2022-03-09 - Relationship, A Vehicle For Freedom by Ram Dass ============================================================ Because when you push against somebody, even the subtlest model in your head [that] they should be different than they are awakens in them at a very unconscious level, pushing back, a resistance, a subtle paranoia. I have noticed in my human relationships that as i want less and less from each individual, there is much less paranoia in them at a deep level, and they are [immediately] much more available. The interesting [question] is, "What does it mean to be a safe space for another human being?" A safe space means you don't have an agenda. But we have this tendency to have a model because we're trying to justify the way we're living our lives. So to me that word balance is a really key issue. I mean there are so many little balances we work with. The balance between the kind of intuitive heart and the thinking mind. Christine was saying as you get too much thinking the energy goes up and there's a whole contraction in the system around thinking. There's a tendency in the spiritual journey to denigrate thinking, to denigrate intellect, to denigrate analytic mind. I think that we as westerners coming out of our history of having the intellect be the highest power that we have; and now as we're shifting the balance, it is important that we don't throw out the baby with a bath. I think we are inclined to learn how to integrate these two things so that we can honor and delight in the beauty of the intellect without being trapped by it. As they say the ego or the analytic mind is a beautiful servant and it's a lousy master. You can sense as you look at the world conditions how the best of intellect the best of the henry kissinger's don't solve our problems. [This is] ultimately because our problems require a different level of wisdom, and we worship knowledge rather than wisdom. Wisdom has a very deep compassion. Maharaji said see everyone as god. The reason i'm saying all this is because you and i spend an huge amount of time in interpersonal relations. The question i ask you, since you and i aren't going to monasteries to live our lives, since that's one of the things we do so much: Wouldn't it be nice to make it a yoga? To make your human relationships your yoga? To make your human relationships the vehicle for becoming free rather than the vehicle to stay entrapped? And what is required is a shift in the way in which one looks at relationships: What they're about, what their function is. We have come out of a psychological morass Freud and all of the personality people took us down. It's hard to appreciate how deep in it we are; how deep in the doodoo of personality; how real it all is. I mean you all think you have needs that must be met. You all think you have personality; identities that must be honored. Even as i say that i can feel you get tight, defending your right to have those things. That's true, i can feel it in myself too. You know i have a right to be angry. Damn right i do. We'll wait. You know there's no rush. When you finish that trip we'll still be here, because awareness isn't in time: it's just here. You want to enjoy your neurosis? Enjoy! Have more! Have another helping. Really climb in. We have gotten so thick in it, and so you're either getting into it through abuse of this or that, or you spend the rest your life getting out of it, which is all giving that plane of reality so much juice. You look at your relationships from the point of view of your separateness. How will you fulfill my needs? I'll be who you need me to be if you'll be who i need you to be. Now that kind of symbiosis is all fine if you don't get trapped in it. But if you get trapped in it it's a nightmare. It's a nightmare rooted in your sense of separateness. It's like feeding the illusion of the separateness, which is the root cause of the pain. So if the game is to be happy, [then] the question is whether fulfilling your needs makes you happy, and whether fulfilling your needs makes you any happier than not fulfilling your needs. It's an interesting one. It does [make you happy] for the moment, there's no doubt about it, but if you notice that when you live on the realm of needs, the minute one is done another one appears. You have a hierarchy of needs. So like a motivational hierarchy: * I need food. * Now i need ice cream. * Now i need television. * Now i need a cold drink. * Now i need some popcorn. * Now i need to go to bed. If you notice that you just go from one need to another and each one is "and then... and then... and then..." It's extraordinary! It's extraordinary. Now these are all going on all the time. We all have needs and desires. We all have all the stuff. But just like i'm not going around being a bald man, i am bald, relatively speaking. To those of you that don't have eyes to see. [Laughter] But my consciousness is not full of baldness. It's an "also ran", sure, in my hierarchy of desires. If i have the yogic powers that Patanjali talks about, i'll create a beautiful head of hair for myself as a whim. I just did it on the astral plane, so those of you that can see... If you see the way in which people get encrusted in their personalities, you can look at somebody and the way they stand, the way they dress, the muscles of their face, the redundancy is staggering; of a person saying "this is who i am." This is [what] they were basically saying, "this is who i think i am, this is who i think i am, this is who i think i am..." So you see helpless people going down "This is who i think i am, this is who i think i am." Then you see bankers [in a more serious tone], "This is who i think i am, this is who i think i am." You see car salesman [in a different tone of voice], "This is who i think i am, this is who i am." Laid-back hippies, "hey man this is who i think i am, hey baby this is who i am." Everybody gives you a little matrix. They're walking down the street with it. Out of the doctor strange comics, these huge mind nets; and the net goes out and it catches you. You immediately go into the "I'll make believe you are who you think you are, if you'll make believe i am who i think i am." So you don't even look to see who it is. You don't see god as your only friend. You don't see that could be god in drag. You see who they think they are and you respond to it. So everybody is going into the personality realm, making it real, and then interacting. Looking at each other. When you're think your personality is real that's all you see. When you look at other people you don't see the other planes of consciousness. I like the image of the man in a row boat, rowing through the fog, and he hits another boat, and he screams at the other boatmen "Why don't you look where you're going?" The fog clears for a moment and there's nobody in the other boat, it was just floating and you're left with... because at that moment the plane of consciousness shifted, there was nobody there. Well imagine there isn't anybody anywhere. There's only one of us that's just awareness. There's nobody. Who do you talk to? Can you and i enter into a dialogue knowing neither of us are real? Can we have needs without really thinking of them as who we are? Where we're living, it seems to me that we come together through roles, through personality structures, through all these things. These are the vehicles through which we meet. These are the vehicles. The identification with the vehicle becomes a tremendous trap. Part of the yoga of relationship is to meet through the vehicle of all that stuff, but recognize "that" through the process of relationship. My relationship with you. Let's find our way out of being trapped by "that" together. You help me and i'll help you, so that we can be in the roles in a kind of celebratory, free, [and] playful way. From a talk given in Detroit, OR, 1994 tags: self-help,spirit,video Tags ==== self-help spirit video