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# 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.
(HTM) From a talk given in Detroit, OR, 1994
tags: self-help,spirit,video
# Tags
(DIR) self-help
(DIR) spirit
(DIR) video