Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Raghu Markuss

Episode Date: November 9, 2013

A special podcast for the Love Serve Renember Foundation!

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Hello everybody, it's me, Doug Atrussell, and you're listening to the Doug Atrussell Family Hour podcast. This is a special podcast helping out the Love, Serve, Remember Foundation.

So we're not gonna do any commercials or anything like that. We're just gonna start off with a great Ram Dass talk, and it's about 30 minutes, and then after that, we're gonna have a conversation with Raghu Marcus, who is the director of the Love, Serve, Remember Foundation, which is Ram Dass' foundation. So, there you go, Hare Krishna, and see you on the other side.

In every tradition, there is crazy wisdom in the, there are the crazy thoughts, there are the monks laughing at the moon in Zen Buddhism. In Sufism, there is a long tradition of that, and one of the best examples is somebody called Nasrudin. It's one of his names. And there are many stories about Nasrudin that people can make up.

I don't know how many actually happen. But there is a story of Nasrudin going into a bank at Kashi Check. It was a large check, and the teller looked at the check. Nasrudin was a very disreputable-looking fellow, and the teller looked at the check, and the check looked all right. But Nasrudin didn't, and finally he said,

well, sir, the check seems fine, but can you identify yourself? And Nasrudin reached into his pocket, he pulled out a mirror, and he looked, and he said, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Now it's interesting how subtle, and yet how formal our identities are, and how much we're attached to them, because of how much we are used to our cards of identity. My name, social security number, my zip code, my address, my occupation, a whole set of labels that define who we think we are. When you and I are born,

very shortly after we're born, we go into somebody training. We start to be trained to become somebody, and we're trained by other people who know who they are, and they're gonna teach us who we are. Very well-meaning, I mean, so that we can function in the world by being somebody. And you become mother's little girl,

or mother's little boy, or somebody who eats all his carrots. We started developing identity after a while, you're a good, or you're a bad, or you're a rascal, or you're... When I was very young, I must have maybe nine or so, I came from a Jewish middle-class family, and it turned out that the best thing to wanna be

was a doctor. That was somebody. And everybody gave you microscopes and books, and patted you and smiled. And I milked that one until I was well in the college, and was flunking histology, and cytology, and embryology. The moment of truth came. And we carry our summaries around with us,

and it allows us to be with other people in a efficient way. Now, just to get us all together into a metaphorical system, we can play in the game of metaphors any way you want. I mean, it depends on who you're talking to, you pick your metaphor. But I'm gonna use one that just allows us to jump across systems easily,

and if we all talk from the same one, it'll make it more fun to play. So, just imagine you have, next to your eyes, a television channel selector. And you set the selector on channel one. And you see woman, man, old, young, thin, fat, dark, light. You see the physical beings, you see physical entities. You see endomorphs, ectomorphs, and mesomorphs,

you're a scientist. If you are full of lust, you would be on a diet, you would be on this channel. It's a channel in which you would see other bodies as whether or not they would fulfill your fantasies. So you would see everybody as bodies, and you would see there's a potential, there's a competitor, and that's irrelevant.

And you would see everybody as one of those three bodies. And that's the physical plane, that's what you would see, this channel one. If you look at me, you see a 51-year-old bald man, Caucasian. And that's what you get on channel one. Probably irrelevant. Flip to channel two. Minnesota Mobile Phasic Personality Inventory.

Now you see happy and sad. You see seeker, you see responsible, laid back. All the social roles, you see responsible teacher, see judge, you see politician, you see mother, you see child, you see all of the psychological, social dimensions channel two. If you're in psychotherapy, this is the real channel. Nothing else is real.

Now, most of our cards of identity are in those two channels. Channel two is our storyline. Channel two is our psychological storyline, for the most part. It's the world terms. That's what channel two is. Where am I going? Where did I come from?

Will I make it? I'm lousing it up. I can only get over this. That's on channel two. Channel two, I'm a warm, affable, intelligent, charming teacher. Channel three is what we call the New Age channel. Scorpio.

In channel three, there are only 12 of us. Channel three is also our mythic channels. The archetypes is the, like I am the Buddha giving the servant of the beer park. The room is filled with earth mothers and seekers after the holy grail. We all have these very big mythic roles also besides our more upholstery psychological cells.

We've got bigger games we're playing. The larger wolf and woofer things. Now notice about these first three channels that they are all what you might call matrices of individual differences. There are ways we can peg each other. Channel three, I'm in areas. So if you go home and somebody said,

who did you hear this weekend? You can say, I heard a 51 year old bald, Caucasian man, warm, charming, affable teacher, Aries. Then they know and you really notice it in the astral plane where they say, what are you, I'm an Aries, right, of course. Now that explains everything. And each plane up explains more, it actually does.

It explains the system, but it's a system, it's a matrix of individual differences in which you're different from you, from you, from you, from me. And we can peg each other. World of individual differences. Channel four, now you look into the eyes of another being. And you see another being just like you looking back at you.

Are you in there? Far out. I'm in here. How did you get into that one? And what you see at that moment is another awareness just like you, but packaged differently. And you see channels one, two and three is packaging.

And this channel four, that entity, is in Christianity, it's called the soul. So the eyes are the windows of the soul. So you see another soul just like you, but who's having an entirely different set of life experiences because they're packaged differently. And you see how much the package affects what their experience is all about.

The package includes all the desires, all the fears, all the hopes, all the social perceptions. So if you and I are meeting on channel four, see we're meeting on channel one, we're meeting in Snowmass, at Windstar, in a room, if we're meeting on channel four,

we're just these souls who happen to be sharing a moment, wondering what we're doing on earth, comparing notes. And the time and space of this is just somewhat incidental to the forms we happen to be meeting in at this moment. You flip to channel five, it's like two mirrors facing each other. You see yourself looking at yourself, looking at yourself, because in channel five, there's only one of us.

That's Shema Yisroel, I don't know how I'll handle it, didn't I? But you're always real about our God, the Lord is one. It's not one plus Dorothy. One plus Pete, it's just one. So from channel five, we are one in drag or we are one at play. I mean, if you were the one on channel five,

well, what'll I do? You wouldn't say today, because you're not in today there, but you'd say, well, what'll I do? I think I'll become many. Like, I think I'll play hide and seek. Then you become the many, and then you bring your awareness down and you go into a little, one of it,

I think I'll go into some of it. And then you look out at the rest, you say, oh God, it's scary. And you see others as them, and then you get all scared. You say, okay, all y'all are in free, and you come back into the one, whoosh, that was heavy. I don't think I'll play that one again. So from channel five, we are the one at play. And just to keep the Buddhist happy,

we flip to channel six, where you disappear, I disappear, and the channel selected disappears, none of it is, was. It's all for you. Okay, now we have a system to play with. Now when I talk about you being born and going into somebody training, the somebody training you specifically went into

was primarily channels one and two. And the anxiety that was attendant to the way in which you started to become somebody. Let me just point out, when you are born, you're not busy being separate. It's all one thing to you, it's all one undifferentiated thing. And then something along the way comes along,

and you start to see that you aren't all of it. No, I don't know, I have a suspicion that my critical moment was when I bit my mother's breast. And she said, hey, that's not yours, that's mine. She pushed me away. There was something that happened where suddenly I had a sense that I did something that I fell out of grace. I was no longer at home in the universe.

I was a separate entity that felt a yearning to get back. I suck, I eat, I grab, I want, I try to incorporate, I try to come back into the one. I am now a separate entity. I learned separateness somewhere along the way. I bought into my separateness. And the emotional loading with which you do that means that you get very, very concerned

about who you are, your identity. And in order to be functional in the world, to be as a separate entity to survive because you begin to feel this vast power around you and you experience impotence or inadequacy or whatever the roots of human neuroses are, you develop a sense of separateness and there is this vastness

and you're always trying to make it all right to come back in, whether you come back in through eating, through collecting, through your eyes drawing in, through later, through all of achievements, through sexuality, always trying to come back into the one, into the unity, into the feeling of being in the Tao, in the harmony of things, in the way of things, instead of being separate.

And the most powerful vehicle you have on channel two for developing your separateness and your computer system for functioning efficiently as a separate entity where I, me, and you are you, is your thinking mind, your analytic thinking mind, your conceptual mind. Now, the thinking mind is very addicting because it gives us so much power. The thinking mind puts us on the moon,

the thinking mind does all these, the thinking mind gives us technology, the thinking mind gives us so much stuff. I grew up learning the statement Kogito Irgosum, I studied Latin and it said, I think, therefore I am. Meaning you are an identity with your thinking mind. I am the thinker.

Like you wake up in the morning and from the moment you wake up, you start things like, gotta go to the bathroom. Could sleep five more minutes. It's warm in that corner of the bed. Gotta do the laundry. Wonder if the stove is still hot. Smell coffee.

Oh, I'm so sleepy. What was I dreaming about? Gotta go to the bathroom. Wonder if the car will start. And on you start, you just start. Brrr, brrr, brrr, it's like trip hammer. Think, think, think, think, think, think, think. And each one is your mind, your awareness.

Just imagine your awareness being the light and it's like, what do I think? And each thought's coming forth saying, think of me, think of me, I'm real, think of me, think of me. It's like that story of the drunk looking for the watch and somebody comes along to help him and they're under a street lamp and the fellow's looking and finally he says,

well, where exactly did you lose the watch and the drunk points up the alley? Well, what are you looking here for? He says, because there's a light here. Well, that's the situation that you end up studying what your thinking mind can know as an object and everything that it can't, you say, is irrelevant. Well, it turns out most of what we are

ends up in the category of irrelevant. Now, most people spend their entire lives with an identity in channels one and two. And it's as if they have created a room for themselves with their mind of who I am and what is me and what is not me and how it all is. And then they, no matter how miserable the room is, they will never step out of it.

I mean, I get images of, I've seen that photograph in the paper of a battered child who's been burned with cigarette ends by the mother and just very badly battered. And the child is in the arms of a police matron who looks very motherly and very loving and very soft. And she's taking the baby away and there's the mother who looks very, very angry and very bitter and hard.

And the baby is screaming for his mother. It's that one. Now, if, as is the case for most people, the need of that separateness to be sure it knows where it is and how it is and are you my friend or my enemy and who can I get what from and is it safe and where do I go and where don't I go? This map, the map built from the place of my separateness.

I am so attached to those identities in channel one and two. That all the information that comes to me from channels three, four, five and six, I in effect reject. It's all there. You exist on channel one, two, three, four, five and six. Now, this is the model we're playing with. And if it gets too far out, just assume

I took too many drugs in the 60s or something. I'm gonna get you out of here. I'm gonna get you out of here. But assume the information is coming in on every one of these channels as to who you are. One, two, three, four, five. But you're so attached to channels one and two that the other information on these other channels

you treat and what the words you use are irrelevant or error or I was out of my mind or I spaced out or I'm losing it or I don't know what just happened or like when I first took psilocybin, the mushrooms and I had these experiences which were like I experienced that I was perfect. You know that I was part of the universe

and it was all perfect. Well, I know I'm not perfect says channel one and two. So what I do in order to preserve my model of myself which is certainly inadequate and not perfect is I say of that experience because I'm a psychologist, you remember a professor of psychology, I say, interesting hallucination. You see, I have a label.

It's called a reductionistic label. It's a label that makes it less than important. It's not real. Because my father used to say, rich come down to reality which meant get a job. Get your act together on this plane. As William James said in 1906, he said our normal waking consciousness

is but one special type of consciousness whilst all about it parted from it by the filmiest of screens there may lay other types of consciousness, mild types. We may spend our entire lives without knowing of their existence but apply the requisite stimulus and there they are in their completeness.

Their existence forbids our premature closing of our accounts with reality. But most of us do. We say this is reality and all the rest of that is la la land, it's playing, it's out there somewhere. But somewhere along the line for some people in some birth, there is what's called awakening.

What awakening is, is that you acknowledge the channels three, four, five and six, specifically four, five and six, have some reality to them. You allow that they are potentially real which means that the channels one and two which previously you were treating as absolutely real now are only relatively real.

So what you have done in that moment is you have done to your social perception what Einstein did to Newtonian physics. As you learn Newtonian, I learned Newtonian physics as this is absolute truth. And then Einstein came along and said depends on where you're standing. And he just shifted it from absolute to relative reality.

Now how that awakening occurs for any individual is as varied as there are individuals. When you are ripe for that awakening, a leaf can fall, who knows. See I in the 60s was part of a club of people who had all awakened through better living through chemistry. And we would have these club meetings which were, you know, I know.

And we just reassure each other that we knew. And we all identified the experience we were having with our method. The club used to look, they all used to dress the same way. Everybody used to wear white and they smiled a lot and they had flowers and they all smiled and they knew. A lot of repressed aggression. At one lecture there was a club

and I was sort of an uncle to the club, that was my role. And down on the front row there was a woman who was in her late 60s and she had on a hat that had little strawberries and cherries on it. She had a black patent leather bag and a print dress and responsible looking oxfords. And I would say these things that only those of us that knew would know. And she would go like this.

And I became aware of her in the front row and I thought, how did she know? I mean, this is, she's not an acid head, there's no doubt about it. So I'd say something more esoterically outrageous that only people that have really been playing out between channels 5 and 6 would even think relevant. I thought, maybe she has a nervous, you know, and I saw, I went to see whether she only responded at certain moments.

But she did, she only responded when I made a point. And so at the end of the lecture I smiled broadly at her and she came over and she said, thank you so much. She said, that was just, felt just right. I understood that perfectly. That's just the way I understand it to be. How do you know? What is it you have done that allows you to know these things we're talking about?

She leaned forward very conspiratorially and she said, I crochet. I crochet. And at that moment I sort of knew that the game wasn't the one I thought it was. Because until then I always identified the method of getting somewhere where you got with your method of getting there. And what happens to all of us is, if your method is crocheting you can't understand why everybody isn't crocheting. Crocheting is the only way, you know, that's your way.

If you do it through zen sitting you just feel so sorry for those poor slobs that don't sit. How much do you sit? You laugh. If yours is skiing you can't believe that other people could be living here and don't ski. If it's sex, you mean you are celibate? You know, you just can't conceive of it. It's just inconceivable that somebody would throw away the ecstasy of transcendence. But yet when you look around you see that people arrive at that by a tremendous variety of ways.

And you see when you can separate the method from where the method takes you you can hear that same quality of delight in a surfer, in a skier, in a sexual aficionados, in a bouyabase cooker, in a cabin builder, in a problem solver. I mean Einstein just went into ecstatic states. He went into places. He transcended. He went into places. He said, I didn't arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind.

Rational mind's a channel too. He went into some other way of knowing the universe. He's trying to solve a problem about the relation of mass and energy. And he's so one-pointed in it that just like following the breath, he goes through a doorway into another way of being in the universe in which everything is here. It's a gestalt way. It's a subjective way. It's not object.

It's not subject object. The thinking mind always thinks about something. So as long as you're in your thinking mind, you're always one thought away from where the action is. You're always feeling separate from the universe because you're always thinking about the universe. You can imagine Bach just having that doorway open into another realm of relationship to the universe where the sound is, where all the laws are. And if you have that doorway open and then it comes down through you, then you can just sit around writing just... All you are really is copying in this bizarre sense. I mean, you as an instrument are merely a vehicle through which this stuff is coming.

And I mean, somebody like Mozart's output, it's not like he sits down and thinks, well, what will I do today? All he does is open up and then the stuff comes through. As if you go into this place where all is. It's not conceptual. It just all is. And then as you come back down into form, if you're doing it sequentially, as you come back down into form, if your form happens to be music, it comes out through music. If your form happens to be physics, it comes out through E equals MC squared. If your form happens to be art, it comes through sculpture of David by Michelangelo.

Now, when you go into these other, altered states of consciousness, as they're called, or come into the spirit if you want it in a religious metaphor, there are things that you see that are very different from the way you see them in what's called normal waking consciousness, so channel two. Like when you are looking at the universe from channel five, from the way God sees it, just outside of time and space, just you're just awareness and it's just looking at forms, looking down or at forms, all form. What you become aware of is that all form is law, is lawfully related. The nature of form is that it is connected to everything else in a lawful way. It's all changing and all the change is lawful. And you just see it, you see law everywhere you look.

You can look at it in genetics, you can look at it in quantum mechanics, you can look at it in music, you can look at it in archeology, astronomy, astrology, you can look at it in the Kabbalah, you can look at it in Yi Qing, you can look at it in Quran, etc. Well, everywhere you look you see law. And you see everything is related to everything else lawfully, including your body. And when you see all this law related, which includes psychology and sociology and suffering and death and violence, and it's all lawful, from that point of view, when you look out and you just see the law, you say, it's perfect. As you see the perfection of the law made manifest. It's all perfect.

But then you come back down into your human heart. Perfect? I mean, you look at the world, doesn't seem perfect to you. The suffering, starvation, violence, paranoia, the fear in people. You look in yourself, look at your own suffering, your own neurosis. Want to call that perfect? Raghu Marcus, welcome, and thanks for letting me put that clip on this podcast. Absolutely, of course, for you anything.

Anything. Really? Anything. Okay, that's great. Can I have Ram Dass' house? Yeah, of course. That's like when Ram Dass first met Maharaj. He came in a beautiful, I mean, for India, it was unbelievable.

You know, Volkswagen bus, you know, those great buses, and we'd all travel around it up, going up and down the hills and the Himalayas. Yes. It was fantastic. Later, but in that time, so he had another version of his, even more upscale. And as soon as he walked up to Neem Karoli Baba, who we call Maharaj, as soon as he walked up to him, the first thing that Maharaj said to him was, is that your car? He said, yeah. Well, and he was, because it was his friend's car. Yes.

Anyway, can I have it? Will you give me your car? That was the first thing he said to him. The absolute first thing. And do you think he meant that? No, he didn't mean it. What the hell would he do with a car? I mean, you know what, I mean, he didn't have anything.

He had literally a blanket and a piece of cotton around his body. That was it, you know, I mean, a water pot in earlier days or something. But no, no, no, it was all, I mean, Ram Dass was so uptight at that moment. It was unbelievable. I mean, he was completely, he thought he was a Buddhist, he was really uptight. And he, you know, the idea that somebody could even think of, he was responsible for his friend's Volkswagen bus or whatever it was. So, no, absolutely not.

Well, it really is the worst nightmare, isn't it? When you've convinced yourself that somebody's a con man, and the first thing they do is ask for your car confirming your worst fear. That is kind of like the worst thing that could happen at that very moment for him. Yeah, no, absolutely. And he got into a complete paranoid tiff over, because he kept doing things like that, you know, and then came the famous thing which changed all these people's lives,

including mine, who went over there after I heard him say this particular thing above all other things. And it was Ram Dass, you were out in the stars the other night, and he said, yeah, and you were thinking about your mother? Well, so Ram Dass thought to himself, well, okay, you know, anybody can be out in the stars, you know, so what? You know, out taking a walk, you know, in the moonlight. But Ram Dass, when he said, you were thinking about your mother,

his mother had died six months previously, so then he got a little paranoid, like what? My mother, because he was thinking about his mother. Right. And then he said, yeah, she got very big in this, she died. She got very big in her spleen, and she died, and she died of spleen cancer. And he said, when he said spleen, he said it in English. And when he did that, then the paranoia went, his mind exploded, right?

It couldn't handle, how could anybody know this, you know, thing? I mean, nobody had ever done this. It was a major miracle. But the second part of it that changed his whole life, even more so than that, was he, so as soon as he had that thought, that, oh, shit, how, he knew that. Oh my God. The next thing he thought was, holy shit, he knows every horrible, awful, paranoid thought that's in my head. And all of the deviant behavior and everything, he knows it all.

And he looked up, you know, going, oh my God, this is the worst feeling I've ever felt in my life. And Maharaj was just looking at him like, you know, he was his long lost son, which he was. And he was just, it was unconditional love, which as Ram Dass says many, many, many times, throughout all of his, you know, teaching days, that unconditional love. That was the thing that completely changed and transformed his life in that moment. And that's what he put into be here now. And that's how another whole generation was changed in the late 60s, early 70s. And this talk that we just listened to, it comes from those days, you know, who am I?

It's two parts. And I think the first part was played. And he just uses the comparison of a television channel selector as a metaphor for, you know, who we aren't, who we can aspire to be, and beyond that. And it's just a terrific, you know, and that's, you know, when you listen to this lecture, it's so down to earth. I mean, am I correct or not? No, I think that's part of what's so amazing about Ram Dass is that he's able to take these big, big ideas and translate them in a way that people like me can understand and connect to, because you read other stuff.

You know, I've got all these books. I've got this immense book, which is a breakdown of the Bhagavad Gita. But it's written by some kind of yogi or something. And I can barely, like, I have to read a paragraph over and over and over again. Like, have you ever read any Hegel or Kant or any of the, like, the hardcore German existentialist philosophers? You read that stuff and it's like three sentences take an hour to digest. And when you digest it, it gives you a heartburn anyway. You just feel sick from understanding it. But yeah, so I think that's part of what's really great about Ram Dass is that he's able to take this stuff and put it in such a very simple way.

And also in a way that's sort of made for people who've had experience with psychedelics too. Because that's what he was so into at the time. Well, that's what was the first thing that made him realize there was another, there were other planes of consciousness that were available through and you know that when you do acid or any psychoactive element. And once you know that, then you, you know, your natural thing is to go there, right? Yes. But you can't stay there all the time with psychedelic drugs. They don't last. So that's what led him, you know, it's amazing all the triggers because he said,

okay, I need a roadmap of this consciousness that's available. So I'm going to go to India and try and find it. And that's how this whole thing, you know, proceeded to happen. And I, there's one, there's one story. I, I, you know that I do this other podcast, you know, I pick talks of Ram Dass and I talk to them about it and talk about it and relate, you know, some of the most key stuff in it for, and you can go to Ram Dass.org to find those podcasts. It's called the Ram Dass Here and Now podcast. And so I did this podcast, it's actually just out, it's called Living the Mystery. I mean, it's really fantastic content.

And it's a lot about suffering and how do you balance suffering and, and, you know, without either turning away from it or becoming so enmeshed in it that you're actually enjoying it. You know, it's the only thing you can enjoy, you know, that kind of thing. Yes. So it's a terrific thing around that. But he talks about one particular time we were all together in India. I don't remember this that well, but I know, I remember there was a big war going on. No, I'm sorry, not a war. There was a huge disaster going on.

There was a war going on with Pakistan around the same time, but that's a different story. This one is around in 71. There was a tragedy in Bangladesh. That's where George Harrison did that whole concert. It was like the first concert to support, you know, a cause like that, a worldwide cause. It's a fantastic concert with Ravi Shankar and so on. All-star thing. It's really great.

Anyhow, Ram Dass heard about that. And he had that Volkswagen bus at the time and he thought, shit, I've got to go. I can't just sit here. People, kids are starving and, you know, there's so much, it's deprivation, you know. So he said, I've got to go there and help. So he went to Maharaji and he said, you know, I really had this, so he told the whole story. I want to go there. I don't know what I can do.

Maybe it can be used as an ambulance, his car. I mean, you know, he just had this urge to do it, right? Very similar to all of us whenever you see or read this kind of stuff, right? I mean, there is a primal thing. In this case, he went to Maharaji and expecting him to say, do it or don't do it. Do it, though, he expected, right? Maharaji said, Ram Dass, don't you see it's all perfect? And Ram Dass thought, oh my, he recalled feeling as if somebody had screamed an epithet at him.

Yeah. You know, that this was so horrible. I actually wrote it down. It was like so incredible. Let me just get, I want to get it right. I mean, that is such an infuriating thing for a lot of people to hear. Like a lot of people listening to this right now, just hearing that. Yeah, it made him crazy, really crazy.

Imagine being in front of someone who, you know, is a realized soul who says this and it's got a huge power behind it, right? Yeah. It's not like when I say it or if it's just absolute bullshit, guff. So anyhow, he said, all right, so he says this and he said, when he said that, it was like an obscenity. How could you hear of children dying? And with the same consciousness, say it's all perfect. And he said, it took many, many, many years for me to have even a glimpse of an understanding of what that could possibly mean. And basically, his understanding is now that the process is realizing that you and I exist on more than one plane of consciousness.

That's the key. Simultaneously, we live on more than one plane of consciousness awareness simultaneously. And on one plane, this suffering stinks. And on another plane, suffering is grace. And the question is, can you balance those two things in your consciousness? Because to the extent you are then capable of looking at suffering and bearing the unbearable, that's the only time in which you have even a glimpse of understanding. Right. Because who it was that found it unbearable changes.

Right, right. So this is such a key thing. And it's the huge, big question. How could there be these gigantic tragedies from natural disasters, but more so human-caused disasters, which are the things that really fire us all off. Which is interesting because you have, you know, that is a, it's like in nature, built into nature, is catastrophe. And it's that part where you have the snake eating its own tail, and then you have the body of the snake. And the body of the snake is doing fine, but that place where it's eating its own tail, that's a really bad part of the snake because it's chewing itself up. And in nature you have this sort of, the effect that the thing is eating itself alive.

And you can look into, you watch any nature video, you know, and you see like, I've talked about this before, only because to me it was just so horrifying on one level. You see like, it was a video of a hyena. And the hyena had found, I think it was an elephant carcass that had been rotting out in the grass for a few days. It was just this open slushy mess. And the hyena was sitting inside that carcass, kind of like taking a bath and it's rotting guts. And you look at the hyena and it is having, it's like somebody at a spa. It's like someone at a day spa. It's so happy, covered in this filth and rot and death.

And you look at that and you think, well, you know, that hyena, are you going to call that hyena evil? Is that hyena Jeffrey Dahmer? Is that hyena a monstrous thing? It's like, no, it's just a dirty old gross hyena, but it's not evil. It's just, that's a hyena. That's what they like to do, is to swim in guts. And so somewhere along the line, when it gets to the human experience, that's where we get into this place. I think that Maharaji was talking about where we start differentiating.

And we try to ignore the fact that indeed we are in some kind of universal blender. If you're attached to your atomic form, you're in trouble because the thing is going to be ripped to shreds, ripped to shreds, eaten by worms. Have you ever heard that Edgar Allan Poe play or poem where it's talking about like, the play is the tragedy man and it's hero, the conqueror worm. You know, like, we all get eaten up, you know? And so, right. So to accept that, to accept that that is perfect and that that is, and not ignore it to make things perfect.

You know what, I have to say, I think that's a very valid interpretation of what this really is. But I think ultimately, honestly, I don't think any of us could ever fully understand that statement. Not unless we, there's this great book, it's called The Aquarian Gospel of Christ. Have you ever heard of it, Edgar Casey? I think I've heard of it vaguely far away, but I don't know nothing about it. He was a psychic in South Carolina. He was like a major seer and he wrote all these amazing books, very astral kind of thing. But that book actually is really great.

It talks, he relates what happened to Christ outside of the Biblical time. Like, you know, before, you know, he went away, he came back, whatever. He was in India, right? Which in India, there's a location in Kashmir that says that's Jesus' tomb. And there's a book's been written about it. It's really pretty fascinating actually, but there is a solid thing apparently that he was in India. Anyhow, in this book, so at one point, somebody comes to Jesus and says, how can there be a God or anything?

There's so much suffering and children dying and starvation and disease and war and all sorts of deprivation. How could there possibly be a supreme being? And Christ says, if you can't see into all of a person's incarnations in the past and all of them in the future, you have no idea of anything. He didn't say it like that. But it's impossible to understand who we are without that. Right. And that makes all the sense because I was with this being who had that.

In India, it's called Antarayami, knower of all hearts. They know the person's whole past and future. And the first, second, I met him. I realized that without my head. Holy shit, I've known this forever, whatever that is. I knew it forever, whatever that thing is in that being, which is not about a personality. He had a great personality and had so much fun. We had so much fun and laughing and eating and it was fantastic.

There was no sermons. There was no teachings and nothing. Just hanging out. And he would say these very simplistic, direct things like, don't you realize it's all perfect? And so in the sense that you can cut through, and that's what this lecture, this talk that we just listened to with Ram Dass, it's about how to even approach cutting through who you identify with. How do you even start to do that? Well, also, Ragu, I think it's important to point out that the idea of how about just being able to understand that everything's perfect when everything's going great.

I mean, aside from there being catastrophe, this is a question I wanted to ask you. What about like, I just went to New Orleans for a few days with my girlfriend just to have fun. And we were being very hedonistic and it was a blast and everything's great. It was great. Yet, somewhere along the line, this like creeping guilt comes in. Like, this is too much fun. What are we doing having this much fun? This is bad what we're doing to have this much fun.

It's, you know, forget trying to understand that things are perfect when things are going bad. What about understanding things are perfect when things are going great? Even then, it's hard to understand things are perfect. That's way too complex for me. When I'm picking out and having a great time and getting wasted in New Orleans with my girlfriend, I never think about anything like that. I'm just happy. Lucky you. You're so dark and you have to just, you know what that thought's worth?

That thought's worth about the same thought is, I have to go take a piss now. That same, there's no difference between those two thoughts. At least if you have a thought like, holy shit, this, you know, how many people are losing their lives in Syria? Yes. And what can I do and how could it possibly be any justification for the suffering that we see all the time? At least there's something to bite into there. You can take a bite out of that apple. Yeah.

But the rest of it, you should go, ah, no problem. Happy. Thank you. Oh, please. Good luck. Oh my God. Are you, that's insane. If I could do that, I would, if I could do that, if I could just pull that off.

Oh man, that would be amazing. But I feel like a kind of, a lot of the times like an underlying omnipresent sense of just guilt, like just a feeling of like, well, you know, or if not a sense of guilt, also a feeling that at any moment, I mean, this isn't all the time. Like sometimes I am in a kind of great mood, but you know, when I really analyze it, shit, underneath it all, there's this kind of like, sense that at any second, you know, the grim reaper is going to come diving out at me and drag me away. Well, that's, that keeps, but you know, there's value in that kind of mental edge that you engage in. Look at this great podcast.

Without that, we wouldn't be entertained without that mind of yours, you know. You will. Dark side telling me about the, but what was that? Arangatang? No, it wasn't Arangatang. Oh, the hyena, swimming in guts. The hyena that was swimming in guts as an example of it's all okay. I mean, that was terrific.

Nobody but you could have thought of something like that. And isn't the, isn't the idea like when you feel that, that horrify, the horror, the guilt, or you do the scream and you find yourself in this neurotic, stupid state. Isn't that perfect too? Isn't that the idea that the whole thing is perfect? Like every channel, every spectrum of experience is somehow perfect. Is that the idea? Yeah. If you don't jump into it, I mean, once you jump into it, like you have a thought and then you react to that thought, Holy shit, I'm a piece of shit.

How could I even think something like that? Yes. You know, whatever you do, anything like that. If you just have the thought and you have, that's what this whole mindfulness thing that's going wild around this country now. It's in every newspaper and magazine and every celebrity is doing it. You got to do it too. Mindfulness. So you realize, oh, that's, you know, you love your thoughts.

I mean, this is another thing from Rondas. You know, you just, you love them, you know, so when they come, oh, fantastic. You're, and that's how it's all perfect. It's all perfect. And you just allow it to be. And then, you know, these things, they just stop. And the noise will, you know, slow down and stop. By the way, not to change.

It's not really changing the subject, but somebody must be wondering, one of your listeners or all of them are like, what are we, like, I feel like we're hocking Rondas now. And I'm on their show. They're used to it. And it's, they're used to it. I ramble about Rondas constantly. So they're, I don't think this is like a, I don't think this is a new thing for them because they, because I inevitably end up talking about him. I think that when we, when you come on the podcast, we tend to like focus on it more, which I like, because it's a chance for me to, regardless of what they're thinking, that I always have like questions for you. Because you, you got to be with Neem Karali Baba and you've become quite a teacher for me.

So I, this is just a way that I always end up asking you questions because you guys are in the same camp, you know. And before you, before, yeah, before I met you, the reason I met you is from listening to Rondas and realizing like, oh, okay, well, I might as well try to like connect on a deeper level than just listening. To his lectures and reading his books as I had been doing for such a long time. And then through that, I ended up finding out about Chogyam, Trumpa. Because I don't know if you remember, I was always trying to get only your first getting to be friends. I was always trying to get info out of you about what to read. And then you told me the translation of the Bhagavad Gita, the Eknatha Swarm translation, and then you told me about Chogyam, Trumpa. And then that led me to Pima Chodron.

And so it's a really cool maze that all started up there with that guy in a blanket. In fact, it's kind of mind blowing when you consider the zillions of weird synchronicities that had to happen for us to even be having this conversation. It's pretty wild when you think about that, that a being can be so potent. And this is pre-internet, man. That's another thing that's mind blowing. This wasn't like, there's no cell phones. This is just some guy sitting in a blanket being so loving to people that it ends up traveling through time and going through, you know, now it's like being broadcast through the prism of this podcast and you. That blows my mind to think about that.

You know what he said once, because we were saying, hey, why don't you come back to America? Will you come back to America with us? Come to America. He said, of course I'm going to come to America. I'm going to come on the plane. I'm going to wear a bowler hat and I'm going to bring hash. I swear to God, I haven't thought of that in many years. Maybe it's a fantasy too.

I mean, Jesus, I know he said he's going to come over and I'm talking about the hash part. That might have been my little fantasy, but I think he did say that. What's a bowler hat? An English hat. He had gone to England. He flew to England once. I don't exactly know when. It might have been in the early 60s or something.

Yes. He went there for one day and saw somebody and turned around and came back. I mean, it was an insane thing. Nobody understands what happens, but he went there. Then he said, I guess, you know, bowler hats, which are English things. Those kind of hats. All of this, and you are the perfect example of the little commercial that I want to run right now, which I know you've given me a carte blanche to do so.

Yes. And this is about just the fact that you found these lectures. They did whatever they started you out on a path and they've continued, you know, and you've been certainly relating with them all, you know, the journey of the last few years of doing these podcasts and sharing it with people. And we've been sharing it together. And it's all of this material that comes from not just Ram Dass, a bunch of other spiritual teachers, some of whom you've mentioned,

Tronpa and so on. And it's been a way for the continuation of people being able to catch on and have a chance themselves just to get out of the jail of, you know, thinking that your mind is all there is and body senses and all that stuff. You know, and being able to know that there is another, there's a roadmap for consciousness. And so we have been trying to put together a bunch of money to the foundation in order to make all of this stuff available online and searchable.

And this looks like, I don't know, there must be a couple of thousands of hours still to be digitized and so on. And then they all have to be, you know, key worded so people can find what they're looking for, like what we're talking about now. What did he say about this? You know, don't you understand it's perfect? You'll be able to go in and actually find that. You actually find, you know, whatever it is that you want.

So anyhow, cut to the chase. We joined up with another site or another nonprofit called Urgency Network. And we're giving away a three-day trip to have a retreat with Ram Dass on Maui, all expenses paid for two. And you just have to go to urgencynetwork.com slash be here now. And there are so many different ways to engage with it so that you get entered into this. You can win entries. There's beautiful rewards and books and DVDs and t-shirts and medallions.

Medallions. Yeah, there's a 101 pendant there that you should have. Okay, have you gone in there and done this? I mean, you need this 101 pendant. I know you do. I don't want to get in the running for this thing. I already went out there. I'd feel like a hog.

No, if you win, we'll cancel you. Don't worry about it. Just buy the pendant. Anyhow, we'd appreciate all the support from anybody. Yeah, man. It feels like they're getting something. Yeah, this is actually, this is a very cool thing. Yeah, it's hard to talk about this.

I don't want to sound like, it's hard to talk about this. You'll end up, I don't want to screw it. I'll just sound like I'm at a telethon or something. But when I was growing up, I can remember my mom listening to these Ram Dass cassette tapes. I had these big, weird cases filled with cassette tapes and listened to them in the car. And I was way too dumb back then to pay any attention to it. But I do remember stumbling upon, be here now would inevitably be laying around someone's dorm room, like a stoner's dorm room or something.

And I can remember borrowing it and then reading it. And then that was definitely the beginning of something. The stuff is, it's a very strange thing because it's like all this stuff kind of plant seeds inside of you and it takes a long time to grow. But sometimes I think about how I feel really lucky that I've got that, that I know about it and that I have it to go back to whenever I'm feeling particularly confused. And I wonder what would happen if I didn't cross paths with this kind of information. Because I think I would just be a vile, sometimes I feel like I am an asshole still.

I was just thinking, this meditation or mindfulness that you're talking about or the practice, I'm realizing that I don't do it, I started off doing it because I thought it helped me get girls. And now I do it in the same way that I think somebody with really bad boils uses a cream. There's nothing romantic about it. If I don't do it, if I'm not careful and I don't spend time every day trying this practice and obviously what I gravitate towards is mindfulness and a lot of the different meditation styles that Ram Dass talks about. If I don't do that, I really, really start getting very clever and that inevitably leads to me just saying some nasty thing to someone and I just turn into an asshole.

So I like that. This is why I like talking about this stuff on this podcast. Because not only does it help me, but I like to imagine that there are people out there who maybe haven't contacted it at all in the same way when I was in college I didn't come across it. And I think it's a cool thing to be able to help plug people into it. So the idea of there being a media library, you guys have to come up with a more exciting name than that. But the idea of there being a media library where people can access this stuff through the internet from anywhere on the planet is kind of like the ultimate, it's a kind of weird spiritual singularity, isn't it?

To think that this guy could transmit this sort of information to you guys and then it could all get compiled in a digital database and then anyone on the planet, no matter where they're at, if they have an internet connection, can access it. Well, that's a beautiful thing for the planet. That's a really great thing. So I think it's super important that you guys are working on this and I hope people listening to it will definitely go in there and buy a pendant or something, just some little something. Yeah, well, listen, again, as far as I'm concerned, because I'm a little subjective on all this, been involved with it since Ram Dass went back to India and went back with him all those years ago.

So I know what he wants. And just so people who don't know, I'm also the director of the Love, Serve, Remember Foundation, which hosts all the website, the books, the movies, the webcasts, the works, all of it, the retreats. Everything that we do is under that moniker, which is basically the only real teaching or the only thing that Maharaji said to us that was definitive, you should do anything. And he didn't say it like that. He said it when people said, how do I raise Kundalini? How do I get more powerful? I mean, some people may be not coming from the right place.

And he said, love everyone, serve and remember. Just remember the one, remember the fact that we are completely all interconnected all the time. And always part of that was tell the truth. So that's what this foundation represents. And that's what we're trying to do and hope that people, you know, I mean, you aren't the only one. You came along and we started doing podcasts. There's been other people who just, you know, somebody else came along and did a smartphone app, right? Right.

Just the rights came along so that this media could be dispensed on different platforms where, you know, the new generation or this generation right now is going 10 years from now, it'll be something else. Hopefully this will all continue. But without this digital database, you know, none of it is possible. So that's what we're doing. And now we're completely bored. I can just hear. I can put myself into the audience now and go enough.

Sorry guys. Well, it's important though. I mean, it can't all be like talking about Aayna's rolling in animal carcasses. And, you know, I, you know, because I'm doing the podcast and for some reason my ego is attached to it. I'm trying to be a little more like, you know, it's a cool thing. But it really, really, you know, this path and especially the way it's elucidated by these folks has meant more to me than any other thing that I've come in contact with. That's written down or verbal. You know, I smoked DMT once and that also had a massive effect on my consciousness.

But this stuff has given me a reference to go back to and sort of try to understand what that experience was. So that's why I wanted you to come on the podcast to talk about this because I think that it's a... I mean, look, you turn on the TV right now and just flip through the channels. And it's no different than being one of those weird perverts at Burning Man who climbs in the Port of Johns in a scuba diving outfit and lets people have diarrhea on his face. That's what's happening all over the planet. Wait, wait. Is that real? Oh yeah, that's real.

No. Oh yeah, that's real. It's real, man. It's real. It's a weird freaky fetish where supreme nut jobs will put on scuba outfits and climb into Port of Johns and just sit there while people crap on them. And I think as a whole, that's what anyone who has cable is doing. It's pretty much the same thing. You're just letting corporations take mind dumps on you all day long.

Whenever you flip through the news, you come away from it just feeling like somebody just removed both your kidneys. So I think that what's really cool about the internet is that it's giving this... It's giving a different channel. It's a different channel altogether where stuff that isn't related to buying scooters to ride around with and because you're morbidly obese or all the other weird nonsense that comes with it. And in a sense that comes through the news and through TV, it gives another kind of information stream out there. And the hippie part of me fantasizes about... I've thought long and hard, man. We don't have to keep talking about the media library.

You guys know enough about this now. So if you want to go support it, you can go to romdost.org and go from there. That's where it is, right, Ragu? Well, if you go... Yeah, the easiest thing to remember is romdost with 2s.org, R-A-M-D-A-S-S.org, go there. And there's a banner right smack when the page loads and it talks about this win a trip to be with romdost for three days. All expenses paid for two and it'll link you to urgencynetwork.com. And that's crazy.

Sorry. You'll go to Urgency Network. I'll have the links there. The idea of getting to hang out with romdost for three days is pretty insane. Because when I hung out with them, which you hooked up just that one afternoon in the swimming pool, I probably think about that every day. So I don't know what it'd be like hanging out with them for three days. But all that aside, one thing that you have taught me, Ragu,

is to sort of stop trying so much to change the world, or to be focused on changing the world, or to get upset by the things happening in the world, and to bring everything back into myself and look at what's there and work on that. And that's the part of the world that I can have the most effect over and the most effect over. I had my friend Daniela Bollelli on the podcast, and we were talking about the idea of every human being being a kind of pixel in this big picture. Like a TV is made up of all these various pixels.

And how one person being an asshole, it's nothing really. It's annoying. Maybe in the very worst case, you get a Hitler and it becomes a Holocaust. But in general, you don't get that many successful assholes out there. You just get these kind of like annoying turds that you run into. But if you zoomed out and looked at the picture that a lot of assholes create, what you find, it is a picture of just like, it's a picture of devastation and destruction and awfulness. In the same way, you have the other types of pixels.

You know, like pixels like Ram Dass are just people we'll never hear about because they don't care about anyone knowing who they are. And all the various people who let you into traffic or the people who out of nowhere suddenly decide to give someone their kidney or all the crazy acts of selflessness that happened, that creates a picture too. And so I think that any kind of process that helps you transform whatever type of pixel you are, you know, into something a little brighter, a little more giving, a little less selfish, just slightly less poisonous, can begin to shift the picture as a whole.

And that's where the hippie age of Aquarius acid head part of me fantasizes about this idea that the internet is going to be part of what pushes us out of the world, out of the mosaic that is made up of thousands of tiny little John Bainers. And into it. Oh, God. Or how about Eric Cantor? My wife went to a prom and danced with Eric Cantor, okay? Wow.

And I have to live with this. Wow. It's unbelievable. But then, you know, I do, of course, there's more self-referential advertising. Please. Yeah. Anyway, I think people, some of you out there know that I do a podcast with my friend Dave Silver called Mind Rolling Podcast.

Yes. And we just, you know, we did one and we were saying, you know, the normal things that one would say about, you know, Republicans and what's gone on here lately and the way that they continue, I mean, you continue to blow, you know, the mind by taking away, you know, food stamps. And I mean, it's insane. And, you know, and we were talking about how hard it is to be able to stay in balance when you start to have this polarization. Anyhow, so this is what we were talking about.

Somebody wrote back a very considered note to us that, you know, it's easy just to take off on Republicans. There's plenty of Democrats that are also, you know, itself before anything. So I don't think you can just blame Republicans for that. And at the same time, there are some things that we stand for, I guess it was a we, that, you know, represent what we believe is forward thinking and what we think and what we believe you don't really understand us and where we're coming from. Whether or not that's true, I think David wrote back and said, you know, in consideration

of all this, you know, I just think that there are some truisms around the way Republicans, they don't want big government, but and they want people to take the initiative to work. I mean, that's the nicest thing you can say about it. Right. But basically, these people are going hungry now. These people are sick and can't get healed and can't get medical care. You know, so, but it brought up one thing was, you know, the way in which we so easily get polarized.

I mean, that's been a big, we've been talking about that on mind rolling a lot, you know, and one of our friends, it's actually an episode that's coming up in the future, Danny Goldberg, who is very involved in left wing politics and has been for many, many years. And he started quoting Martin Luther King and just saying, you know, what is the way? I mean, one does have to express themselves in relation to people who you, you know, are not in your mind doing what would be correct to our fellow humans. So, and that expression, he said, can only be done through love. And he started quoting the most.

I mean, we're going to put a speech up that he linked us up with that Martin Luther King. He gave these incredible speeches, not just political, but to his congregation, and they recorded some of them. And he said they're just like some kind of Indian saint. I mean, you know, yeah. So anyhow, I'm just saying that whole polarization thing, you know, that we talk about so much. Yeah, you know, I want it like, you know, it is fun to like watch the Republicans or to watch Fox News or to watch anybody who is really pissed off and just watch someone

be angry, whoever they are. You know, this, this is why I like this idea, this Pima children idea of forgetting the storyline. Just forget the storyline and look at the way someone's acting. And there you'll see everything. You'll see everything right there. It's like, you know, whatever the thing is that they've gotten all over, all over, which is whether the guy, there's too much government, too little government, or how about whether

they're in fucking Auschwitz? Like if you read Victor Frankel's man search for meaning, you get this, you know, he talks about other people who would just give their food away and he would just try to help people even though they knew they're probably going to die. And so you forget the storyline there that you're in a concentration camp and you just look at like, well, here's somebody who's just giving themselves to the world. And, you know, even though it's going to kill them and you see, well, that's the way to be.

Whether you're at a concentration camp or a day spa, if you can be that way as an individual, then the people around you are going to change. And if the people around you change, then probably the people around them are going to change. And the next thing you know, the people like Boehner, instead of seeming normal, will begin to seem more and more insane. And eventually people like that will seem like lunatics. You know, correct me if I've already mentioned this to you.

I don't think I have because we haven't talked at least on a podcast, but I went to see his holiness, the Dalai Lama. I think we talked about this on our podcast. Yeah, we haven't talked about it on this one yet. Yeah, but it's very relevant, even if it's repetition for some people. You see, he gets up to start speaking and after about three or four minutes, he goes, wait a minute, wait, wait, there's my friend. And he points the summon in the audience.

And he's going, wait, I have to talk to my friend. Sorry. You know, and he, this is the Dalai Lama. Okay. This is not, you know, anybody. And he walks out and he walks down into the crowd and he embraces this middle-aged man and so on. And it's all this hubbub and guards, you know, there's lots of security.

And he comes back on the stage and he says, this is one of my best friends. And here's, I met him in Dublin so many years ago, I don't know, 15 years ago. And this man, when he was 11 years old, was shot by the British soldier. You know, of course, maybe it was Crossfire or whatever. Maybe it was in 10, I don't even know. But he was shot in the eye and he lost, you know, in the head. I figured somewhere where he'd lost his sight completely. But he never, ever became polarized.

He didn't get angry. He didn't join, you know, the IRA. He didn't do anything. And if you could imagine his parents and the suffering that they went through and the way in which the whole family was turned upside down. And he consoled them. He made them feel, I'm going to be okay. And he worked at whatever he, you know, he needed to work at in school, whatever he needed to do, he did. And then eventually, he had a rep, what's it called in English.

He met the shooter, the British soldier. And in French, it's called rapprochement, where he had a coming together and breaking through of any kind of anger. I mean, he wasn't angry, but breaking through, even this guy was so guilty, you know, he broke through it all by virtue of his openheartedness and his holiness. The Dalai Lama said, this guy is my hero because he didn't come from any background. He didn't have any training. He was a young child. He was 11 years old. He doesn't come from a Buddhist tradition where that's all accepted compassion.

You were nothing. This was just in him. And he kept going, he's my hero. So, you know, it is naturally within us to. Hold on. You cut out there. Sorry. It is very, very much part of us to act in this compassionate manner and go towards love rather than hate.

That is naturally within us. And that's why, you know, I think his holiness, the Dalai Lama was saying, this is why he's my hero. You know, that reminds me, speaking of Republicans, there is a comedian at the comedy store, which is a comedy club I work at, who I knew. His name was Katie Brown and he moved to Vegas and he was a Republican. But he moved to Vegas and I guess he was doing some job passing out flyers. But there was a guy in a nightclub who pulled a gun out and shot somebody and everyone ran. But Katie jumped on the guy to try to protect other people, to get the gun away from him and the guy shot him and killed him.

And he just had this instantaneous impulse to try to help people. And he gave up his life for it in that moment. That's the decision he made. I bet he didn't even think. I bet he just did it. And you know, there's a woman who lives in Asheville, Tajo Munich, who is into Zen. And she was talking about compassion. And she said, compassion is the thing that happens before you even start thinking.

Like when somebody sees someone drowning. I don't know if you've ever seen the video, like I think it was a bridge collapsed and there are all these people who are in this ice cold water drowning. And this guy kept jumping in and pulling people out, jumping in and pulling people out, jumping in and pulling people out. And finally he jumped in and didn't come back because he froze to death. You know, he drowned there. But that non-thinking place that compels you into doing things like that, as one little pixel, it's like mind-shattering to think about it. But even more mind-shattering, imagine if everybody was like that. Isn't that proof?

Isn't that enough proof that the underlying interconnected tissue of everything that is, is that thing that is horribly represented in our culture or in any culture? The word, certainly the word love is ridiculous because it has all of these, you know, immediately rings. I mean, some people go, that's New Age. Other people go, oh, yeah, that's just for, you know, little guys, you know. Whatever, some crazy-ass bullshit. But whatever it is that you want to call that, which is, and here the most beautiful way to call it, is that before thought, there is compassion. Or this Zen priest in Nashville, before thought, there's compassion. So that before thought, that we call compassion, we can call unconditional love.

It's probably the best because it's unconditionally gave his life for it. Or whatever permutation of that unconditional love is, that is absolutely miraculous, right? That's the mystery. And that's also the thing, you know, which we talk about a lot, certainly we talk about it, but listening to Rhonda's various lectures, a lot of what's in there is that you're preparing, you know, the way that you live your life prepares you for your death. So that if you are going towards that compassion before thought, which is the best example, probably, because it's so, you know, we have people, we know they've done this. It's not a miracle. It's not me sitting with the name Karoli Baba and, you know, him letting me know, he knows everything about me from every incarnation passed forward. And this is something right in front of you that is absolutely, you cannot question, because you've seen it.

You know, I mean, every, well, we hope most people have seen something like this in their lifetime where someone does something out of their self interest, beyond their self interest. And that one moment is really what it's all about. Yes. So Gap Rinpoche talks about Trump. That's a million times more powerful than any act of clairvoyance or any kind of telekinesis or levitating or walking in water or anything. That is so, anytime anyone gives up their existence for other people, that is such a, that goes against everything to the point where you could see how that would be if we were truly continuing to evolve. Yeah. And that would be the first monkeys, that would be akin to the first monkeys that came out of the trees and started using tools for humanity.

It would be us coming to the realization of our true identity, which is not this thing that is poking up out of the time space continuum in the form of a human body, but the thing underneath that mycelium, that spiritual mycelium that's connecting us all in this matrix of being. That's what we are. Yeah. Sorry. No, please. That's, of course, what the Christ represents, right? Yes.

You know, in its most graphic sense. But, you know, as you're talking, I'm realizing because when I went to India, the first things Maharajie talked to us about, the few of us that, you know, in the very beginning, there was just a few of us, which is insane to think about. But it was about Christ. And, of course, I'm Jewish. And so I think that one of the first things he said, where's your cross? I go, I think to my, I'm, but like, I'm Jewish. But I went out and got a cross, you know, I thought, okay, he thinks it's cool. I'm going to do it because I wasn't that invested.

You know, I was angry at Judaism all through my youth and so on, you know, for the polarity of Judaism and Christianity, you know, do good or die, you know, kind of thing. So then he used to say to us over and over that Christ and in India, in Hinduism, there's a monkey God called Hanuman. Now, I know we're getting into esoteric area. Yes. But Hanuman, but he used to say Hanuman and Christ are one. And as we're having this talk right now, and we're, you know, as we're discussing this, and we're talking about how, you know, that, again, I go back to the compassion before thought where, and that's just, that is our basic nature, really. That's our basic nature. That's what Christ was all about, right?

Yes. And then Hanuman is known as the, his basic nature was not to think about himself whatsoever. And there's a great story where, you know, the whole story is called the Ramayana in Hinduism. It's like there, there's two major texts. One is the Ramayana, one is the Bhagavatam. From within comes the Bhagavad Gita, not to get into too much of Indian philosophy and holy books. But in this Ramayana, you know, Hanuman, Ram comes to earth as a king, and he loses his wife to a demon and enlists the monkey, powerful monkey God to go find his wife and return her to him. Well, he finds her and he says, here's what you need to do to go vanquish these demons.

And, and there's this one scene that is, that is the essence in my book of everything that we really are talking about. And, and in it, Ram comes to Hanuman. So God comes to, you know, and he says, you know, nobody ever, not in, in this eight realms, or 20 realms, whatever it is of existence, no one's ever done what you've done for me. By reconnecting my wife with me, my, my Shakti, my primordial power with me. You've done something that nobody has done. So you can have, I'll give you whatever boon that you want. You can have anything.

So the famous thing here and what this is all about is Hanuman falls down crying at his feet and says, and this is what he wants. Save me, save me from the tentacles of egoism. And he was a, he was the pure, absolutely pure servant of God, like Christ. And he was like, whatever vestiges that remain of the, of any meanness of any, somebodiness as Ramdas would say, just take that away. That's all there is. So it's that selflessness. It's the compassion before thinking.

I love that. I never heard that. That's fantastic. Oh, you should meet Tejo. You would really like, you guys would hit it off. She's really cool. She runs a Zen temple, I think in Anderson. I'm not sure where it's somewhere out there, but she runs a Zen temple.

I think it's right around the corner from me. That's how bad I go by there when I. Oh man, you guys should meet. Well, maybe I'll introduce you. Yeah, you hook it up. I look it up. Well, this, this has been great. And as always, thank you.

You answered a ton of questions or reminded me of stuff I forgot. I'm going to have the links to check out how to help out with this media library and get the chance to go hang out in Hawaii for three days with Ramdas, which is pretty incredible. But even if you don't get to do that, it's still a great thing to support. And if people support it, are they going to have access to it when it comes out? Absolutely. We have, in fact, you can get a glimpse of what it is by going to Ramdas.org

and linking to the media library. We have a limited part of what's there because we've only been able to get at so much of it. You know, so there still is, you know, quite a wealth of media there. I mean, we have media, you know, from Gins, Alan Ginsberg to Tim Leary to Deepak Chopra to at Cartoli with Ramdas. I mean, just amazing stuff from the late 60s and, you know, and you can search it out. But, you know, I want to thank you and the listeners really for bearing with, you know, all this spiel about supporting and stuff.

I mean, you know, things have to be supported. You know, what we do is a non-profit. On the other hand, I think you said it best. Look, this shit has done something good for me and it allows me to remember, you know, in terms of the loves of remember part. And that remembering allows me to be a mensch of some sort, which is really, that's all we're looking to be so we can, you know, feel like we're of some use, you know, in this world, you know, with everybody around us.

So I thank you. I really do. Oh, my pleasure. And, you know, I won't even put any commercials on this episode myself. I'm just going to upload it with the, I'm just going to upload it. And then, and that'll be that so that it's just, just it is what it is. And you guys, so instead of whatever you might normally do for me, just this episode, go and give a couple of bucks to this media library.

Just do that. And follow Ragu on Twitter and go to Mind Rolling Podcast. And I'll have all those links too because he's got an excellent podcast. Thank you so much, Ragu. Thank you. Thanks everybody. See you later. Bye.

You're listening to Krishnadas from his album, Breath of the Heart, which is available on iTunes. Thanks for listening, everybody. See you next time. Next time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.