I’ve been sitting with this early ‘80’s Ram Dass talk for a few hours this morning, unsure how to share it - and wondering whether to share it at all.

When the world feels as unstable as it does right now, the instinct seems to be reaching for something that helps us cope - and an invitation to “love it as it is” can sound bypassy, like it lets us off the hook from doing the real work of standing up and working for a more just society, from helping our neighbors who are struggling.

But when I went back to what Ram Dass is actually saying in this 1981 teaching, I realized he’s doing the opposite of bypassing. He doesn’t gloss over the suffering from those times, in fact he is brutally specific. From global starvation, nuclear threats, to The Moral Majority and the Cold War, of humans dehumanizing each other. He isn’t asking anyone to look away, and that’s not something Ram Dass would have done anyway.

What he’s asking instead is a bit of a thought experiment: Where would we have to be standing to love and serve the world as it is, despite the deep flaws? And who is “we” anyway?

For him, everything in life was Grist for the Mill. An opportunity to become more human, not less.

He’s asking what kind of perspective could possibly hold all of this without breaking down. I think these types of inquiries are incredibly important as we keep our eyes open to what’s happening around us, while we try to stay engaged without burning out or losing our joy. There is so much to hold at once, and there is so much paradox to live with.

So we are here on earth in human bodies - how do we “love it as it is” - “eat it as it is” - and still remain here and now, in service in a world of paradox and polarity?

— Rachael, Creative Director, LSRF // RamDass.org

Ram Dass: We used to live in a small community in New Hampshire, and my father was a member of a group called The Mountain Boys. We didn’t live there all year round, we were sort of summer residents, and these were mostly local people. And they would go off to the mountain and drink a little bit, have a barbecue and tell dirty stories and play poker.

And over the years, there were a number of expressions that would become sort of oft repeated expressions. And one of the members was a man, an Italian restaurateur, and they waited for his turn to cook, because he would come and he would make extraordinary spaghetti. And at one point, one of the men said, “Angelo, this is good, but do you have any more sauce?” And Angelo, who had a very husky voice, said, “Eat it like it is.” And that became like a family expression. So anytime you would complain about anything, somebody in the family would say, “Eat it like it is.”

There’s a fellow that wrote a book called The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment. His name was Thaddeus Golas. And he had a line in it that says, “Love it as it is.” Now, where would you have to stand on the earth today, to love it as it is? I mean, it really looks like a mess, doesn’t it?

Every fundamentalist belief system is about to die in honor of its beliefs. One group led by Gaddafi and Khomeini, and one group led by Brezhnev, and one group led by Begin, and one group led by the Moral Majority, and on and on it goes. One group undoubtedly led by Big Business. Prison conditions are abominable. There is somebody starving to death every two seconds. Every two seconds, somebody is starving, not dying a nice natural death in bed, starving to death. There you go. 1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 3. There you go. 2, 2, 3, 4, 2. There you go. 1, 2, 3. There you go. Every two seconds.

Amnesty International catalogs the inhumanity of human to human, out of political righteousness. The water becomes more unfit to drink, the air, more unfit to breathe. The potential for nuclear holocaust becomes greater. The signs point to Armageddon. It looks like it’s really hit the fan.

Where could you stand that you could eat it like it is? Or you could love it as it is?

Where could you possibly stand?

Where could you allow that it is what it is?

What perspective, what vector view would you need to have?

Who would you be if you were seeing it that way?

Like, if you take this auditorium, this whatever, this wrestling arena, this dog show place, this space in which all these “whats” are gathered. Who are we? Who are we? What are you, Austinites? Austinonians? Austinites. Earthlings? Earthlings. Like, who am I talking to at this moment?

And you say, well, you’re talking to us.

Who’s “us”? Which “us” do you think you are? Which “us” are you busy being?

Well, we’re members of the planet. Okay.

Well, we’re men and women and children. Okay.

Well, we’re mostly Texans. Okay.

Well, we are people that are concerned. Okay.

Well, we are people who had nothing else to do tonight. Okay.

We were curious. Okay.

All of these are definitions of who you think you are. Who we think we are.

This audio teaching comes from our online course, Centered in the Storm - a 10-day offering exploring polarity, suffering and resilience in difficult times, available on Ram Dass’s Inner Academy. Published by the Love Serve Remember Foundation, the nonprofit caretaker of Ram Dass’s teachings since 2010. Learn more at RamDass.org.

Ram Dass:

So we got out of the car at the temple, and Bhagavan Das asked, “Where’s the guru?” And they said, “The guru is up in the hills, up in that hill over there, around the hill.” And Bhagwan Das goes off at a lope, but all the way up into the hills, tears are streaming down his cheeks. And I know that we’re getting close to something very powerful, but I don’t know what it is.

And I’m very bugged about the car, and I’m sulking in the corner. And, you know, I’ve been smoking too much hashish. So I had stopped a few days before, but I was having the down effect one has after having a smoke for a long time.

We rush up the hill. I’m rushing behind him, trying to keep up with him, and I’m being ignored by everybody. And I’m just in terrible shape, really stumbling up this path. And we come out into this field. It’s a beautiful, sunny day overlooking a valley. And there’s an old man sitting there with a blanket wrapped around him. Around him are probably eight or 10 Hindu people sitting there.

And we rush over, and Bhagavan Das does danda pranam, a full pranam out flat on his stomach, before this man. And he’s crying, and the man’s patting him on the head, and it’s some kind of joyous reunion. And I’m standing by, you know, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to touch this guy’s feet? I don’t know what to do. I’ve never seen a guru before.

Thus far, all I had met in India were pundits. I met many wise men, many men who knew the Upanishads and who quoted Ramakrishna and told me about Ramana Maharshi. But I didn’t meet Ramana Maharshi, and I didn’t meet Ramakrishna, or their spirits, and I didn’t meet anybody like them. So I had never met one of these real ones.

And I assumed if he was crying this much, it must be somebody. But I was too angry to even care, to tell you the truth. And after a few minutes, this man looked up, and he looked at me. He smiled, and he said in Hindi to Bhagavan Das, “Have you a picture of me?”

Bhagavan Das says, “Yes.”

He says, “Give it to him.”

Bhagavan Das said, “Alright, I will.”

Then he looked at me and said, “You came in a big automobile.”

I said, “Yeah.”

“You’ll give it to me?”

That really blew my mind. I mean, you know, I wished I could have, but, you know, so I said, “Well, it’s not mine to give.”

“You get me one like it?”

So I thought, my God, I just got here, and he’s hustling me. I mean, what kind of a thing is this, you know? What have I done to deserve this? Am I that bad a person that I’ve got to be subjected, you know? And I was, boy, was I self-pitying and paranoid.

All the time, he’s laughing. He’s laughing, he’s putting me on. But I don’t know that. “Costs a lot of money.” He says, “You make a lot of money in the United States?”

I said, “I used to.”

“You’ll get me a car like that? It rides nice, huh?” Just coming on to me something fierce, right? And I’m really angry, but I’m suppressing it and answering pleasantly. And everybody’s smiling at me, and I’m smiling at everybody.

Then he says, “Take them for food.” And they take us to a room and they give us a big feast. These beautiful sadhus bring us food, food that the women bring to the guru each day as an offering. And we eat.

And then a few minutes later… Bhagavan Das and I are together all the time, and he’s the only one I’ve come with, and this is way up in the remote mountains, no electricity up here, nothing going, you know, very remote… A few minutes later, I get called back to the guru and go back to him. And he looks directly at me, right in my eyes, and he said, “You were out under the stars last night?”

“Acha, yes.”

“You were thinking about your mother?”

“Acha”

He leaned back. And then he said, “She died last year?”

“Acha.”

“She got very big in the stomach before she died. She died of spleen.” He didn’t ask. He said, “She died of spleen.”

And he looked at me with a twinkle at that point. Now, the only way I can describe what happened to me at that moment is to compare my rational mind to a computer that has been fed an insoluble problem. The computer runs through all of the alternative resolutions of this problem that are in the storage units, and it runs off each of them in sequence.

And I thought, Well, does he have a telephone? Did Bhagavan Das go away from me for a moment? Bhagwan Das doesn’t even know my mother’s dead… how is he going to? Because he wasn’t interested in my past. He doesn’t know that. I’ve never said anything to him about it.

Was he reading my mind? Was I thinking about it at this moment? What would that mean? You know? And I went through… but I wasn’t even thinking about it. I had even forgotten what she died of. I mean, the spleen, I hadn’t even remembered the term for the organ.

So the computer went and went and went. And then, as computers do when it finishes its analysis through the storage unit, a little red light goes on, and a bell rings, and it stops. And that is literally what happened to my rational mind at that point.

I realized I had just been overwhelmed. I mean, I, ego, Richard Alpert, had just been beaten. You know, there was nowhere to hide. I wasn’t high, so I couldn’t say this was a drug hallucination. There was a guy doing this thing right to me, right then, right through my gross senses.

And at that moment, when that computer stopped, it was like a very severe pain in my heart. It was like a really wrenching feeling. And I started to cry. I wasn’t crying because I was sad, and I wasn’t crying because I was happy. The closest way I could describe it: maybe I was crying because I was home. I mean, because, yeah, right. Wow! That kind of feeling. Like, I didn’t have to do it anymore; it was all okay.

But I kept crying and crying and crying, and they carted me off to another temple to rest for the night. Now I had no trouble at all touching his feet. You know, whoever he was.

Well, that night in the temple, I was very confused. I would cry a lot, and I was confused. I mean, that was just my state; it was confusion. But I really felt like I had arrived somewhere. I mean, I felt this feeling that this man knew what was inside of me completely. I just understood that he was part of me. I felt completely safe.

Published by the Love Serve Remember Foundation, the nonprofit caretaker of Ram Dass’s teachings since 2010. Learn more at RamDass.org or join our virtual community and archive at Inneracademy.ramdass.org.

The flipping of the channels is a pretty classic Ram Dass lesson. It’s kinda like his “intro to relative reality,” a fun approach to the ways in which our experiences are shaped by our desires and identities. In this particular lecture from 1976, there is a chunk missing: he skips the second and the third channel, where he discusses our psychological and astral identities. I’ve superimposed a couple lines from a different lecture to make up for the gap. This part is italicized.

In spite of the missing sections, I’ve decided to use this specific video for a couple of reasons: one, he’s being particularly cute with his description of being on the physical plane (I DO have a funny looking nose, and have spent quite a bit of time on the funny looking nose plane of reality…) and two, I love this footage. There are some great shots of the audience where you really get a sense of the widespread love for Ram Dass. The auditorium is filled with a vast sea of devoted students from all walks of life: a few in bohemian all-white outfits, a messy looking acid head, a lady with grey hair and a smart pink suit, all listening intently, quietly flipping past their physical appearance to that last channel in which we’re all one.

— Aidan Gould, Content Creator, Love Serve Remember Foundation // RamDass.org

We are collectively in training to become wise persons. A wisdom that is going to be reflected in our beings. Our actions are going to reflect the shifts in consciousness that we are about at this moment.

Now, actually, who you are has another level of significance that some of you will find difficult to hear. Others will hear it comfortably. And it concerns issues of reincarnation and karma of who you are.

See, at one level, you think you are somebody sitting in North Miami Beach High School. And you think you are a man or a woman or a boy or a girl or some mixture.

But you have so many levels of identity. Why do you pick that particular reality to cling to?

Because it’s being fed by your senses and by your thinking mind. Until your eye be single, until you only see with the third eye, you are hooked on these eyes, these ears, this nose, this mouth, this skin, these thoughts. And that creates this reality. And they’re all tuned with a certain frequency. And on that frequency, you are sitting in North Miami Beach High School. But who I see you to be is, for the most part, very different than who you think you are.

I’ve been through this example many times. Many of you have heard the example, but it’s such a vivid image that we can repeat it and work with it. It’s a good one. It’s the one of the flipping of the switch by the eyes, your perceptual apparatus, your receiving set.

See if you tune into a channel, let’s say channel two on your television set, your eyes, what you see when you look out at the world is the physical reality. You see man, woman, big, little, old, young, dark, light, bald, hairy, developed, undeveloped, mole, bent nose, this, that, whatever. If you’re preoccupied with that in yourself, that’s what you see in everybody else.

If you think you’ve got a funny looking nose, what you notice when you walk down the street is everybody’s nose. It’s bizarre, right?

If you think you don’t have the right clothes, all you notice are people’s clothes. The physical reality.

If you are horny, what you notice in all people are who’s makeable, who is a competitor with you for who is makeable, and who is irrelevant.

And that’s the reality. That’s what you see. That’s watching all the girls go by on the street corner. Or the boys go by in this magazine.

Flip to the next channel, now you’ve entered into the psychological domain, and you look at everybody as happy, sad, righteous, lazy, etc. And you could call yourself a manic depressive, and you could say, “I wish I was as happy as everybody else.” or “I’m a young woman looking into the future.” or “I’m a Mother.” That’s a social-psychological role. “I’m a good citizen.” or “I don’t care about anything.” “I’m seeking God.” That’s a nice one but these are all psychological.

Try the next channel. Now you look out at the world, and there are twelve categories, “Ah, you’re a Leo, I’d know you anywhere.” “I’m an Aries, that explains it.” Thus far all these channels have all been the game of individual differences. How are you different from me?

One more. Flip.

Now, when you look at another person, what you see is as if two mirrors were placed facing each other with nothing in between. You see itself looking at itself, looking at itself, looking at itself infinitely, for you have moved to the plane of the ancient one. Of the one where there’s only one of us here.

In that reality, there is one of us here talking to itself. We are making believe we are the many. We are playing as if we’re many so we can play out this dance. We are all in drag because when you rip off the mask, there’s only one of it. And I am talking to myself.

Now, the minute you left the psychological, the minute you left that second channel and went to the astral plane, you immediately left North Miami Beach High School.

Which of these realities is you? Who are you? Who do you think you are?

Just to complete the game, we’ll just go one more. One more flip. You disappear, I disappear. The television receiver disappeared. We have just entered into the formless. The Void. Not nothing. That’s something.

These are all relative realities. Physical, psychological, astral, soul, One. All of those are relative realities in form. They are all relatively real. No one of them is absolutely real. If you try to stand in one of them, you’re going to have to deny all the rest of them.

— Ram Dass, 1987

Ram Dass: The delicate thing is that I’m not interested in creating desires in other people or making other people feel frustrated because they don’t have a guru in the same relationships that I do. Because what you and I may see in Maharaji is just what you and I see, and that’s because of what we need to see for our own work. And other people find their direction through ways very much other than the guru and so I’ve been very reticent to speak about this because of that. Otherwise, I think I would probably not want to talk about much else because where it is in my head. And he has never encouraged me to send people to him or to talk about him publicly, so you are the first person that’s even mentioned his name on the air.

I always called him “Maharaji” which covers many, many holy men in India which I think is the best way to deal with that, because those that he needs to have find him will find him, I guess. To talk about him a little bit… I get speechless.

On the physical plane, he is a jungle sadhu who has in recent years started to spend more time in temples around Northern India that devotees have built in order to try to capture him or hold on to a little bit of that light. And he appears in one and stays for a little while, and then just when they get all their rituals in order to hang on to him forever, he’s gone in the middle of the night, he just disappears again. I mean, not in any astral sense, he just gets somebody with a car to take him off somewhere. Nobody knows where he’s gone, and he turns up somewhere else. And he floats around in that way so that nobody can really control that kind of light in him.

When you’re with him, when I am with him, I experience many, many levels. At the personality social level he’s often infuriating and frustrating, and Mickey Mouse, and repetitive and childlike, and stubborn, and willful, and playful, and funny, and an old man, and a little child, and very concerned, and very indifferent, and that’s at one level.

At another level when I’m in his presence I experience ecstasy and bliss from the depth of the love that our relationship has for me. And that’s a drunken kind of love where I often find myself just dissolved into tears because I’ve just never experienced such profound love from any being.

And often just when I’m going into that he will interrupt it with some question like, “How much money does Stephen make?” or something like that, just to bring me back to the plane. He keeps me very firmly down in the physical plane until my work is done. He doesn’t allow me to just float around in bliss very much when I’m around him.

Then on a deeper level, this time when I was with him he said to me when I first met him, he asked me why I’d come back, and I’d told him to purify myself more, and he said, “I am always in communion with you.” And I have more and more deeply understood that to be the case and in fact, that’s now who he is for me.

He is a being who is with me always, and sometimes he’s with me so closely that I am him.

That is, when I’m saying things to people, or I’m acting towards people in certain ways where I look at the reaction they’re having to me, and I see they’re not reacting to me, but they’re reacting to him. That is that he’s just coming through me completely. And at that point, I don’t feel his presence because in some sense I am his presence. And then the rest of the time I just feel like I am constantly hanging out with him at this very, very subtle plane.

And at this plane I just feel him as this gentle, firm, guide who’s slowly drawing me towards himself, just pulling me ever so gently. And there’s no rest, it’s a continuous process. And I take almost everything that happens to me as part of his teachings to me. I take everything if I can remember. Like if I get uptight about wanting to do good about something, I see him saying to me, “Well you’re still caught, aren’t you? You really still care, don’t you?” And I can just constantly talk with him all the time at that level.

He has devotees at many, many different levels of attachment to him. Some are attached to his body and to him, sort of as a grandfatherly figure to their families, in many Indian families. He has many, many Indian devotees or villagers, very simple people. And there are no big gatherings, ever, except a few small ones at the temples, but no great big public thing. And his sort of simplicity and humility is awesome.

He has just a blanket and a dhoti, and he sits on a wooden table. And when you go into the room he’s staying in you’re struck by the absence of everything that you would associate with somebody’s bedroom. There is no reading lamp, and there are no books hanging around, and there’s no evidence that there’s a human being living there. It’s just… he walks in, he sits down on this wooden table that’s sometimes covered with some quilt, and there he is, and that’s his universe, and he’s fulfilled. You can see, and there are many pictures of him just sitting by the side of a road, and that was enough for him.

Others are very attached to him because of the miracles that are associated with him. There are many stories that the Indians have of various things that he’s done that are showing the use of incredible siddhis, or powers, for all kinds of things. So many Indian people come to him asking for favors, asking him to use these siddhis.

And there is a very awesome quality about those interactions because they’re asking as if he were somebody who uses the siddhis or doesn’t. And the whole dance is almost as if he’s somebody who bestows grace or doesn’t. And at the same moment, when I’m sitting with him I see that there really is nobody there at all. There is merely a form. And that the only time that they are going to get what they ask for is if it is their karmic predicament that that should happen. And if it is further their karmic predicament that they should perceive it as happening through him. That it’s not like he’s sitting around deciding, “Shall I do it or shouldn’t I do it?” And even when he’s saying the words like he’s deciding whether he should or shouldn’t, that’s all part of their karmic runoff; that you begin to see that all he is is a manifestation of the desires of the people around him.

And that a being like that only is in form because of desire of other people, because there isn’t any desire in him. And every time you project desire in him, that’s why a being like him is such a pure mirror, because he keeps showing you where you’re not.

Because if you get ten people sitting around talking about him everyone will describe him a different way. And they’re all describing, of course, it’s like the blind man with the elephant. Each person is describing what he’s touched of him, and he’s touched what he was capable of touching. You know the story of the blind men and the elephant, I assume. Where one touches the tail, and another touches the leg, and another touches the side, and another touches the trunk. Later they’re talking at lunch, and one blind man says an elephant is very like a tree, and another says no he’s like a snake, and another says he’s like a wall. And they get into a tremendous fight because each of them has touched a different part of the elephant.

Then there are other devotees who merely see him as God incarnate. And they are just very humble before him, and they ask for nothing. And they just serve him in any way they possibly can. They just feel so blessed to have a being like that in form, to be even near. There is one particular being who is one of his closest devotees, I guess. It’s interesting, see he doesn’t have any big ashrams or there’s no ‘scene’. And most the time he just throws you out if you go near there. He lets you stay five minutes and sends you away. So you can’t collect him, you can’t hold on to him. You can’t just hang out the way you’d like to. Unless that’s what your work needs to be at that moment.

But there is one devotee, he’s a professor, he’s a PhD. He’s a professor of economics. He’s the head of an economics department at a major university in India. And he is one of the older devotees of Maharaji. And his devotion is a model for me of this form of yoga that I’m pursuing, which is really called guru kripa, or the method of the guru. And he pursues the total surrender to Maharaji.

And here is a man who in his own right, he’s the editor of the leading economic journal in India, very reputable high intellectual being, and everything in his life is done only in relation to Maharaji. He only keeps his job or works because Maharaji tells him to do that. And when he’s with Maharaji his service is so total and pure. It’s just as if, if you look at your hand and you go to make a fist, and you notice how your fingers come together. Each finger doesn’t think for itself, “Should I come together?” You send a message and the fingers come together. And he is exactly like a finger on Maharaji’s hand. He’s just a perfect instrument. There’s not any place in him that has that little will that says, “Should I do it or shouldn’t I?” Or, “But you said…” or anything like that. He’s just a perfect, perfect extension. He’s like Hanuman is to Ram.

Then there’s the other aspect of Maharaji, of course, in which he is very intimately related with Ram and Hanuman. Just how intimately related is a source of some mystery to those of us that are around him. There are many beings who have reported being with him when he has turned into Hanuman. And there is one man that every time he comes near Maharaji he takes one look and he passes out cold. And when they revive him all he says is, “All I saw was a huge monkey!” And my feeling is that on an astral plane, or in another plane, Maharaji is, he is Hanuman, he is Hanuman manifest at this time. That’s who I think he is.

But even that is only a game, you understand. Because a being who is nobody is everybody. And he’s merely taking that form because that’s the particular form that’s connected with that particular sect.

I think it would be even too limiting to call him anything at all. Because in a way a being such as that is every way you think of him, he is. And there’s nothing you can say he isn’t, in a funny kind of a way.

He’s known to show up in many places simultaneously, to appear and disappear, to all these kinds of things. And he always denies it all, by the way. I mean he leaves you always with the doubt. He leaves you always in a very funny space, that if you were going to test him you’d always come away saying, “Oh well he’s just an old man in a blanket”. And it’s only those that are saying, “Look, the hell with testing, I’m going going going”. Those are the ones that start to experience his grace.

And that’s the predicament with the West. People say to me, “Look, if he’s so high why doesn’t he come here to the West and demonstrate his powers for us so science can get ahead?” And that’s like asking the elephant to reorganize his life in order to serve the mosquito in some kind of a way. I mean, Western science is just trivia in the presence of a being like this. It’s all nice and well-meaning and good, but the rational mind is just another little dance.

And it’s only when you’re thinking of moon, and tides, and the Sun, and universes, and the passing of yugas and kalpas of time, and timelessness, and eternal beings and so on that you’re dealing in the realm of Maharaji.

And the quieter your mind is, the more you’re sitting in your own ajna where you can meet him. Any time you want to meet him all you have to do is bring your mind totally to one point right at your ajna, at the place between your eyebrows. And all you have to do is ask for him. Your thought brings him, anybody, any human being’s thought brings that pure guru to him the moment that thought is pure enough, intent enough, single-minded enough.

A guru only exists to serve his devotees, that’s the only reason for his existence. And seeing him in the physical form is only another part of the dance and another part of the illusion.

The devotee, the economist I was telling you about said to me once, “I am closer to Maharaji when I’m away from him than when I’m with him, because when I’m with him my senses get in the way, I get lost into enjoying because he’s such fun to hang out with.” And it’s interesting, that it’s true for me that I’m meeting him in a much deeper place when I’m not around the melodrama of the temple life with him. At the same moment, of course, it’s fun to hang out with him. But less and less is that a pulling matter.

Like for me it doesn’t really matter whether I go back to India or not. It would be fun, but I don’t think I’m going away from him. When he just threw me out of India this last time I was sobbing and a woman came up and said, “Don’t cry, you can come back,” and I said, “I’m not crying out of sadness, I’m crying out of bliss.” I said, “I’m just so happy that he’s even telling me to do anything because I just want to be an instrument of him.” That’s all I can ever ask him, is make me a pure instrument of your will.

And that’s the far-out thing because no longer do I even have a desire to be enlightened. I’m not interested in becoming, being all done.

That is not a realistic thing for me. It may happen or it may not, I don’t know. But I feel a thing because he has kept saying to me, “I’ll do that for you, I’ll do it for you.” And what’s been happening to me is that more and more I am less and less in evidence to myself. More and more I’m just, whatever it is I am doing at the moment. I mean it’s just happening. I’m just action, I’m not self-conscious action. And I can feel that I am, in a sense, becoming like a finger on his hand, or like Hanuman is referred to Ram in relation to the breath of Ram, it’s the breath of Ram.

And I’m perfectly content to be the breath of Maharaji. That is, I think, enough of that.

Published by the Love Serve Remember Foundation, the nonprofit caretaker of Ram Dass’s teachings since 2010. Learn more at RamDass.org or join our virtual community and archive at Inneracademy.ramdass.org.

Ram Dass:

The summer I got back from India, I went to live in a cabin at the back of my father’s farm. I went into town one day in my father’s Cadillac to buy some groceries, with my beard and beads and all. I had a Massachusetts plate on the car, and this was in New Hampshire, in a little village.

Two young guys came up to me and said, “Are you the connection from Boston?” They saw this guy with a beard and a Cadillac from Massachusetts, and they were waiting for a connection, so they assumed I was it.

I said, “No, I’m not that kind of connection.”

There was a hook there, so they said, “Well, what kind of a connection are you?”

I said, “Well, I’ve been to India, and I’ve really learned a lot about consciousness and stuff.” They asked where I lived, and I told them. They came up to visit my cabin, then they brought their friends, then their friends brought their friends, and within about two and a half weeks, 300 people came on a weekend to sit out under the trees and talk about dharma.

Then they all started to live at the place. About a hundred people were living in the woods in tree houses and tents and so on, and a couple hundred more would come all the time, and we’d have these HUGE gatherings in which we’d talk dharma.

My father was great, just very open to the whole thing. He loaned us some money, and we put up a big, screened-in room—we all just got together and put it up—and we used it for hatha yoga, for reading the Bible, for whatever we did. We had a big fire pit in the center of it, and we would gather there. It was like our darshan hall.

So the ministers in town heard that I was starting a church, which was some threat to them, and one of the ministers came to see me and talk about it. I said, “Oh, no, no, I’m not starting a church. There’s no ordained minister here. This is just a place of the spirit.”

He said, “Oh, well, if that’s all it is...” Which is a great line.

Then I said, “Would you like to see it?”

And he said, “Oh, yes.” So we started to walk up the hill.

We had put in an outdoor shower that had an opaque screen around it, but you could see his mind going: orgy, orgy…

And we came into this hall; everybody was doing yoga, or reading the Bible, or reading the Gita. He said, “This is very interesting. Maybe you’d like to come to our bag lunch on Tuesday, where all the ministers and priests from the area meet, and tell us about your work.”

I said, “Well, maybe better still, why don’t they all come up here?”

“Oh, that would be fascinating!”

So we got bridge chairs around the fire, and they all came up. I said, “Can all the people here be present?”

“Oh, yes, that’s fine.”

So all these young hippies were present, and we had a fire they all sat around. And the young hippies started to tell their stories about what they were experiencing.

At that point, one of the ministers, who had tears in his eyes, said, “You know, when I was studying for the ministry, this is the world I hoped I’d come into. But it isn’t the world I came into. Is there any chance that this is going to come back to the churches?”

Imagine that. Imagine what it took him to say that. It was an incredible space.

Published by the Love Serve Remember Foundation, the nonprofit caretaker of Ram Dass’s teachings since 2010. Learn more at RamDass.org or join our virtual community and archive at Inneracademy.ramdass.org.

This is a great clip from a Q&A Ram Dass did at a pharmaceutical company in the 80’s. He gives a sort of two-pronged response to the question of religious identity; first, we get a beautiful teaching about how we cling to all sorts of self-conceptions, before he explores the way in which we can use those same definitions as methods for awakening.

That first teaching is very relevant in a world filled with identity categories that expand beyond just religion: more and more, our algorithms force us into boxes based on our lifestyle, interests, gender, sexuality. The Internet is a good place to find likeminded people and community, but I’ve noticed myself clinging to these labels, setting myself in opposition to others that don’t consume the same media as me or share my opinions. This teaching is a good reminder that we are much more interesting than that.

The other side of that coin is listening to and honoring these individual differences. I was raised Catholic, and, like many Catholics I know, I began pushing that identity away as a teenager. Jesus always felt a little stuffy after forced confessions and three hour Latin masses. Eastern philosophy seemed much more attractive. Here, Ram Dass has a wonderful bit about how Jesus, Moses, Buddha, all these guys are teaching us the same thing, the singular truth that we are all one consciousness manifesting in different forms. Instead of spending time pushing the Catholicism category away, I could’ve embraced it for what it is: a part of that beautiful mosaic of love, just another way into The One.

— Aidan Gould, Content Creator, Love Serve Remember Foundation // RamDass.org

Ram Dass: When you say “I am,” anything that follows that is a limiting condition. The closest to truth you can get is just the statement “I am.” The minute you put a limiting condition on it, you define out what you aren’t. You immediately make an “us and them,” or a “me and that”.

So by my saying “I am a Jew,” makes me not all the rest of it. And then I say, “But I was born a Jew,” well what does that mean? And then I can be cute, I’d say, “Well, I’m only a Jew on my parents side.”

And I hear that from my point of view, what I’m trying to do is to learn the lessons of this birth. I’m trying to learn that everything that is on my plate has been given to me as a curriculum through which I can become free. That’s the way I see the universe. I’m giving you the advanced course right now, but that’s roughly it.

Everything, including the fact that my father was this, my mother died this way, that I’m bald, that I this, that, all my neuroses- they are all part of this curriculum that is offered to me through which I can awaken.

So I listen to each thing to hear what it has to teach me, if you will. Now, sometimes, if you push away a role identity prematurely, it still has you. For example, in the early days, I just wanted to get high all the time. I wanted to go be in la la land. I wanted to be in The One, to hell with all these individual differences. I didn’t like who I was, in individual difference land. So I wanted to be out there. I kept trying to get high all the time.

And then I saw that that was a trap. I was pushing away something. As long as you try to push something away, it’s got you. It’s like your hand sticks to it. So, you know, the secret of all the transmissions are attachments or aversions. Both of them catch you.

One of the highest teachings is the third Chinese patriarch of Zen. It starts out with a line that you immediately feel you’re not ready for yet. It says “The great way is not difficult”-- meaning the great way, the true understanding, the deepest freedom– “the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.” When you’ve got that one, let me know and I’ll give you the next line. It says, “When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. But make the slightest distinction and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.”

What you hear is that as long as you identify with anything, this versus that, as long as you push away your humanity to hold on to your divinity, so long as you grab your humanity and push away your divinity, it’s got you. You don’t see the truth of things.

They say in the mystic literature, “truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.” As long as you want anything, you only see the outward container. As long as you identify with any thing or group, you’ve got an agenda. You’re trying to protect it. If you say I am a Christian, you’re busy trying to protect that definition.

Jesus is one of the most brilliant teachings of just what we’re talking about today. I mean, what a mind blowing teaching. He comes and he says, Look, I’m taking a human birth just like you, and I’m just going to show you the truth of the fact that you aren’t who you think you are. Watch. I’ll go and I’ll just be like you and then people will scorn me. Now, that would freak you because you’d say one, you know, shame is terrible. They’ll shame me and I’ll still be here.

Then you say, Well, shame is one thing, but your body is your big deal. Go ahead, I’ll be crucified, and I’ll drop back in three days and show you that isn’t it either. Can you imagine the statement: I’m offering my life to show you you aren’t who you think you are, so you can be free if you believe that I just did what I did. What a statement.

Now you can appreciate that statement of the Christ consciousness coming down in the form and giving that teaching. But I can also appreciate Buddha, who started out as a rich boy and then saw through the fallacies of stuff that he saw there was suffering and sickness and death and that as long as you try to hide from it or push it away, it had him, and he went out and he had commerce with it, and he kept working on himself. And he saw through the whole game and sat down and came back and taught these clear truths about the nature of suffering and humanity, and I can love him. And I can look again and again to Moses and what happened up on the mountain.

And in each tradition, I see the truth. Because every religion was rooted in somebody that had a direct experience of who we are.

And then it’s different strokes for different folks. They came down and they, for a different time, they formulated it in a different way, and then people kill each other for it. “My way is better than your way.” And it’s interesting to understand the universality of the deepest truth and yet honor your form.

I mean, my guru was a Hindu guru, but he used to say to most Westerners, Christ is your guru. Christ is alive and well in your heart if you will allow him to be, and he’ll guide you. And I think that’s true. And I listen in each religion to find that form that allows me to touch that deepest truth.

— Ram Dass, 1987

🔊 Listen to Ram Dass teach in his own voice & read the transcript below

Ram Dass: When, like you, I was born, I donned a space suit for living on this plane. And it was this body. This is my space suit. It had a steering mechanism—my prefrontal lobes and all the brain motor coordinating stuff.

Just like Rusty Schweickart and the others who go to the moon, they wear their uniforms, learn how to grab things and lift things, so I did that and I learned my prehensile capacities. And I got rewarded—you get little stars and kisses and all kinds of things when you learn how to use your spacesuit. You get really good at it.

You get so good at using your spacesuit that you can’t differentiate yourself from your spacesuit anymore. You think you’re your spacesuit.

Everybody comes up and says, what a nice suit. And you’re constantly looking into other people’s eyes to find out if you’re really wearing a nice spacesuit. It’s what I call “somebody training”. When you’re born, you go into “somebody training” because your parents know who they are and they’re going to make you “somebody” too.

My parents were very intent on making me somebody. They wanted me to achieve, be responsible, be healthy, be successful, bring pride to them. And if it didn’t interfere with any of those, I should be happy.

The problem that I experienced, though, was that the suit that I was wearing felt like one of these suits that doesn’t quite fit.

You’re a little uncomfortable and you’re constantly trying to readjust yourself. The suit didn’t fit, but everybody kept saying, beautiful suit, really impressive suit, you must be very happy. But I wasn’t.

If you look into their eyes and they tell you you’re happy and you’re not because the suit feels so weird, what do you conclude? It’s like those experiments in psychology where they have a group in a room and everyone in the group is a plant except for one person. They show two lines in which one is shorter than the other. And everybody in the room says that the shorter one is longer.

And then they ask this other person, this poor sucker, who’s the subject, is that longer or shorter? About 90% of the time, the person gives into the rest of the group, even though it’s obvious that the line is shorter than the other one. Because if you don’t, you’re so deviant. And who wants to be deviant? My God, life’s hard enough coping.

I felt when everybody said what a nice suit I was wearing that I must be sick. I went to an analyst. He was wearing another kind of weird suit. And what he did was he said that for a pittance he would teach me how to wear his suit instead of my suit. So I learned how to wear his suit, and even more people said, “beautiful suit!”

Part of learning how to wear that suit was you didn’t see people anymore. You just saw psychosexual stages of development. You saw anal retentives and early phallics and things like that. And I really wasn’t very happy in that suit either. In that suit I was a therapist, and I really needed to be a therapist because I was so identified with my needs at that point that everybody else had to be a potential patient.

If you wouldn’t be my patient, I didn’t have much use for you because I needed to be a therapist full time. So that suit felt weird as well. Then, through the kindness of a rather wild Irish fellow [Tim Leary], I took off my suits entirely and I stood naked as an elf. Or a little Irish gnome.

I took off my suit and I stood naked and it felt wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. I felt at home. I felt at peace. I felt content. I felt like this is where, I knew in my inner being, I really was. But somehow I’d never been able to get there ever since I had been born into somebody-ness, the somebody-ness had always short-shifted who I was.

What I had been trained in was an ego structure, a conceptual structure that defined who I was and who everybody else was. Most people are in these structures and they’re like huge mind nets that come out of your head.

You walk down the street, you’re somebody, you know who you are. You dress like somebody, your face looks like somebody. Everything is somebody in us. This is who I am, this is who I am, this is who I am. This is who you are, this is who you are, this is who you are. Everybody is reinforcing their structure of the universe over and over again. And they meet like two huge things—this is who I am and this is who you are.

We just kind of bump against each other like huge shmoos or something. Big mental mind nets that keep walking down the street. You can see them in everybody.

Everybody’s busy being somebody.

So when I got out of my somebody-ness, which was very cramped, it was like a prison to me, I didn’t want to go back to prison. It’s like you go out, you see the stars and you smell the air, and then they say, okay, chemicals are wearing off. Back into prison. And you don’t want to go.

You say, “no, no!” But you go anyway. You go back in your suit and you feel weird again. You feel doubly weird now because you know that that isn’t who you are, but you’re caught in it…

- Ram Dass, 1992

Published by the Love Serve Remember Foundation, the nonprofit caretaker of Ram Dass’s teachings since 2010. Learn more at RamDass.org or join our virtual community and archive at Inneracademy.ramdass.org.

If this teaching resonated with you, it comes from Reimagined: The Teachings of Ram Dass → a 4-week self-paced course on the Ram Dass Inner Academy that traces Ram Dass’s journey of transformation throughout four life stages. Offering content from our archives and a fresh context for how to apply his wisdom to our own lives, we will open up to the possibility of taking off our masks and reconnecting to our loving, compassionate hearts.