Mystery's Edge — Omega Institute 1995

be here now. [Music] Boy, Zman's a great warm-up act. I'll tell you that group sound with you chanting Zman, that was a real gift. [Music] I was um asking myself, what am I doing here? And um that question could lead to many philosophically interesting points, but let's just take it. What am I doing here on this stage in Atlanta at this moment? And uh of course because of the interdependence of all phenomena everything is the answer because the grass grows. I was looking at dominant ones that I could label and notice and there are two that are very interesting stories that I'd like to start with. By the way, how many of you have heard me lecture on aging before? Okay. Well, for you, the oldies are the goodies. The first started in um on a train from Westport, Connecticut to New York City. It was autumn in New England. I had been visiting Judith Stanton, an extraordinary woman, one of great women. And she and I had been walking in the woods. The leaves were magnificent. And I got on the evening train from Westport to New York City. And it was after the station was closed. So you bought the ticket on the train. And the coach was dimly lit. And I was sort of having a revery about the day and the beauty and the wonderful feeling of well-being of the parapro processes of aging and of leaves aging. And the conductor came down the aisle and he said, "Tickets, please." And I said, "Well, I have to buy my ticket on the train because the station was closed." I said, he said, "What kind do you want?" So I said, "Do I have a choice?" He said, "Regular or senior?" So um I said, "Uh, senior." And I heard the tone of my voice the same tone as when I wanted my first beer when I was 18. beer. Are you going to serve me? I have my identification. So I said, "How much is the regular and how much is the senior?" And he said, "The regular is $7 and the senior is four and a half." And I was pleased about that. So he gave me the ticket. He never asked for my identification, you realized. And as he walked away, I looked down and said senior on the ticket. And it was a mindblower. I mean, I was a senior citizen in the society. What a weird feeling. I mean, really weird. I had just been classified by my society as what? Irrelevant, demented, you know, somebody that needed help. That was an interesting one. We need help. we're old. Whatever those attitudes were, I realized I was when I accepted that ticket, I mean, for two and a half bucks, I was paying a hell of a lot, you know, and I didn't know whether I could afford it, you know. I think I want to go back and say, could I have the regular ticket, please? You know, I'll go to the gym. And one more little old story put in because it fits so well. That moment I felt like I had put on a coat, a piece of clothing that didn't fit. It was like the the mantle of senior citizen had nothing to do with what I experienced myself to be. And the story which is one of my father's old stories which many of you know I got to even get the tone in my voice is about Zambach the tor. And a man goes in a small village. He goes to Zumbach because he's made some money and he's going to have a suit made by Zumbac who's the best tailor in town. Zumbach takes his measurements. He makes the suit. The man comes in for the fitting, the final fitting. He puts on the suit. He stands in front of the mirror and this sleeve is about 2 in longer than this sleeve. And he says, "Zumbach, I don't mean to complain, but this sleeve is 2 in longer than this sleeve." Zumbbe said, "There's nothing wrong with the suit. It's the way you're standing." And he took his shoulder and he pushed it down like that until the sleeve fit perfectly. And the man looked in the mirror and he had to admit the sleeves were now equal length. And he looked and there was a big bulge of material behind the neck and he says, "Zumbach, my wife hates that one that's in a suit. Would you take that piece of material out, please? There's nothing wrong with the suit. It's the way you're standing." And he pushes his head down. So the man is now the suit is fitting perfectly but perfectly. It's a real Zumbac suit. So the man leaves and he goes to the bus stop and he gets on the bus and he can hardly breathe and somebody comes up to him and says, "What a beautiful suit. I bet Zumbac the tailor made that suit." And the man says, "How do you know?" cuz he can only talk like that at this point. And the other man says, "Because only somebody with a skill of Zumbac could fit somebody with a body as crippled as yours." And that's what I felt like that night on the Westport train. And so that kind of piqued my curiosity because I saw myself sliding down into an ooze of cultural conspiracy to define reality a certain way. And it had so many little pieces to it. I mean if I read economic news now that I am a senior citizen for the economy I am a disaster. Matthew talked about last night for the gerontology community in large part although there are some very hip gerontologists but for the gerontologists I am now a problem that's who I am for the advertising community I am a consumer all of these are projections of who I am that are coming at me from the environment ment in which I'm living. They're all like mirrors in the crazy house or the mirror house cuz none of them reflect who I am. And it's interesting because if you're not careful, you lose who you are into who the projections create you to be. And the cost of that is you lose yourself into the game of life. Now what I saw was that for 30 years I have been intentionally working on my consciousness. You could say my spiritual life. That's been my prime concern and interest. Altered states of consciousness, whatever you want to call it, for about 30 years, 35 years now. And I thought to myself, if I've learned anything, how would it now apply to aging to keep me from sliding down this greased slide into some kind of an obscen obscene caricature like the Milton Burl thing we talked about last night. So that whole question has led me to start to turn my attention to the issue of aging and it's led to the fact that I'm now threearters of the way through writing a book on conscious aging and I really want to honor Zman for your book. It's a beautiful book Solman and it's a and I would you know when I read his book I thought why am I writing a book and then I thought why not now the other thread that gets me into this peculiar predicament For that we have to go to India to Alahabad. Alahabad is the government seat of Uta Pradesh which is the largest state on the continent of India on on the uh country of India and my guru my spiritual teacher was having darion meaning he was sitting in a room and a lot of people came to hang out with him because it felt good and so there might have been 40 of us in the room, some westerners and a lot of Indians. My guru was sitting there and he said he was talking to different people about things just kind of randomly. You just sort of sit there and you just hang out. It's like sitting in honey or something like that. It's really tasty. And he was talking to this older gentleman and he said Ramdas used to be a great professor at Harvard. A very important man and he built me up. Now mo if you knew my guru who had one water pot and a doty that kept falling off him and lived in culverts under roads. He was hardly somebody impressed by any of that crap. But he was milking it like it was like and Ramdas is this and Ramdas is that and he was doctor and you know and the man was getting more and more impressed and uh Maharaji introduced this man to me and he was the head of the Supreme Court of Uttar Pradesh and the head of the court said perhaps you'd like to visit the court. Now I grew up in a family of lawyers and I didn't come to India to go to the court system of India which is it's all nightmare to me. I mean that's a hard world. I honor you that are lawyers. So I of course didn't want to do this but I was very well trained in my parents' knees. So I said that would be very nice figuring someday. So the man says tomorrow. So I said I said it's up to my guru. Okay. I figured he'd save me. Maraji says if Rambda says it's would be very nice, it'll be very nice. And he looked at me like this. See, like don't screw around, baby. So, okay. And so I went to the court to the court and there was a murder trial with three judges sitting there and I felt all of that and went through that and then I ended up in the in the room of the uh lawyers who were all wigged and uh with their robes and they surrounded me cuz I was from the states and uh I was new in the room and they and I was being escorted by the chief of this court that helped and they started to question me about Nixon's China policy which was had just come in at that moment. Now I had read Time magazine so I was totally knowledgeable about the deepest truth of this topic. So I said everything I had learned in time and they were deeply impressed because I said it with the authority of being being brought in by the chief justice, you know. So uh then I was sent back to my guru and I came back and he said, "So what happened at the court?" He was like a he's sitting with the women out in the kitchen and what happened in the court. So I start to tell him and he keeps filling in information. So obviously he knows. So then he kind of dismisses me. Later the evening, there's a darian, another darian, and there is a man sitting in the back. He's and I'm sitting in the back and he looks just like a spy print. If you've ever seen the spy print of lawyers, they're sort of caricaturures with the long ears and the long faces and the long nose and the the barristister look. and he said to me, uh, I wondered if you would like to speak to the Rotary Club of Alahabad and also to the bar association. So, I mean, I didn't come to India to go on the cream vegetable circuit, you know, I could do that here. So, and um I didn't want to do either of those. And I remembered what happened the other day. So, I said, "No, I don't want to do either of those." But I said, "But it's up to my guru." So, the lawyer and I went up to the guru. The lawyer said, "I'd like Ramdas to speak to the Rotary Club and to the bar association." Maharaji acted as if the most wonderful mitzvah had fallen from the skies. I mean, you want him to speak at the ro like now we're going to be in, you know, I mean, it was like the Rotary Club the bar and he called people in. He says he wants him to speak at the Rotary Club and the bar association. So then Maraji looks at me, he says, what are you going to talk about? So that hadn't entered my mind yet. So I said um law and dharma meaning the the spiritual laws and the humanmade law. Acha very good. So then he said are you going to speak about Hanuman the monkey? Well, Hanuman is the Ishtadev or the divine form for the army in India. It's on all the flags Hanaman because Hanuman is the is the aspect of the route to God that goes through service. In fact, my name Ram Das means servant of Rahm, which is another name for Hanuman, the monkey. So, I am a of a monkey sect basically. So he said, "You going to talk about Hanaman?" I said, "Oh, sure." He said, "Are you going to talk about Christ?" Oh, I said, 'Absolutely. I I saw how I bring that in and he said, "You going to talk about me?" I said, "Well, you're my guru. Of course, I'm going to talk about you." So the lawyer interjects. He said, "Well, we rather thought Randas would speak about Nixon's China policy." Maharaji looked appalled. You wouldn't trust him to speak about something like that. Randas doesn't speak about those things. Ramdas speaks only about God. I said, "Yes, that's true. I only speak about God." And the lawyer says, the lawyer says, "Well, I'll tell you. Um, maybe I'll just have a few people into my house one evening. I don't think it would be appropriate for the Rotary Club or the Bar Association." Now, that was an interesting statement. I don't think it would be appropriate for the Rotary Club or the Bar Association. Now what happened was that story stuck in me and thousands of times when I've been giving lectures I'm in the green room back there being neurotically nervous and I think I hear Maharaji saying Ronda speaks only about God. I think well that's going to be simple. But the fact is I'm about to deliver an address to a group of business entrepreneurs and I had planned to talk about sustainable consumerism. Now Maraji says Ronda speaks only about God. Now I have about two minutes to figure out how to say what I was going to say but also say it speaking only about God. And that in a way has been a little game I've been playing with life. Do you talk we talk about every religion remember God? Remember don't forget remember. Remember well what the hell are you remembering remembering? What is it? So that story led me to take up different areas in my life. where I could practice remembering God. So I work with the dying. Obviously a perfect place to remember God to remember the mystery. You're dealing right at the edge of the mystery. It's like being at birth. Birth and death. See, the the funny thing is when I was born, you never got born and you never died. I never saw anybody being born. I never saw anybody dying because you weren't allowed to see it. It had the stork brought me or something. I mean, it was behind some door. Women were taken somewhere and something happened and then there was a baby and then when it was time to die, they took him somewhere and they put a sheet over and then we were all crying. And then in the first part of this century, it started the trickle and it went into a wave of birth came out of the closet. It was suddenly okay to be born. And it got so that people would invite their friends and they'd have a celebration and the father would reach in and touch the head and draw the head forth and we'd all be crying and there'd be music and the midwife would be midwiffering and the whole thing it would have such a beauty to it and it was a ritual of such joy. And then between Cesley Saunders with hospice and Elizabeth Kubler Ross and all these fantastic people, death started to come out of the closet. It started to become okay to die. Imagine that. Imagine that. It was okay to die. To the medical profession, that is an obscenity. It is not okay to die. It is an error to die. It is our technological failure that you die. And I was just with Tim Liry last week and he's got a bracelet on because his brain will be frozen when he dies in cryionics. Now that must have an interesting belief system behind it. It's all I can say. I mean, if Well, I can go on the fantasy forever. So, I get here into this room because I'm practicing applying dharma in different situations and aging just happens to be relevant to me at the moment. And I'm doing it for two reasons. One is that I think the consciousness work has a hell of a lot to do with how you experience aging phenomena. It's as simple as that. I mean the extreme is that an illness or fatigue or energy or whatever or illness suddenly becomes curriculum rather than ovault terrible. You turn suffering. It's the place where you can say what grace because you feel the process of working with the pain. What I want to do since I got here because aging was relevant to me and I wanted to bring my consciousness to bear on the phenomena of aging to see whether I could cultivate the qualities of mindfulness, the qualities of resting in my soul so that I would experience the phenomena of incarnation, the phenomena of the unfolding of life as the divine play of which I was part and all as a celebration of God. That was my game. And then I talk only about God. And those two paths bring me here. And what I'd like to share with you in the few minutes that are remaining to me, what's my time frame? 10:5. Okay, we have about 15 minutes. is I want to share with you what I have learned thus far, what I have figured out or what where it is for me. I'm 64 that might be of use to you, but some of it might not be because it may be just too weird. But it's what I've learned. What are we going to do about it? First of all, I've learned that who I am will not die. It's a very far out finding. Extremely far. I bet you thought you were going to die. Didn't mean I wasn't going to die, but it meant I wasn't going to die. It didn't mean my physical body wasn't going to decay, rot, and be eaten by something or other. as wonderful nourishment for the soil. But it was through grace and through spiritual practice and 30 years of something I have acknowledged a space of my being where I am not in time. I just am. And yet I am also living in time. So what I recognized was that I didn't have to live life on just one channel of the television set. I could live it on two planes, in time and not in time. In space and not in space. Hakuan the Japanese poet says there is no coming. The coming and going is where you are. The coming and going is where you are. Your experiences of coming and going. You're always here. It's where you are. Like I'm right here. In a few hours I'm going to be on an airplane and going to Colorado Springs. When I get to Colorado Springs, if you say, "Ramas, where are you?" I'll say, "Here." What was all that flying about? Where did I go? I'm still here. Now, the easiest way when when Mahatma Gandhi said, "For me, God is truth." What I saw was that I could design my life to move towards truth. Even though I understood truth was not a concept. So I could never know truth. I could just be truth. So the strategy became very clear for me in my life. And what I'd do is I'd find those places where I would get stuck in the storyline, get stuck in the melodrama, get stuck so that my mind got so identified with the story that I forgot. That I forgot. And I use those as my fires of purification. I went towards the edge of those always. If it was horniness, if it was money, if it was power, if it was inadequacy, whatever psychonamic you could play with, if I could find it, I go up towards it, sort of cuddle up to it, see if I could befriend it. Always cultivating mindfulness, always cultivating the witness, always cultivating the space in my awareness where I just see how things are. It's not judging. It's not changing anything. It's just resting in its being. The Dao says one does nothing and nothing is left undone. That's two plains of consciousness. I am resting and doing nothing. And yet a lot's happening. But it's nothing personal. Has nothing to do with me. I'm just a kind of a playful bystander dancer. Too weird. Are you okay? Okay. Cuz I don't know. You know, it's all weird in here. So first of all, I found that I had to look at my society and I had to do a hell of a lot of studying to watch the way in which the projections of it were conditioning my mind so that I could get free of these conditions cuz once you see the way an advertisement works, it doesn't work on you the same way anymore. Okay. I think Christian was talking about that yesterday. Boy, she was good. Wow. certain things I saw when I looked at what I had to reflect about. First, I saw that we were in an incredible moment of disease for two reasons. One, that we had what Christian also talked about yesterday. We have this youthoriented culture. We value youth and verility and and reproductivity and etc. And the other is the demography is that we have an aging culture. So that more and more people are out of the loop of the mythology of the culture. In other words, we are functioning with a dysfunctional mythology about who we are and what we are elevating or whatever. And Betty Friedan wrote a good book about the way advertising and media and all that do us in create the attitude. Then I found out that I wasn't living in a traditional society. I was living in a society which valued knowledge and knowledge was changing all the time and I was living in a society in which change was being celebrated and in under those conditions I was obsolescent. Then maybe I could learn the next CD ROM move, but maybe I'd say the hell with it. And how could I ask youth to listen to me when they valued those things and I didn't understand them? I was irrelevant to them. So you go from a traditional society where the elder passes on to the youth the wisdom and you come into a knowledge valuing society in which the old people are irrelevant because the knowledge is held by the youth because it's changing so fast. Well, that's one of the things I saw that I found interesting. I saw there were no clear roles to play other than those kind of creepy ads that show people smiling in Hawaii having long-earned fun. I mean, how much more fun do I have to have? Enough already. God, it has no substance. It has no depth. Boy, when when Matt talked last night about pilgrimage, my t mouth was watering to be in those cultures where there is such warm living spirit in the people and the way they embrace you in the way you are, you understand human life can be. Living in India for me has blown my mind about western culture. First of all, what going through the streets are rick shaws carrying dead bodies wrapped in cloth on the way to the be for a funeral ground. Boy, talk about bringing death out of the closet. But it was never in the closet. It was part of the process of life. And when I went to the burning gods in Bernaris, there were all these people walking through the streets with loin cloths on with little bag of whether men or women with little bags on their the loin cloth that ke held the money necessary for the funeral wood for their funeral par. And they had cancer and they had leprosy and they had everything. And they were beggars. And the first time I went there, I was so horrified by what I was seeing. I mean, it was my the Westerners's worst nightmare. And I was so freaked. I went back to the hotel and I got under the bed. I was in such pain about it. And then I went and lived in a Hindu temple and I started to learn a whole new universe. And I opened in a sole new way and I started to just drink up and drink into this culture. And I suddenly realized when I was in that Bonaris the first time, I couldn't look in any of their eyes. I mean, it was just too much. Seven months later, I was back in Bonaris and I looked in their eyes and what I saw was that they were looking at me with pity. Pity for what? Pity because in their universe the greatest thing that could happen to a human being was to die in benaris. It's like dying in the arms of God. And they had spent their whole life planning for that moment within their reality within that particular reality. And they looked at me as a kind of a lost wanderer, like a hungry ghost drifting through the world. Me with my travelers checks and my antibiotics and my whole stickick. What I learned was that there were no roles for me. I couldn't figure out who I would be because I also looked and I saw that in our zeal for individuality, individualism, we had sacrificed community so grievously that we were starving to come back into the networks of which we were part as human beings. I saw how we sacrificed the extended family into the affluent dream of living only with your spouse in one place alone, not bothered by other generations who wouldn't understand and how that was the gift. I remember when atomic energy was the gift. I remember when I was celebrating it, it was change all of our lives. Turned out I was wrong. And I was part of I mean, I'd be out there feeling I was a combination of the Buddha and Christ. I'd be floating. I'd be seeing the universe in whole new ways. I come back to visit my family. My father would say, "You got a job?" And he would like, it was like cold water in me, you know, and I'd say, 'What do they know? And I'd go off and I'd say, 'I can't be part of that. They were my birth family. I've got spiritual work to do. And isn't it funny? I spent the last eight years of my father's life taking care of him, overseeing it, being there, making sure he was protected. and ended up changing his diapers as he's changed my diapers. And I learned so much from that experience. I can't begin to tell you what I learned. Like one little vignette, my father, who was a railroad executive, kept changing. So then we went through a period where he was thinking I was his brother back in 1926 and telling me to get files from the bureau and we went through that one and then my father became very quiet and he smiled and it was incredible massaging his body. It was like massaging the Buddha. He was just this smiling being. And am I >> am I can am I okay for >> three more minutes? How can I waste three minutes on this story? >> Because to let you know who my father was, we were sitting on our estate in New Hampshire looking out on our four-hole golf course that my father had created. It was sunset. There was a magnificent sunset. We were in deck chairs and my father said to me, "Isn't that beautiful?" And I said, "It sure is." And he said, "Look at how close it's cut." And now here was my father smiling and he and I were holding hands looking at the sunset. And I liked him much better than I liked him before. So my brother came in who never got along with him said, "Hi dad, how you doing?" My father just smiled at him. My brother went out and said, "That bastard, he still won't speak to me." And then my sister came, my aunt came in who loved my father so deeply. She was his he had taken care of all of his sisters and brothers after the father died. She just treasured him. She said, "George, how are you?" And he just smiled at her. She said, "Oh, George, what have they done to you? Where have you gone?" And I I sat there, he and I, holding hands, looking at the sunset, and I thought, "What's going on here? They're both miserable because they're holding on to who he used to be. So, they can't even be with who he is. And he and I are together and we're having a ball. We're just here. He doesn't give a damn who he used to be. He did what Castanator talked about. He let go of his personal history. He's just here. And by the time my father died, I felt like I had been given such a gift of bringing myself into the harmony of being family, of being part of the whole relational web of incarnation. And at the same moment my mind was very uh quiet, empty, loving, doing nothing. And in that sense, taking care of my father was my spiritual practice for remembering God. And finally my father and I the remembrance of God was that finally dad and I were just hanging out through the process of taking care ofness. But who was doing the taking care? It didn't matter anymore. Nobody gave a damn. It was just two beings being together. That's a lot of learning for your father who he got child abuse. Da da da. He didn't abuse me but with a hairbrush but nothing bad. I can milk it for a while, but I don't think I can get too much mileage out of it. Yep, I know. I understand. I would I'll end with just this thought. I'm sorry. I'm so I'm not sorry about anything. Um uh I have I'll tell you what my what I'm doing now. First of all, all of my past stuff and Zman talks a lot about this. It's great. All my past stuff I bring up into my consciousness and bring into the present awareness I have instead of leaving it locked in with who I was then. Okay, I won't give you examples. I'll just say that's so what I'm basically doing is infolding my past into my present. And that takes a lot of contemplation and a lot of quiet time to really do that. Okay. Then the other end of the scale is that when I look at the future, I see that there are number of things that generate fear in me. Fear of the mystery of death, fear of dying, fear of dependency, fear of chronic illness, fear of loss of control, fear of dementia, fear of, fear of, fear of, fear of, fear of. And I realize that what I have to do to come into that relation to God is to fold the future into the present in the same way I folded the past into the present. And the way I fold the future into the present is by coming up as close to my fears as I can and bringing to it whatever compassionate mindfulness I have cultivated. And I look at death and I say death is a mystery. I don't have the remotest idea what happens after death. And I realize that any idea I would have would be so trivial compared to what in fact it's all about. How presumptuous of my trivial mind to try to conceptualize God. God in form is a God deformed. You know, it's absurd. God defined is a God confined. I look at the pain and suffering that is to come and I see it'll be a lot of pain probably. I'm not creating it. I understand. But I'm acknowledging there's a probability it will come. And I look at the way I've dealt with pains in the past. and they stunk and they were painful and it hurt. But yet my consciousness was always around somewhere. It hurts. It hurts. My heart's breaking and I'm still here. And I realized that I could trust my awareness. I could trust my the faith in my living spirit identity was strong enough to be able to say when the next pain comes here we'll be together and we'll embrace the pain and we'll work with it. We won't get lost into it and if we get lost then we'll remember. [Music] Just be here now.