An archival 1990s Ram Dass talk in which he distils what he has come to understand at sixty-four. The first finding he names is that what he is will not die — that the physical body will, but that the recognition is irreversibly distinct from intellectual belief about it.
Transcript
be here. Now, [music] >> 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 holding 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 or five. 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 out. 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. There's wonderful nourishment for the soil. But it was through grace and through spiritual practice. In 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. 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 Rhonda, 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 because 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. that 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 longearned 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 Bonaris, 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 p. 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 so new way and I started to just drink up and drink into this culture. And I suddenly realized when I was in that Bernaris 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 stick. 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. Just be here now.