Facing Death - Ram Dass Full Lecture 1992

For some of you coming to this morning's session is uh a lark and for some of you it's a little threatening and frightening and I recognize all of that and I appreciate that we all realize that part of our agenda as people of any age is to find some way of being with the idea of death I know that's why you are here there's a uh Tombstone inscription that I think many of you have heard dear friend please know as you pass by as you are now so once was I as I am now so

you will be prepare yourself to follow me and we are preparing [Music] [Laughter] ourselves take that as a blessing from Beyond I realize it's very presumptuous to get up and talk about death as if I know but I have a lot of Hutzpah that's Sanskrit [Laughter] for and something has happened to me as a result of my meanderings through the Realms of Consciousness over the past 30 years that has changed my attitudes towards death a lot of the fear that death generated that led to denial has gone from me I'm one of the strange people

that absolutely Delights and Enjoys being with people as they're dying in fact it is as such incredible Grace for me that in the morning when I know I'm going to be with such a person I get AB absolutely thrilled in my body my being because I know I'm going to have an opportunity to be in the presence of Truth so I would like to share with you this perspective and stories and images and talk for maybe half of our time and then Work with questions and answers we are living at a time where um Birth

has come out of the closet in the past 20 30 40 years and death is just beginning to come out of the closet it is now beginning to be acceptable to consider the possibility that people actually die usually in our culture it has been put behind doors behind sheets behind you don't talk to the children about it you don't show anybody and for me who has uh grown up In that culture it was quite an experience when I started to live in India where when somebody is dies they are put on a um pallet and

wrapped in a silk sheet or a sheet and then carried through the streets to the burning grounds with sat sat with the Mantra being recited as they go through the streets and the death is public for everybody to see the body is right there it's not in a box it's not hidden and because India is a place of The extended family and very few and inadequate hospitals most people are dying at home so that most people as they grow up have been in the presence of someone dying while in our culture an amazing number of

people even at middle age have never been in the presence of someone dying they have walked away from it and hidden from it and I was one of them and I have certainly changed in the past uh 25 Years I think the reason that I changed was that and I know this will offend some of you but it's truth is always difficult that through my experiences with psychedelic chemicals spec H yeah you might [Laughter] say particularly originally the uh the mushrooms of Mexico which were used by corand deros and oracles in Mexican religions and the

mushrooms have been Used throughout religious history actually for mystical experiences through that first experience I came in contact with a part of my being that as an adult I had not identified with I had it not acknowledged and it was a part of my being that lay behind my social roles behind my personality and it was indeed a part of my being that didn't seem to have much to do with birth and death Could be called Soul or awareness or Spirit or God or whatever and for me who was a western social psychologist professor at

Harvard materialist philosophical materialist that experience was an extremely confusing one because there was nothing in my armentarium of scientific methodology or in Psychology that prepared me to deal with that component of my being once I experiened that being it started to profoundly change the nature of my life After that of who I thought I was because up until then I had identified with that which dies and as long as you identify with that which dies there is always fear of death because it's the fear of cessation of existence and I realized now that although I

didn't know the form that it would take after death I knew that what there was about something about the essence of my awareness was outside of death now the interesting thing for me At that time was that when I had that experience it was what I called ineffable Indescribable because I had no Concepts to deal with what I was Finding in my being probably had I been more emotionally connected to my Jewish roots I would have found in the cabala the book of Brilliance and so I would have found uh metaphors and uh analogy is

for what I experienced but I wasn't and the book that came to my attention that was brought to my attention by aldus Huxley Who was a part of our project and visiting an MIT the year that year was a book called The Tibetan Book of the Dead and what happened to me when I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead was I was reading descriptions of the direct experiences I was having with the mushrooms now this was very confusing to me again because this book was 2500 years old I thought I was at the leading

edge of the unknown and here was a very ancient text A book that was used by monks by llamas read to fellow llamas at the point they were dying and for the days following their death whispered in their ear in their ear about the process of dying out of that my colleague Timothy Larry and my the colleague Ralph mner and I began to see the Tibetan Book of the Dead in metaphor torical terms as a story of psychological death and rebirth even though it was used as physical death and rebirth and so we did A

book called the Psychedelic experience which was a manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead for going through this psychological death rebirth and I really think that although it has been made trivial in a way the idea that's a Biblical the idea of dying and being born into truth or wisdom or spirit is really what our business is that we're talking about when we deal with death and that as you have extricated yourself from a solid identification with body And with personality and with materiality you begin to have spaciousness to allow for the possibility

that death may be part of process rather than end I feel that very deeply people say Do you believe that there is continuity after death and I say I don't believe it it is which offends my scientific friends no end but belief is something you hold with your intellect and this has gone way beyond that now you may be Just shearing my total pathology I have no idea and that it's up to your intuition to decide that I would never know if I was completely crazy [Music] so to show you how crazy I am I

have a u a friend who some of you have met through books uh a friend named Emmanuel Emanuel is a spook a being that has dropped his body somewhere along the way and speaks through a lovely woman named Pat Rigas and um I must point out to you in when I talking about a channeled beings that all beings that don't have bodies aren't wise that there are as many um schlock people without bodies as there are with them and um there are a lot of well-meaning beings who have left their bodies and want to send

back messages like bu United States Steel and they don't know any more than they knew before So you have to be very discriminating when dealing with disembodied beings in the same way as you are with embodied beings and but Emanuel has a lot of Nas he has a lot of real wisdom and he's a great he's like an uncle to me he's just wonderful fun and when I said to Emanuel Emanuel I deal a lot with uh the fear of dying in this culture and death what should I tell people and he said ramdas tell

them the death is absolutely Safe now just put those two things together and realize what a far out line that is death is absolutely safe and then he added one more image he said it's like taking off a tight shoe okay can you hear that one like taking off a tight shoe now just imagine that you as Spirit or awareness have contained yourself in an Incarnation or contained it in a conceptual model of who you are and on a storyline and then at some point you dissolve out of that You break out of that and

there is this incredible release quality well these kinds of things I'm talking about are very different from the way in which our culture is presently treating death presently we see death as an enemy the medical profession sees death as a failure the Temple of life is the Intensive Care Unit the medical person is the priest when that became unacceptable we then move towards the Hospice movement now the hospice movement is extremely useful in coming back to a psychologically supportive environment because int I of care units don't allow babies they don't allow dogs they don't allow

flowers they don't allow the human connections give you psychological support and the hospice movement was very interested in providing psychological support and as such it has been it has played a useful role and it Provides a um a warm setting either in the home or in a hospice residential space for people to have psychological support and respect and and dignity as a human as a personality while they are dying uh I want to support hospice and at the same moment express my reservations because Hospice in order to be fully acceptable into the economic structures of

the society meaning Medicare and so on has avoided the spiritual aspects and it has done so Quite intentionally actually and I find that CES Saunders who started the hospice movement who I think is a very caring human being still is it says death is an outrage and I personally don't experience that so that I want to support the hospice movement as a step in the right direction but I want to say that we have a lot further to go in terms of what our possibilities are for creating environments for people as They're dying where they

can have the spaciousness to explore the process they're going through without being surrounded by people who feel sorry for where they are uh and what I have tried to do with Steven Levine and uh his wife Andrea and Dale boram a number of people is over the years create a space we've had different programs like dial of death where you can call up and talk to people and have pillow talk with people to share with Them the process of coning conscious through dying uh we've had the dying Center we had one in New Mexico my

model was I knew that my being with people that were dying here's my predicament I'm incarnated and I have all of the stuff that goes with an Incarnation the deepest one is a what's called first chakra uh for those of you in those systems understanding those systems Which is the fear of survival it's preoccupation with survival I know that if I am going to work on myself spiritually in this lifetime one of the things I want to do is work with my fear of death and the way I can do that is by being around

death during my lifetime in in the terad and Buddhist tradition for example they send the monks out to the cemeteries to spend the nights in the cemeteries and in that tradition they throw the bodies out there uncovered for The birds to eat it so the whole thing um is ecologically sound so you go out there and you sit with the bloated Corpse The Fly infested corpse the skeleton and you get a chance to be aware of all the process of Nature and you watch your own disgust and Loathing and fear and as as I am

now so you will be prepare yourself to follow me and it's in a way beginning to see the whole way that the body is decaying and meditating on Decay so that you can find The place in you that has nothing to do with that by opening to that rather than because the denial of it keeps you stuck in it that's the problem denial keeps you f fixated and so part of the work and that's why I wanted to get as close to the dying process as I possibly could so the two combination of the two

things one was that something had happened inside of me which was a spiritual awakening that made death feel different and the second was that I Wanted to work on myself and be close to the the deepest fear of incarnation which was the fear of death that combination led me to start in the 19 about 1963 to work with dying people and to want to be available to them what could I do I wasn't a doctor I wasn't a nurse I'm not a lawyer I am not you know I'm not an ordained priest so the question

what I could offer a human being I and I've realized I've purified the way to Say it now over the years what I have offered another human being is a spacious environment with my mind in which they can die as they need to die I realize that I have no moral right to Define how another person should die that each individual has their own Karma their own stuff to work out it's not my job to say you should die beautifully or you should die this way I don't even know why how they should die let

me give you an example of That I was helping my uh my stepmother die she was um 69 or or so and she had developed cancer and um when she developed the cancer she and I were good buddies and my father was 18 years older than she was my role was to be with her and to help her through this process and she and I went to the doctors together and we did the whole thing of getting all of the reports and dealing with all the emotions now she was a a very tough New England

lady she was a a wonderful grounded tough poker playing smoking just fun she was argumentative and tough and willful she had this kind of stiff upper lip way of living life and so she was doing that around her death my job wasn't to say hey Phyllis you should open to this that wasn't my moral right my job was just to be there with her and I would lay on the bed and we'd hold each other and we just talk and we talk About death and what we thought it might be like and all but she

was still very very strong but the pain of the cancer was very intense and over time it finally wore away her will and there came a moment shortly before maybe maybe four or five days before her death when she gave up now in our culture giving up is seen as fager everybody says keep trying keep trying we surround people that are dying with a certain kind of falseness that Comes out of our own fear when my mother my my natural mother was dying I remember it was back in ' 66 and she was in a

hospital in Boston I would be sitting with her and in those days I was taking a lot of psychedelics so I'd usually be on something sitting with her I'd watch people come into the room all the relatives and doctors and they saying you're looking better you're doing well and then they go out of the room and say she won't live the Week and I thought how bizarre that a human being is going through one of the most profound transitions in their life and as surrounded completely by deception can you hear the pain of that that

nobody could be straight with them because everybody was too frightened even the rabbi all of them everybody everybody and she and I talked about it and she said what do you think death is I said I don't know I look at you and you're my friend and it looks like You're in a building that's burning down but you're still there and I figure when the building Burns it'll go and you'll still be here and way we just met in that space so Phyllis I was open and she could ask whatever she wanted I didn't say

now let me instruct you about dying cuz she would have not accepted that but then she gave up and at the moment she surrendered it was like watching an egg breaking and some being emerged that was so radiantly beautiful and present and Light and joyful it was a being that she at some deep intuitive level knew herself to be but had never been busy being all of her adult life and she opened to this being and she and I just basked in its Radiance and she at that moment had gone into another plane of Consciousness

where we were completely together talking being but the pain and the dying process was just phenomena that were occurring at that moment she was no Longer busy dying she was just being and dying was happening and to tell you how extraordinary this just to complete this story right at the uh last moment she said Richard sit me up cuz I'm Richard to my family she said Richard sit me up so I sat her up I put her legs over the bed and her body was falling forward so I put my hand on her chest and

her body fell back so I put my other hand on the back and her head was Ling so I put my Head against her head we were just sitting there together and she took three breaths slow deep breaths and she left now if if you read in the ancient Tibetan texts the way in which conscious llamas leave their body they sit up they take three breath and they leave who was she how did she know that what was that about I just want to play with you with the Mysteries that I play with Raman Mahari

who was a great Indian Saint was Dying of cancer and they said let's treat it and he said no no it's time to drop this body cuz in India it's called dropping the body and you hear the implication of it that there is something that drops the body the body doesn't drop itself the body is dropped and his devotees started to cry and they said don't leave us don't leave us and he looked at them with confusion he said don't be silly where could I [Music] Go I'm just dying don't make such a big deal

it's like I'm just selling the Ford you know it's not such a big deal I'm just dying so the dying Center in my mind was an institution where people like me who wanted to be around people that were dying as part of their spiritual work on themselves would create the support system whether they were nurses or doctors or attendants or whatever and the place would be open to people who wished to use their death as A vehicle for their own Awakening because as you're going through these processes for a person that really sees life's journey

as a one of spiritual work on oneself this is an Optimum set of experiences to work with the process of dying so if you imagine now you have an institution in which everybody in the institution is there in order to spiritually awaken they're called Monasteries or ashrams it happens there are ders and there are helpers of ders there but that's ground not figure the figure is the spiritual awakening and everybody's there for the same reason reason like what I experience is that when I am with somebody like somebody I work a lot with AIDS patients

now here's a young person who very often is the object of social stigma they're dealing with family rejection often they're dealing with an Opportunistic illness in which there are symptoms that are occurring in a jumbled mass and you feel better and then you feel sick and then you hit here and then hit there they're dealing with economic difficulty when I come into be with them the first thing I have to do when I sit down with them is to open myself to all my reactions to their predicament the minute I try to deny it it

catches me so I have to open myself to it so I have to open myself to my Empathic reactions that is to me as a separate entity feeling what it would feel like if I were being socially ostracized had an opportunist to illness was young didn't have a chance to live out my dreams all of it all of the pain of it it's only when zman gave me a beautiful line I was interviewing him for a television show and I said zman if you were an Israeli what would you say to a Palestinian and zman

said Oi oi such a problem he said before we can be with one another we have to learn to grieve with one another we have to open ourselves to grieve for the other person's loss and pain and when they feel heard in the grief then we can start to meet behind the grief and what I've learned is in whether I'm dealing in this because I do a lot of work with political activists and I when I'm dealing with uh people of Ethnic different ethnic Origins and minority groups and all kinds of diversity that I can

always be my spiritual cuteness and up level and say we're all one what are you so busy being black or you know Latino Cho or whatever they say oh that's not going to work you are not hearing us but if we sit with each other and grieve together then we rise into the place of unity behind it so when I sit with somebody the first thing I have to do is open my heart as a Separate entity to this other separate entity and go through the process of empathy that's not compassion yet that's empathy of

as a separate entity feeling what they're feeling to be able to do that is interesting to be able to keep your heart open in Hell really to keep your heart open when it's breaking in a situation to do that requires that you have cultivated the spiritual perspective behind it that allows for the wisdom of the universe that allows For the I mean this is a little much to say but it's true that allows for the Perfection that exists even within the imperfection and once you are rooted in that understanding if you have stood back if

you've been able to stand back enough to see the beauties of the laws of the universe to see the Exquisite intricacy of the unfolding of the spark of God manifesting into form shakina if you see that the the just the Brilliance of it you are in awe And at that point the little mind that you have which is just part of the manifestation suddenly gets humble before that and instead of saying this is terrible this suffering is awful if I were doing it I'd do it differently you say I really don't understand but there's a

place in me that has faith in the unfolding what has happened to me as a result of inner work which I am talking about and commending to you is that that Two planes of Consciousness living both with the Perfection and with the pain of the suffering allows you to stay with the pain without pushing it away because you have the balance within yourself it's as if you're part of the unity and you're also separate you're part of the unfolding it of all that includes suffering like with Phyllis how am I to say now that the

pain she went through that four forced her to give up that led to the spiritual awakening For her the few days before she died I wouldn't have personally given her that pain cuz I couldn't have done that but am I to judge that as somehow wrong and I'm faced with the Paradox that I as a human with a human emotional heart want to take away your suffering and at the same moment there's another part of me that understands that suffering is Grace that suffering is the Sandpaper from the spiritual point of view that is Awakening

people and once you've started to spiritually awaken you rep perceive your own suffering and start to work with it as a vehicle for awakening now the interesting part of that Paradox is you don't say to another person that says oh I'm suffering you don't say hey it's Grace see have to give people space to do what they need to do and if they're at the stage of their evolution where they see Their suffering as this horrible thing that's being done to them you can do the best you can to remove their suffering the way they're

experiencing this suffering as my Guru says God comes to the hungry in the form of food and you get you get what you need so when I come in with somebody let me give you an example woman 42 years old very wealthy very beautiful very talented very Creative is dying of AIDS and she comes to me several months before she's dying and she said ramas I wonder if you would help me die I said well great we'll we'll do it together so we started to meditate together we started to talk we started to read things

and discuss them and she said I'd like to stay as conscious as I can through this process because you understand that the the more you are aware of the spiritual nature of Life The more you see the moment of death as a moment for release for taking off the tight shoe and the art form in dying is that at the moment of death you are neither grabbing at life nor pushing it away You're neither pushing nor pulling it's the the attraction and aversion that keeps you holding to form so to prepare for the moment of

death when the processes that go on in Consciousness are a dissolving of Boundaries a speeding up of awareness a a kind of a an opening and expanding to be in that process where you don't go h no and grab hold one prepares one prepares for the moment of death and it's interesting that in almost all the Eastern Traditions people see one of the works of life is the preparation for the moment of death now each person does what they can do we don't make believe we're more ready than we are so that I'm Very pleased

that we're getting to the point now where people can decide how much pain medication they need in collaboration with their doctor rather than the nurse saying you had it 4 hours ago you can't have anymore each person knows and when they know they have control over the pain medication they need a lot less it turns out because a lot of it is their fear of pain that they're dealing with so with Mary as I started to get to know her she was an Absolutely beautiful human being her family had ostracized her and she had wonderful

many many wonderful friends we started to be together in the hos when she was finally in the hospital we just sit and hold hands and look in one another's eyes and what I then was able to do see after the first stage when you empathize with the pain of another person then comes the next stage where you start to meet the person behind it all it's like are You in there I'm in here far out what are you doing in there I mean if I can just run you through this kind of oversimplified model if

you had a little television receiver Channel right here next to your eyes what you're finding what we're talking about is planes of Consciousness or channels on a television set and most of us most of the time in this culture act as if we have a one or two channel Set we don't have cable and today we're talking about cable we're talking about acknowledging all these other channels that are floating around in the room but we're not picking them up because we don't know how to tune Our receiver that's BAS basically what this is about so

on the first channel when you look at another human being you see old young dark light fat thin Etc you see physical body and if you're obsessed With your physical body that's what you see when you look in the world other people's physical bodies that's the channel you're on if you flip one channel then you're in the psychosocial realm you see Power and you see happiness and sadness and neurosis and it's the therapy channel it's the and it's the it's the social role channel it's where there are mothers and truck drivers and all lawyers and

all the different roles and identities all the Social stuff that's all a channel and that's As the World Turns and it's a NeverEnding source of Fascination I mean it just goes on and on and on and on most people are happy with Channel 2 that's in Channel 1 and two about 98% of the people you've ever ever known are busy with those two channels all the time but now we're talking about something else we're talking about shifting now you shift one more Channel and there's a little in between one Which is called it's like the

astral plane it's where you're dealing with arct types the yian arch types you're dealing with what's called astral or Mythic roles and Mythic identities it's that sort of place where you see people in their Mythos rather than in their personality structures you look at me and you say he's an Aries I just knew it know it's a Sagittarius and Leos and you see there's 12 of us in various permutations if you flip to the next Channel you go behind all those individual differences and you just see another Soul just like you that has all that

packaging that's different than you but is just another being just like you that's when you say are you in there I'm in here how' you get in that one and you see all of the stuff of the personality and the astral and the Mythic and the body and all of it as like packaging and you see the spiritual individual entity and just for fun if you turn the channel Once more what it is is you're looking it's looking at itself looking at itself there's only one of it it's awareness aware of itself and just to

keep the Buddhist happy you turn it once more it all disappears which is basically the one in itself it's basically the one in itself rather than looking at itself first of all most of our images of love in our society have to do with romantic love they are poetic love they Are interpersonal love I love you you love me we love each other we all give lip service to but hardly ever really acknowledge that there is another kind of love that is not interpersonal we call it conscious love or Christ's love or God's love and

the image I have have is to is that when you grow up in a society of conditional love which most of us have grown up in because of the way in which we are Socialized we end up very needful for love and that's why a lot of the literature is about love and affection it's as if there's something in us that's very hungry we're on a deprivation diet and so when we meet somebody who has the key to un lock something in us we experience that we are in love and we say I am in

love with you what we're really saying another way of saying it in a kind of an u in Instinct literature is you are the key stimulus that is releasing the mechanism in me that allows me to be in love you're my connection and as my connection I want to possess you because I'm hungry to be in this state in my being I have come into the place of love in my being and everything is beautiful suddenly but it only happens when you're around so where will you be Thursday and where will you be Friday and

where will you be for the rest of my Life and the tendency is to want to possess the Beloved which as you and I both know is one of the quickest ways to destroy the pro the experience and the that that love has in it fear because somebody's going to die or go away or find another lover or something that's interpersonal romantic love and that's why there so much poetry about it because it has the fear and the joy and all of the stuff in it but now take that Image that the key stimulus is

something that opens you to the place in yourself where you are love and through the spiritual practices and through understanding the metaphysics and through opening yourself you find yourself starting whether you call it awareness where you draw your awareness back from thought or however you get in there through meditation through devotion through study whatever your practices are you Find yourself starting to rest in the place of presence in your being which has the quality of that openness that boundarylessness that heart intuitive heart space where you experience that you are in love but now you are

no longer dependent on an external thing to awaken you to it you're beginning to rest in it you are beginning to be love now the social problems that raises are very interesting because what happens is now Everyone you look at you are in love with and you don't quite know what to do because if you've been working on an old deprivation model you want to collect them all so you get one and you take you say let's nest and you go back and you get twigs and drapes and you know make a nest and then

after some time you say I'm going to the supermarket to get some tofu and beer and um and at the checkout counter you look at the person the Checkout counter and it happens again I mean because now when you the eyes you see are the windows to the soul and the Soul rests in love the soul is a qu a being within the place of love so you look and there's your beloved now what are you going to do you got one at home so you say have you considered a Minaj at but what are

you going to do then are you going to not walk down the street and look at anybody because it's going To keep happening and you realize that you're going to have to give up your deprivation model because there's an abundance of love you're going to have to stop collecting it and you're just going to start to go so that you pass your beloved on the street and you don't even wink so you go through stages of at first you can't believe it's so you get down the street and you meet one and you say let's

have coffee together or give me my your telephone number number you Know in case I run out of the others later I want to know that this one is cuz it's so beautiful and then after a while you just keep letting go and letting go and letting go until you realize that isn't the way you're just living in this presence of love because the thing that has closed you down is the fear of the other person's pain and suffering and once you have that spiritual perspective that allows you to keep your heart open in the

hell and the Pain and the grief and the stuff then you can start to be in love with another human being without feeling the possessive quality about it and so with Mary I'm sitting with Mary and I am falling into love with her and that is both levels the personal level I'm attached to her I don't want her to die I've got to love her so much I don't want her to die and the other part she and I are just floating in the ocean of Love and I realize and what she is experiencing is

such an intimate human contact as I am we are both dying together and we go right up to the moment of death and at that point what happened to me in that case was I then found myself separating myself from her because I wasn't yet capable of staying in love through death and that's my work on myself I could stay in love through dying but not through death yet and yet Love transcends death but to be that wisdom is different than knowing that wisdom and I am dying into that wisdom this too weird for you

or are you still here with me because I work a lot with people that are grieving and my way of supporting grieving is to say grieve my God grieve don't try to stop grieving don't get don't be strong grieve some more go grieve some more just allow the human pain don't hide it just let keep going through it and then At some point you will quiet down naturally might take a couple of years who knows at some point you will quiet down you will be quiet enough to realize that the love when you and another

person enter into the space of love together for even a moment that relationship has transcended relationship you have entered into a unitive moment together and that sends death and at that moment when you quiet down enough and you're sitting with your Beloved you suddenly realize that where did they go as REM Mahar she said where could I go I'm still here just the form that left you were busy missing the form you weren't missing the essence cuz the essence is here and when you recognize that you feel as a human being enriched by everybody you

have loved instead of deprived by the loss of their form you realize that there living through you and that everybody you've ever loved is part of the fabric of your being now in The way in which you go forward and that's when grief gets transformed into a living love space a spiritual Transcendence of the pain uh there was a nurse in a uh seminar that Elizabeth kuer Ross and I were doing together she was about in her I think late 20s and she had three children and she had Advanced cancer and she had been through

many many operations and it was a very poignant story with three young children and she said to the audience what would You feel if you came to visit me in the hospital and different people raised their hands and Elizabeth wrote on the board and some of them said anger and some of them said anger at God some of them said pain some of them said sadness at your plight some of them said confusion a whole list of things and she then said you you see the predicament she said all of you were so busy being

with 28-year-old nurse with three children with cancer nobody was with me You see the issue I mean when working with an AIDS patient or cancer patient the symbolic power of dying is so powerful that it's extremely hard to get through it to be with the person behind it like I have a friend friend Kelly who was a quadriplegic Kelly was a quadriplegic he was hit on the side of the head in when he was about 9 years old and it was misdiagnosed so you can hold his hand over an alphabet board and he can spell

out words and that's the Way he communicates and he like this and he's fully awake and fully brilliant and he's 33 years old Kelly is a delight absolutely a delight I had Kelly introduce me once when I was speaking before a group of doctors and holistic health Healers about 500 people in the audience and Kelly was wheeled onto the stage and of course they were all a gas you know like Kelly spells out Rd ramas Rd says we are not our bodies amen but when I met Kelly the immensity Of his predicament so caught my

Consciousness that it took me almost 6 months of visiting with him before I could get behind the symbolic power of his identity his social identity and his Psy physical identity to meet him to say are you in there and now Kelly and I have been together for eight years and you know I mean he's just another being just like me he's just got his karmic trip and I got mine I've just been through a Very profound experience with Kelly about two months ago Kelly said to me I've decided I've had enough and I'd like to

commit suicide I said well you have every right to do that he said what do you think about it I said well um a human birth is an opportunity to do incredible spiritual work and you've been doing incredible work and there's a lot more you could do cuz you're still a hung up greedy little bastard but you could do some great Work Kelly and I have a good relationship as you can see I said but you know I don't know how much the the game is you take what you can take and when you have

had enough taking you stop there's no blame you know nobody's going to come and say you committed suicide you're ter not from where I'm sitting I said and I'll miss you terribly I wish you wouldn't cuz I really love having you around but you have a right to do it the problem is how You going to do it he can't take anything can't move his hand he can't take pills he can't cut his throat what's he going to do so we talked about it and I said well I think the only way you can do

it is is not eat cuz he can just most of the stuff goes in he chokes as he's as he's being fed but he can swallow so that day he decided to stop eating and he called his mother and his father and his step parents and all Gathered and the doctor and everybody and I had gone and left for somewhere else and he kept saying ramas has given me the courage I thought oh god oh and I've decided to stop living and so he fasted for um 49 days and I spoke to the doctor and

the doctor said well now this young man could do a great deal with his life and you know he was being doctory cuz he he had to protect his he his insurance And I said well doctor tell me if you were in Kelly's predicament for 20 years he said I don't know I said well that's the predicament I don't either and when we don't know we've got to give Kelly the support to do what he wants to do because how are we to tell him what to do so then around the 48th day I came

to see Kelly he had lost 30 lbs he was too weak almost to push the button I mean it took a long time to get the thing out and he said What do you think happens at the moment of death so I told him what I thought would happen he said it's still all right with you if I die I said it's up to you I I miss you and I think you could do more work but it's okay with me and that evening he ate but in those 48 days he took me through so

much he took his parents through so much he took everybody now all most of the people around him are really pissed off at him they're really Angry at him how could you do this to us and he said to me are you angry with me I said Angry what a gift you gave me you took me so close to the issue you kept me awake with it all the way through when you get to the place where your awareness is really clear let me just tell you a story just give you a couple couple stories

to give you feelings in a Olden time an army is going through Villages and it's killing many people and it's a Buddhist uh Country and it's disemboweling the monks and it's getting rid of Buddhism which happened a lot in times of gask Khan and stuff like that and there was one particularly harsh captain and he had a bad reputation of being very cruel and he came into this town and he said to his agitant what's happening in the town that a and said all the people are bowing down to you they're all afraid of you

and in the monastery all the monks have fled to the mountains except for One Monk and the captain was Furious that there was a monk who was still there and he got up and he walked to the monastery and he pushed open the gates and there in the middle of the courtyard was the monk just standing there and the captain walked up to him and he said don't you know who I am I could take my sword and run it through your belly without blinking an eye and don't you know who I am said the

monk I could have your sword run through My belly without blinking an eye apocryph the captain bowed and left and when you start to get into the spiritual literature you start to see a lightness about death a Zen monk is dying and Zen Monk's Masters are supposed to leave a a verse and he hadn't written his verse and his students were very concerned he died before he wrote his verse so they kept saying what about jerse what about jerse so he picked up his brush and he Calligraphi birth is thus death is thus verse or

no verse what's the fuss and he died I want to read you just two things and I went way out on a limb here I had to do this and I'll explain why this is one of the hardest stories you'll have to hear an 11-year-old girl and her girlfriend went to the Jewish Community Center in the Northwest to play tennis and they were both raped and murdered and I was called that night by somebody who said the parents are people who have Read your books and listened to your tapes and perhaps there's something you could

say to them at this moment and I realized I couldn't do it tomorrow it had to be done right now and so I sat down and the enormity of that pain was so great it catapulted me out of the ego part of me that felt insecure in writing and so I wrote this letter which I'd like to share with you dear Steve and Anita Rachel the daughter Rachel Finished her work on Earth and left the stage in a manner that leaves those of us left behind with a cry of Agony in our hearts as the

fragile thread of our faith is dealt with so violent is anyone strong enough to stay conscious through such teachings as you are receiving very few and even they would have only The briefest Whisper of equinity and peace amidst the screaming Trumpets of their rage grief horror and desolation I can't assuage your pain with any words nor should I for your pain is part of Rachel's Legacy to you not that she or I would inflict such pain by choice but there it is and it must burn its purifying way to completion for something in you dies

when you bear the unbearable and it is only in that Dark Night of the soul that you are prepared to see as God sees and to love as God loves now is the time to let your grief find expression no false strength now is the time to sit quietly and speak to Rachel and thank her for being being with you these few years and encourage her to go on with her work knowing that you will grow in compassion and wisdom from this Experience in my heart I know that you and she will meet again and

again and recognize the many ways in which you have known each other and when you meet you will in a Flash know what now it is not given to you to know why this had to be the way it was our rational Minds can never understand what has happened but our hearts if we can keep them open to God we'll find their own intuitive Way Rachel came through you to do her work on Earth which included her manner of death now her soul is free and the love that you can share with her is invulnerable

to The Winds of changing time in love around us let me just share with you one more story when I came back from India in 1968 I was living in New Hampshire on My Father's Farm and a young fellow came to see me He was about 18 or 19 he was living in the low E side of New York he was um from Russian parents and he was from uh quite wealthy parents actually and but he was living as a kind of a hippie in New York with his girlfriend and he came to see me

and he said I'd like to study yoga with you Happ the yoga and so on I was teaching all those things at the time and we sat together and he was a very uh unusual fellow and at one point we were looking In one another's eyes and this blue light flashed between our third eyes and it was so powerful we both fell over backwards the same moment and I had no idea what that was so he began to uh study yoga and he would come to see me his parents had a place nearby in an

island and he would go there and he came to see me and he started to improve he was doing hot the yoga pretty soon he was doing it by the end of the summer I said look you now need a real teacher I Mean I'm great but I'm kind of a schlock you know teacher and you need a real one and so I suggest you see so and so so and so he said well I think I have enough of the basics I'm going to go into a cave on my parents place down in Arizona

and I'm just going to do yoga all winter if I can just fly to wherever you are once a month and see you fine so every month he would fly to see me and he was starting to look like a yogi he was fasting and he was getting that kind Of look about him and then he didn't come in February and he didn't come in March and in April and I didn't think much about it in April I got a letter from his mother saying my son has entered mahasa which in India means it's when

you die and you enter the enlightened State that's very strange for a Russian woman to say to me and I realized she was saying her son had died she said I'm coming to see you because I have to show you his diary so she came To show see me and she had she was somewhat of a hysterical woman and she she showed me this diary and it said scribbled in big scroll on the pages was Mother I have finished my work I am with Christ and I'm with maharaji which is my Guru who he met

through me tell ramas it's all right I and I will be watching over you you need have no fear via condos go with God love signed It she says see he finished his work to be honest with you what happened to me when I looked at that book was I saw this big scrawling writing and I thought where have I seen that before and then I know I remembered that in all the times I've taken LSD there are moments when you are way way way out there and you suddenly see The Grand Design of the

entire universe and you want to remember it so I would stagger across the room to get a pen and Something to write on and I'd write this laboriously this wise thing which the next day would turn out to be like the word is which undoubtedly was the secret of the universe except I no longer understood it so it looked to me like it was acid writing and I thought uhoh he took acid and he probably cuz they found him in his cave with blood on the walls from his nose he probably took acid and did

Pranayam or something and burst his heart and died she said he is he did finish his work and he's enlightened isn't he I said well I don't know but I said I know somebody who would know my Guru in India cuz he knows everything I'll ask him I'm going in the fall I'll ask him send me a picture of your son so she sent me his high school graduation picture which I put in my for going to India 6 months later I'm in India I've forgotten about the picture it's in my Stuff one day we're

sitting with my Guru my spiritual teacher and he's looking through everybody's bags and taking out their pictures and looking at them and kidding about them and I remember this picture so I go back to my room and I get the picture and I bring it out I don't say a word about it I haven't talked to anybody about it and I place it on his thing he sitting on in front of him and he's talking and finally he looks down he looks at this High School Graduation picture and he says to me he's dead I

said yep he said he died from your medicine mean the LSD I've got to tell you I forgot one part of the Story 2 weeks after the mother came his friend came his brother his brother actually came and he said I've got to tell you this he said I went to visit with a friend of mine I went to visit my brother out in the cave and we Went we I had I brought some acid and we all took acid together and we went swimming and while we were swimming he came over to hug me

and I went into a homosexual homophobic reaction and I pushed him away and he got upset and he told us to leave and that was the last time I saw him alive so now you see what I had in my mind uh he took acid paranoid went back tried to do yoga killed himself that's not Enlightenment Now m maharaji muru is sitting there he says he died he died from your medicine I said see I knew it and mahaj looked at me he said n he heard the tone of my voice and then maharaji said

he is one with Christ and with me he finished his work he is watching over his mother she KN not fear and he quoted word from word from this boy's diary exactly word for word and he said he told her to go with God he said he finished his work and When when he said that to me all of my models about how you're supposed to die were completely undercut and I realized that when somebody was ready the hook came out from the side of the stage and they left and our models of you're supposed

to go out dancing were just our models that it was a much deeper story than that and my Guru said nobody dies a moment before that time and nobody remains a moment after it And in Tibet where they have cultivated so much awareness free of identity with that which changes there are llamas who are so conscious that they will there was one that sent out cards to everybody saying I will be dying next Thursday at 2 won't you come by for tea people came they had tea he turned around three times sat down went into

somebody and left his body now I just want to play with the Edge of the mystery with you the mystery of Anita's death the mystery of Mary's death The Mystery of the mystery the mystery the mystery there's one more little funny story Mother and Dad exchanged one red rose on every anniversary as a token of their love my mother died in 1966 big funeral at the temple everybody's there to share the grief the uh casket is covered with a um Blanket of roses red roses as the casket is wheeled down the aisle and goes by

the first Pew in which my father who's a very practical lawyer my brother who's a very practical lawyer his wife who's a very practical wife I have another brother who's crazy and thinks he's the Messiah and his wife who's a very practical person and me who's completely mugan so as the casket goes by one rose Falls off the blanket at my father's feet now who can resist that we all see the rose as we are leaving my father reaches down and picks up the rose and we go out and get into the Cadillac limousine for

the ride to the airport my brother the Messiah says I guess mother sent you a message because nobody else could say that they were all too practical but everybody agreed because they were all in that State you know I mean they'd never agree on on other condition conditions but they all agreed the next thought in the car was how will we save the rose okay this was in ' 66 so preserving methods were so it involved suddenly telephone calls and thises and that's and flying it in ice to some and and it was put in

a glass container you know with water with in it sealed in and it had was on the mantle piece but the method hadn't worked quite Well and slowly it turned this kind of the water turned this kind of brackish uh brownish quality and after a few years my father was ready to remarry and carrying this brackish um so it ended up in the back of the garage where I found it and put it on my holy table as a reminder of uh the transitory nature of phenomena in Tibet when they give me the instructions they

say at the end they say as the Earth element leaves your Body will feel heavy as the water element leaves you will feel dryness as the fire element leaves you may feel cold as the air element leaves your out breath will be longer than your in breath the signs are now here don't get lost in the detail let your awareness Go free imagine oh I'm thirsty she's thirsty give for Water I'm cold instead of ah the Earth element ah the water element just recognize what an adventure this transformation is the appreciation of death and the

spiritual journey after death is the prerequisite for living life Joy y now death does not have to be treated as an enemy for you to Delight in life keeping death present in your Consciousness as one of the greatest Mysteries and as the moment of incredible transformation imbus this moment with added richness and energy that otherwise is used up in denial I encourage you to make peace with death to see it as the culminating adventure of this adventure called life it is not an era it is not a failure it is taking off a tight Shoe

which you have worn well but those that find the way in the morning can gladly die in the evening it is said in the Mystic literature so I encourage you to explore and find in your being that part of you that is on those other channels so that when on channels one and two the world turn series comes to its final chapters you won't be caught in feeling loss but rather the adventure because From where I'm sitting life on this plane of reality because I live in the world of Reincarnation of karma of Life on

this plane is like being in the fourth grade you took birth here because you had certain work to do that involves the suffering you do the kinds of situations you found yourself in this is your curriculum it's not an error where you are now with all your neurosis and your problem you're sitting in just the right place imagine the that imagine That nobody made an error and all that stuff in you of saying if only if only I could be no this is it including the if only it's perfect and then at the time you

graduate and somebody says oh but he died so young so if you graduate from fourth grade early big deal wonderful don't get so caught in worshiping life that you lose the balance that real realizing that the spirit is says live life fully and Richly as a partner with God and at the same moment don't be afraid of the next thing go towards it with openness and with love and not with forbidding the way that is understood in the morning one can gladly die in the evening