Ep. 16 – Little Shmoos

Welcome to Ramdas, here and now. And I'm your host, Ragu Marcus. Well, in going through the archives and we have over years of these incredible archives from Ramdas, I came across something called Sacred in the Everyday. And it's Ramdas talking about how to be true to that deepest part of yourself and relate from that place to every aspect of your life, not just separating spirituality to a meditation session, a weekend retreat, but rather changing your actual identification so that you are, in his case, not the professor, not the bone vivant. You are something deeper.

And he says he did not even encounter that possibility until psychedelics. Up till then, it was just a matter of many different suits of clothing, outer clothing, cloaking. That deep part, all of us can relate with that. So it's an exceptional talk that he gave quite some time ago. And I reflected on something that happened in my own life, actually.

Well, it's an interesting story. Let me tell it. When I was in India with my brother, we got a letter from my father saying, I want to come over there and see what you guys are up to. And I thought, oh, boy. Really?

I didn't have what we would call a healthy relationship with my father was a lot of recrimination and anger on my part, a lot of screaming despotism on his part, if that's a word. Tyrant. Tyrant is probably the correct word. Anyhow, he did get over, and bang, there we were, my brother and I and my future wife to be, traveling in India with him, and went down to Vrindavan, which I've talked about before, which is near the Taj Mahal and not far from New Delhi, and to see Maharaji. He wanted to see Maharaji.

I couldn't believe it. Anyhow, we get there, and he's sitting there trying to figure out how to get his shoes off, which he didn't want to do outside the temple. And there was a big wall where you did that, outside the wall and then came inside. And of course, I quickly got rid of my sandals and popped in. And there's Maharaji saying to me, Your father's here.

Your father's here. Of course, nobody sent him a telegram or anything. He couldn't see anything. Father was still outside the wall, but that was par for the course. And we sat down, and he immediately told my father, you're from Canada and you got on a plane and you stopped in Germany and an Indian businessman got on and you chatted with him and so on.

Anyhow, my father's jaw dropped. He couldn't believe because he knew he didn't ever tell us anything like that. Those kind of details no one was interested in. That was the first salvo to break down that mind. I mean, he was a middle class businessman.

He was in the advertising business. I mean, he may have smoked pot once or twice, maybe a few more times, but he was pretty disconnected. He thought he wasn't afraid to die. He was a World War II bomber pilot, if you can imagine. And so anyhow lovely conversation.

Maharaji was charming him and talking to him and praising him and so on. You're very good. You give money to your sons, and so on and so forth. And then he turns to me and he said, did you give him the medicine? All in Hindi.

Translated. And I go, yeah, he had a cold. So I gave him some Aspen or something, and he said, Nigh the Ram das medicine. Yogi medicine. I went acid.

My father went, LSD like, what? That's not something he'd even dreamed of. And I thought, oh, my God. And then Maharaji, towards the end of the meeting, said, take care of your father while he's in India. And I thought, okay.

And he said, Meet me back in Lahabad, another town, in about a week. So off we went to Banaras, figuring to take him to a really amazing ancient city in India. Also the city where the Ganges River runs through it, and there's burning gods all up and down the river where they've been burning bodies 24/7 for the last thousands of years. Thought that would be a good spot for dear old dad. And we were on a houseboat and rats all over it and brushing your teeth in water with poop coming by and dead bodies that weren't completely burned.

I mean, it was a trip. Banaras is a trip. I mean, it's called the end of the world, which it is. And a friend of mine walking on the street, I said, do you have a hit of acid? And sure enough, she did.

She gave it to me, and dad took it. Couldn't believe it. I mean, it was pretty brave, actually. Anyhow, he took this drug, this psychedelic drug, and we walked through the streets of Benaris, dead donkey from one animal to the next. Then a person had died and was on the street, on the ground.

Nothing over him was an old man. People were coming by and putting money on the body so that enough wood could be bought so that the body would be thoroughly burnt and cremated. Well, he was never quite the same after that, my father. And a few days later, we ended up with Maharaji in Allahabad, and who never said a word, by the way. He's not like, hey, how was that trip?

It was nothing going on. Like, just what he did do was tell him about this incident where my father had saved one of his favorite horses on this horse farm. He had described the horse to him, the color and the whole nine yards. Said, you went out every night, every couple of the vet said, you got to euthanize this lame horse. And he wouldn't do it.

And he kept treating it and treating it and treating it. I mean, up all night every couple of hours. And Maharaji told him that story and of course, he just broke down at that point, he was a puddle on the floor. And from that point on, we had a wonderful relationship, a real friendship. I mean, we still went through stuff.

It wasn't like but it was night and day, night and day. He came there with a fake, god knows what's it called, a fake hair.

I mean, he was bald and he had a rug. That's it. He had a rug and he left without it. His suit of armor was beyond anything. And Maharaji literally broke it down within two weeks.

Made him take this, made him, I mean, suggested he take this. All he knew, obviously, what was going to happen. And my father was just opened up from inside out. Yeah, to pay. The tupay was gone, the rug was gone.

And he came back about four or five months, maybe six months later by himself. He went back to India, took my sister, as a matter of fact, and her eventual husband, and spent two, three months again with Maharaji and almost lost his advertising agency as a result. But he was so committed to he got it. I mean, just the karma. It is staggering.

One other interesting thing that Ramdas talks about in this talk that he gives called Sacred in the everyday, is he says an interesting thing. He says, after all of this work that I've done on myself, from being with saints in India to meditation practices and studying the panishads and whatever, I still have all of the same neurosis that I have had all along. But one thing has changed, and this struck me because I can identify so much with it. Those neurosis that were like mountains to me prior to the meeting of Maharaji, prior to these practices and immersing myself in the sacred life. Prior to that, they were huge mountains.

And then he said, after that, they all became little schmooze. Love that term, little schmooze.

And I see it in my own life after all these years. It's not like these things go away. Your personality doesn't go away. You remain dealing with identifying yourself, with your roles. I mean, Ram Dass talks a lot these days about getting out of your role and into your soul.

And this was the beginning of him talking about that. It was getting into the deepest part of yourself and starting to identify there. And it's a gradual process, and it just doesn't happen. Like just the little schmooze are way easier to deal with, let me tell you. And so here is Ramdas here.

And now, each evening when I'm going to come out to speak, I invariably think of the line from the Tao Dei Qing that says, he who speaks does not know, and he who knows does not speak.

And I see the absolutely bizarre humor of my predicament, and I realize that I have to be both of those. I have to be that part in me that is not speaking, that knows and the part of me that's speaking that doesn't really know. And hopefully they're connected. And if you are open to the possibility, let the words merely quiet your mind and let's meet on the other level where we meet in the silence between the words because we come together to speak about the unspeakable, because the rational, analytic mind, the intellect only knows objects. It only knows what it can think about.

And what we come together to talk about are really matters of the heart that are known subjectively, not objectively. And they are always hidden from the eyes of the thinking mind. And yet I'm in the word business so that we just have to take the words very lightly. There's a very great mystic poet, Jalaluddin Rumi. He said, I am a sculptor, a moulder of form.

In every moment I shape an idol. But then in front of you, I melt them down. I can rouse a hundred forms and mix them with spirit. But when I look into your face, I want to throw them into the fire. The you, in this case, being the beloved or that higher part of ourselves that our minds keep creating realities, we keep creating models of ourselves, we keep creating expectations about the world.

We create these forms of clay and we try to breathe life into them. But the minute you look directly into the eyes of the forms, all seem to dissolve before your eyes and you're left speechless or heartful, whichever way you'd like to look at that.

Now, I, like most of you, when I was born, went into what could be called somebody training. That is, my parents were somebody and they set out to make me somebody as well. And it's called the development of ego structure. And I developed a somebodyness. I knew who I was or who I thought I was.

I developed a set of models, thought forms that defined who I thought I was and who I thought everybody else was and how I thought it all was. And I worked very hard at that. And I became so much somebody that everybody came up to me and said, you're really somebody. And you know, because you keep looking into the eyes of people who the more somebody somebody is, the more you look into their eyes to find out if you're really somebody. I would look into the most somebody's eyes and I'd say, Am I somebody?

And they'd say, you're really somebody. Now, the predicament with somebodyness was that it had been developed from outside in, from I was trained to think of myself a certain way through my parents, my education, my culture and to get reassurance from the minds of other human beings that I was doing it right. The problem was that inside it didn't feel good. It was as if I was wearing a piece of clothing that didn't fit right and that I was trying to make myself make it fit so I would scrunch my body so that it would fit perfectly, so that I could be the somebody everybody wanted me to be. And I would be in pain.

And people would come up and say, what a lovely suit. What beautiful material. So I decided that if everybody and everybody would say you're really somebody, you must be very happy. So I decided if they all thought I must be very happy and I wasn't very happy that I must therefore be sick seems like a reasonable conclusion. So I went to a psychiatrist and for a small pittance he offered to teach me how to wear his suit which was equally uncomfortable in a different way.

But it was even more somebody than the suit I had been wearing. It was like a double somebody then. So I put it on and once I was wearing his suit because he was a Freudian, I no longer saw people. I merely saw like psychosexual stages of development. I saw late anal retentives and early oral incorporatives.

And I think at that point, I would have settled for that kind of discomfort, assuming that everybody else was as uncomfortable as I was or else that I was so pathological, so neurotic, that there wasn't any chance that I was going to be happy. And I might as well just live it out as best I could and reap all the rewards that society showered on me for being somebody. So that when the moment came, when I took off the suit, when I, if you will, transcended ego or broke out of myself which happened in my case, chemically, I had a series of awakenings at that moment. One was that all the clues I had had in myself that I was sick, those weren't correct. I hadn't interpreted those correctly.

They were merely telling me that I was not being true to my deepest self. And when I broke out, I suddenly felt at home, comfortable, I felt peaceful, I felt compassionate. I felt connected to the world around me. These were feelings that I had never expected that I would feel in this life. Because I always felt alienated, self conscious and slightly separate.

Because as long as you're in your thinking mind exclusively, since your mind takes an object you're always one thought away from where life is. You're always thinking about it. So you're always just one thought away. It's that sense of alienation that comes from thinking about life rather than being life. Well, 2 hours later, when the chemical wore off, I then went back into the suit, much to my chagrin and spent then the next many years attempting to get rid of the suit chemically and spirit through all kinds of spiritual practices in India, Japan, et cetera.

And there were moments when I would be in a temple in India where I had been doing long fasts, where I had been doing meditative practices, where I had been doing a lot of chanting. I would find myself in these altered states of consciousness that William James talked about that are available to everybody, although, as he pointed out, most people never meet them. But then he said, apply the requisite stimulus, and there they are in their completeness. And I found that through these various techniques, I could come into these altered states of consciousness, and I would look out at the world, and I would see we are all sisters and brothers. Or even if I went a little further into another altered state, I'd see there's only one of us, there's only one awareness that keeps manifesting in all these different forms.

And I would get so clear and so peaceful and so loving and so present. I felt like a combination of the pure mind of the Buddha and the heart of the Christ. I was really out there, and my eyes light was pouring out of my eyes, and I was full of what's called shakti, and I was just and I then come back to the United States, and I would go to visit my family, and my father would say just some simple thing like, do you have a job?

And I would come crashing down, and I would say, going home brings me down. That was the expression that was used in those days, brings me down. And I began to have a whole list of things that brought me down. Cities brought me down. Earning a living brought me down, politics brought me down.

And I suddenly became aware that I was wearing another kind of a suit. It was I'm wonderfully high. Don't get near me. It was that kind of thing of, I'm very spiritual, just stay away, because I've got to keep my high or keep my altered state or keep that spiritual connection. Something felt wrong about it, but I couldn't quite figure out what that was.

And it took me a number of years because everybody around me seemed and most of the spiritual practices of the world were designed to help you escape from the trap of dualism, to help you escape from your own. Separateness into which you took birth so that you could pull your awareness out of identification with your own separateness, whether by prayer, by meditation, by fasting, by any of the number pilgrimages. Whatever the techniques were, they were designed to help extricate you from identification exclusively with your separateness. And what I saw was that my body was if I look at this foot, for example, this is a 56 year old decaying foot. It's like an old tree trunk that you might meet out in the woods, and it's decaying according to the laws of nature.

It seems to be doing beautifully. It's rather aesthetically exquisite as a decaying foot. If I look at my hand, I see that there's now veins, and there's wrinkles and bone, and it's really getting to look like my father's old hand. Now he's 89, and I can feel me growing into my father's old hand. Now, if I thought that was my hand, I would freak.

But I see it's just a part of nature. It's just a phenomenon that the identification. I mean, I have these spots on my head, and I don't know whether here, but in the United States they sell something called porcelaina, which is something you put on, which makes the spots disappear. The advertising says they call these aging spots. I call them ugly.

But I noticed that as my spiritual work progressed and I identified less and less exclusively with my body, I could say they call him ugly, I call him aging spots, that they were just beautiful phenomena of nature, that I was no longer so what you might call ego involved or invested in. And I saw that most of the practices were designed to mean my body was decaying gently and sweetly, but it was still decaying. And certainly investing in this was like, as Christ said, laying up your treasures where moth and rust doth corrupt. There's no doubt about was then my that I had basically quite a neurotic personality. And it's interesting to note in reflection, that in all the years that I was a professor of psychology at Harvard and Stanford, in all the years that I was in analysis, all the drugs I've taken, all the yoga, I've studied all the spiritual teachers.

I've sat at the feet of all the meditation I've done. I don't think I have gotten rid of one of my neuroses. Not one. However, what has changed is that before they were these huge, big things, that they were very frightening, and they took me over, all my sexual perversities and fears and insecurities would take me over. And now they're sort of like little schmooze or they're little beings.

They're sort of little friendly beings, and I invite them in for tea, and they're still around. They're all there. Oh, hello there, sexual perversity. Come in. Have tea.

Instead of getting so caught in them, instead of taking myself so seriously, instead of taking my personality so seriously, and I don't shove it under the rug, I acknowledge it. It just doesn't have the power over me that it had, because there is another part of my identity that has been cultivated in this course of time. This podcast is brought to you by the Love Remember Foundation. And, Ramdas.org, we appreciate you listening, and we appreciate all the support that you've given us. Please continue that support and donate@ramdas.org.

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