Ram Dass: Mystic Firewater and Self-Alchemy — Part 1, 1993

[Music] be here. Now, [Music] >> what I heard these few days are a set of beliefs that we feel are somewhat inevitable. On the negative side, the imminence of disaster if we don't make a change. And on the positive side, the exciting irrevocable changes that we sense are occurring through the way in which technology and everything summates to bring us into other plains of consciousness. I want to immunize us against what's in store for us because uh Barbara used the image of birth. While I haven't given birth, I have been present at many births and there is an incredible amount of pain. And it is ecstasy, but it's also pain. And the predicament is that when you expect it all to be beautiful too soon and then it isn't and you've only got the belief system that it's all already happened, you're incredibly vulnerable to despair and to a feeling like it all didn't work. I think the work we're called upon to do is incredibly interesting. But I think it's really demanding work. I think it demands that out of our compassion for all beings, for the future, for the earth, we work on ourselves with great joy, but with very singleointed effort because the vulnerability of each of our minds to get trapped into the old habits of getting caught into the world of good and evil, of dark and light, of success, and failure. We are tremendously vulnerable to that. And while I think in this room there is a shared awakening to our predicament, there is not enlightenment. We're not home free. We just know of the possibility. We have yet to become the possibility. And this is really where the fun begins. And I've got an expression, if you like the 60s, you'll love the '9s. And I want to go back and and say why I feel that way. Most of the speakers have spoken about planes of consciousness. And each of us probably in our own anecdotal history can recall vivid example of our being trapped in various plains of consciousness. Prior to the 60s, I really thought who I thought I was was real. I thought I was really a young upwardly mobile psychology professor and I was very much on the physical plane. So, as I was growing bald, I had a long piece of hair I wore curled around my head. And I always was aware of which way the wind was blowing because my identity was deeply invested in my physical existence. It was also deeply invested in my psychological in existence. I had been an analysis for thousands of incarnations. It seemed I had enriched and an analyst immeasurably and I had bought the whole thing. So I was teaching Freudian theory and I was an analytic trainee and when I looked at people I didn't really see people. I just saw stages of psychosexual development that was all real. It was all mediated by my thinking mind. The world was object to me and I was object to me. Object to be manipulated in order to bring about a cerse of the pain. And the predicament was that I kept looking at the myths. I had won by the myths of the culture and yet it didn't feel good. I had what it could offer. I had I had a advanced degree. I had a position at a status university. I had an airplane and a sports car and a motorcycle and I had beautiful companions and I had antiques and I had the whole shtick. But in the bathtub I was still depressed and I just assumed that was all you got. That was it. And I thought I'm going to have tenure here. I'm this is what I'm going to have for the rest of my life. So I might as well settle for it. But then the 60s came along and along with it this very wild Irishman named Timothy Liry who took pity on me as a kind of middle class Jewish neurotic. He wasn't. I was. He was a Irish buccaneer. He introduced me to the psilocyb mushrooms. What that introduced me to was the realization that I wasn't who I thought I was. It introduced me to a connection to a part of my being back into the intuitive heart, into the deeper spiritual essence of my being. Because my adult consciousness, I'd never even known this existed. Because as a social scientist, I took an anthropological view towards religious literature, saw religion as the creation of the human mind to avoid the fear of death. And as Freud said, it was sublimated sexuality anyway. And I was a behaviorist. So I studied the humans from outside in and I never got in deeper than the hierarchy of needs, motivational hierarchy. So I taught motivational theory and we were the sum of our motives. For me as a psychologist, personality was real. And a moment later or a few hours later, it was only relatively real. And that's what's called an awakening. Now, the effect of that for all of us at that time was once we saw that it wasn't the way we thought it was and that how it was was far more awesome and beautiful and exquisite as we touched other plains of consciousness. We assumed that since we had seen it, it would only be a matter of moments before everybody saw it. I remember we had a chart on the wall, Kim and I and Ralph, of how soon everybody would get enlightened. It involved things like putting LSD in the water system, but it was it was basically designed to and because what we had opened to allowed us to break through the ways in which we saw other people through the veil of the fearddriven paranoia that comes from getting trapped in one's separateness. And when we broke out of that, we suddenly were experiencing the presence of love. We were experiencing the presence of shared awareness. We were experiencing a compassion that was not pity and not kindness, but it was a compassion born of identifying with the people around you. I think that experience was for on a Friday night. I don't remember it was March 6th and um on Monday I had to go back and teach human motivation again and I remember the pain of the dissonance between what I was teaching and what I now had experienced and I would say that in the 32 years now that pain of lack of integrity of my being has never fully gone. gone away because I am still growing into the divinity that I know myself to be. And yet I don't act in full harmony with what I know. I thought it would all die away and integrity would just emerge. I was very naive. I was not alone. Those were the moments when because we saw through the fragility of social institutions of vertical patriarchal social institutions we thought they would dissolve. We surrounded the Pentagon and owned and expected it to rise. I mean there were incredible things that did happen. I mean not all connected with psychedelics but it was just a part of the web of that moment of civil rights. of sexual freedom, although that got the levels of what freedom meant got a little confused, of alternative economic systems, of bartering, of communes, and I smiled at Patricia's reference to communes, her not liking them. I They did turn into a psychological free-for-all after a while. I like communities better than commun. and the antivietnam movement because there was a sense of the possibility of justice in the world and we were going to go and have it and get it and demand it. We were going to demand love. We were going to demand justice because we saw how it could be. We felt if everybody saw what we saw, everybody would want it and we would have what we wanted. Although we yet hadn't integrated it into our own lives. We weren't yet walking our talk. The result was that we won battles, but we didn't win the war. In fact, we were primarily responsible for creating Ronald Reagan and George Bush. We gave the right, we gave fundamentalism and the reactionary side of America the fear motivation because what we represented was chaos to them. We represented the loss of the power structure in which they were winning and they were not going to let it go without a fight. And what I experienced in the last 20 years was this violent and dramatic pendulum movement in which the absolute beauty by 67 and8 it had started to turn. the summer of love. It had started to turn actually because as the psychedelic and the rock and roll minstrels carried the message and the the whole quality of the game kept evolving and it started to have power and juice. Then what happens when something is noticeable as having power? A lot of things happen. First of all, a lot of people try to rip off that power by playing with that field. So you had the new age and these were there was a new age in the sense that these people weren't really people that were working on themselves. They were people that were adopting the language and the metaphor and selling it back to you. And the other side is because it did involve the freedom of human consciousness and the freedom from vertical systems because it fa it placed so much emphasis on the individual as opposed to the social institutions. It was considered anarctic by Jay Edgar Hoover and many others and a major threat to the stability of this country for us for whom the psychedelics had been sacramental. So what I experienced in the 60s, late60s and early 70s there was then the great movement towards Eastern spirituality and there were all the the guru scenes. In each thing there was some truth and there was also incredible fad. You could feel the fad. You could feel people wanting the cheap trip. They their yearning wasn't that great. There was yearning and there was seeing the possibility but it wasn't very strong. And by the middle 70s and then through the 80s the whole game changed tremendously. I mean like in the early 70s I used to speak at most colleges. By the late 70s I never got invited to a college. All the college students were drinking beer and trying to become engineers or lawyers. The 60s and psychedelics were seen as some error blip on the continuous achievement of the culture. what was happening to the country really hurt my heart a lot. And I saw that part of what we had done of of being oppressed by social structures by emphasizing individualism had turned into a religion in our culture that started to destroy not only the bad institutions but the good ones as well. So I myself, I remember in the 60s I was a world apart in consciousness from my family, my primary family, my original family. And I thought, well, you know, I've got to go ahead. What can they know? And off I went. And that attitude of not honoring that genetic lineage if you will that has led I mean that isn't the only cause of it. Mobility has done it. Affluence has done it. There's a whole lot of variables always. There are a lot of variables. I mean I'm only talking about things I've been intimately involved with. But realize this is a multi-etermined situation all the time. It's like watching the hand of God write if you stand back far enough and it's overdetermined. God writes with a heavy hand. But whatever it was, we started to throw out the baby with the bath. If to shift metaphors, we started to throw out the family so that suddenly young couples were having babies and they had no uncles and aunts as babysitters and they had no economic stability in the community. and we left villages and go to cities. I mean that's from the industrial revolution on and cities started to become places in which you were isolated and the level of alienation and the whole model through the 80s what's in it for me. I can have a BMW no matter who doesn't have what? because I have a right to it because I'm part of this system. And this system says you that if everybody takes all they can get, everybody will have enough. It's called the trickle down theory. The problem is the trickle down theory is based on an assumption of that the that compassion and caring is stronger than greed. And that's a risky assumption about human nature. And that's part of why there is a balance between business and government. Business without government is piracy and government without business is oppression. I mean they they really need each other. So through the 80s I never got invited to colleges. I had a group of people who come to hear me who were all growing old with me. What's interesting to me now is that I am being invited to high schools. [Applause] What's interesting to me now is that in the late 70s I became aware that my father was old and needed some support. My stepmother was with him. They needed some support and I was uh mobile and so I moved into the basement of their nice house and I used it as my base camp to make sure that they were just the scene was taken care. I mean there was money so I didn't have to do the nursing but I was handling the administration of the game and making sure everybody was comfortable. And I did that for my father's last eight years. I helped my stepmother die and then I helped my father die and I did the executive, the estate and the whole trip. And I remember the stages I went through in doing that. I remember that at first when I did it, I did it like somebody came up to me and said, "Aren't you wonderful to be taking care of dad like that or your father?" And I would say, "Well, somebody has to do it. can hear that long suffering, slightly pitting. Aren't I a good person to be doing this? Then it shifted gears and I started to think of taking care of my father as karma yoga. Dad, you're my yoga. I'm taking care of you to get enlightened. Turn over. And it was interesting that by the end of the whole process, there was just dad and I doing what we did. I was no longer doing something for somebody. That level of was going on, but the level we were meeting in had nothing to do with that. We were just two beings hanging out. And it just happened he was my father and I was his child. and he had taken care of me when I was little and needed my diapers changed and now I took care of him when he was old and needed his diapers changed and I was totally relaxed with it and he was relaxed with it and there was great beauty in our moment again. There's one other little image in that that I just want to throw in. Near the end of his life, he died at 90. near the end of his life, he started to go inward a lot. And he used to smile. He just smile. He was like a Buddha. And we'd rub him and massage him and I just sit and hold his hand. And one of the family came and said, "Hi, how you doing?" And dad just smiled at him. Guy went out of the room and he said, "That son of a he still won't talk to me." And then my aunt who loved my father came and said, "George, how are you doing?" And he just smiled at her and she said, "Oh, George, what have they done to you? Where have you gone there? Dad and I were holding hands, watching the sunset, both of us smiling." I saw this bizarre predicament that both of those other people were miserable because they were holding on to a model of who he was. And he and I were totally happy because we were just being with who he is. And it really has to do with hold on tightly, let go lightly. And those of you that have worked with anybody with Alzheimer's knows that's one of the secrets of the game of how quickly you can let go of how it was five minutes ago and be fully in the moment. What a wonderful training program. There's a great story I heard which is appropriate to me now a little bit. I'm 60 going to be 62 now. I get on the train. And I say, "May I have the senior citizen ticket?" First time I did, they didn't ask me for identification, which I was feeling guilty cuz I felt like the first time when I was 18 and I asked for a drink, you know, they're going to say, "You're not 60." You know, they he said, "Sure." I was horrified. But there's a man walking down the street, an older man like me. There's a frog, and the frog says, could you help me out? Man looks around. He looks down. He sees the frog. He says, "Did you speak to me?" Frog says, "Yeah. Uh, I wonder if you could help me out." Well, what exactly do you want? Well, I'm under a curse and if you would kiss me, I will turn into an absolutely beautiful young lady and I will serve you in ways you can't imagine. I'll make you so happy. Not only will I cook for you, but I will be in your bed and I'll spend years with you. I'll make you so happy. Moment the man reaches down, picks up the frog and sticks it in his pocket and walks on. After a little while, the frog says from the pocket, "Hey, you forgot to kiss me." The man says, "At my age, it's more interesting to have a talking frog." [Laughter] By 1967, when I realized that whatever we knew about psychedelics, whatever it was, it wasn't good enough. I saw the predicament was that I knew how to flip planes of consciousness. I knew how to go from the physical psychological through the astral through into the causal plains into the plains of pure idea into the kind of emptiness states or approximations of that and into oneness and all the different planes. I mean there are infinite number of planes but I some of the more gross ones I was familiar with. predicament was that I always came down because the habits of my identifying with myself on the physical, so psychological, social plane were so deeply ingrained in me that I was always looking at high from here. And so I was a lot like the person who goes up to the top of the mountain and sees the village you've lived in all your life and then you see that you've been doing all of this thing. You see the whole pattern of your existence and then you come down from the mountain. But what you're left with then is not the top of the mountain. You're left with the memory of the top of the mountain. And you're here but you've got a memory. And those memories are better than nothing, but they're a long way from living simultaneously at the top of the mountain and in the village. Do you hear that issue? So when I went to India, I went really with uh considerable despair and not a hell of a lot of hope because uh Alan Ginsburgg had already gone to India and Tim Liry had already gone to India and they came back and they were still Alan Ginsburg and Tim Liry and all my acid buddies were fascinating when we were all high and when we weren't we were all as neurotic as we ever were. It was clearly doing something. But whatever it was, we didn't know the maps. We couldn't read the maps. And yet all this Huxley gave us the Tibetan book of the dead and and there was the Gita and the Upanishads and there was on and on and on and the Gnostic writings and you know there were just Sufi writings and we were just drowning on all this these maps of all this stuff and they we knew that everybody that was writing those things knew what was happening to us. But somehow we couldn't figure out or we didn't have the discipline because we were still following what Gurjief called the way of the sly man trying to get it for nothing. And I'm not trying to be righteous here. I mean, if I could have had it, I would have. I don't think it's better to work for something if you can have it. But I couldn't. But I went to India in the hopes maybe there was somebody who could read the maps. And you meet the drunk and you say, "Could this be the map reader?" My god, you know what's And I met my drunk. I met my crazy man, my guru, and he was absolutely offthe-wall. I mean, for me, uh, a western middle class intellectual to meet a guy who's whose dot is fallen off all the time, who's from the jungle, who couldn't care less about anything, who will sit and as well as on a table. I mean, to take that on as a role model is tricky business, you know. You know, there are a number of experiences in your life, and I'm sure every one of you has had this, where you see out of the corner of your eye the way the game is being played, and you realize the way you're upon in it. You realize that the level you think you are isn't the level it's at. You're being had, so to speak. And I'm aware of that for my whole life most of the time. Now then it was quite a surprise. I mean I really thought I was going in search of the guru and that I found the guru. It turned out I mean that wasn't the way it was at all. I mean the delicious confrontative moment when I met him which I've written about adnauseium and I've told in every for so many 25 years now and I feel like giving an aa testimony you know how I found god when I surrendered the quickie version I'm on the plains in India with a friend he's got to go up to the mountains to see his guru he's a Hindu guru we've been in Buddhist temples. I like the cleanness and neatness of Buddhism. Hinduism seems very schllock. It's all calendar art and fluorescent lights and I don't want anything to do with it. He wants to use the car that I'm taking care of for a friend. So, I'm trapped and I'm burned out on hashish and I really want to go home and I've never found anybody and I'm discouraged and I figure I'll become a shoe salesman or something, you know? I mean, I've been thrown out of Harvard so I don't have that to go back to and I drugs aren't working. So what'll I do, Nick? So I'm not in a good state. And my mother had died the previous February in Boston of a spleen, enlarged spleen. Her bone marrow stopped producing blood and uh they removed the spleen and she died. Then four months later, I went off to India. So we stay overnight on the planes going up to the mountains. And during the night, I go out to go to the toilet and I'm under the stars and the stars are very present and I think about my mother. She comes very strongly to mine and Freudians have had no end of fun with the fact that I'm peeing and thinking about my mother, you know. But leaving that aside, the next day I don't tell anybody. I just go back to bed. And the next day I continue up to the mountain with my friend and we come to this little temple and he gets out. He's crying. He's going to see his guru and I'm just like, "Oh, you know, let's get this over with." People surround the car and they say, uh, he's up there and this guy's out of the car and I don't even want to get out of the car and they say, "Come on." And so I get out and stumble up this path and under a tree is sitting this uh old man with a blanket around him and about eight people around him and my young friend is doing dunder prrenam. He's out flat on his face touching this guy's feet. And I think, well, I sure as hell am not going to do that. And I'm sort of sitting with my standing with my arms crossed, sort of watching this scene as a kind of an anthropological dig sort of thing, you know. He looks up at me and he says in Hindi, which gets translated, you came in a big car, which was my friend's car, which was a Land Rover, which was very expensive in those days. And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "You'll give it to me?" And I thought, you know, I've been connected with Jewish charities for years, and I've never been hustled this fast in my whole life. You know, this is absolutely incredible. And this young fellow said, "If you want it, you can have it." And I said, "You can't do that." I'm getting very And everybody's laughing at me and I'm getting incredibly paranoid. So he said, "You made a lot of money in America." That got my ego singing. I said, "Well, yes." Cuz I I said, "Well, yes." And he said, "Well, you'll buy one like it for me." I mean, can you imagine how unlikely that was? And I said, "Well, maybe. I mean, you don't know what's going to happen, you know." So then he said, "Take them and feed them." And then we were taken off and fed. And then I was called back. He wants to see you. And I came back and he said, "Sit down." And I sat down. I still wouldn't touch him or, you know, I was going to put up with it. And he sat really close to me and he looked at me and he said in Hindi, it was a translator sitting right there cuz he said, "You were out under the stars last night." I said, "Yeah." I mean, the likelihood you're going to be out under the stars is pretty good, you know? I mean, what the hell? Anybody? That's Wow. You don't say. Yeah. I mean, sure. Great, man. That's wonderful. Yes. So, he closed his eyes for a second. He said, "You're thinking about your mother. Now, just put yourself in my position. Harvard professor of psychology. I've got, you know, I've got my virginity to protect here. I've got my social science." And this is a quaint little man. And how does he know that? I haven't told anybody that. So I said, "Yeah." Closed his eyes. He said, "She died last year." Said, "Yeah." And I could feel the sweat started to come down my arms and my spine started to tingle and the whole funny feel very strange feeling. And he said um she got very big in the belly before she died. I said that was all in Hindi. And then he leaned forward really close to me and in English which was bizarre because he never spoke English later he said spleen and I fell apart. I mean it just blew my mind. And that's what literally blowing the mind is about. I mean, usually you use it as a kind of a cute expression, but it just gave up my mind. No matter how paranoid I got. I mean, I went through my CIA fantasies, you know, like he's going to push a button and the Earth opens up and there are files and, you know, this is cuz, you know, from science fiction, but there was no way. I mean, this was too far off the wall. And I just gave up. And he stayed there just looking at me. And I felt this violent wrenching in my chest. And I started to cry. It was like something opened that was very ancient and closed. And I started to sob and so and so and so. I cried for about 2 days and I don't know what I was crying about. It was like I was home or something like that. And they took care of me and I didn't leave that place for 5 months except once I had to go to Delhi for my own visa. This was three months later and by then I was so high I was doing yoga. I was doing pranayyam like four hours a day and I knew those weren't yogic food. I just knew it and they knew it. But I wanted those biscuits. I really wanted them. I looked in this direction very holyike and I slowly moved the dish because there was a wall here. I moved it over here and I uh took the biscuits and palmed them and then the next day I went back by the bus the eight hours up to the mountains and I came to my guru and I bent kneelled down. Now I would love to touch his feet and kneel down and he grabbed my beard and he pulled it up and he looked at me he said how'd you like the biscuits? So that that suggestion we've had, imagine that everybody somebody knows everything about you is what I've been living with since 1967. I just I can't go into the bathroom and close the door and assume he isn't there. That's the problem, you know. And he's he's even dead and I can't assume that. It's a real drag, you know, cuz Ramano Maharshi, one of the great saints, was dying and everybody said, "Don't leave us. Don't leave us." He said, "Don't be silly. Where could I go? I'm just dropping my body. It's no big deal. I'm selling the Ford, you know. So then I started to study Raja Yoga and Patanali's Ashtang Yoga. I mean that that's same thing but I mean I started to study it intensively and I had good teachings from other people. He he made sure I had good teachers and I really started to really believe what I was reading in Patanali that you know you could go inside other people's minds and make them do things. And so I thought I mean I was alone in a temple and it was icy cold up there in the mountains. So at night I'd have fantasies. See, I'd get really anxious at times and I'd I'd want to leave, you know, because as good as it was, it was a real deprivation situation for me. I was doing nine-day fasts and and it was cold and I had a cold brazier and I was getting lungs conditions from that at night. And so I take out my return ticket when I knew the bus was going to go by each day and I'd hold the ticket. It's like I became like those uh cargo cult people, you know. I worship the bus that went off to Nanal, you know, every night I'd look at it and think I could be on that, you know, and then I I'd fantasy I got there and then I took the plane and then I ended up at a Grateful Dead concert and wow, you know, then I thought and then what? Then I'd think, gee, I wish I was in India. So, here I am. So, I put the ticket away and sit down and do my yoga. But as I got all these uh started to get all these condundalini experience, I thought I'm going to get all these powers. What'll I do with them? See, which is a discussion we've been having a little bit in the past few days. I thought, well, I'll do good obviously cuz I'm good. If nothing else, I'm good. It's a final trap I want you to know. But I really am good at that trap. Righteousness is a very delicate issue. So I thought, well, I'll Lyndon Johnson was president then. So I thought, well, I'll teleport. I'll move my mind and I will become I'll just appear in his study. You know, I'll just appear and I'll just say, "Don't get nervous, Mr. President. Don't push the button. They won't see me. They'll think you're crazy. I've just come to help you. to make decisions that are more compassionate because you're really screwing up rather badly. And then I just I started to think of all the decisions I'd make. But as I thought, as I mean the hours wore on and I wo it, it got more and more complicated. I realized how totally ignorant I was about economics and about the things that made the game go round. And by the end, I had created such a mess in the world that I decided I didn't want any powers at that level because I was definitely going to screw up because it was a much more complex game than the one that I was ready to play somewhere along the way. Well, then I went back to the States and then I went back to India and I went back to the States and I've done that maybe 14 times I guess many many years and the path that I had gotten hold of in India which came out of traditional Hindu and monastic traditions in Buddhism was basically the path of renunciation. which was B which assumed that the power of the habits and the desires on the physical plane and the psychological plane are so strong that even to have commerce with them at all is almost dooming your spiritual practice to fail. Because if your job is to find a way to be comfortable in these other planes, the planes where you're one or where it's empty, and I can talk about one and zero as time goes on, but if you wanted to get comfortable in those planes, you had to sort of for a little while get free of the tremendous pull of the worldly plains, you had to pull back from the marketplace and go up the mountain or go into the monastery or go into the cave or do something. Now I've just come from India about two weeks ago and one of the places I was at was the Orurabindo ashram in Pondicherry which is a fascinating experiment. There are two places called Oruraveville and Pondicherry. These are two different experiments. And the Pondicherry one has 2,000 people living there from birth to grave. And they are beautiful people and they're all celibate and they live there and they I guess they don't give birth. Somebody else gives birth and comes in. Um and they um they don't seem to be frustrated. But what happened to me was because I'm a westerner with my predelections towards personality that at the end of years of renunciation really basically what I was was a horny celibate. I mean I was busy not having sex. It was not like I was with God. I was busy not having sex. If you can understand like at one point my guru said Ramdas you shouldn't have anything to do with money. So I said great so I had this money so I had said to a friend of mine would you take care of my money so that when I got in the bus he pay so I had a bag man so I didn't have to touch money. Then I realized that what he was saying was something much more interesting than that. And even now part of my work because ultimately as you'll understand once you taste what's possible for each of us the zeal to to be it gets stronger and stronger and stronger. And as that zeal gets stronger you start to use the things that catch you as your vehicle for getting free. See, at first you want to get high. You want bliss and rapture. And then what happens is you realize that the getting high, you know how to do. The predicament is why you come down, not how to get high. You know those planes are there, but and it's not and you know that they are your natural state. That's what it is. It's not like something outside of yourself. It's like you're connecting to yourself, but then the veil covers it again. And so you're interested in what makes the veil so strong. What makes your big head so hard, so to speak. And when you're interested in that, your attention shifts from what gets you high to what brings you down. And then you start to get fascinated and focus on what catches you. And that becomes the work to look at what catches you. It's called your aversions and your attractions because it's those aversions and attractions that are the cause of the suffering. They're the cause of what catches you. So you start to it flips around and you're not asking for pain and suffering, but when it comes along it's it shows you that you still got a stash of clinging and so you start to look at the world a different way at least regarding your own suffering. Now I'm just talking about your own suffering now. So where before when you got angry you got angry because you got angry because you wanted to be happy. Now you get angry and you say why am I getting angry? What am I clinging to that's making me angry? I'm angry because this person isn't fulfilling the model of how I think they ought to be. So I'm angry. I'm saying if I were God, I would have made you different. How presumptuous of me to know why you are the way you are. How do I know? I'm so busy deciding how you should be. And I would see that it was my models that were causing me the suffering. It wasn't the way the person was. If they were a thief, they were just being a thief. They were thiefness. My getting uptight about their being a thief is my problem, not theirs. It's a poem from uh Jalaladine Roomie, great mystic poet. He's talking about fire and water because when you want to get high and be in bliss, you want to swim and you want to go to the pool and you know, I love water. I got to stay have a hot tub from California. says, "If you're a friend of God, fire is your water. You should wish to have a 100,000 sets of moth wings so you could burn them away one set a night. The moth sees light and goes into fire. You should see fire and go towards the light. Fire is what of God is world consuming water world protecting. Somehow each gives the appearance of the other to those eyes you have now. Meaning after awakening what looks like water burns. What looks like fire is a great relief to be inside. It's a bizarre reversal. It's like what's night for one person becomes daylight for someone else that the minute you start to awaken your curriculum shifts. The meaning of your acts. We've talked about this this weekend. A number of the speakers have been very lucid in this point. that your curriculum shifts that you start to work with your anger, work with your depression. Around the mid70s, this issue of integrity was haunting me. The issue of living my life in a way that didn't acknowledge what I knew. It's the statement, the way I humorously refer to it is we're all one, but it's my television set and I am part of the small percentage of the universe of this world of the people of the five billion people in this world that uses an inordinately large amount of the resources. I am part of the wealthy middle class of America and I'm not wealthy but by standards of the world I'm wealthy because and I had to struggle with the question really the issue of suffering like today 35,000 children died of starvation and tomorrow another 35,000. Under those conditions, how happy can you be? How are you going to be happy? Are you going to be happy by averting your gaze? Let's not talk about that. Can't you will leave me alone for a little while about all that I gave at the office. I want to be happy. And I saw that that wasn't good enough. And I want to tell you, I mean, this is one of the most profound things I can say to you, that if you and I are going to be peace, if you and I are going to be the people that are going to help the evolutionary process happen, we have got to be able to look suffering right in the eye and not flicker a bit. And we have to be able to keep our hearts open in hell. It's not for the faint-hearted this game. And the only way you can do that is by living simultaneously on more than one plane of consciousness. When I was in India, there was a moment when Bangladesh was just falling apart and I wanted to take my Volkswagen over there to help as an ambulance. And my guru didn't tell me to do it or not do it. But he saw how agitated I was about it. He saw the agitation and he said, "Ramas, don't you see it's all perfect? It's just given a t-shirt based on that statement. It's all perfect." And and I said, "Perfect?" You know, like I was outraged. My righteousness was outraged. How can it be perfect if people are dying and suffering and being violated? there's injustice and he'd go, "Don't you see?" And yet he would cry over suffering and he would do things to alleviate suffering. And I began to try to embrace that paradox, the paradox of plains of consciousness in which they seem inconsistent. At one plane, it's perfect. It's the unfolding of law. It's beautiful. It involves curriculum. It involves evolution of the individual soul through all kinds of learning experiences that involve suffering and death and all. But if you're looking at it through the eyes of your separateness that is afraid of death and your individual rational mind, it looks like somebody really screwed up. And it's the trap of perspective. It's the trap of perspective. And the way in which you deal with suffering is to simultaneously realize that it's perfect and it stinks and that it hurts your heart. And there's also the cosmic giggle and that you do what you can to relieve suffering. And you sit in the place where nothing's happening. And you do your part to relieve suffering. Not cuz you're good, but because what else are you going to do? Because the person that's suffering is no longer them. I mean, as you play with plains of consciousness, you realize it isn't even us. You realize it's me. I work in Guatemala in villages that uh Rigberto Mento Menchu came from who just won the Nobel Prize as you probably know. Villages that have nothing from the violence. And I go to those villages and I sit with the people there and I see a woman holding a baby whose hair is showing the vitamin deficiency of the baby and they don't have the seeds. They've had drought and they don't have the seeds to plant if they had the hoe to cut the ground. They got nothing. And I come with my traveler's checks and my whole wonderful trip of doing good. And I look into her eyes. And we meet and we know each other. She's us. She's me. She's that part of me that's living out that storyline. And I'm that part of us that's me that's living out this story line. And I go away from that meeting feeling fed. And she goes away from that meeting feeling fed. And we do what we can on the physical plane to help each other. Whoever needs it. You got food here, you take it. Part of the art form of service is not getting trapped in being the helper, but keeping the other plane of consciousness going where you're meeting behind the drama all the