offer I have my love to offer but if you can flip through those channels that love is not conditional love it's not based on individual differences it's merely the love because you're seeing the divine plan made manifest [Music] again every moment moment of your life once you understand the purpose of it is your vehicle for awakening this moment is your vehicle for awakening if you're uncomfortable at this moment okay you're uncomfortable allow it if you're fascinated fascinated be fascinated

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allow it give it space give it space imagine a picture and the picture is a picture of a cloud and if the cloud fills the whole picture frame all you see is the cloud and you're totally immersed in the cloud but allow a little teeny bit of blue sky around the edge of the cloud and then imagine identifying with the blue sky instead of the cloud from that point you can say ah cloud the difference between I'm depressed or I'm depressed versus wow am I depressed or I'm depressed versus look

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at that depression boy I don't think I'll ever get through that one wow that's a heavy one boy that's the worst depression I've ever seen I don't think people live through those kind now the second kind I'm doing is showing the ability to keep a sense of humor in the midd middle of the depression well if you've got a sense of humor how depressed could you be see but that's the issue it's the issue of the tiny bit of spaciousness that surrounds the identity with the

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happenings of Life the experiences of life it is said in the spir Mystic literature one to me is loss and gain one to me is Fame and shame one to me is pleasure and pain meaning ah there's Fame hello ramas Ah that's Fame Ram who dos did you say Don do yes oh you're that horrible guy that was G that shame oh you just won the lottery that's gain ah wallet just stolen loss oh pleasure Oh My Darling come here oh my leg hurts and each one they take you completely get lost in it I'm somebody

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who has a hurt leg versus here I am and there's a leg that hurts the predicament is that most of us don't want this kind of consciousness because we don't want to lose the rushes or the trips of life we don't want to forgo the Romanticism we don't want to forgo The Rush that comes from identifying with our own mellow [Music] drama and that kind of equinity that kind of quietness that kind of spaciousness that kind of presence that kind of compassion for one self and for all things because from a quiet Clear

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Place you see how it all is without pushing or pulling for it is only the non-attached mind that can truly appreciate how it is otherwise you're just seeing the projections of your own desires if you're hungry and you get down the street you will notice restaurants if your car is making a strange knock you will notice gas stations if you are horny you will notice makeable people and that is what your universe is full of because you and I are living in entirely different universes because

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each individual is living in a universe created of selecting from the possible infinite Infinity of things those things which which lock in with your own desire system so if you identify with a desire that will determine what you see in the world when you get to the point that you can allow a desire system without identifying with it sure I have lust sure I have greed sure I have fear sure I have depression but here I am I am I am and there's an aging body and I am and there's depression and I am and

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there's hope and I am and there's planning and I am and there's death how different the space that's because the television channels you're living on more than one of them simultaneously you're starting to live on all of them all at once there are some very heavy processes that occur at the time of death and the Tibetan Buddhist for example understood that the meaning of life was the preparation for death you were preparing to stay conscious through these incredibly heavy

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processes that [Music] happen heavy process example fellow called me the other the day his mother just died he's a meditator he's a Buddhist meditative person he sat with her through the process he said At first she protested then she acquiesced he said then it got to the point where she was too weak to eat so I had to feed her and he said that we made fun of that we thought well I used to be the child you used to feed me now I'm you're the child and I'm feeding you and that was

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kind of fun and playful then it got to the point where she lost her sphincter control and her bowel control and I found myself carrying her to the toilet with her feces dripping down my leg and that was a hard one for us and then it got to the point where all of her unconscious processes started to rise to the surface and I found in the middle of the night sometime she would be calling to me and I'd go over and she'd start to make love to me and all of the edle stuff was coming up and he said and through it

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all we still kept the thread we still kept the threat of Consciousness with one another it's not the physical death that's so scary it's the psychological death it's the ceasing to be who you think you are the thread was held and I have been there with many people and just holding them as they die and being right with them looking in their eyes as the spirit just leaves as they just leave and the last breath occurs and the eyes glaze over and the being just leaves and there's just a

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release an opening Because by the time they got to that moment moment they were no longer clinging to that which dies don't be silly where could I go there's no more clinging to that which died for who we are was is and will be and these are just processes of transformation that we're going through just like it's very hard for a prepubescent to understand the time will come when his baseball cards aren't that relevant so the time will come when even our mortal coil isn't

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that relevant I gave a scenario at the last workshop and I liked it cuz it's so explicit it's a very heavy far out one but I'll give it to you anyway if you will just imagine somebody who has died and they died in the western I'll give you two people one has died in the western metaphor see so they busy not dying doctor save me save me transplant me implant me do whatever you do but don't let me die but you're dead then you die and a voice says to you hello and you say well if I can hear a

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voice saying hello I guess I didn't die the voice says no you died you said well I can't have died and that's confusion it's called Purgatory in Christianity and you just sort of hang in in that place and then you get reprogrammed into the next round but now as you go through Incarnation after Incarnation on and on and on and on somewhere along in the sequence of these you begin to awaken just a little bit and you get to the point where you begin to hear what I'm talking about you begin

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to see wow far out that's all that happens when you die so as you're dying this time instead of doctor doctor you say wow this is going to be great here we go ready put on your safety belt here I go ready or not a wow now you're you're dead see somebody says hello and you say hi now you're in a new predicament you're still somebody you're not nobody yet you haven't finished your rounds of birth and death so you're going to take another Incarnation because you've got more

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stuff to do you've got to go through more experiences so you have a list of things you got to go through see you say gee if I did it right I could clean up all of these in one birth let's see if I if I took birth as a as a child as a a child in the poorest tribe in Africa that would be good cuz I'd clean up that one that was the one I got from being that King 50 births ago when I misused that then let's see if I um see I'll get raped when I'm nine that'll be o that'll be beautiful that

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would take care of that one see and then see I'll get syphilis at 13 I could die at 17 and clean the whole thing up far out okay so now you've got a problem you're all ready to do this you've got your plan and you put a little sign on you saying this is all just a scenario you this isn't reality you put a little scenario a sign on it and the sign says um I am somebody who wants to take this birth looking for two other people who need me you know karmically like I need them you know and the computers were and

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all kinds of things happen and within a million or two Earth years something comes up doesn't matter you know it's going on anyway uh and these two people say let's have a baby and or there's a moment of passion and there you are and as you're being born you say to everybody well see you later and you dive into Earth and you go w w and you're a baby Veil over you are a baby that's all your reality is a baby 9 years old you're raped 13 syphilis 17 you die you die I don't want

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to die I don't want to die you're dead you come up and you say everybody says hi back so soon right well that cleaned up all those five now is that too gross for you from where I'm sitting I I've got to uplevel it just one bit by just saying to you that since and the reality that lies behind all these relative realities there is no time all your reincarnations are happening simultaneously I mean that's a little heavy for you but you got to understand that it's not like it's spread out like um briy Murphy like

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you with that 40 years ago it's all here now AUD your incarnations so that when you get all done with the last one you realize nothing happened anyway I mean I'm pushing your mind all over the place if you could see the universe that way what would be the difference in the meaning of death well I'm finishing chapter 3 now I'm not saying that you should have a mind intellectual overlay that makes everything different that way not a dishonest imposition of intellect but for anybody that

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will subject themselves to Simply sitting down quietly and learning how to quiet their mind by allowing the thoughts to come and go just as simple a thing as following your breath just take two minutes now bring your awareness to your breath just notice the breath either notice it going in and out of your nose or notice it rising and falling in the middle of your abdomen pick one or the other and stay with it notice the breath going in notice the breath going out and notice the little transition

00:50:52
points between the in breath and the out breath and the out breath and the in breath keep your awareness focused on your breath let the rest of the thoughts come and go just like tiny little insects around a light if you notice feelings in your body notice them and then let them go if you are thinking about what this is all about notice that thought Let It Go come back to your breath breathing in breathing out the thought we are sitting in a school auditorium in Orange County at a conference a set of thoughts notice them

00:51:57
let them go floating by like leaves on a stream thinking about the future remembering the past thoughts coming going bring your awareness back to your breath deeper quieter follow the breath carefully follow the in breath the moment of turning the out breath the moment of turning the silence in the room notice it Let It Go come back to the breath the breath is the focal point it's the primary object the rest of the universe comes and it goes problems come into mind notice them bring your awareness

00:53:19
back to your breath staying right in this place now don't move yet that is the first method that you use in order to begin to be aware of who you are you can do it anywhere anytime you don't need beads you don't need priests you don't need ashrams you you just need your breath because while you are following your breath which is the doorway between form and formless because between the in breath and the out breath and the out breath and the INB breath there is the space now let me give you one more

00:54:20
exercise just find the whole other quality focus in the middle mid of your chest just as if you had two nostrils and breathe now as if you were breathing in and out of the middle of your chest let your nose or your mouth breathe in or out the oxygen but imagine that your chest is simultaneously breathing in a very soft very delicate Mist breathe in breathe out when you breathe in let that mist pour through your body let it pour up into your head to your arm arms to your torso to your legs and when you breathe out

00:55:39
now breathe out all of the heaviness all of the tightness all of the guardedness all of the disappointment all of the pain the loneliness and then once again fill in the in breath with this very very soft Mist let it wash through you just as if it were draino cleaning through all the tubes when dislodges something a sadness or a doubt or a fear Just Breathe It Out breathe deeply and then once you feel you have loosened as much of the stuff that holds you back from knowing who you are as you can at

00:57:02
this moment then become like a director of energy and take in this very fine Mist fill your being with it and then breathe it out and send it towards those beings with your thought send it towards those beings who suffer whether their suffering be physical psychological or spiritual just as if you were surrounding them with light you were surrounding them with a loving space that said do what you must do but know that I am here with you use the power of your own thought and the openness of your

00:58:02
heart to give life and love and space to all beings and you can get so that every in breath is a blessing you receive every out breath is a blessing you you transmit with those two exercises following your breath to quiet your mind and breathing in and out of the heart to deepen your receiving of love and your compassion outward you become become an environment in which everybody you meet can grow you become an environment of quietness of non-judgment of Love of presence for you to share the higher

00:59:19
channels of Consciousness you must know them in your own being not with your intellect but with your being when Gandhi was on a train that was leaving the station a reporter rushed up to him and said mahatme would you give me a message to take back to my people and Gandhi said he scribbled on a piece of paper my life is my message [Music] to die consciously you must live consciously to live consciously you must have the courage to go inside yourself to find out who you really are to understand that behind all of The

01:00:21
Masks of individual differences you are a being of beauty of love of awareness when Christ said the kingdom of heaven with it was within he wasn't just putting you on when Buddha said each person is the Buddha he was saying the same thing until you can allow your own Beauty your own dignity your own being you cannot free another so if I we're giving people one instruction I would say work on yourself have compassion for yourself allow yourself to be [Music] beautiful and all the rest will

01:01:22
follow if there are any pressing questions I'll be happy to answer them yes only happening on planet Earth or what do you have about a question is asked about the existence of beings on other planets in our [Music] universe well um I think that there are many planes of reality and there are many beings that exist on planes other than the physical plane of reality I think you're asking a question about the physical plane about the physical Universe beings on other planets I know nothing about any of that I do know that

01:02:09
there are beings living on other planes of Consciousness that are and that this is merely another plane so that you could look at Planet Earth or the Earth or the physical plane not earth the physical plane as a certain kind of training ground for people who have certain kinds of work to do Buddha talked about them as being beings that had one of the five hindrances that those were the people that took birth on the physical plane because they needed the kind of grossness of the Sandpaper of the

01:02:50
experiences of the physical plane to do the certain kind of purification so and he said that the five hindrances were lust and greed was one of them that's just one um hatred and ill will agitation sloth and torper which means inertia and doubt and that if you didn't have one of those five you didn't take birth on this plane you took birth on another plane that's so that's who we are to begin with which makes it us rather a colorful lot and so in that sense there is um that this is the Earth and is there are

01:03:27
other planes that are what I call the Heavenly planes there all these Locas or planes in almost every tradition you find these things and they are all equally as much the projections of Desire systems just subtler and subtler ones all the time and so beings take birth here and then take birth on other planes but in answer to your question I think about the physical Universe I don't know I don't know the Eastern mystical experiences had do not get extensive [Music] exposure the question was would I have

01:04:05
um um been open to the Eastern mystical tradition had I not had such extensive experience with psychedelic chemicals the answer is that I probably would not have however somebody who is now young in this culture now would be able to in other words at that time I would have now I might if I wasn't so encrusted and closed in by the time I'm 47 and have bought a model so tightly that I don't have any space then I wouldn't be able to hear it now but now the environment is supportive of hearing this message while

01:04:45
15 years ago it was not I think that the psychoanalysis um was useful I'm sure everything in my life has been useful I mean I look back on all my experiences now ones that when I was in the middle of them I thought oh nobody's been cursed like I've been cursed and then I look back now and say wow so that's what that was about well far out look at what I learned from that isn't that interesting right um I tend to think of um Psychotherapy now as um sort of like Body and Fender repair

01:05:22
work it isn't the essence of my being but it's good to keep the you got to honor the whole organism and the personality and the body as well my diets all of that stuff is ways of honoring the container I'm in if you will which includes my personality um but what happens is that as you start to break the identification to the grosser planes and start to identify with higher and higher awareness in yourself you find that the individual differences that before were a problem for you are no longer a

01:05:58
problem they are merely a definition of your uniqueness so that I would say that my Neurosis didn't go away I've just made them my friends okay they just kind of irrelevant they're irrelevant friends to have around okay I'm just as neurotic as I ever was right yes this is a question about the relationship between creativity and mental health well I didn't hear Dr May yesterday but I uh do feel that the Western model of creativity is based on neurosis and that there is a whole other

01:06:44
way to understand creative act which means for example Bak was amazingly non-neurotic and he certainly was a prolifically creative being and so have been many creative beings with very little anxiety and I understand creativity the way I understand it is just as Einstein said I did not arrive at my understanding of the basic laws of the universe through my rational mind rather he went inward into a higher way of knowing an intuitive space another plane of Consciousness in which the universe is outside of time it just

01:07:24
all is and then as he comes back from that what's called a mystical experience he comes back in and then his training as a physicist leads him to take that non-conceptual thing and conceive of it into physics and so abak goes into these spaces and comes back and he hears the whole Symphony it's all there just like that and then he just comes back and writes it out so that I my feeling is much less that we are learning versus we are remembering my feeling is much less that we create rather than we tune to as

01:08:01
far as I'm concerned the entire universe is within us we merely have to quiet down enough to hear who we are and as you become more conscious and less mechanical in the sense of being identified with the things which are within law like body and personality which are within deterministic law As you move into pure awareness you are Freer in that sense and out of you every act becomes a creative amalgam of all of the things in the universe that's what dosm is about that's when you see a monk

01:08:36
you can see the way he walks is a creative act the way he washes a dish is a creative act his caligraphy is the creative act you can see just in the form of the movement of the hand the creative act it isn't now I'll be creative it's just a creative way of living it's a way that's in flow with things around around you and that's what that breathing is about it's about opening you up until you just become part of the the force or the flow of the universe and there's where

01:09:06
creativity is from where I'm sitting okay this is a question about how chakras work the chakras or psychic energy fosi in the body of which there are seven in the body and there are some over the head are a way of conceiving of the process of transformation of Consciousness via the root of focusing on energy okay working with the Kundalini or the Shakti or the energy or The Prana or whatever you want to call it that's one route of doing it okay like if you're climbing a mountain you could

01:09:47
take the southern route or the northern route of the Eastern roote of the western Route One route will be meditation you could just sit down and follow your breath and in the course of that all your chakras will open and all the energy will flow and it will all happen and all you did was follow your breath or you could do breathing exercises and bring the energy up your spine the sushumna another method the South Route or you could uh do service my route is service of love and service I mean my daily life is my vehicle of

01:10:17
coming to God you are my exercise on myself that's my vehicle and I am yours so that's Karma Yoga okay so it's just another route through and it is a way it's a very beautiful way but it's only another way thank you [Applause]