Ram Dass: How to Keep a Relationship — Switzerland 1990

[Music] be here now [Music] ramdas was born in 1931 as Richard Alpert in 1967 he traveled to India where he met his spiritual leader Neim Karole Baba under his guru's guidance he studied yoga and meditation and received the name Ram Das which means servant of God ramdas is co-founder and board member of the SA Foundation a without profit organization dedicated to manifesting compassionate action to alleviate suffering in the world community randos received a master's degree from Wesleyan College and a doctorate from Stanford University he taught psychology at Stanford and the University of California and taught and conducted research in the department of social relations and the graduate school of education at Harvard University between 1958 and 1963 while at Harvard Ramdos did extensive research with psilocybin LSD25 and other psychedelic chemicals because of the controversial nature of this research he was dismissed from Harvard in 1963 the first professor to be fired by Harvard in the 20th century and now Rahm Das some years ago I had a um an interesting dialogue with my father uh this was back in the um 60s and the commune days and uh I produced or a group of us produced a sixrecord album um of lectures and music and radio shows and so on and I had done four all night radio shows on WBAI in New York and uh this was called Love Serve Remember and it was a six record album and it had a beautiful uh photographic book with it with uh uh stories in it and so on and the whole thing we um distributed for $45 of course the economy was different then in the 60s and uh it did very well and my father looked at it and he said that's a very impressive piece of work i said thank you because he didn't always agree with most of what I was doing and he said um you know this thing is worth a lot more than $45 i said you're right he said you know you probably could charge$9 or $10 for this i said you're right he said "Would the same number of people buy it?" I said "Probably." He said 'Well I don't understand i said 'Well it cost us $35 to produce and there is a profit in it of a dollar that seems reasonable he says "I don't understand." He said "Are you against capitalism?" And I tried to figure out how I would talk to my father about this and I said "You're a lawyer last year you tried a case for Uncle Henry didn't you?" Said "Yeah." I said "Was it a hard case?" He says "Damn right i had to spend a lot of time at the law library." I said "Did you win?" He says "Yeah I won." I said "You know you charge pretty good fees to your clients i bet you charged them a nominal egg a healthy fee for that." He says "Don't be an idiot." He said "It was Uncle Henry." I said "That's my problem i said 'If you can find somebody who isn't Uncle Henry I'll rip them off if you can find somebody who's them I will charge them what the market will bear you see I was growing up at that moment in a culture that said I want to live in a world of us not in a world of them and the way in which I priced my economics was based on the assumption that everybody was my relative or everybody was us and I was going to create a price structure that didn't create that feeling of themness now let me just read you this in order to play our role we are often required to define people as us and them this is very subtle the question is who is us and who is them when we started out as tribes the tribe is us we find there's another tribe and maybe we decide that because there's only one buffalo available the other tribe becomes them because we have to protect the buffalo meat for our own tribe so it's us against them and we share the buffalo among us and we compete with them in a competition paradigm in business who you're competing against is them and we in our company are us but it doesn't stop there if you're an administrator or an executive and you have to motivate the people in your company to get a certain level of pro productivity to some extent you have to see your employees as them as well playing to get the best out of them and you say nice things about us but you're thinking them so now your employees are them and you are us meaning the administration of course you as an executive are surrounded by peers who are waiting for your misstep because they're trained in the same competitive school that you were in so at some level your colleagues in your own company are a little bit them as well well you say "At least I've got my family they're us but now your husband or wife is very upset because you're spending so much time in business they don't understand how important this is and because they don't understand or appreciate your predicament you start to think of your family as them then within the family of course there's the issue of generations the kids don't understand they're a different generation so the kids are them my parents don't understand and they become them you slowly are getting cut off from the generations and finally after all how can my husband or wife really understand because it's a different sex and so your partner is them also so I am left with only me in the category i started out with us as the tribe and now I've got us down to just me and the extraordinary level of alienation when you take it one step further is that when you start to think about yourself as an object you even become alienated from yourself even you are them and you have ultimate and total alienation so in a way this is our a problem we're facing that the myths in our culture which are so much based on individuality have led us down a path that has isolated us very profoundly from each other because it has become acceptable as a following from really the industrial revolution a long way along the myth of the individual succeeding using whatever they need to do to do that using whatever and now as ecology becomes an issue we're seeing that that's not quite an acceptable that's kind of a dysfunctional cosmology now but it wasn't before so the the myth the mythic structure structure which like this type of thing that Joseph Campbell would point out the hero figure the role of the individual going to develop their own uh strengths and capacities is a major trap because it ends up leaving a person caught in separateness now this is an interesting kind of quality of separateness it's a separateness of the mind it's in the which you are thinking about other people because you're identified with your needs and the interesting thing about identification with your own needs and desires is that it colors everything in your world in terms of what you perceive others to be because you see them only in relationship to the satisfaction of that desire i mean if you're hungry you see what's edible if your car is breaking down you notice service stations if you are um lustful you see what's makeable and in other words you have made everybody around you into an object and the cost of that is incredible because the mind when you're when you have a desire and then you think about how to satisfy it and you take somebody and make them you think about them as an object to be manipulated to bring about the gratification of your desire you separate yourself from them and what gets starved in that process is both you and them it's an incredibly starving process what it does is it closes down the quality of the heart connection between human beings and that is a um an extremely um painful cutting off um most of us don't have that much control over this that these desires just take us over i mean I've watched myself uh in the most horrible and ghastly way is the way it's worked uh where I can be sitting so lovely and spacious and caring and open towards people and then um uh say lust will enter into me as if it came from somewhere else but it comes it awakens it arises and suddenly my whole perceptual apparatus shifts in uh the Hindu tradition you'd say "I went into my second chakra i went into the plane where suddenly I see everybody in one of three categories either makeable potentially makeable a competitor or irrelevant right?" And uh I watch myself go from being this very open spiritual being to looking at everybody in this way and then suddenly to my horror I am ready to use everything in the service of gratifying this desire and I'll say terrible things like "Won't you come up and see my holy pictures?" So and I'm horrified by my at myself saying "You didn't say that did you i mean I I can't believe that I was taken over by this desire system." And uh when we have these powerful desires like lust or the desire for power that comes out of inadequacy or fear uh feelings of loneliness um we will manipulate the people around us in order to get what we want but in the process we treat them as objects not as us but as them and those of you that have been uh subject to feelings of lust know that the difference between a lust and a love is that lust manipulates an object for the gratification of your own desires and the minute that desire system is gratified the other person is a literal stranger to you because you merely know them as an object you've never let them in as a fellow being with you now um the as we develop our um our identities um I if I develop my identity as a public as a teacher I need you as uh an audience or students in order to legitimize my definition of myself so I'm constantly looking to you i'm manipulating you to get you to give me back something I need to reassure me I am who I think I am and that's where the identification with my own separateness starts to make me use everybody around me to get that and you can feel that in your own lives again and again and again the way if you feel yourself as a competent mother you need your children to be a certain way to legitimize your role as a mother and the minute you need somebody else to fulfill a model you have of yourself you start to manipulate the other person and don't think the other person doesn't feel manipulated and that then you're dealing with an interesting situation in which you're creating in other people around you the paranoia that feels that they're they feel that they're being used and exploited now um uh to just complete the problem we're facing is that most of us create models about how we think life ought to be like the woman who thinks her children to be a good mother she must have be her children must be a certain way like my mother felt that her children should be clean and neat and be quiet should be seen and not heard and therefore every time we were heard as well as seen or every time we were dirty we were a threat to her definition of herself and as much as she loved us what she loved us as was her child not as us but as her child she didn't hear me she only needed me to be what she needed me to be in order to feel adequate because she felt very insecure as a human being and I think that you can see how you do this in interpersonal relationships of um using people to fulfill your needs or your models or your and having expectations if you really loved me you would be who I need you to be in order to feel that I'm okay that's a very convoluted process and it's the process that most of us are living with most of the time that's what's so bizarre right okay now um let me give you another model about relationship and let me leap out into some other place for a moment um I was invited to swim with these two dolphins named Joe and Rosie um it was a cold --- up under my arm and I wanted to uh swim with her so I took hold of her fin and she went down and then my hand slipped off her fin and I floated back up and I thought well see I'm back in my mind now i thought well I don't want to hurt her and so she came back under my arm so I held the fin a little tighter and we went down and I slipped off and I thought what I really want to do is put my arm around her belly and hold her but that's really coming on a little strong you know i mean so I uh I um about three or four times this happened and finally I figured well look I'll do it if she doesn't like it she'll let me know and I grabbed her and we started to swim wildly around the tank uh at great rate and very violently and I thought it's bothering her so I'll let go must be bothering her because it's so violent and I let go and floated up and she came right back in under my arm again thought okay you're asking for it so I held her as tight as I could and we started to swim wildly around the pool and it was an an ecstasy of intimacy with this other being and after a little while I thought a thought came in see while it's happening there's no thought it's just this incredible process and then a thought arises and it says look Rosie you're a dolphin but I got to breathe you know the minute the thought arose in my mind Rosie came to the surface waited for me to get a breath and then went back down again and this went on for about 40 minutes that Rosie would swim wildly and every time I felt like I was exhausted and I needed a breath Rosie would come up and wait for me so once we came up and people were taking pictures and I got into this kind of hammy roll of you know me and the dolphin and uh I forgot to take a breath and Rosie went under and I thought well this is the moment of truth because I don't have any air in my lungs and it was only about 3 seconds and Rosie turned and came right up again and waited for me to get a breath and then we went on until finally I started to get very cold my body was turning blue i was shaking it was a cold day and Rosie came to the surface shook me off went and got Joe and they both with their noses pushed me over to the edge of the tank pushed me onto the holding platform forced me out of the tank and wouldn't let me back in okay now what is that relationship about what am I what kind of a quality of nonverbal and non-conceptual in tunement did we get into that made that process so incredibly feeding and rich and loving and present i mean I didn't know Rosie we hadn't talked about our histories we didn't we didn't know anything about our social lives we just suddenly were there together and when you are cast into that relationship with another being you begin to realize what you're losing most of the time in the way in which you are dealing with human relationships in which you're mediating the way you are with people through your mind because every time you think about a relationship the thinking mind takes an object you think about things so you're always one thought away from where the action is it's always just a little way away so um I I'm talking now about the way in which the mind cuts us off from the heart or the mind cuts us off from a certain way of being with another human being that feeds us because it's as if we have two clear obvious mechanisms for being in the universe one is through the mind that processes sense data and thoughts and relates to the world as objects and then there's this other quality of the heart and we always have these expressions like my heart goes out to you and the quality of the heart is that it doesn't have boundaries quality of the heart is it loves without discrimination it just loves it has no boundaries the mind is continually setting boundaries this is me this is not me this is good this is bad the mind is constantly judging the heart is not judging the heart is just opening it's it's boundaryless so that the mind is actually afraid of the heart that's what the interesting thing is the battle that goes on in us you're afraid of your own heart because your heart would give away the store and the mind says you know the heart says you need my car you need my house you need my life take it and the mind is saying now wait a minute you got your health insurance to pay keep cool don't don't blow the whole scene so the interesting question is when and under what conditions can you meet people in such a way that you can keep your heart open without giving up your discriminative wisdom about how to be with another person here's an example um I'm on the board of an organization called the SA Foundation which is a uh an it's an an experiment group of us came together in 1979 to see if we could try to we wanted to all of us shared the common desire to help relieve suffering in the world but we realized that we were very imperfect instruments of that so the criteria we set was that we would join together in a service to relieve suffering but we would use it as an exercise for us to grow so that we could become freer thus better instruments of service and we would also have fun doing it that was the third criterion and so in one of the first project that we took on was world blindness preventable and curable blindness and the country of Nepal invited us in and we went into Nepal under the uh umbrella of the World Health Organization originally and then we became an an NGO there um so uh we had a rotating chairman of the board status and my turn came to be chairman of the board and it was just at a time when we were um about to build one of our hospitals in Nepal and I suddenly found myself as the chairman of the board in Nepal because we're a hands-on board and I was meeting with the minister of health of Nepal who works for the king and it's a real monarchy i mean the king can say off with your head and that's it so uh I was meeting with the minister of health and we came together and now I had been for some years by that time uh I had left academia and I had been really a practicing communal hippie for a long time and now here I was with my um blue blazer and my red tie and I was suddenly a representative of a foundation and I had to keep my act together and I had to make sure we got what we needed from the government and he had a wish list because when you're the third poorest country in the world and you meet somebody that's the head of a foundation from America you know it's like meeting Santa Claus and from my point of view I needed him to let go of certain restrictions and so on so I come in with my wish list he comes in with his wish list we sit down we have tea I have my entourage he has his entourage and I'm very nervous because I'm going to have to be very strong in this situation and I'm busy being chairman of the board and I'm busy seeing him and he's got his Nepali dress on he's the Minister of Health and in passing I happen to go by and just look into his eyes and as I look into his eyes what I experience is somebody looking back at me i mean he's right there and he in effect is saying I mean it's as simple as he's just saying hello and it's as if I saw I said yesterday in a in the class I was teaching it's as if you have a television receiver with a control dial right here by your eyes and I was tuned to the channel where we were social roles and then he was tuned to another channel where he was just a fellow soul he was a fellow being looking out at me like "Are you there i'm here far out." And what happened at that moment was that the plane of reality shifted for us and at that moment I saw the entire dialogue around hospital and bargaining and win and loss in the same way as I would play a game of monopoly and chairman of the board became the thimble and minister of health became the top hat those of you that are familiar with that game will understand that and we understood we had come together to play a game a game of life really but we were meeting behind the game that was the key point we were meeting behind the game and once we recognized that we started to go at our bargaining and we fought very fiercely for what we wanted but the profound impact of that meta meeting behind the level at which we were opponents was that the more we bargained the more we came to appreciate each other and the closer we became as friends now can you hear what I'm saying i want to get that in the whole idea of two levels of consciousness like when you go out to play tennis with somebody realize that you are going out to compete but you both collaborated to go onto the court together to play the game so there are two planes of realities there's the plane of collaboration and there's the plane of competition and we call that a good sport somebody that is not a good sport one of those gets out of proportion to the other either way if you're just there to collaborate you'll give the game away that's not good sportsmanship if you're just there to win you forget that you're collaborative and you start to get so attached to winning that you alienate the other person and you create a hell realm for the two of you uh and we have a lot of sports u models of both of those kinds of things so when we're talking about relationship now we're talking about not giving up the mind but balancing the mind with the heart so that you get both of these things simultaneously going in relationships it's interesting that when you go out into the woods and you look at trees you appreciate trees you appreciate an oak and an elm and a pine and a gnarled tree is a gnarled tree and a straight tree is a straight tree and a big tree i mean if you're in the lumber business it's different but for most of us we're not and so you're just looking at a tree and enjoying the tree for itself and you're appreciating the tree you're appreciating its uniqueness but you notice when you come near humans how it shifts you go into your judging mode you say better worse older younger should be this should be that and you went from appreciation to judging and um part of the ability to be with other human beings is the ability to shift ground back into appreciation rather than judging to look at another human being like look at your child or look at your colleague or look at your employee and appreciate their human predicament like um Al Hunt yesterday we were on a program together and he said an interesting thing that I disagreed with the way he said it he said we were talking about um he was talking about Jesse Helms and um he doesn't like Jesse Helms and he said Jesse Helms is an evil man and I will tell him when I see him i haven't said this to him yet but I think it would have been better and I'd like him to reconsider whether he'd be willing to say Jesse Helms is a being who does evil acts because that's a very critical distinction because the minute you identify somebody with their acts when you find their acts reprehensible you reject them and there is a a quote in the poet by the poet Kabir that says "Do what you do with another human being but never put them out of your heart never close your heart down to them." I watched in myself how hard that is to learn in the last administration I had considerable difficulty with Casper Weinberger um I just had difficulty with some of his policy and so I took a picture of Casper and I put it on my table with all my holy pictures and I had the Buddha and I had Christ and I had all the Indian saints a --- ens is behind the two when you've been with somebody for many years you know all their stories you know all their routines you know how they think you know what they're going to say and they know all your routines too and in a way you're sharing a body of knowledge that's brought you into oneness in which okay it's you that does that you're the one that tells the old fishing story you're the one that go puts the garbage out and so on let me read you i want to take you to one more level and then we'll talk together this is a poem by a uh Vietnamese monk called Ticknot by the name of Ticknot Han any of you ever heard of him extraordinarily uh advanced uh Buddhist teacher and this is the um this is the voice of the part of us that merges with other beings do not say that I'll depart tomorrow because even today I still arrive look at me i arrive in every second to be a bud on a spring branch to be a tiny bird whose wings are still fragile learning to sing in my new nest to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone i will arrive in order to laugh and to cry in order to fear and to hope the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that are alive i am the mayfly metamorphizing on the surface of the river i am also the bird which when spring comes arrives in time to eat the mayfly i am a frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond i am also the grass snake who approaching in silence feeds itself on the frog i am the child in Uganda all skin and bones my legs as thin as bamboo sticks i am also the merchant of arms selling deadly weapons to Uganda i am the 12year-old girl refugee on a small boat who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate i am also the pirate my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving my joy is like spring so warm it makes flowers bloom in all walks of life my pain is like a river of tears so full it fills up all the four oceans please call me by my correct names so that I can hear at the same time all my cries and my laughs so that I can see that my joy and pain are but one please call me by my correct names so that I can become awake so that the door of my heart be left open the door of compassion as long as you are identified with yourself as a separate entity then you are always in relationship with them with objects the minute you cultivate that part of you that is connected that is part of the web of things in which we are us then another quality comes into human relationships and this is the quality of course that you recognize the quality of love of coming into love with people because all of the ways in which we are separate are at some level rooted in fear and really the dialogue in humanity is the dialogue one way of characterizing the dialogue is the dialogue between fear and love and I let me tell you one story um I was I had a 1938 Buick limousine at one point it was a beautiful big black limousine with white side tires on it and I was very proud of this car was in the uh 60s sometime and um I was driving it from uh Boston to California and I was going along the New York throughway and um I had come back from India and I um was driving uh this this car weighed um um 6,000 pounds three tons very heavy car it was like driving a tank it was very you know just just you just drove all day and I had one leg folded under me and I was driving along and I had my beads and I was repeating the names of God and the name I had chosen for that moment and I mean that sometimes I used uh any number of names Allah or M or Ram or whatever but in this case I chose the name Krishna and Krishna is one of the forms of the Hindu gods at one of the Yugas or time periods and uh Krishna was this being of blue radiance presented as blue and um very beautiful being and Krishna was a very playful type of u he was and in his time he was a cow herdsman and he used to make love to all the milkmaids and uh he was always a rascal when they go bathing he'd hide their sars and he'd cause immense troubles of trouble i mean we in the west don't have gods they're as much fun as they in Hinduism they got a lot of fun gods so uh I was enjoying Krishna and I was just going Krishna Krishna and that song that's many of you know from airports um that is fortunately uh and that that was coming from a slightly different place but it was still that uh the Har Krishna Har Krishna Krishna Krishna Har [Music] and I was singing that and I've been singing for maybe four And I was getting myself into a state where I kept just this little oh well I kept just enough consciousness on this plane to keep the car moving down the road i kept the steering wheel working but in my realm I was in the realm of Krishna it's interesting if you go to Bindavvern which is uh one of the holy cities in India you find that many of the people are living in the realm where Krishna you go to the milk salesman and his eyes are like this because he sees Krishna and you're busy buying milk you know I mean it's just two different levels of reality he's just tuned differently so I was doing hot Krishna I was thinking of this beautiful blue uh cow herdsman and and all of his stories And I was going deeper and deeper into my love of Krishna and I suddenly became aware of a blue light in my mirror and a a kind of a undulating blue light and I had enough on this plane to recognize that this was a state trooper so I pulled my car over and um he came up to the window and he said "Uh may I see your license and registration please?" He said "You're" I said "What's the problem officer?" He said "You're going too slow." See cuz I was I was only going 45 and it was a minimum was 50 I guess and now um you've got to understand what state of my consciousness was in at that point because what I saw was that Krishna had come to give me Darian he had come to give me an audience he had come to present himself and he came in the form of a state trooper all right because when I got into that realm how would you know i mean that because Christ came as a carpenter why wouldn't Krishna how would Krishna come if he came in you know in the New York way why not as a state trooper and this guy came with blue light and I was really see so um I would have not only given him my license and registration I would have given him anything you know and I gave him the license registration but I looked at him with just incredible love now state troopers it's interesting see in that role I mean when they're not in their uniform it's another thing but in that role hardly anybody looks at them with love at that moment so he took the license and registration and he went back and he called home and did whatever you do and um then he came and he walked around the car and then he came up to me and he looked inside and he saw a box in the seat he said "What's in that?" And I knew what is was in his mind and I said "They're mints would you like one?" And all the time I am just this is I mean this is God that has come to be with me and I just want to keep him there as long as I possibly can i mean this is who he thinks he is that's his problem but who he is for me is God you know so uh now what happens is is absolutely fascinating at this moment he says "Well you're going too slowly and if you want to do that you better go on on this you know the um parallel road and not on the throughway." I said "Yes officer." And then he gives me back the license and registration and the interesting thing is he doesn't want to leave at that moment because he's felt that thing he's felt that feeling that has been of my feeling towards him just in this very gentle feeling of presence of love so he says to me "Great car you've got here." See because there are certain things that men can talk about that are acceptable you know under those conditions so then I get out and we sort of spit and we kick the tires and we talk about straight eights and you know slant sixes and how they don't make them like they used to and we you know do all that stuff and then we run out of that you see and I'm enjoying I mean he's Krishna I'll take him whatever he can talk about anything he wants what difference does it make to me and so finally he finishes and he says now we've run out of things we can do at this moment he's either got to throw off the veil and say I'm Krishna because he's got nothing else to do as a state trooper i mean there's no other roles we have available to us so he says well be gone with you i said all right that sounded strange so I got in my car and he walked back to his cruiser and I started to drive away and I looked in the mirror and he was waving at me and I thought "Oh come on state troopers don't wave." You know he was like giving himself away i sort of knew he just blew his cover so what I learned from situations like that and what's from what has happened in my own life was that when I was capable of looking at another human being in a way that I could appreciate their beauty as a human being just appreciate them i mean often times we are so interactive with people we're busy reacting to each other but if you sit back in a corner and just look at another human being like sit in the lobby and just watch people and appreciate the incredible beauty of the human condition of each person that has taken birth like a soul has taken birth and is attempting to live with light is attempting to be beautiful is attempting to have joy in their life and happiness beings don't want to create suffering inherently and you just look at the struggle and what they go through and how much pain and you can see the pain in the muscles of their face and in their eyes and you just look and you see just what a courageous existence it is for a being to be a human and you look at the human with such compassion and such love and such beauty just in the generic sense of human and then appreciate each one's uniqueness in the same way you would appreciate pine trees and oak trees and elm trees and then notice what happens in your relationships with people because if there is one thing that a person needs from another human being it's to be appreciated it's to be listened to it's to be heard to be appreciated just as you are not as I would make you i work uh about half of my time working with people that have AIDS or cancer as they're dying and I hold them as they're dying and I talk with them and I'm with them now I'll deal with this more tomorrow in the how can I help section but when I meet such a being they have a certain symbolic value in my world they are a dying person with AIDS and I have a certain symbolic value i'm a person who's come to help them die if we stay at that level if I stay in my role and they stay in their role we stay separated from one another and there the relationship can be very kind but it doesn't feed either one of us and you will see that people who do helping to other human beings who stay in their role of helper ultimately burn out they burn out because they're not being fed by the interaction and what I realized at some point was that what was required was that I had to open my heart to this person and go behind the roles that we were both caught in and see beyond instead of like when Al identifies um Jesse Helms with his actions if I identify this being with his AIDS I am trapping him in being somebody with AIDS now he is somebody with AIDS but beyond that he's a being and when I can find --- tionships for efficiency we enter into these conspiracies i'll make believe you are who you think you are if you will make believe I am who I think I am and we say well that's efficient i know her she's Doris and I know him he's Sam and Sam is Sam and Doris is Doris and all the parts of Sam it's like cookie cutting when you cut the cookie and then all the stuff around it you push away all the stuff that doesn't fit into my model of Darus becomes irrelevant in you so that when you're with me I'm only getting one little facet of who you are because my mind only lets that in and the interesting thing is what is it like to be with another human being where you don't impose models on each other of who everybody is all the time so you listen aresh to hear who you're meeting and allow another person to change I mean this happens when parents deal with teenagers I mean a teenager is one person and then suddenly the endocrine system starts to become activated and they're another person and it's very hard for the parent to recognize that this is the same human being they just keep forcing the child back into the mold you always did this before why aren't you doing it and it's the person's a different person so um in our relationships with each other we begin to see how much we get trapped in the kinds of things that make us into objects for each other instead of subject and we start to see this is a kind of a curriculum for us to break through the subject object relationship with another human being now sometimes if you're lucky you find another human being who wants to break through it with you and that in the spiritual tradition is called the satsang or the sa it's the community of beings who say let's be together in order to awaken out of the illusion of our separateness that's what what a sa is about it's a spiritual community and relationships where you're lucky enough to have a partner that says "Let's use our relationship in order to awaken and let's use it in order to get free of the traps of our own mind so that we can really be together in truth behind the dramas behind the symbology so we can be together as the spirit behind the form it's an incredibly exciting adventure for human relationships it's the most profound yoga that I know of and it's also the hardest one because what it does is it keeps the relationship right on the fine line between chaos and cosmos it's not a secure thing you can't settle in and say "Well you're always this way." Because the person may not be that and one of the criteria for being in a relationship in which you are trying to to use it to awaken is the the simple rule is the rule of truth and truth is heavy to deal with in human relationships and I to sit down with another human being and share truth now I don't mean truth in the beating a person over the head see and in most contracts between human beings truth is not the is not required what is required is you don't say things that will hurt them you don't say things that will upset them you allow them to be who they are now there is a way in which I say "Look I am who I am but let's enter into this contract in which we will be straight with each other." And I've sat with people and I'll tell you how scary and far out it can get you just sit with somebody for about five hours and you face them and I've done this with husbands and wives and all kinds of people and you just take turns asking if there is anything you can bring to mind that would be difficult or uncomfortable to share with me share it now just feel the pain of that thought even think of what that brings to mind just the thought of it i mean I'm not going to tell her that oh my god no because what it does is just that question brings forth all the stuff in your mind that you wouldn't share with another human being because everybody's got that stuff now it's interesting it is not the stuff itself it is the fear of sharing it that's what cuts you off from another human being because when I have a thought that I can't tell you what happens is a little part of my mind makes you object it keeps you at a distance from me and I find after a while that if I really want to enter into a relationship of living truth I can't afford the lie any longer it's costing more it makes because every one of those lies deadens the relationship it just takes a little bit of it and it makes it a little dead a little der a little der because it's the part where the other person's object and I've watched relationships where people start to talk and where people start to share this stuff and I mean I was a therapist for years so I've heard all the stuff i mean what are you going to tell somebody i I masturbate i had sex with somebody else i want to kill you i'm thinking of eating you alive i don't know i mean you know I pick my nose i uh you know I have these weird sexual thing what could it be it's stuff it's stuff yes well the question the question is are we talking about truth or honesty um I'm honest with you because what is truth yeah i I think I would I think you're absolutely right i think I would rather say let us be honest with one another all right but in a way we are approaching a truthful relationship because we are cutting through the the conceptual structures that are keeping us from the being together in truth which is the non-conceptual way of being together it's why Gandhi's life autobiography was called experiments with truth it was that experiment of learning how to move towards truth by honesty as a vehicle but I huhar by sharing by sharing and by sharing but sharing honestly now when you look around at your relationships you will see how few of your relationships have this contractual agreement the contractual agreement is I won't bug you you don't bug me i have my privacy you have your privacy it's all wonderful it works it's efficient but you end up alone and the interesting question is if you're going to use relationships to break out of the alienated state it is scary business but the reward of it is incredible because each thing when you tell when you're when you enter into a contract with somebody that says "Look let's wake up let's really attempt to be honest with one another and to come as clear as we can and to share as much as we can." At first it's very scary and the minute the stuff comes into conceptual form now it isn't always that way sometimes it's too scary i had a couple which they said they came to me and they said "We would like you to marry us." And I said "Well I really only like to marry people who want to enter into a relationship where they want to awaken together." Oh we want to awaken together i said "Well awakening together is pretty tricky because you have to be honest with one another oh we want to be honest with each other i said 'Well in being honest with each other you have to share the things you might not want to share oh we want to do that she was very adamant she wanted to do that i said all right why don't we just try a little experiment why don't we just face each other and I said to him if there's anything that you can say that you wouldn't say say it you know anything be different he says "Well when you were out of town last year Carol your best friend came over and one thing led to another and we had oral sex." She said "You bastard." And she turned him off so fast i don't think I can forgive you you've just you've destroyed the fabric of our relationship what he had destroyed see it was interesting because the fact that he had done that with her created in him a place in his mind in which she became an object his this partner because this is something he couldn't tell her so she was out there they were living with that which was like it was like a poison in the relationship and the minute she brought he brought that poison out she said "I can't live into in this situation." I said "Well you have three choices he's an absolute rat you can leave him you can do what often people do which is even more horrible you can say "Well I'll try to forgive you." Which means that for the rest of your life you can say every time "Well I tried to forgive you but it's very hard." You know you can hold it over them for the rest of your life or you can say "Look we're human we all blow it at what the hell here we are let's go." Okay see and it's an interesting one because in in truth what happened was that she said "Oh I want the third i'm going to let go completely." and she didn't and a year later they got divorced as you begin to see where you're going with human relationships and you want to awaken out of your own separateness and your own isolation to the extent you have a choice you begin to look for people to be around where you have some choice you intend to be with people that will want to enter into some contract to awaken through truth and sharing and this can be I mean like the SA foundation is a very interesting experiment i I know some of you are on on boards of directors our board is a very interesting board there's there are 18 of us on the board this is made up of doctors and uh uh professors and all kinds of people uh some from India some from the states our board meeting goes for the the summer board meeting goes for uh seven days the first two days are the first day is a day of meditation in which we all quiet down get here and we do some practices some meditative practices then we start the process of circle sharing the next day we start going around the circle each person bringing everybody up to date about what's happening in their life my children what's happened to my family what's happened in my work etc then we start going around deeper what are the things that are keeping me stuck at this moment oh then it gets interesting then as we go around the circle what is it about anybody else in this group that is catching me see like for example we had a committee together but the you didn't ever call a meeting and you really screwed up that committee do I tell you that or don't I tell you that right or you know you always come off sort of halfcock i don't really know what you're talking about or you went to Guatemala and then you made a statement in the press that has caused some real problems for us and maybe we don't think we should trust you to go to Guatemala these are our board our fellow board members and we begin to see that we for us to get straight with each other so that that board will have the power of this of a center of a powerful organization we are setting the criteria that we're going to be straight and clear with each other now there are very few boards that any of you have ever been on that have demanded that kind of criteria everybody comes in as an expert everybody knows everybody leaves each other's territory alone and the result is you come to a board meeting you serve you feel like you're a good guy and you go away but you didn't get fed by the process we come out of those meetings much more vibrant and alive and we take breaks to play volleyball every few hours so we won't get lost in the shuffle and then we shift our game of who we are at that moment that kind of an experiment of an intentional community that comes together in order to awaken see we're coming together in order to awaken through doing service okay it's time to stop oh oh I'm sorry i thought I thought I was sorry i blew it again okay well thank you uh yeah thanks [Music] just be here now