The Predicament of Modern Humanity

this is the 14th of um 36 City Tour and uh each night or every other night one or the other uh here we are again and each time I have to ask what am I doing here what are you doing here what business have we together and I began to realize that we have an extraordinary quality of business together because you and I both know something or we wouldn't be here I mean you wouldn't come to hear somebody called ramas just by chance you must know something that must be similar to what I think I know for you to want to come to have it reinforced and here you are sitting among a lot of people all of whom in some individual way probably think they're crazy see because of the way they feel and think and see the universe and here you are getting reinforcement I'm not alone here we all are it's a gathering of the Mad these are the last remnants of a failed experiment which astral storyline would you like these are the people that has seen the way and on them rests it all that's a good one I mean we're always milking these mythic identities you know we we buy one and then we take it seriously and the horror is when you live out the myth and you win and it feels lousy I mean you put all that juice into it like there's a study that says that people that make $10,000 this is a study that was done about realizing one's dreams people that make $115,000 say that if they had 50,000 they could realize their dreams people that have 50,000 say that if they had 100,000 they could realize their dreams now put that with the other statistic in answer to the question have you realized your dream 5% of the people making 15,000 said they had of the people making 100,000 6% said they head is it worth it [Music] you and I come together as a a quality of family a family that shares some appreciation of something let's start general for me personally this all unfolded or unwrapped Tred in the 60s in the' 60s I suddenly realized that I wasn't who I thought I was because I like everyone else that I knew had uh gone into somebody training when they got born because their parents thought they were somebody so of course they trained you to be somebody and we were all busy being somebody you somebody I'm somebody hi who are you I'm somebody okay okay you know and then who was more somebody than somebody else and that was more [Music] somebody and I woke up in the 60s and I thought Wow have I been had because this is only a creation of mind I'm in a prison of a structure a kind of a paradigm or a Mythic structure of reality that everybody says this is real my father says come down to reality my boy but even my boyness is only relatively real not only is that only relatively but his sense of reality is only relatively real in fact that he exists at all is only relatively real and that scares you to realize that what you thought was real turns out to be only relative ly real and that you and I are meeting as a speck of foam on an ocean wave or a star at dawn well most of us once we see we we began what happens first I think if you're like me is you start to get uneasy in your somebody it feels a little claustrophobic everybody see we enter into these conspiracies with everybody 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 don't shake the ship it's not very alive but it's safe but it feels a little constrained because you are and I am so much more than anything we could think we are so you begin to feel uneasy so you realize GFF the Russian philosopher said an interesting thing he said if you would escape from prison the first thing you must realize is you're in prison if you think you're free No Escape is possible it's a far image so something happened to me and it I'll and it was induced via psychedelics and therefore I obviously must honor psychedelics in a time when no is in Vogue so I do what I say no no no [Music] no and when I bring it into my mind I spell it k o w [Music] no so when you start to realize you aren't who you thought you were because you you are able to override the powerful habits of mind that everybody has agreed to as reality I mean I was watching a a press conference this morning between Bush and the press and they all were in this incredible conspiracy to Define reality a certain way and within that they were all very reasonable except it was totally psychotic [Applause] [Music] well when you first feel a little cramped by who you think you are you go to a therapist because cramp is usually neurotic so I feel cramped and the therapist helps you rearrange the furniture in the prison cell [Applause] because because the therapist thinks she or he is a therapist I mean how can you expect somebody to help somebody else Escape only nobody can help somebody Escape but the likelihood of a therapist being nobody well the really good ones are playing with it cuz when you realize you've been had you go into nobody training see that's why we're meeting we are in no body training and then you become nobody being somebody which is different than being somebody see cuz the first somebody you really think you are the next one you don't as Don Juan said in the Caston books you it's called controlled Folly you huff and you puff and you make believe it matters that's scary isn't it now wait a minute it matters we'll wait [Music] but if it doesn't matter will I be compassionate won't matter matters to me huh so then you go to the therapist and then you realize finally that you're going to first of all what you do is if you found a way to get out of the prison cell for like an afternoon in the Sun which you do through all kinds of methods I mean people do it through surfing they do it through sex they do it through drugs they do it through eating they do it through joining [Music] groups prayer meditation they transcend there's a trans they go high they get [Music] high and what I did was I decided I wanted to really get high because what this all was was just so I mean I had been so stuck in this and in such suffering that to come up out of it was so wonderful that out of it was wonderful and it stunk so I became a renunciate like get away from me I will have no Commerce with you I'm going to a cave be with God but I'll see you have you're an existing karmic entity you come with some stuff and all I ended up you know I ended up a horny celibate is when I ended up it's like you know not smoking you know I haven't smoked in 2 years 2 months 4 hours and 32 minutes the kind of people that die of not smoking and then I had this um uh spook friend Emanuel um Emanuel is a being that doesn't have a body um now some of you are you know well I don't know about that but I don't see why you should be prejudiced I mean see you get over prejudice against color and and age and all that stuff and you really think you're pretty liberal what if you don't have a body at all well I don't know about that well you sound like Jesse Helms I mean it's we're here we Bess people are here you got to be you're going to have to let us in sooner or later oh dear can God people be political do you think oh so Emanuel my friend who speaks through this woman named Pat rodast he's she channels Pat Emanuel and Emanuel is very charming and delightful and it's fun having a friend that doesn't have a body because um you know they tell you groovy things they know things you don't know not necessarily of course I mean you're got to realize that everybody that doesn't have a body isn't wise I mean a really jerk can die and then send back messages and like be a jerk you know and so yeah Buy Lincoln savings stock you know so you've got to trust your intuitive heart as to whether it's a you know a useful friend just like you do on this plane so um but Emanuel is a delight like when I said Emanuel what do I tell people about dying since I work with dying he gave me the best oneliner I have ever heard on Earth which is a lot to say he said ramas tell them that death is absolutely safe and let that reverberate through you for a while he said it's like taking off a tight shoe so when I said to Emanuel you know what am I doing here on Earth who made this mistake you know I mean I'm much too high to be here you know this is like everybody's got either greed hatred ill will sloth and toror agitation or doubt it's called the five hindrances those are your entry credentials and he said a wonderful thing he said ramdas you're in school why don't you try taking the curriculum why don't you try being human see I I had never thought of that cuz I was trying to get high and human wasn't high but then I realized that I wanted to be free not high and that free meant you couldn't stand anywhere which meant you had to stand everywhere which meant you had to be as much human as not human which is --- um it's in the center and it's more what the Chinese call the Sin Sin the the heart mind it's the it's the wisdom seat it's called the Atman in Hinduism the Buddha mind a Christ Consciousness um you know the still Small Voice Within uh it's the uh the love of Allah inside that part of us which the intuitive heart or mind we have um it has a problem all by itself in that it does doesn't really have much to do with our separateness so it treats our separateness rather shabby especially from our separateness point of view as you might imagine because the heart I mean take even the emotional heart when you fall in love with somebody what do you say what can I do for you just tell me what I can do for you I mean you want my car you want my house you want my life what do you want let me oh here the heart my heart goes out to you the heart Knows No Boundaries I had a far out experience last year I was teaching a course at St John the Divine in New York it's a beautiful place very powerful space and I was teaching it co-sponsored by the SAA foundation and uh St John the Divine open Center in WBAI and there were about two 200 250 uh something like that people like us and all of us in the course was a seven meeting course we had to go out and participate volunteer into either a homeless shelter or a homeless or soup kitchen or some political action around housing something like that and then we had to keep a diary and then we had open mic to discuss what we were learning one woman said I joined a was in a shelter but that's not what I'm in what's in my diary I want to share with you that every day for the past year I've gone out of my apartment and I've gone to the bus store and store and at the corner most days there is this man begging and she said I give him a quarter sometimes and sometimes I don't she says when I think about it I realize I sort of have a a budget in my mind I gave him the 34s already you know two days ago probably it's maybe 250 a week they've been doing this for a year she said but as a result of this course I began to examine I realized that I had never acknowledge his existence she said I started to look at why I hadn't and I realized that I was afraid she said so I asked myself what are you afraid of and she said I wasn't afraid he was going to rape me and I wasn't afraid he was going to steal my pocketbook after all we'd known each other for a year no she said I was afraid he'd end up living with me that if I open my heart to him where would be the boundaries I mean once you say somebody's family your family stay on the corner I'll give you 250 a week and every time the heart goes out wants to give away too much the mind says now wait a minute the Liles and the field stuff's great theoretically but you got health insurance it's interesting that we end up feeling a tension between our mind and our heart the deepest part of our heart and that tension is is where the Mind sees the heart as its enemy because it will destroy it it's like trunk periche saying Enlightenment is the ego's ultimate disappointment so beware somebody only somebody heard that Wavy Gravy who's a uh A very wise member of the board of the SAA Foundation he's a clown and he's extraordinary wise man he uh he ran in the last two elections he ran nobody for president and um there were you know these great campaign slogans like nobody can solve our economic problems the best one was nobody cares nobody makes apple pie like mother used to make you know I mean it's it goes on and on and on and on and he pointed out that nobody got more votes than all the other candidates put together so there's this tension and what happens is we we Veil our hearts with our mind and we become like if we're uh working in uh emergency rooms or IU units or something like that we often become what's called professionally warm oh dear you know and we're feeling it but we're not opening our hearts because if we open our hearts it's going to hurt and we got to save something for when we go home we think the other part of this um this uh intuitive heart which is this connection to our Unity is the word intuitive and you know cultures change very fast we're living in a new moment because 2025 years ago the word intuition was we were so much in our intellects that the word intuition was like blasphemy it was like a intuition know the thing was to be rational because the rational mind that was science and science created technology and technology created progress and progress who knew what that would create maybe even happiness it didn't but we thought it would and all of that was being created to ward off the fear of death because somebody dies cuz who you think you are will die turns out who you also are it doesn't cuz it was never born but who you think you are dies again and again and again Tim lirry said I die so hard each time the predicament for us is that when we Veil The Heart with the mind we cut off our own source which is a quality of intuitive wisdom and not only did the rationalists I mean back in the old days before women finally demanded that they be acknowledged to exist uh the mind was very sexist and so they would say they they sne at intuition I was at Harvard so I know I could hear the sneer I can still hear it in my mind you know intuition women int it men think see that's the problem turns out turns out that just what we need now and we realize it suddenly women had but who would listen to them it's exactly like what happened with the American Native Americans I mean we attempted total genocide we didn't quite succeed because they were primitive you know simpleminded people and we just knew much better but it turns out they knew what we now desperately need to know and they're they may or may not say screw you you know or they may be willing willing to guide us who knows those that we haven't driven into alcoholism by our lack of respect of their Traditions which understood that they were part of [Music] systems everybody is experiencing the intuitive heart and information all the time but the power the mind gets so strong about what reality is that you the Mind does the perception does a denial mechanism process where you don't even see this other stuff and if you do you decide it's irrelevant I was out of my mind I don't know what I was oh we call it error variance in science the fact that it's 80% you know of the variability well we'll improve our tools yet that's an in joke for people in [Applause] science like for example here's a statistic in the past 20 years there has been an increase a continuous increase in polls showing in the number of widows who report having conversations with their dead husbands now in reflecting about that I was wondering 20 years ago was it the fact that dead husbands didn't talk to their wives the there were two other choices one is one is they didn't talk to them the second is the women didn't listen and the third is they listened but didn't admit it because they'd be thought crazy I think it's unlikely that men husbands weren't talking to their wives so I assume it's one of the latter two and probably a combination of both of them and the fact that now they can cop to it I remember once living in a small town in uh New England and there was a um a big Mill in the town and it was the the thing of the town and there was a a manager of the mill who was the thing of the mill of the [Music] town and I came back from India and I was a real muga you know I mean I was like a beard and a dress and you know long hair and Beads and and lived in a you know washed with cold water and cooked my own food uh you know I was really out there and I I mean I was holding on to my high is what I was [Music] doing and one day uh the wife of this man came to see me it was far out I mean she came with um suede gloves on little white gloves and everything perfect and she drove up in a black shiny Chrysler and she came in to see this nut you know and she said you know there's nobody really I can talk to about what's been happening to me she said for the for the past 10 years I've had this astral lover and every time my husband leaves for work this astral lover arrives and we're together all day then he goes and my husband comes home she said I've never told anybody [Music] this you can see why can't [Music] you I remember um the rabbi that um when there was the unveiling of my mother's Tombstone I had just gotten back from India and my father was on the board of the temple which was a very prestigious temple in Boston and so the rabbi was there and he was in his soft hat and sunglasses out at the um cemetery and uh you take a cloth off the something and I was the son so one of the sons so I was helping to do that and there I was in my dress and Beads and beard and all t --- truly listen to the harmonies of things you see that you and I are both separate and we are not separate and that the mind is a beautiful instrument for discriminative wisdom that helps us discriminative knowledge that helps us maintain our separateness and express its uniqueness at the same moment our heart is our connection it's our feeding way into the universe we're then connected with all things we then have the energy of all things it's all part of the same thing and we are like trees or rivers or you know trees don't burn out like I'm tired of being a tree Jesus what a drag holy God this must end sometime here you know the horor of being afraid of your own heart and yet unless your heart is acknowledged in part of the balance between the mind and the heart if you don't come back into that balance and the Heart isn't open there's no feeding just like when you're in love you get fed there's a the feeding going on and all the tiredness and tightness and closeness and alienation and all that stuff now the interesting time we are in is a time in which there is very rapid change on the plane where people who think they are real live that reality there's a lot of change going down I mean there is change politically really far out changes and they may be extraordinary changes because what's happened in Kenan man square and then in Eastern Europe and in Africa [Music] and hopefully in China and Central America maybe soon to bet was The Awakening of some quality of human spirit that felt that got in touch with its intuitive wisdom and Truth deeply enough to say and felt strong enough to question the reality of the social institutions under which it had been living and suddenly like a house of cards they all started to do this thing like the Berlin wall that seemed I grew up with the Berlin Wall I mean for 40 years we've been dealing with The Emperor's New Clothes that's been a reality and suddenly in all the peop to people bridg links it turns out that over there are other people just like us you here I'm here say this is a real mess isn't it yeah right boy our leaders have really taking us for a ride haven't they but they're us so that's the problem our fear took us for a ride because the mind is always busy being the representative of our somebody which is very tiny in such a big universe always feels vulnerable and frightened deaths at one end and chaos is everywhere [Music] around so you keep trying to structure things like the handkerchiefs go in that drawer you know and I know how it is and there's good and there's evil and there's right d d d da da and then we'll stay that way but it's tricky because everything's changing I mean in the nature of things they change so when you invest in not change it must be difficult I mean that is a bad investment you know things will never change around here those are usually in Grade B movies somebody says that just as the bulldozzer drives down the street and the people that are opposing change or are frightened by change they're not bad people they in their minds are doing their their fear of chaos is immense I mean it's interesting like Madame chesco just as they were about to shoot her said something like my children why are you doing this to me I mean in this paternalistic maternalistic patr you know I'm sure the king and queen of Nepal are roughly saying the same thing hey kids what are you you doing we we've been taking care of you it's okay so politically I mean there are whole new kinds of Role Models appearing the Dal Lama this a political figure people say to him aren't you angry about the Chinese he says no that wouldn't be functional I mean that's an interesting politician I mean we have President Havel of Czechoslovakia and he says to our Congress unless we find a new way of human consciousness nothing much is going to happen that's pretty far out for a politician to say to our Congress and they all wanted his autograph and this Nelson Mandela I mean we're we're it's great there's a whole Renaissance of of beings who are in some way connected to that deeper place and are speaking from there like Gandhi was or people like that I think Lincoln was in part so what those Eastern European countries are doing is they are mirroring for us because they have lived under repression for so long that they are now experimenting with democracy so they're looking and saying what is democracy all about and that is mirroring for us what we came to believe democracy was all about and we have been the leaders of democracy in the world except that our democracy has to do with consumers it's so economically linked and our democracy is still living within a Mythic structure that has very little humanness in it I mean it produces as its Mythic result Donald Trump for example now Donald I'm not talking about the human being in there I'm just talking about that Mythic role that is an obscenity it's a runaway system in which that is somebody that's a hero figure in the culture and you and I know it isn't a hero figure in the culture and yet we're still living in a culture in which it is that's the interesting thing the tension between the inner and the outer between what you and I intuitively understand as we've acknowledged and given vent to our intuitive wisdom which has to do with compassion and Truth and Love and merging and equality and fairness and Justice and humility and and emptiness and equinity I mean the increasing polarity the in economics leave politics from economics between the HS and the heav Nots it's getting staggering how few people have and how many people have not and they're not indefinitely going to wait around for the altruistic trickle down effect so there is hot breathing at the door and the north south debt structures and all of that I remember being in Guatemala for the sa Foundation we work in the highlands with these Mayan Indians who are extraordinarily beautiful human beings and they are people who the women have watched their husbands and Sons be murdered by the Army which is in the employee of the rich people who control the government that of course our government backs which is like about 4% of the population that has about 85% of the land so the women have watched these people come in and murder their men folk for attempting to get their lives together they're waiting for the rich people come in and murder them and I flew from there to Hollywood where I had some business and I found myself in Brentwood which is a very Posh community near Beverly Hills and I drove down a street and there on this street were all these huge houses multi-million dollar houses each with big walls with big iron gates that electrically open and closed with monitors and just going and in front of each one was a little red sign put there by the security agency and it set on it armed response I thought isn't that far out I just came from a country where the poor people are frightened Sitting Waiting for the rich people to murder them isn't that far out certainly seems so to me see the predicament you and I face as individuals is we thought I want to be happy and I happiness has to do with a certain style of life and I've got the style of life and now I want to be happy but there are a lot of people who don't have that and who aren't happy by those criteria so the only way I can be happy really is to sort of not think about them but you find out it's just like the woman with the man standing at the corner begging that if you turn off some something in order to be happy your happiness is extremely unstable because it's based on denial and not only that but it doesn't it it means you have to close down your heart to be happy it's like there is so much suffering in the world most people say if I open to the suffering I would just be in constant I mean my heart would be breaking all the time and the answer is yes it would but you would have connected to the deeper part of your heart that heart wisdom that sin sin that intuitive place that is the quality of love not loving it's the presence it's quality of presence and there would be a part of you that would be absolutely present and in the state of Love even as your emotional human heart was breaking again and again and again and when they say that in India for the Saints all people are their children I mean imagine just imagine that at this every day 30 to 40,000 mothers in this earth watch their babies die of malnutrition are they them or are they us are they us or are they me where does your mind Define the line in order for you not to be overwhelmed by the amount of suffering and to protect yourself and hold on to your stash it's like you know it's interesting because I used to misinterpret a Sufi statement which is very far out I used to mistranslated as trust in --- to live with and that's the way you finally keep your heart open in hell and you embrace the suffering into yourself and therein lies real Joy the joy is being part of this immense process of formless and form and change and Decay and growth and birth and death if you think the political and economic things are creating changing conditions in life try ecology woo we are having a rude awakening to the fact that we have that the technology in which we put so much faith is drowning us with its excre and we don't know what to do with it cuz we didn't make a plan cuz who thought you couldn't just use it all up indefinitely keep the GNP going up I mean poor little Minds you've got to expect a problem I mean the political structure is like 2 to six years long you know take nuclear waste that's a good one I mean nuclear waste has a toxic life of 250,000 years we don't know what to do with it well we'll dig a hole in salt in New Mexico and we'll put it in there and the salt will close down and the barrels are double barrels and it'll all be safe for 250,000 years how do you know well we've researched for 250,000 years years I mean that's 100 times longer than recorded history no but we have a theory aha how interesting and as the stuff hit the fan about the nuclear waste uh 2 m square hole in the ground in Southern New Mexico a memo comes out describing southern New Mexico cuz it's poor and as what's called a sacrifice Zone that didn't sit too well with the New Mexicans we're facing a situation where we are polluting at such a rate and using up our resources at such a rate that we have taken billions of years of something and in a couple of hundred years just completely done it in almost and it's going to mean if it's to change a basic change in our lifestyle and our myths so that there you've got political economic ecological and I haven't even dealt with social and moral you've got changes everywhere and how do people respond to change people who are busy being somebody and identifying with what they've got are going to get frightened and when they get frightened they get very difficult they get judgmental they get repressive they even get violent and when they push against the change and the change is so powerful that it inevitably has to happen it forces the Revolutionary process that one thing has to overthrow the other for it to happen but change doesn't have to happen through Revolution it can happen through Evolution as well it can happen because enough people or some people or whatever it is whether it's the H hundredth monkey or whatever you want to call it enough people dwell in another kind of reality so that one reality just kind of flows into the next one and suddenly we are living in a new reality I mean it has happened dramatically in the last 30 years like 30 years ago I would tell a story that I about something that had happened to me under a th000 micrograms of acid you know and I tell it to the club of people who'd either tripped or had been to India or you know read holy books or Alan Watts or something and we'd be a club and everybody would understand yeah right wow far out now I can speak to any lecture hall of people I'd say 70% of them never took grass never went to India never read holy books like that and I can tell the same story and they all go like this now how do they know it's interesting to watch a shift in Consciousness creep into a culture now you can look at that positively or negatively you know there's well last week was Earth Day and I felt I should make a contribution Earth Day in some way so I got this image which was a fact that I thought I would contribute to Earth Day Consciousness the fact is that when you take a frog and drop it into boiling water it will jump out that's only half the fact the other half of the fact is that if you put the frog in cold water and heat it up it will boil to death now you could look at this either way I mean as you adjust to the pollution say well that's life I mean it's too bad all the tuna was poisoned but you know well you know I used to love those trees but the cement is nice and you know as you kind of keep adjusting to it it's only a styrofoam cup what the hell I mean it's not going to be the you know and I got to get to work and as you keep adjusting to the quality of life going down and down and down as the good life is sold more and more and more which separates the rich from the poor da da da da da that's one way of understanding the Frog story the other way is that the changes are the evolutionary changes are happening and nobody's even noticing and that the thing is so gentle and there are Daly Lamas and there are havels and there are Nelson mandelas and there are people like Mother Teresa and there are wisdom beings that emerge that in which the whole process goes softly it goes gently it goes lovingly it is not ruled by fear it's ruled by love it's ruled by compassion it's ruled by caring it's ruled by The Compassion that arises out of an identification with all of it it it comes out of the wisdom that you and I have been working to cultivate and acknowledging in ourselves all these years it puts you and I in an interesting role in the dance because of all the people who are afraid of change perhaps we are a little less afraid of change than other people and as Gandhi said when somebody said give us a message he said my life is my message and you and I as we acknowledge our life is our message and we acknowledge the intuitive doorway that gives us a wisdom that understands about truth and compassion and the heart and the balances and that it doesn't have to be the way it is and you feel how long you've been a closet compassion how long you've lived in an alien environment I mean it became interesting what forces work like President Reagan's eight years were so lacking in compassion not in among of all the people but the Mythic structure of it was that it offended us didn't it I mean it was offensive to the human heart it was an offense and it caused the pendulum to swing and so now there's another moment it's an incredible moment my my phrase these days is because if you like those kind of M you know those volatile exciting moments between Cosmos and Chaos like riding waves in the ocean my expression is if you like the 60s you're going to love the '90s because it's here we go now what are the things that allow us to change I mean who you think you are and who you are to become to be part of a bio region to be part of a global Consciousness to be part of a system to understand your unique part in it which is the balance between your mind and your heart and you're listening to hear what boundaries your karma demands and flowing within all that keeping your heart open in hell and becoming an instrument of compassion and emptiness at the same moment that's what it's about [Music] and in this kind of volatile period of change that dissonance between the inner and the outer there is a new moment when we hear resonance from outside like Eastern Europe like tianan man square like South Africa like where the the dignity the conscious of democracy or of human potential realization whatever that quality is about honoring species honoring systems being part of systems all of that has another opportunity to play it can come out a little bit and we start to make the inside like the outside now one of the ways those changes go from who you thought you were to who you to become are through rights of Passage or rituals in many tribes when you want somebody to change that way you pull them out of the context keep them out for a period of time do a retraining like they take a young male in the tribe who would have been with his mother for the first seven years and then the men would come and take the kid and pull him from his mother and go off to the woods for a year and then he'd come back and he would be a adult male of the tribe we don't have so many of those for what we are about what you and I are about that's why our coming together in networking and recognizing each other is very critical I mean think of how common the disease was for how many years in Poland Hungary Czechoslovakia Romania Etc before this all this this didn't come out of nothing think of how many people in Germany were in pain about what was happening to the Jews and the [Music] poll and yet you couldn't acknowledge it the next thing that changes people is trauma believe me when it gets bad enough things change I mean at that level what we're looking at is we're all busy um shuffling reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic Suzuki roshi said in relation to that he said life is like setting sail aboard a boat that is about to go out into the ocean and sink that's irrelevant to this discussion it was just a nice line