Beyond Success - Ram Dass Full Lecture 1987

Good morning yesterday a couple came to see me at the hotel they had written to me in Boston and I arranged for them to come yesterday he is 42 she is 33 he's a graduate of a business school he started a business which is now grossing 80 million he did that in seven Years they have been living for the past three and a half years on what Carl refers to as the FasTrack that is they have been realizing all of the benefits of affluence you want a house let's have a house you want a bigger

house a bigger house should we travel here let's go here new car yes of course of course yes yes they have a 20-month-old child 6 months ago the wife was diagnosed as having cancer Liver it is now spread to the bones she's been in treatment in Texas and they've now decided to discontinue all treatment she is a beautiful woman now quite thin so 6 months ago something happened in their their lives so profound and so dramatic that it stopped short the game of their life and it led them to ask some very profound and soul-searching

questions especially for him the Questions of what am I doing with my time and my life what is my bottom line and for her what is death about and how do I deal with the issues of healing and healing into life or healing into death and and so on now um he said to me that the past 6 months have been months of the most profound growth in his life they are collaboratively dealing with her illness I mean little things happen for example he had an Aversion to hospitals he would get nauseous when he and

he wouldn't go to a hospital he just refused to go he didn't want to deal with sickness or death from all the time he was growing up now he found himself spending days in intensive care this wine and he began to work through that aversion and learn how he could be in that and be with people and grow through that but he saw that along the way in business a number of Personality Qualities had become dominant in his being that were slightly toxic to his relationship with his family and to his ability to be with

his wife fully through this and he had some pretty agonizing self-examination to go through at that point and as I say he feels that the past 6 months he's grown immensely now in the business Community there is some process that goes on which we're going to explore a little bit that often it is only some traumatic event Such as illness such as a child's breakdown or a child's acting out such as the moments of retirement such as bankruptcy such as some intense crisis like that that forces an Awakening that forces a person to confront how

they lock stepped into a game and the interesting question is are there subtler motivators for that self-examination we're talking about stages of the evolution of consciousness Of individuals and we're asking now whether built into the business process the process of being entrepreneurial or being in management or being involved in the business mode whether there are Clues along the way that one tends to ignore because they are subtle and because one feels somehow that those Clues are showing a weakness in yourself rather than clues that reflect something that if you listen to might be the cue

for You to consider that there's another way of you looking at the meaning of your life and why you're doing what you're doing I remember a stage in my father's life where my father who had been um he had been a successful lawyer he helped start a university brandise he had been president of a railroad he had from the culture's point of view been a success but as he retired and turned to his Hobbies then there came a period where at night he would wake up Remembering all his failures remembering the Investments he didn't make

remembering the bad Investments he made and the feelings of failure and I thought is that what the product of all of his efforts are that's what he's left with is this feeling of failure he's gone beyond that now and he's just in total peace now but he's also very quiet and then I see also people in business I saw this more years ago than I see it now there's a little more Consciousness in the business Community than there used to be I don't really know a lot about business I think you all realize that probably

at the outset I mean everything I invest in Los so I think you should know that at the outset so uh uh and I just know really from like in the old days when my father was chairman of the brandise and uh head of the joint distribution committee and Jewish Charities I used to play Jin Ry with his rich friends and we'd play on somebody's yacht in Miami and I'd meet a man who was in his 70s whose company was on the New York Exchange and he had just moved all his Mills from the New

England area to the Tennessee area and he was in his 70s and he was complaining and such headaches and he had many millions of dollars and I said to him why why did you do it why Do you keep doing it and he looked up at me with what looked from my point of view like almost a sadness and he said what else am I going to do and I felt at that point the pain of getting locked into a game a model of oneself that you couldn't trans send because the reinforcers were too strong

for staying in the thing so um what I want to look at is some of the subtle not so subtle things that are clues in business life that Might resonate for you and if they don't fine you are probably well beyond them or you may be still not realizing them who knows we'll allow for both possibilities ideally and now I'm talking from really outside the business Community but ideally I see business as uh business people as people who find viable means to realize Visions they see a possibility and then they find a viable means to

realize that possibility and in the doing of that if They do that well and effectively profits follow and in the process they deepen and enrich the infrastructure of the society now this is the idealistic statement of business in other words the thing that they contribute through their business just enriches the structure of the society and its stability and its growth and its caring and its compassion and its richness and its opportunity and so on one of the interesting shifts in Consciousness is is that what was a serendipitous effect or at least just a small component

effect which was profit starts to loom as the dominant Criterion and people are working instead of being part of finding a manifestation of a vision they are working then to make a profit as their goal rather than as a side effect of their goal and that becomes such a built-in cultural statement that people start to justify their actions in terms of profit even Though it is at the expense sometimes of the enrichment of the infrastructure of the society or the realization of the dream of the vision and then they have to build an individual has

to build an entire philosophical justification in their mind to be able to handle the fact that their goal has shifted from something which has a social significance to something that has just a personal sign ific and they see that what they read in the textbook about Idealism of business and when they get out on the street they find that the street values are very different and in order to buy into those Street values they have to armor themselves in a certain way to do it and it's that armoring which we're talking about a little bit

today now um because of this particular group that I'm speaking with this is not um the disenfranchised or the homeless I assume Um unless I got my schedule dates mixed up I think that one of these subtle issues we are reflecting about today is the issue of the effects of success that is if you invest in a myth in a culture and that myth says those who do such and such get such and such and then they are happy and you do such and such and you get such and such then you are happy or

are you right there is where the edge is right at that Point some people who have been very successful in this culture who have won in a big way and in their early winds they were part of the moving towards success and they were very very excited and each win was another marker along the way then as they got a greater margin of success it was harder to see it as a path because they saw that the difference for example between having 20 million and 80 million wasn't going to really change the style Of their

life that much it was going to put them in a different league with other players but it wasn't going to change the style of their life that much and they began to feel that the excitement or the feelings of the gratification that success brought with each Act started to diminish as the success has got greater and greater which is a very strange experience you would think they would get higher and higher but they don't seem to the early Success is when you just begin to make it the person that just starts as a self-made person

and then makes the first good deal there's a certain gratification but the 80th deal is a very different kind of psychological experience than the first deal you do a thing it gives you a certain feeling of happiness or fulfillment or pleasure and that is just like a rat in a maze that the animal learns to turn right and get a pellet you get that certain feeling Everybody looks at you and smiles you're doing well you're doing wonderfully come be with us let's have lunch together and then at that moment you are motivated to try the

next one and the next one and that is the root of what often turns out to be an addiction or an obsession I was with a man a few weeks ago in New York City he started working in Coney Island with one of the rides in Coney Island selling the ride he's in real estate in the York City and around The world his net worth is I don't know probably 75 to 100 million his children are all in therapy very neurotic his wife is heavy on valium he has a private yacht airplane many homes he

has an office in which he has three room so he can have three Deals going at once it's Showbiz he's just rushing from deal to deal the more chaos the more excitement the more excitement the more gratification his family has gone everything else in life Has gone but the deal and the bigger the risk for the deal it's it's a paper game and you all understand this better than I do the bigger the risk for the deal the more the adrenaline pumps the more the sweat the more the excitement the more he can embroil every

everybody in the drama the more Rush he's getting and he's got to keep doing it he can't stop he can't stop for an evening off he can't stop for vacation they mean nothing to him he's just got to keep Going that is as much an addiction as a heroin addiction it's an addiction to that he only feels alive at the moment when he is playing with that edge of risk it's like a gambler at Los Vegas it's the it's risk-taking behavior that is reinforcing him for lead playing at that Leading Edge and it's very exciting

and very heady stuff and he can't stop and he keeps parling it more and more and working on on further margins and at any moment I've watched people like that Do one wrong one and then they go under and loss is even part of the game as far as they're concerned and they just start again it's part of the excitement and the uh adrenaline hit now um that one is based on the model that more is better and if this is good more is better this deal more is better more is better and more is

better that's part of the myth that more is always better but I ask you have you seen through that one already that when is it enough when is There a feeling of Peace within more is better years ago I was hanging out with a fellow named Billy Hitchcock this may be in that tape that I wrote once before Billy is one of the melon family Uncle Paul melon has 700 million and his mother has 700 million and so and so Billy had maybe 20 million and so Billy bought a little plane a Piper Cherokee or

something and I was teaching them how to fly and we were having a wonderful time and we landed at LaGuardia Airport And um we pulled over to the um private parking area and we were very happy and really enjoying ourselves and he had made a good landing and all was well nice pretty day and as we pulled in we pulled by this big Jet private jet Billy looked at it and his face fell and suddenly he was deeply sad and I said Billy what are you so sad about he said oh that's Uncle Paul's plane

and I mean he couldn't have one he couldn't have one and I could feel that His life was related to Uncle Paul's money not to his money I mean 20 million was nothing to him he was living in a world of people with 700 million and making himself Miserable as a result of it so uh that one of more is better I saw it as an extreme example at that moment cuz I had cess the 172 I would have loved to have his plane see it's all relative you see now um I think another thing

that You see about success is that it changes the nature of the risk you can take because as your investment gets greater and as you have a beautiful physical plant and you have all of this you have to shift ground and a lot of people who have entrepreneurial and you all know that that issue about why entrepreneurs don't make it as maintainers of big businesses because they can't handle the changing risk structure that they have to do in order to preserve the Structures that they have created and uh they are willing to play on the

edge and they can't pull back enough to maintain existing institutions without changing their self-image and most people can't do that so entrepreneurs often leave a company after they start it and management comes in people who are comfortable with that kind of risk-taking level but there is a feeling for people who start and build success of a narrowing field as they get More successful because of the fact that they can take less risk and that they have more writing in the sense of more responsibility more people involved and they start to feel hemmed in and they

don't feel the kind of freedom and the space that they felt before another part of it is what's called Ro entrapment that is a sense that the role you've gotten into of being a certain kind of a person starts to entrap you my father told me a story some years ago about a Tailor in a Middle Eastern European country there was a Jewish man wanted to show that he had done well so he went to the best tailor in town whose name was zumach and he said zumach I want your best suit so zumach made

a suit and the man came in in to try on the suit and he put it on and it was beautiful material no doubt about it but when he put it on this sleeve was about 2 Ines longer than the sleeve and he said zum back he said I I don't mean to complain but he said This sleeve is 2 in longer than the sleeve zumach took a front zumach says there's nothing wrong with a suit it's you're standing stand like this and he pushes his shoulder down and the suit then fits perfectly you see

and the man looks in the mirror and he sees there's this big bunched up material back here and he says Zach would you mind taking that Mater my wife hates it when there's that extra bunch of material there zbec says there's nothing wrong with a suit It's the way you're standing and he pushes his head down like this so finally the suit is fitting perfectly and the man leaves with his new suit on he's afraid to breathe for fear it won't fit and he's been completely cowed by zbec and he gets on the bus and

he's standing on the bus and somebody comes up and says what a beautiful suit I bet zumach to Taylor Made that suit and the fellow said how did you know he said because only somebody as skilled as Zumbach could fit somebody as crippled as [Music] you now uh the feeling often of Ro entrapment is that you have gotten into a suit suit and everybody's saying what a beautiful suit what a beautiful suit except your spine is out of whack and you're feeling inside not the same not as good in my rather checkered career which I

guess some of You know some of the checkered of it there was a point I remember when I had become a professor at Harvard and I was a winner in the culture I mean I wasn't making any money but I was a winner my my father he said to me he wanted me to be a doctor and when I became a professor he says well that's fine but what are you going to do for a living so but at any rate there I was a professor and for most people except my Father I had won

and um people treated me with great respect because I was part of a symbolic institution of great and everything I said people listen to and they thought I was wise and every day I'd go to work and everybody would reward me all day and I was teaching human personality and motivation and Freud and all the latest stuff so that if anybody should be happy it should be me technically I mean if we wise persons knew what we were talking about why Shouldn't I be it but I go home and I get into the bathtub and

I'd be a neurotic mess and I decided I would feel somehow that it wasn't good enough I didn't feel fully satisfied inside and I thought it must be me so I went into analysis and therapy and what I met was a therapist who was wearing another form of zumbach suit and he said he said I'll tell you what I'll teach you how to wear my suit you don't have to wear your suit which I learned and Then I became a Freudian therapist and I had this suit on and then I I got a new role

model and a new identity and when people walk down the street I didn't see people I saw psychosexual stages I saw early anal retentiveness and it took me until um a rather wild Irishman by the name of Tim ly uh came along and introduced me to uh ways of uh changing my own Consciousness that I began to understand that the feeling of malaise that I was feeling in Myself which because everybody around me kept smiling and saying you won I assumed was my sickness was maybe not my sickness but was a cue to me a

clue to me that there was another kind of growth lying in store for me and that maybe that feeling wasn't something to be treated as pathology but rather something to be treated as something worth exploring and that did guide the rest of my life some of the uh side effects of success interestingly enough One of them is boredom you've learned a skill that you know how to do very well and you keep repeating it it's just like making p Pizza I mean you can be a big deal maker but it's still the same thing after

a while you know just the ingredients to put the game together and it worked and you keep playing the same one over and over again and you've got a strategy and it works and you start to get bored by the finiteness of the game and the finiteness of your role and the Problem is it's working and it's giving you all The Fringe effects but the thing itself you do every day starts to bore you and the way people respond to boredom it's interesting how aversive people experience boredom to be especially people who have become successful

because they are doers we have a funny distinction between doers and beers beers just sit and be doers are always doing it I'll mow the lawn here let me help you I'll do this what Do you say let's go and their vacations are exhausting I mean they come back from their vacation needing a vacation because they are so excit because they can't stop doing because they got rewarded for doing and that's the style they have in life and what happens to somebody that gets bored that's a doer is they just do harder and they do

more and they keep doing more until if you watch them it is exhausting to watch a doer being Bored because they are so busy avoiding the boredom because the boredom is so real for them and that kind of fast action to avoid boredom has connected with it and the anxiet about seeing the Trap that you're in and not knowing how to get out of it because all your models of how to get out of it were just to do more of it can you hear that issue if I do something and do more I will

get out of it and that's the one you learned and then it doesn't feel Great but I'll do more of it to feel better out of that one but after a while the more you do the worse you feel because you're beginning to see the handwriting on the wall that it's not going to do it for you these are the cues I'm talking to you about about that can force growth prior to a trauma prior to a total breakdown of the system I think it was Jesus who said what profiteth a man if he gain

the world and lose his soul we're talking a Little bit about that the idea of more is better and acre stuff stuff more stuff so that your life becomes stuffier and stuffier and you got garages full of stuff you want to see my stuff come see my I got two house is full of stuff I mean it's just stuff and stuff and stuff and it keeps collecting because when you feel that bad feeling of boredom or finiteness then you are absolutely a mark for the advertising industry which says to you if you buy this car

that's Going to give you this certain Driving Experience you won't feel that feeling and they know exactly they meaning us I mean we are the advertising industry too know exactly what feeling that is you're playing with in advertising the feeling of I'm not potent enough the feeling I'm not beautiful enough the feeling I'm not successful enough the feeling I'm not happy enough I'm not free enough I'm not stimulated enough the whole idea of more and different is going to be better it's The idea that something external to yourself is finally going to give you what

you want and that is a basic fallacy now there's just one more that I think that will be familiar to some of you uh of these sort of little Clues and that is your relation to time I think that a number of you I suspect see see time as your enemy you see yourself as caught in time and there's never enough time i' love to do it but I don't have time can't be with you for your birath I Don't have time and you feel like you are running against time so much of the time

I mean I've been in that so often that out of my basically greed I want more on my plate than I can digest and then I am running like the rabbit I can't stop and I can't do it because I don't have time and they say that the secret of what we're talking about today is to snatch the pearl of freedom from the dragon time and get into another relation of time so that instead of time Using you you are in another relationship to time and that's part of what we're going to be talking about

today now finally a lot of the things that Force this lock step and the trap of this singl minded model of success and and the why you get caught in and more is that there is a tremendous reinforcement in who you hang out with I'm not talking you personally now and I'm talking about Collective that quality of the of U the business Community tends to unless it makes an intentional effort hang out with people that share your values so you hang out with people who are in the same kind of lock step and reinforcing for

each other that this is the way it's done like my friend in New York who has got three Deals going at once and his net worth is say 75 or 100 million but his friend has a net worth of 1.2 billion and he's living in relation to that guy and that guy is Saying make bigger deals work faster work harder you're already 61 you're losing it that's his Guru that's his spiritual Mentor if you will so that who you hang around with who you're spending time with are not usually people who are um free of

time for example so everybody say I'd love to have lunch with you and they even talk fast you know because you don't have time to talk slow you know and the way you eat you eat fast because you've got to do it faster and there's There's just that quality of collecting collecting and moving faster and faster in order to cram more into time that's again more is better okay in order to play your role often in business it requires you to think about other people a certain way now this is is very subtle the question

is who is us and who is them when we started out as tribes the tribe was us and then you found out there was another tribe and maybe you decided that because there was only one Piece of Buffalo that the other tribe was them and you had to protect the piece of Buffalo so it was us against them and you shared the Buffalo Among Us and you competed with them what happens when you get into a model of competition when you're in the role of being a competitor it often is that who you're competing against

is them and we in our company are us that might be a next step then what happens in your own personal life is you are an administrator or an Executive and the people in your company you have to motivate to get a certain productivity out of so you have to see them as them to play with them to get the best out of them you say nice things about us but you're still thinking them I mean am I pushing too hard or can you hear any of this so that they are them and you are

now us is the executive Cod that runs it but the executive you're the top executive the executive Cod they're waiting for the mstep because They trained just like you did in the same school so at some level your colleagues in your own company are a little bit them see well you say at least I've got my family you know they're us see my family's us but now your wife is very bugged because you're spending so much time at business but she doesn't understand or your husband and he doesn't understand how consuming this is and because

they don't understand then they are them do you Hear the whole process of what is called alienation in the culture in order to realize the goal you wanted you had to make everybody around you the kids they don't understand it's a different generation they're screwing up you know they were good kids basically but that kind of feeling at times but I can't run their life and they don't really understand so that it gets so and my parents are a different generation and they don't understand you slowly get cut Off from Generations from opposite sex at

times because after all I'm a woman or I'm a man and how can he or she understand so very slowly you keep getting inside and inside and as long as you are in your thinking mind the quality of the thinking mind you notice is that it thinks about things it always takes an object so as long as you think about other people you are making them into objects this is going to be an interesting one for us to explore in a Minute so this problem of depersonalizing like I can show it to you some of

you are familiar with uh some of you I'm not I'm sure but some of you are familiar with what it feels like to have lust and you can be looking at somebody who's us until that lust awakens and then the whole Consciousness shifts and the other person becomes them or her or him or somebody to be manipulated to bring about gratification that's why the Bible says Thou shalt not lust in other words Thou shalt not push somebody far enough away to desire them as an object because you lose the love you lose the usess the

problem with getting into a world which your job forces you into of treating people as object is that it isolates you and when you get isolated from a safe relationship with other human beings you starve to death emotionally and you don't get fed you cut off your own lifeline and that's Because of the definition of bottom line being a little too narrow if the bottom line is my net worth in terms of money then you can justify all this stuff if my bottom line is not only net worth but friends and an intimate relation to

the family that's a whole different kind of bottom line and it justifies different actions and sometimes you can say I could go into that deal but it's going to cost me too much in terms of the rest of my bottom line so what we're talking About now is considering what our bottom line is and how do we broaden that bottom line now all of this that I have been talking about which can be characterized in the most beautiful terms of I am an achiever I'm a Visionary I'm working hard I'm I'm helping the society move

ahead you can justify everything or you can put it in the negative terms of you usually do it about somebody else say she's hard driving impatient Relentless cynical and Judging that's the negative way of looking at it the other way is I'm assertive responsible seeking you're you know working hard Etc all of these cues that I'm talking about are the clues that finess that boredom that realizing the limits of the game that seeing that more isn't going to be better that you want to not look at because you don't know what else to do that

is the clue that you are right for the next stage of the Journey of life and that there is Another stage of the journey in the spiritual work that I do I teach that you got to be somebody before you can become nobody that is you've got to develop your somebodiness first you've got to develop your ego structure you've got to develop your grounding your control and Mastery of the universe the problem is the control and Mastery of the universe is not freedom and it's not happiness it's just control and Mastery of the universe and

then you have to Move beyond that so in the stages one goes through usually it's material control first that's mine this is mine this is mine and then there's the next one of you move up into the psychological thing when you've got your base camp together and then you say I I want my personal accomplishment achievement I want to psychologically feel good that's another stage and you've all passed through that one then the next stage is you see the finiteness Of all that that accomplishment all by yourself isn't happiness you see the kind of ephemeral

nature of this stuff and then you start to shift your goal and you start to go for some kind of deeper truth of your being and deeper meaning to your own life and that's the next stage that flips around and that's where we go from now Carl Jung said the biggest problems in the world for us are not solved they're just outgrown and in order to outgrow them it requires a new Level of Consciousness and that's really what I'd like to talk about from here on now I'm going to give you a very naive story

and I know you'll all say well it's easy for him to say so I'll say it first back in the early '70s I did a series of radio shows on a radio station in New York WB and one in Montreal and excerpts from these were made into a set of records and I read holy books and I did chanting and I answered questions from telephones it Came out as a six record album and it had a beautiful book in it with very beautiful Printing and calligraphy and stuff like that and it was in a box

six record album and we mail order sold it for $45 now it was a different economy in those days but that was still pretty reasonable my father who was at the height of his worldly Powers at that moment looked at it he didn't listen to it but he looked at it and he I mean can You imagine what he I must have been to him I mean I'll just give you a vignette that I've described of my coming back from India in 1968 his his son who made it to be a Harvard Professor then got

thrown out then ends up in India and he picks me up at the Logan Airport in His Cadillac I am standing there barefoot in a dress Indian outfit with beads a long beard and long hair and a big musical instrument his comment to me was get in fast before anybody sees [Laughter] you and he used to call me rdom [Music] it's better than my brother he called me rammed [Laughter] ass at any rate my father looked at this album he said this is an impressive piece of work I said yeah he said um only $45

I said yeah seems pretty cheap to me I said yep said you know it looks like you could Get $10 for this I said yeah he said would fewer people buy it if you charge $10 I said no he said you mean the same people would buy it for $10 they're buying it for $45 I said well it cost us $4 to make and there's and ship and there's a 50 c margin for we put towards reprinting or giving doing something with he says I don't understand you he said are you against Capitalism I said

no I said I'm standing on it why would I be against it and I tried to figure out how to explain to him what my predicament was he was a lawyer at one point I said' a few years back you remember you tried a case for Henry he says yeah I said was it a tough case he says I knew it was actually this is just a little routine I said said damn right it was I said you work hard on the case I spend a lot of time in the law library that was a

very tough case And I brought it up to the Supreme Court in Massachusetts I said well you know you've been known for a pretty good fee structure and you did all that work for Uncle Henry I bet you charged him a nominal egg and he looked at me like I was out of my mind he says what are you out of your mind he says that was Uncle Henry of course I didn't charge him big feet I said you see my problem I said if you can find somebody that isn't Uncle Henry I'll rip them

off my predicament is very simple that as a result of what happened in my own Consciousness I extricated myself meaning my awareness from such an exclusive identity with my own separateness that I directly experienced that other people were Us in other words I broke out of my own alienation alienated State and I experienced that when I looked around I saw the people were my sisters and my Brothers and if you'll give me license to just play at the edge of mysticism I actually experienced the feeling that there was really only one Consciousness in all of

it which is something now that physicists understand finally coming at it from another point of view this was a direct experience so that if you look at planes of Consciousness now for a human individual there is one level at which you are a separate entity and everything else in the world is it or them or Other in which you are very little and it's very big and it's very frightening and your biggest fear is your own death because you identify with his separateness and that thing can die so a lot of Your Action is to

ward off the threats to the loss of that separateness then there are planes of awareness where your awareness breaks out of that identification and you experience the feeling that you are part of a community in which you look and you See other people like the the image that I use again and again in almost every lecture is that when you look at another person what do you see when you look at me on the physical plane what you see is a 55-year-old balding gentleman attractive gentleman okay that's what you see at the physical plane then

you shift the ground a little bit shift the lens a little bit and you see personality and what you look when you see is you see a warm personable Seeker After Truth uh teacher etc etc you see my social psychological identity now there are many many planes but let's flip to another one where you look and you look into my eyes what you see is another awareness just like you but it's packaged differently it's what the Christians called the soul and the eyes are the windows to the soul it's where you look behind the Matrix

of individual differences that is body and personality to see another awareness another entity Just like you looking back no different than you it has a different agenda because it's packaged differently now when I see that and I experience that the minute I meet you in that place behind our individual differences and we recognize one another there is an incredible rush or an Incredible release of energy or an Incredible feeling of I have met us I have met us I have come into a space of sharing which opens me up which feeds me Instead of my

relationships alienating separating me this relationship makes contact and I get some energy from it and my heart opens a little bit then I see this tastes so good and it feels so wonderful and I am so at home in it then I get terribly greedy to be in that and every time I come back into my separateness to my alienation I start to feel pain and separateness and loss and you begin to feel your awareness moving through these planes and you begin to Observe what it is that quote brings you down what catches you back

up in your own separateness what catches you back up in your alienation see there are two stages of this one is where you start to recognize that you are much more than you thought you were that you were sure changing yourself tremendously because your intellectual mind was treating you as an object because it thinks about objects and you were so invested in your thinking mind that you couldn't escape This objective dualism this kind of reality and as you bring your awareness back out of it or acknowledge those parts of you where you have been out

of see the the situation is that everybody gets out of their thinking mind all the time they do it in sex they do it in skiing they do it in uh the the headiness of a deal where they so are IM immersed in the moment that they lose their separate sense of identity and they transcend it and they feel a lot Live and Juiced and fulfilled by the moment and that's why often people do things like surfing or skiing or motorcycling or something that brings them very close to the edge because it engrosses them so

fully in the moment that they transcend the models in their head that keep them separate and they experience a connection to the universe and they feel fed by it they feel a part of everything you could think of it as addicting and most people that are in Business know how to get there through that edge of risk-taking and gambling but they have ruled out other ways of getting there at first your job is to get there to experience that connection and then you come back into your separateness you feel cut off again and then later

once you know that you can get there but you're going to get cast out again like the going to the wedding feast and not wearing the wedding garment in the Bible then after a while What you become interested in is what brings you down and how to not get caught how to be as Christ says in the world but not of the world how to play your game of life but not get lost in it it's like two people walk on a tennis court or a they have a golf match and they are competing for

who's going to buy on the 19th hole and they are competing and it's a fierce competition and in that competition the other person you're trying to beat the other person Which could be part of the business Community too but you remember also that you both collaborate to walk on the golf course together so that simultaneously what called good sportsmanship is that you are collaborating and competing simultaneously in other words you are playing at two levels with another human being and you're not forgetting that and that's what's called a good sport a bad sport is somebody

that forgets one of those levels because if you're just Collaborating and not competing you give the game away and what kind of a game is that and if you're just competing and not collaborating you get vicious and you're called a poor sport when you lose and you sneer when you win you're beginning to hear that the secret of the shift I'm talking about has to do with the nature of who you think you are and if you push that back one step you're back to the nature of the way your mind works and the way

you are identified With your mind how you are in relation to your thinking mind there's a story of a big samurai a protector of the faith who hires out out and he comes to a very diminutive little Monk and he says monk teach me about heaven and hell very arrogant the monk looks up at him and says teach you about heaven and hell I couldn't teach you anything you're so stupid you're dirty you smell your blade looks Rusty who'd hire you as a samurai you're probably a Second rate Samurai I wouldn't teach you anything I

don't think you're worth anything the samurai got so Furious that the veins were sticking out on his neck I mean nobody talks to a samurai that way and this little Monk and the samurai pulls out his sword to cut off the head of the Monk and just as he's about to do it the monk looks up at the Samurai and says that's hell and the samurai realizes that the monk has just practically given his life To give this teaching and he is so humbled by the C of the Monk and by the caring of the

monk that got him into that experiential learning moment that he sheads his sword and he bows and the monk says and that's heaven now you see what the monk did he just played with the mind of the Samurai and he made the Samurai's life into a hell or a heaven with just a flick of the Mind same situation same monk same Sam now I want to read you a story from A very good book that just came out called how can I help by me and a fellow named Paul Gorman and this is a a

story told to me by a friend of mine uh who's an Aikido Master the train clanked and rattled through the suburbs of Tokyo on a drowsy spring afternoon our car was comparatively empty a few housewives with their kids in toe some old folks going shopping I gazed absent at the drab houses and Dusty hedge RS at one station the doors opened and suddenly the afternoon quiet was shattered by a man bellowing violent incomprehensible curses the man staggered into our car he wore Labor's clothing and he was big drunk and dirty screaming he swung at a

woman holding a baby the blow sent her spinning into the laps of an elderly couple it was a miracle that the baby was unharmed terrified the couple jumped up and scrambled towards the other end of the Car the labor aimed a kick at the retreating back of the old woman but missed as she scuttled to safety this so enraged the drunk that he grabbed the metal pole in the center of the car and tried to wrench it out of its stanion I could see that one of his hands was cut and bleeding the train lurched

ahead the passengers Frozen with fear I stood up I was young then some 20 years ago and in pretty good shape I had been putting in a solid 8 hours of iido training nearly Every day for the past 3 years I liked to throw and grapple I thought I was tough the trouble was my Marshall skill was untested in actual combat as students of iido we were not allowed to fight iido my teacher had said again and again is the art of reconciliation whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe

if you try to dominate people you're already defeated we study how to resolve conflict not how to start it I Listened to his words I tried hard I even went so far as to cross the street to avoid the the chimpa the pinball punks who loued around the train stations my forbearance exalted me I felt both tough and holy in my heart however I wanted an absolute absolutely legitimate opportunity whereby I might save the innocent by destroying the guilty this is it I said to myself as I got to my feet people are in Danger

if I don't do something fast somebody will probably get hurt seeing me stand up the drunk recognized the chance to focus his rage aha he roared a foreigner you need a lesson in Japanese manners I held on lightly to the commuter strap overhead and gave him a slow look of disgust and dismissal I planned to take this turkey apart but he had to make the first move I wanted him mad so I pursed my lips and blew him an insolent kiss all right he hollered You're going to get a lesson he gathered himself for a

rush at me a fraction of a second before he could move someone shouted hey it was earsplitting I remember the strangely joyous lilting quality of it as though you and a friend had been searching diligently for something and he had suddenly stumbled upon it hey I wheel to my left the drunk spun to his right we both stared down at a little old Japanese man he must have been well into His 70s this tiny gentleman sitting there Immaculate in his kimono he took no notice of me but he beamed delightedly at the laborer as though

he had a most important most welcome secret to share come here the old man said an easy vernacular beckoning to the drunk come here and talk with me he waved his hand lightly the big man followed as if on a string he planted his feet belligerently in front of the Old Gentleman and roared above the clacking Wheels why the hell should I talk to you the drunk now had his back to me if his elbow moves so much as a millimeter I drop him in his socks the old man continued to beam at the laborer

what you been drinking he asked his eyes sparkling with interest I've been drinking saki the labor bellowed back and it's none of your business Flex of spittles spattered the old man oh that's wonderful the old man said absolutely wonderful you see I love saki too every Night me and my wife she's 76 you know we warm up a little bottle of Saki and we take it out into the garden and we sit on an old wooden bench we watch the sun go down and we look to see how our Pimon tree is doing you know

my great-grandfather planted that Pimon tree we worry about it after those ice storms we had last winter our tree has done better than we expected especially when you consider the poor quality of the soil it's gratifying to watch it we Take our saki out even in the rain he looked up at the labor his eyes twinkling as he struggled to follow the old man's conversation the drunk's face began to soften his fist slowly unclenched yeah he said I love P Simmons too his voice trailed off yes said the old man smiling and I'm sure you

have a wonderful wife no replied the laborer my wife died very gently swaying with the motion of the Train the big man began to Sob I don't got no wife I don't got no job I don't got no home I'm so ashamed of myself tears roll down his cheeks the spaz of Despair rippled through his body now it was my turn standing there in my well scrubbed youthful innocence my make this world safe for democracy righteousness I suddenly felt dirtier than he was then the train arrived at my stop as the doors opened I heard

the old man cluck sympathetically my my he said that is a difficult predicament sit down Here and tell me about it I turned my head for one last look the laborer was sprawled on the seat his head in the old man's lap the old man was softly stroking the filthy matted here as the train pulled away I sat down at a bench what I had wanted to do with muscle had been accomplished with love what we see in the old man is the quality of standing back in his awareness out of the game of Life

far enough so that instead of being reactive To the situation that he finds himself in in a mechanical way like the young akido fellow was he could open himself to the totality of the situation in a quiet way and out of that would come a response which would truly bring about reconciliation and Harmony and bring things back in in other words from an effectiveness of playing the game of Life there is a stance where your mind is that increases your Effectiveness in the game and it also liberates you from Being entrapped by the game like

say you're playing Monopoly and the Monopoly things on the Monopoly board some of you may or may not know are a top hat an iron a thimble and you be the thimble and I'll be the top hat now the question is are you a thimble or a top hat or are you somebody playing with a thimble and a top hat well you don't get lost in that too much well I'd ask you the same about business are you an executive are you a CEO are you a president or are you a being who is being

a president CEO whatever that is in other words where is your awareness in relationship to your role if you identify with your role exclusively you are trapped and you are experiencing some sense of finiteness boredom trapped in all the rest of it if you stand outside in your awareness not pushing it away you are what Christ says being in the world but not of the world and you learn how to fulfill the roles Without getting trapped in them by working to extricate your Consciousness away then what you become is a more effective game player because

your risk isn't as great so if you lose your job AO instead of oh my God I lost my job there's job and there's not job and here I am you're still here in fact you get to the point where you begin to see when you are able to stand back that even losses are vacuums into which growth can come and that when you're winning there Is less opportunity for growth actually than when you start to lose or feel the finiteness or feel it fall apart a little bit yenh a disciple of a famous DST

Sage by the name of changu yenu was also a prominent figure at the Imperial Court and was to become an adviser to the emperor this Emperor happened to have a great predilection for chopping off heads of his advisers if they made a Mistake Yen wh was afraid of this job and came to his teacher for his advice he said to his teacher I don't think I'm sufficiently enlightened to be safe in this exalted position Chang Su said to him in that case you must retire and practice mindf fasting Yen asked what is mind fasting changu

gave him the following instruction now this may be a little far out when you want to hear with your ears don't listen with your ears when you Want to see with your eyes don't look with your eyes when you want to understand with your mind don't think with your mind listen see and understand with what he calls the da or the deeper intuitive wisdom of your being other words go for a deeper part of your knowing mind rather than your intellect yenu retired and spent 3 years practicing this disciplin after 3 years he returned to

his teacher and said master I think I am ready changu said Well prove it so yenh said before I practiced mind fasting I was sure I am yenh but now after I have practiced mind fasting I have come to realize that there never was a yenu the teacher said you are ready now that's a lot but my statement is my suggestion is where did you learn who you think you are you learned it from your parents you learned it from the school and you built a structure or a model which is called an ego structure

In your mind of who you think you are and then it comes like a mindnet around you so you go down the street and you enter into a conspiracies with each other saying I will make believe you are who you think you are if you will make believe I am who I think I am and we enter into these games to keep reinforcing our models of who we think we are we dress that way we look that way we project it of who we think we are all the time and we get trapped in it

And it turns out to be too finite you are short changing yourself because you are much more than any model you can have of who you think you are and finally when you're ready for that next push you start to go deeper and you start to become interested in those methods that allow you to escape from the structure your mind has created so that the structure is available as your servant but not as your master in the spiritual Traditions they Say an intellectual who is proud of his intellect is like a prisoner who's proud of

his cell now you may decide I'm a flake that's perfectly reasonable I might if I were in your position too but I would not like to quote from a man who was a vice president of AT&T can't resist this is the last page of his book his name was Robert greenle he said awareness behind conscious intellect I See as infinite and therefore equal in every human being perhaps in every creature the blinders which block our conscious access to our own vast awareness are the uncompensated losses we've sustained the errors we have acquired from our cultural

inheritance from the undigested residues of our own experience and from our own conscious learning remove the blinders from your awareness by losing what must be lost the key to which no one can give You but which your own inward resources rightly cultivated will reply then set forth upon your journey and if you travel far enough filling the voids of loss with the noblest choices you may be given the secret of the Kingdom awe and wonder before the majesty and mystery of all creation the shift in perspective that is required for the next stage of the

journey is the realization that everything that you thought you were is Only part of who you are and the desire to cultivate if you will The Meta system of which the ego structure is only a subsystem and the problem is that a subsystem can never understand a metasystem and that is why in the biblical injunction it says lest you die you cannot be reborn in other words you can't realize your larger system if the smaller system keeps trying to explain it away or control it that is the rational intellectual analytic mind has Gotten you to

just where you are now now the question is can you see it's like you use a boat to cross an ocean you get to the far Shore do you then have to Portage do you have to carry it with you or can you let it go and now be on another medium in another way that a journey of going beyond your own the tool that you have mastered but now letting the tool go for a moment be the the Trap Of course has been that you thought you were the tool kogo osum I Think therefore

I am the fallacy of that is that it's the reverse way behind that is I am and I think and the thinking mind is your servant while for most people the thinking mind is their master and as you cultivate that meta awareness that other part of your being that What's called the intuitive heart mind the sin sin in Chinese the Atma in Hinduism do names for it in every system as you cultivate this meta system then you learn how to Delight in the forms of The play you learn how to work in the business World

it doesn't mean you give up the game it means you give up the vantage point from which you're playing it so you no longer have to milk it for the success because you're not so busy identifying with your separateness that you need to keep proving again and again that you're adequate that you're good that you can ACR more so that the Journey of the separate individual now starts to balance with that part of you That is identified with the totality so your actions are coming out of a much more interesting place so that your action

is the coming together of a number of strands in your being because you and I are human and what that Humanity represents is a creative tension between our animal humanity and our if you will awareness or Divinity or spiritual consciousness and it's only keeping both of those in Balance so you keep both of them honored does the Become interesting everything short of that is just is it your piece of meat or is it mine and then I go in and lift my Paws and I got my cave and if you're going to the next level

out the work begins inside your own head it does not begin in manipulating the environment it begins in manipulating the furniture right in here and where the identification is there are two little stories of Mahatma Gandhi one is he started to lead A March of protesting against the British and after a few days he saw that it was going to have some bad consequences and he stopped the March and his lieutenants came up to him and he said mahatmaji you can't do this people left their jobs they're taking great risk they're here behind you you

can't stop now and Gandhi said I have a mixed understanding I'm only human I don't understand it all my understanding of Truth changes from day to Day my commitment is to truth not to con consistency I'm sorry if that upsets you a lot of us have built our security on consistency on being who we thought we were and projecting it outward is it possible that you at your stage of Life can allow for a discontinuity to allow a shift of Consciousness into another way of being or is your commitment to consistency great G than your

commitment to truth it's an interesting one and you will Notice that the entire circle of the people around you count on consistency they don't count on Truth they count on consistency but what you can offer them and yourself finally is a reaching for the truth that becomes part of your bottom line and in the course of it it may not be consistent the other part of Gandhi that I want to talk talk about is he was on a train and it was leaving a railway station and a reporter rushed Up to him and said mahatmaji

give me a message to take back to the people in the village train was already moving Gandhi took a paper bag and he scribbled something on it and he handed it out and what it said was my life is my message I think that applies to every one of us what you are offering back into the universe is what you are what you are all of it if you in the Zeal to do well in business have had to separate means and ends and have not realized That means and ends are a piece and you

use means that are divisive to H The Human Condition in order to bring about ends that are good realize that that is the statement that you are projecting into the world it's like you try to bring about peace with anger in your heart what you do is sew the seeds of anger look and see at your totality of your life ask it of yourself is the way I am with all the people around me is the way I use my Resources is the way I enter into business is the way I am with my family

is the way I am in relation to silence aloneness am I ready to stand up and be counted as I am and say this is what I offer to all of you or do I say don't notice me notice my product finally for each of us our life is our message in talking about methods of working on oneself or Awakening or Shifting the perspective or Shifting the context in which you understand what you're doing and what your life is about the various strategies uh some of them in evolve the withdrawal into another context in order

to change and then coming back like when you go on a vacation you leave one context in order to reintroduce yourself to parts of your being that got lost in the sort of subtle toxicities of daily life you pull back you get another perspective then You come back with that enriched so for example what we do when we go on vacation is usually get very busy in doing which doesn't really deal with the quality of our mind at all and then we bring the Mind back still very agitated and quite Speedy in other cultures for

example in Burma where I have studied the heads of government and business their vacations they go into a monastery in order to meditate for 2 weeks or 10 days or a month in order to quet their Minds in order to get this shift in perspective so that they can come back and be a more effective effective game player if you will and uh um understand the gestal in which they're functioning more effectively in that strategy of a cyclic form of life think about how you use the time that is available to you to if you

will get Beyond time to find that part of you that is beyond time that can be done spirally in that way of coing out into the world and coming back uh And those going out and come back the pulling back can be it could be in terms of a sabatical a year it could be in terms of a month it could be in terms of a week it could be in terms of a weekend it could be in terms of an hour every morning or an hour every night because most doers if you will notice

they are so addicted to stimulation that they go from going to work and then there's stuff to read on their desks and then there are people to See and there are things to think about and spreadsheets to study and problems to deal with and then they come home and in the car back they're listening to the radio and then they get home and they turn on the television to read the to see the news and then they are dealing with the family and what's come up in everybody in the family in the day and then

in the evening there's more stimulation and the minute it slows down for a second let's go out let's see more People let's do more and it's constantly feeding that need for stimulation and there is just an interesting experience of just sitting down I mean if there's a stage where you get in your life whether you even want to believe that it's possible where you move towards what's called voluntary Simplicity and it gets to the point where you are you are realizing how cluttered your mind is and you would like to get a free of the

identification with your thoughts so Much that the EnV the external environment you start to want it to be simpler and simpler it's interesting the first time you sit in a totally white room in a simple way and feel fulfilled and don't feel with no books to grab and nothing and feel at peace with yourself that is a different once you have tasted that quality of peace that you can allow yourself to just be and it's enough then you can work with the sensations and the people and the books without that slight Anxiety about not having

them which keeps coloring it just a little bit the coloring if if you watch even as you're eating you'll planning what you do in the evening even as you're at the movie you're planning what you'll do after the movie even as you're doing after the movie you're planning what you'll do in bed and so it goes and it just keeps going and going and you're always your mind is always planning the next thing out of anxiety that you're going to get Caught without something in the sense of not having anything and having to deal with

the emptiness and then you say well at least I'll think and to come behind it is extremely interesting now um so that could be as much as 20 as little as 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening or something like that in which you just start to use some technique to quiet yourself down to examine the way in which you are so trapped in your own Thoughts to develop this other quality of awareness and then you go back into your life and then the next time you you come back to it

and then you go out the other strategy is to is to take the stuff of daily life and use it in a double way you use it one at the level that it exists like decision making uh business uh processes and the other you're using it as a vehicle to awaken Yourself and you're using it simultaneously on both levels at once let's see if I can give you an example um presently this uh Gathering all of the funds that came in for this Gathering are going to the sa foundation and the SAA Foundation is a

um nonprofit that does work in developing countries uh and uh with the American Indians and so on it's a Um it's a very interesting and unusual organization which maybe we can go into later but at any rate this we have a rotating chairmanship in our organization and for these past couple of years I've been chairman now being chairman of a foundation is um it's a role and um but when I uh go to Nepal which is one of the countries where we do work and where we have a presence we are an NGO a non-governmental

organization that Has been legitimized by the king and the Queen and so we're we're real over there and um just like the Red Cross or any of the other organizations so uh when I go to Nepal I put on my blue blazer and my tie and I am now chairman of a board and in the course of my last term uh the time I was there last time I was I had an agenda in which I wanted the government to do certain things for us and we in turn are doing certain things for the government

Now what the I had an opportunity to meet the minister of Health now the minister of Health he has an agenda also all right he's after all a representative of the king and he sees me as you can imagine what somebody sees the chairman of a Board of a funding agency from the West when you're a poor country what it look what what I look like to him and we come together now he is the person that can say yes or no to certain things we need to help us with The opportunity to serve really

and so we come into the room each with a certain Entourage we've got and we sit down at the temple it's just like U it's like real people you know and I don't tell them there are no adults present I mean I'm not going to scare and uh we sit down and we meet and face one another and we do all the Bowing and the hos and he's the minister of health and I'm the chairman of the board we have our roles and we each have Our agendas now at that point and I am saying

I've been working on my Consciousness now for 25 years but this job I think I'm not going to get through this is going to be a hard one and I'm probably going to burn out on it very quickly I think but I'll see if I can work with it so I am sitting opposite him and I've got my little reminder things these are like worry beads they're just beads that I use to remind Myself so I don't get too lost in the drama and I'm just sitting there looking at him and suddenly our eyes meet

and I find another being just like me except he's busy being the minister of health and I'm busy being the chairman of the board and we just met for a moment behind our roles as two fellow beings now for an easterner that's much easier to do for a West than a westner because they're trained to do that I mean that's part of what their Acculturation process is unlike ours for me it took me 25 years to realize that I was a being who was being chairman of a board rather than the chairman of a board

for him him he was trained to fulfill a role without getting lost in it so that when we meet we meet and suddenly there is this delight and we meet as two beings who are sharing the the dance if you will of forms and then we go into the game just as a Monopoly game with his with his Agenda but instead of him being his agenda and me being my agenda we are two beings who are meeting here and playing as two people minister of health and chairman of the board and dealing with our agendas

and we're dealing with it from a collaborative place in that we both would like to end suffering and the result is that our dialogue together brings us closer together rather than ending up being divisive where well if you won't do this Then I won't do this instead of separating us it's just like Russians and Americans or any people where they come together in a dialogue whether they can meet in what's behind it as well as being in their separateness can they meet in their unity and what I experienced was that my journey to Nepal this

time I came out of it of continuous meetings meeting with the Opthalmic associations and all this stuff Continuous meetings I came out of it with more energy than I went in I came out of it lighter than I went in I came out of it with my heart more open than I went in I came out of it seeing that us included nepes and westerners and people from the states instead of the people from the states were dealing with them in developing countries now so what I'm learning and every time the as I was approaching

the minister of Health I Thought oh my God you know it's fine to play this game when you're playing lowkey but here I am now I'm a chairman playing with the minister of Health this is big business and is that going to suck me in to lose my Consciousness into it and what I had to do was just keep reminding myself and keep waking up until I met him and we met behind it and then it started to be play from there on in and so what I'm learning is how to take the stuff of

daily life and convert It during the break one of us asked me how do you keep from burning out well the answer to how do you keep from burning out is the injunction that the bagabag Gita which is one of the s text of the east in Joins which says do not be identified with being the actor it's one of the key things in other words when you drive a car most of you do and you are roughly hurtling through space with about 4,000 lbs of steel or something see like it You're doing that making

incredibly subtle and complex decisions about about centrifugal and centripetal force and rates of deceleration and all that and all the time you're usually tuning the radio thinking about where you're going watching for police who knows what else you might be doing and all the time you're doing all that and you're doing it on what you could call Bas brain that is you're doing it without being somebody who's Driving and yet driving is happening well it is interesting how you can cultivate a place in yourself that is at rest even as you're full of activity so

that the activity doesn't wipe you out because you aren't doing it you can take a long trip like people say to me I'm on a tour now of 60 cities which means that between now in April 15th I'll do 32 cities I'll be in a different city every other night so I get on the plane every other Day I go to airports I carry bags I get off meet people get up give like is go to bed get up Etc people say what a demanding schedule must exhaust you you know who'll say that to me

like a woman who's raising three kids I said are you kidding I said I look at your life what a demanding schedule it must exhaust you I said I don't know just like you I get up every morning I brush my teeth I get dressed then I do stuff all day then at night I Take off my clothes and I go to bed and then I start the next day that's what you do but you see the minute I have a model of travel something happens interestingly people well I'm traveling and they get so caught

into what they call you call the dramatic storyline of it that you wipe out you wipe out because you milk the drama of your own life if that isn't too crude an expression and you learn how to not like what a day I've got instead of okay you Do what's immediately on the plate in front of you if you're here and you got to get there you get in the car and drive there and then you're there and the next person comes in and you meet them and if if you keep overriding it with the

whole story line of well it's 10:00 and I've already done four and I've got six more and will I do it and all you'll wipe out on the other hand if you just do the next thing and the next thing and each Thing you do fully constantly pulling your awareness noticing where your awareness is and bringing it back you keep coming into a resting space just as you're doing it and then it's just event after event EV after event and you end up being at rest and I'm learning how to do this I don't know

how to do it I know it's doable because I know beings who do it and I just have to learn how to be in the doing rather than get lost into the Doing and lose the being that's the whole process and this is just a mechanical technique there are techniques called the witness which is cultivating a part of you that notices what's going on like most people when you get agitated or angry or depressed boy am I depressed now if you came to me and you said which people do I'm so depressed right yep you're

really Depressed I'm boy am I depressed is every part of you depressed yeah I'm completely depressed is there any part of you that isn't depressed no I'm completely depressed you're noticing your depression yep is the noticer depressed well the notice is just noticing aha there's your entry right there that's that little Place and it starts out with such a subtle little tiny bit of your mind 9 99% of your mind is depressed and 1% is noticing it's like um clouds in the sky if you take a frame and frame a cloud a certain way it

looks like you just get a frame of gray but if you put a little bigger frame on you see there's a little blue around it and you suddenly say oh that's a cloud it's the same thing you do with Your thoughts see the thoughts grab you like I go into meditation and the meditative technique I use which is so Mickey Mouse it's absurd is I follow the breath this is a a southern budist tavad meta technique it's ancient it's an ancient technique I follow the breath rising and falling in my abdomen there's a little muscle

that goes up and down when you breathe you can feel it now I start in and my instruction From my teacher is follow the breath follow the rising and the falling and when it rises notice it it rising and when it follows notice that it falling so I start Rising falling Rising falling Rising falling and the first thing that my mind says is this is never going to work see now what happened was you see my mind just said my mind came up with a thought and said think of me this is Never going to

work and if you buy into that thought you say you're right this isn't going to well thank you very much for the teaching and you're off see if however you just agreed that for 20 minutes You' follow the instruction of the teacher and he says every time a thought arises notice that it has arisen allow it and then very gently return your awareness back to the rising and falling so you say okay thought see you later And you go back to Rising falling fall then a thought comes in for this I got a PhD you

know like here I went and got all this training and all this and I'm you know I'm this intelligent person and I'm following the breath of who am I I better not tell anybody I mean it's an embarrassing thing well what' you do all summer well I followed the muscle rising and falling in my abenue don't you have anything more important to do you see I Mean you can feel where that is in relation to the cultural context so I noticed that as another thought and then I go back and then Rising falling falling wonder

if the 20 minutes is up yet notice it Rising falling then I'm hungry right my knee hurts each one just comes up and it grabs you and says I'm real think me I'm real think me and each time you notice the thought allow it and you go Back the one that really sucks you in is rising falling Rising my God I think it's happening that one really gets you that takes you every time you know and oh yeah it's happening you know I remember going to one of my teachers and I said oh I've just

experienced such peace I am feeling the peace I've always year for all my life oh thank you so much oh this is just so wonderful he listened he said that's Fine now go back and watch your [Music] breath and that's called spiritual materialism when you get caught in the experience es that happen along the way now what a simple exercise like that does which has no religious overlay of any stuff it's just a mechanical method is it's allowing you to see the way in which your thoughts keep capturing you into being identified with them by

giving you a focal point around which You can see your thoughts grabbing you and pulling you and just doing that simple little exercise allows you to see your thoughts grabbing and taking you until pretty soon you begin to see that the thoughts are an ocean of continuous thinking it's like sitting on the edge of a stream and watching the water go by and leaves come and little fish go by and all kinds of things go and twigs and every now and then something catches your Consciousness and your head turns To follow it and when you're

meditating you just keep it right there and the stuff comes in exists and goes by and what happens just from that little mechanical method is you start to develop a connection to the awareness it's like the sky that's behind the clouds instead of just transferring your identity from being one Cloud to the next Cloud to the next Cloud which what happens is I'm hungry and then you're focused on the Refrigerator and then as you're eating you think I'm missing the game and then you're focused on the television set and and then you're in the middle

of the game and you I got to go to the bathroom and you're focused on and your mind is just constantly you watch from the minute you wake up like the alarm goes off or somebody nudges you or you wake up and you say I could sleep 10 more minutes what was I dreaming last night I've got to go to The bathroom that's what I need to do oh it's so warm in bed GE I and smell coffee what was I dreaming what was I dreaming now boy do I need to go to the bathroom

oh I got to do the laundry later oh I forgot that appointment oh God I got three more minutes and your mind starts see in each one is grabbing you and it goes all day long it's just all day long and each one grabs you And you do this and then this and if you would watch it from any Vantage Point other than being in it you'd be absolutely amazed at what's happening that you're you're at the mercy of these thoughts that just grab you and invest and invest you with reality and only when you

even have a context that it's possible to stand behind your own thoughts in just presence all you are to Define who you are is you just awareness it just Is questions sir we did a study uh took a year of a 100 people in the the little plan of ours and we implemented some of these thoughts and ideas and found that productivity increased quite a bit for a number of reasons that maybe this is one and found the Western mind or our mind here was is pretty difficult to maintain that it kind of leveled out

at a at a good productive rate I wonder if you've had some experience about Collective Groups in the western Arenas going further with it well um the whole idea of of sharing the journey with other people is extremely useful extremely strong because when somebody if you're alone in a marketplace where everybody else is like if you look at the sequence we're talking about some people are on their way up the first round some people have plateau they see the finite Limitless of the game limits Of the game and they're starting to go for another plane

they're starting the second level up if they are all surrounded with the people on the first rise everybody doesn't understand what they're doing they get no support for it at all what's ideal is if you're surrounded with people who are at this next level with you and ideally even some people who finish that one or on another tack even that can keep doing that that's what teachers are about and Guru and all that idea of somebody that's gone beyond that and sort of let helping you not get caught mirroring your caught this back to you

and it's called in Hinduism the Sanskrit word is satsang or in Buddhism SA or in the community or the fellowship in Christianity it's a group of people that come together to agree to help each other awaken to help each other awaken now it's very hard when there is no either manual like a holy book or a Teacher to help everybody because otherwise everybody keeps reinforcing the way they're caught so it's extremely useful to keep having some either method or text or person or group that keeps pulling you up and what I think is when I

talked about consistency and Truth is that as you start to grow now beyond the stage of success in a worldly sense and start to deepen your understanding of who you are in the broader social context it may well be that the nature Of your friends changed that a lot of your friends who you picked or who picked you that were relevant at one stage of your life they don't want to change or grow and you find that you're starting to be a little bored with being with them and you feel embarrassed by it and discomforted

by it and that's part of the cons inconsistency of growth that sometimes you start to look around for new kinds of friends to be with in order to help you grow the nature of a Selfpropelled group like the one you might be talking about is the nature of the contract you enter into with each other and the first of them are things like truth and the contract to help each other grow I mean uh like our board at SAA we are we're very like unlike the Red Cross with the board comes together they may be

um people with that come together to Serve on the board and make decisions we come together in order to work on ourselves in order to be the instrument of service rather than just stand back and do service so the contract with each other is I would you all help me awaken so that when one of us gets caught the others are there to help each other that's quite a contract between human being so you examine the nature of what the group is together for and if the group Has some sense of where it's going in

terms of what freedom is and what quietness of mind is to increase productivity increase satisfaction increase Des having some control and Mastery control over your own life not just control of the environment control of your own life so you free yourself from your own addictions then what you really need is a contract that allows you to help each other and that has to be spelled out and It's risky it's scary because most people don't want truth from each other they say I won't wake you you don't wake me questions yes um if you're I know

I'm interested in doing some things with some organizations or even going for a period of time somewhere and and working or studying doing both like working silver something like that try to know the how does one find out about what Organizations there are available to work through that you might be able to go to places where there are needs to actually be there with people you're talking about organizations opportunities for your own growth and I'm talking about opportunities well it would be for my own growth but it would also be uh say like going to

someplace like India to work with an organization like is it SA or with some of the other organizations Which how do we find out where do you find out which ones are appropriate for you and um that actually isn't as easy question as all that it would be nice if there were a huge computer network that would allow you to feed in I have this many hours or days or months and I have these skills and these talents and out would come your airplane ticket I know we' all like it but what we have is

quite a hit or miss program I mean There are what you do is you look at what your skills are and you lead with your skills because if you're going the vehicle through which you are there is your skill if you're an administrator you've got those skills you are a being that has a certain skill but you don't sell being you sell skill and then you your skill meets another person with their skill and then together you be that's what the process is so like somebody needs help And you're a helper of a certain kind

you come together the vehicle is helping but the nature of what the juice is is you're just meeting as fellow beings behind the helper helped role see this whole book is how not to get trapped in being a Helper and to help and and um one of the uh I think once you do that you look around for the professional groups that that are connected with your skill and then you explore with them where the Opportunities are like in education there's a whole there are books this thick of educational opportunities for teaching in in developing

countries uh nursing uh administrative um things like that unskilled labor though I mean third developing countries have a glut of just that and when you're busy like SAA is busy in emping the nepes not sending in westerners to do the jobs so we're busy training nepalis doctors and training op Phalic assistance and getting the nepes to do the work so that when we leave they are more powerful than when we came in not impoverish so we are not a resource for sending people to developing countries so you've got to hear whether the role you're going

to play see it's interesting whether your role in relation to other human beings empowers them and frees them or entraps them and there are ways of doing good for other people that actually Diminishes them in your act of doing good it's a very interesting thing that if you are getting a rush off doing good if you're getting a sense of righteousness from being a do a do gooder a good or you doing good the person you do good to has to feel the effect of that and they feel somewhat they it's it's interesting in the

old days I was a psychotherapist in a previous life and so and I was I needed To be a therapist so I was identified with being a psychotherapist the result was that the person in the room had to be the patient if you can hear that and my need to be a therapist kept them being the patient and in fact now as I look back the horror is that I actually punished them when they got better because they didn't need me as much and I needed to be needed I mean that was my problem and

it's the same thing that if you need to Be identified with your role for your own adequacy what you do is tend to force other people into symbiotic or complimentary roles and you don't let them out of them and then you only meet in the roles you don't meet in the space behind the role now when I'm with somebody in a role I may be helping somebody like I work with AIDS patients and I may be going in and holding somebody or changing their sheets or whatever I do with somebody my vehicle Is doing the

stuff I'm here if they wish to come up for air and be here that's fine if they want to stay being an AIDS patient that's suffering that's up to them I have no right to take away their right to stay in their role all I can do is create an environment that allows them to come up if they want to you can't force another person to give up their suffering but you can create an environment where they can come up for a if they want to and That's the same one of playing your role say

as an administrator with people around you and being impeccable in it and making demands and standards and all of it and yet not being so entrapped in your role that you force everybody around them to be caught in their roles but that even as you're fulfilling your roles you are in them but not of them and then often you and a secretary or a staff person and all keep meeting in the space behind it and the relationship Keeps feeding both of you even as you are impeccable at the level of playing the rle zone you

talk a little bit about your relationship now with God the roles that each of us plays I am a Jew I am a Christian I am a and the difficulty with with those roles that we we put on it's struggle for me any when you say I am anything that follows that is a limiting condition right the only truth the closest to truth since all words are lies the Closest to truth you can get just the statement I am the minute you put a limiting condition on it you define out what you aren't right you

immediately make an us and them or you know me and that all right so by my saying I'm a Jew makes me not all the rest of it and then I say but I was born a Jew does that mean and then I can be cute I say well I'm only a Jew on my parents' side Right and I hear that from my point of view what I'm trying to do is to learn the lessons of this birth I'm trying to learn that everything that is on my plate has been given to me as a

curriculum through which I can become free that's the way I see the universe right I'm giving you the advanced course right now but that's roughly it so that everything including the fact that my my father was this my mother died this way that I'm bald that I this that that all My whole all my Neurosis they are all part of this curriculum that is offered to me that I can use through which I can awaken now sometimes roll identities if you push away a role identity prematurely it still has you for example in the early

days I just wanted to get high all the time I wanted to go and be in la la land I wanted to be in the one the hell with all these individual differences I didn't like who I was in individual difference land so I Wanted to be out there I kept trying to get high all the time and then I saw that that was a trap I was pushing away something and as long as you try to push something away it's got you it's like your hand sticks to it see and the secret of the

of all the Transmissions are attachments or aversions both of them catch you I mean one of the highest teachings is the third Chinese patriarch of Zen that starts out with a line that You immediately I only get get to give you one line for you to say oh not not ready for that yet says the great way is not difficult meaning the great way the true understanding the deepest Freedom the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences when you've got that one let me know and I'll give you the next line

says when love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised but make the slightest Distinction and Heaven and Earth are set infinitely apart and what you hear is that as long as you identify with anything this versus that as long as you push away your Humanity to hold on to your Divinity as long as you grab your humanity and push away your Divinity it's got you you don't see the the truth of things they say in the in the Mystic literature truth Waits For Eyes unclouded by longing as long as you want Anything

you only see the outward container as long as you identify with any thing or group you've got an agenda you're trying to protected if you say I am a Christian you're busy trying to protect that definition you say I am I was raised a Christian and Jesus is got one of the most brilliant teachings of just what we're talking about today I mean what a mindblowing teaching he comes and he says look I'm taking a human birth just Like you and I'm just going to show you the truth of the fact that you aren't who

you think you are watch I'll go and I'll just be like you and then people will scorn me now that would freak you because you'd say one you know lost shame is terrible they'll shame me and I'll still be here you think you say well shame is one thing but your body is your big deal go ahead I'll be crucified and I'll drop back in 3 days and show you that isn't it either can you imagine A statement I'm offering my life to show you you aren't who you think you are so you can be

free if you believe that I just did what I did what a statement now you can appreciate that statement of the Christ Consciousness coming down in a form and giving that teaching but I can also appreciate Buddha who started out as a rich boy and then saw through the fallacies of stuff and he saw there was suffering and Sickness and death and that as long as he tried to hide from it or push it away it had him and he went out and he had converse with it and he kept working on himself and he

saw through the whole game and sat down and came back and taught these clear truths about how the nature of suffering in humanity and I can love him and I can look again and again to Moses and what happened up in the mountain and in each tradition I see the truth Because every religion was rooted in somebody that had a direct experience of who we are and then Different Strokes for different folks they came down and they for a different time they formulated in a different way and then people kill each other for my way

is better than your way and it's interesting to to understand the universality of the deepest truth and yet honor your form I mean I think my Guru who was a Hindu Guru used to say to most westerners Christ is your Guru Christ is alive and well in your heart if you will allow him to be and he'll guide you and I think that's true now and I listen in each religion to find that form that allows me to touch that deepest truth it turns out that in Western religions most of the exoteric component of the

religion is not designed to awaken you it's designed to keep you from causing Too much trouble to yourself and everybody else and when you start to awaken then you go into the esoteric components like Gnostic Christianity or the cabala in Judaism or you know the VC teachings in Hinduism stuff like that questions last time I heard you you this time you talked about viewing yourself and then the last time you mentioned that there was a viewer a second viewer of the viewer the developing of the witness that Notices your game movements your life movements is

still it's one part of your mind noticing another part of your mind that's only halfway home if you're going to go the full Journey then ultimately then this is a very tricky discipline to do it your mind turns in and observes itself observing because the observing self is just another part of the mind and then at that point if your mind is disciplined enough to do that you go Through a doorway and then you come into the space where you are no longer in your thinking mind you are behind your thinking mind and you just

that's the thing that the green span was talking about about saying um awareness is uh below conscious intellect is infinite and equal in every human being perhaps in every creature that's the one and that's the one where you are no longer witnessing yourself there's no more self-consciousness you Just are the thing itself you just are the ACT you you are the washing the dish you are the driving of the car you're not thinking I am driving the car you just are it and it gets very simple and very immediate then you're like a tree or

the grass or the river you're part of the universe of forms as Gandhi said when you die into that completely then you find yourself in the service of all that exists it's just natural it's your Recreation And your joy rabindranath Tor the poet said I slept and dreamt that life was Joy I awoke and saw that life was service I acted and behold service was Joy see there a stages of this recognition until not that you're doing good anymore next level is you are good not that you are Milking for your self-image how good you

are you're doing it because if your hand is sitting in the fire your other hand Will pull it out and this hand doesn't say to this one this one doesn't say to this one thank you because they're both part of the same thing I I've had this I've been struggling with in my lectures trying to deal with this issue of look uh the description I describe is that I was in a beach in Marin and I was playing frisbee which is a frivolous game right frivolous frisbee sunlight it was beautiful day And I was playing

frisbee and as I was about to throw the frisbee into my mind came the inscription that is over Gandhi's tomb and it says think of the poorest person you have ever seen and ask whether your next ACT will be of any use do you throw the frisbee or don't you see what you and I do most of the time is we have little category compartments in our head well I've done good now I can play Golf and when I'm playing golf I don't really want to think about those starving people because they'll ruin my golf

afternoon but now you call me and you say they're a blind and apal I'd like to help and then you get a good feeling about yourself and then after three lbs of Good Feeling you can have you know 2 oun of pleasure and you got these these we have these very subtle ways of playing of compartmentalizing our life But I'll tell you there is another level to play the game from because if you think that your happiness can be had through denial of something else you've got to realize that part of your energy is involved

in that denial process and you're not it's not free energy and there is another level where you have gone out and you have what's called embraced it all into yourself and there is the poverty and the suffering and the joy and the pleasure and there you Experience your own unique role in being part of an incredibly affluent society that has tremendous resources to work with and instead of Turning Away to grab that and then going back and then turning away to grab that you embrace it all and then you do what you do and you

hear that your acts can't be done by a rule book and sometimes it involves playing frisbee and sometimes it involves service but no longer are you denying you're allowing you're allowing And appreciating because you're hearing the unique part you have to play in the total structure of the dance of the game of life and you're just playing your part the way an oak tree does or an elm tree does to make believe you're not part of an affluent culture is dishonest but to make believe there aren't developing countries where there are people at this moment

starving and blind is also Dishonest and finally you have what they describe in a smile on a Buddhist statue the smile of unbearable compassion you bear what's unbearable there is so much suffering and it's all us you go up in your Consciousness you see we're all us and then you come down you say but it's my television set or in Islam they say trust in Allah but tie your [Laughter] Camel and you learn that you have to be impeccable on every plane that you can't be clean out here with the one and sloppy down here

like from a long time I was helping my audiences get out there and then I saw I looked and there were a lot of audiences out there in la la land and my teachings were learn your ZIP code get your act together get a job you know grounding people and you find half the audience you're trying to say go fly Dance Play and the other you say come on down and get it together because finally we have to have it all if we're going to honor our Humanity fully we've got to honor our Divinity our

Humanity we've got to honor that we are part of the one and live it and we are also separate that we have fears and pain and grief out of our separateness and we also have absolutely safety and invulnerability out of our Oneness and you keep learning that and Learning it and you study books that help you understand that you listen to tapes you come to Gatherings like this you examine you explore your own silence you start to quiet your mind you start to look to cultivate what is that quality of softness that allows me to

be part of the universe rather than separate from it this all becomes part of your agenda and finally part of your bottom line one more one more in in your five years since some of us in here have Seen you before are you finding there any change in our culture business culture primarily uh are are businesses business people uh more open to looking and searching and and and maybe questioning the values that we've had and the roles that we've been in there are some very interesting um effects of the um the immediacy of information in

the culture the information facility the technology has Given us has changed us in some ways for example the immediacy of appreciating the the What's called the global village or the fact of everybody's presence and the immediacy of suffering the um I'll tell you I'll list the things the bomb which means the presence of the potential of of not living so you got to live with death presently immediately uh communication which has Changed our Natures of time and space because of the immediacy of everything Transportation Mobility which has changed the nature of space and time also

uh things like terrorism which has increased the anxiety that comes with an anarchic system the economic instability of debts and debt structure and the fact that the culture the business Community Particularly is playing Paper games with money further and further out so that there is less stability Less rootedness in the way the game is being played now all of these overdetermines changes in consciousness of the culture they all contribute to changing the name of the game so that for example what Einstein did to physics to Newton see what Newton when I grew up I took

Newtonian physics in school and I Was told that Newtonian physics was absolutely true I mean I remember it was only seemed like a few years ago and then Einstein came along and he said well it's relatively true depending on where you're standing now einsteinian physics is taught and everybody assumes that and it changed the whole game it took what I was taught was as absolute reality and it made it relative reality didn't make Newton Newton a liar it just made him relatively true rather than absolutely true well all this stuff is doing the same thing

to the the cultural stand you're having anywhere that the information uh facility is making your reality relatively real but not absolutely real because you're having all these other realities presented to you you're not growing up in a village in Iowa where you don't know anything but what's going on in Iowa like just One generation back was doing you're knowing too much all the time I mean a kid in Iowa by the time he's 12 years old has vicariously through television lived out hundreds and hundreds of roles that's a whole different world of than the kid

that grew up in Iowa two generations back where he dreamed of becoming the postmaster in the post office I look at my audiences now 20 years ago my audiences all looked a certain way they had all either come To me through drugs or through Eastern mysticism and philosophy my audience is now and I'm saying the same thing roughly that I was saying 2 years ago I'm sorry but nothing changes it's the perennial philos philosophy my audiences are now first of all my audiences in those days were at narrow age range of about 10 years between

about 15 and 25 my audiences now are between about 20 and 80 over 75% of them have never taken marijuana or any drugs or any Eastern philosophy who are they what what are they doing there why would they come here a flake named ramas I mean what is it I don't understand I only have can assume that there is a shift in the cultural context that has to do partly with the anxiety of the times and partly of the receptivity to these kinds of ideas maybe the culture is ready at this Moment maybe that's what

affluence finally does people burn out how much they think they're going to get happiness through what they can buy and acquire either they do it directly or they do it vicariously because they look at the faces of their hero figures and they don't see happiness and contentment Frank Sinatra is not a Content man I don't know that he's a hero figure either but he's he was he is partly but That's the problem that we are seeing the limits of our own culture as as a certain Mythic culture and that limit that is becoming visible through

our hero figures WR large on television so it's Dallas and Dynasty and that kind of unhappy meanness and sadness in greed and fear that's involved in those kinds of shows and those are our big images that makes us ripe for the next step of a journey there has to be some despair there has to be a realizing of The limits of one level before you will ask the next questions because it's threatening to even allow that there is a meta system when you're still trying to milk the initial system okay thank you very much for

sharing dur this time this has been a what comes out of me is so much a function of who's there and I want to honor the willingness everybody has to come in together and share because the sharpness of your minds brings out stuff in me That um a different audience wouldn't bring out at all so thank you