The Miracle Of Consciousness

When I do this old exercise I’ve done many times, where you put a tuner, control knob, next to your eye, and you tune it at level one and you look up here and you see a 65-year-old, paunchy, bald, handsome gentleman, okay? And then you flip at one dial and you see me as teacher, as spiritual seeker, as da-da-da. You see me as Caucasian, you see me as… on and on—all my psychosocial identities. That’s who you see. On channel two, that’s as the world turns. That’s where our personalities hang out. That’s where we think our storylines are real, okay?

Then you go to channel three, where we’re all bigger than life. It’s the astral plane, and we all have our archetypal identities. And I’m an Aries, and you know what that means! And then we go one more channel, and when we look into the eyes of another person—whom we just saw as their physical body, their psychosocial identity, their astral identity—you look in their eyes and you see from behind all that another being looking out at you. Are you in there? I’m in here. How did you get into that one? It’s as if you see—it’s as if you have brought your awareness back into your soul identity, and what you see when you look out are other soul identities. And then, if you flip the dial once more, you see that those souls are all like jivatmans; they’re all little parts of one thing. They’re like holography. And you realize that it’s looking at itself looking at itself looking at itself. There’s only one of us here in drag. See?

Now, it’s interesting: you and I—from my point of view—exist as that one awareness. We also exist as souls who are aware of our predicament as souls. And we also exist as incarnates, as egos. And I’m using the word 'ego' now to include your body and your personality and all the psychophysical shtick of channels one and two. So you and I got born, which was in itself an interesting trip. But then (not to get delayed there) you and I went into training, and we went into basically 'somebody training'. See, we went into training about how to be somebody.

Now, you were trained by the best kind of people, because they all thought they were somebody. Your mother and father both thought they were real. And therefore they thought their child was real. So you are surrounded by a consciousness in which your separateness is what’s real. And you go into separate training. You’re somebody, and you learn how to be somebody and get what you think you need. Because at first you think it’s all one thing, and then slowly you see it doesn’t always happen.

Most people, when that happens, they get so busy. The somebody-ness is like computer software for functioning on this plane, on this loka. It’s our thinking minds. Once we are somebody, meaning we have a conceptual map of reality that includes who we think we are and who we think everybody else is—so we know a tree is a tree and a rose is a rose—and then we go into 'somebody special' training. See? Didn’t you? Didn’t you? Then we get trained how to be somebody special. I was. I was very special. Everybody was special.

And then, for us—certainly us who are gathered in this room—something happened. It may have been lurking all through your life, or it may have just happened. But at one moment, or at some point, you awakened. And you can put those in many terms. You realize you’d been had. You realize you had been trapped in somebody-ness. Just in the same way as Gurdjieff talks about landing in prison. And he said, “If you would escape from prison, the first thing you must realize is you’re in prison. If you think you’re free, no escape is possible.” Far out image. So you awaken. And for me that’s what happened in 1961 with the mushrooms.

And from then on the game changes. Because at that point your awareness has experience from other (what I now call) non-ordinary states of consciousness. You have experienced reality from those planes, and you have known experientially that it’s equally as valid as the plane you thought was real. Is that too weird? Are you here? Okay.

When I first awakened, the feelings I had were: I’m home. This is so familiar. Where have I been all this time? How have I cut myself off from this thing? I’ve been starving to death, and here I was in an ocean of plenty. How bizarre! And then slowly everything would wear off and I’d be back in it. But I’d have the memory of that. And that memory kept compelling me forward to try to get into that state and stabilize it. So Maharaj-ji showed me that that was possible.

And what I have done since that time—which is the last 23 years—is to do the practices and live my life in such a way as to optimize my stabilizing myself in an awakened state. Because, as far as I can understand, that is the most compassionate thing that I can do. Now, that has nothing to do with whether I’m active or not. It’s how I’m active. It’s how I’m active. Because what I have seen in my own horror is a lot of my best intentions as an ego to relieve the suffering of others has ended up increasing the sum-total of suffering in the world—either because I suffered more than they did in trying to, whatever—and I realized out of all that that if I cared about the world, the Earth, the other people, and I saw that I was the instrument—just like you are—I was the basic instrument through which social change would occur. Because as you see the web of interconnected information and consciousness, you see that, as each individual in the system changes, the whole system changes.

So I saw that I had to work on myself as a way of extricating my awareness from the exclusive identification with my ego structures, with my map of reality, with my identification with my desires, with my needs, with my wants. Not stopping any of that or trying to stop it or denying its existence. This is not meshuggena stuff. This is the ability to extricate yourself from exclusive identity with those things. You don’t push them away, because then you just end up a horny celibate. You can’t do that. It’s a process in which you—best characterized for me by Mahatma Gandhi. His autobiography was called 'Experiments with Truth'. And when he was on a train and it was leaving the station and a reporter rushed up and said, “Babaji, Mahatmaji, give me a message to take back to the people in the village.” And Gandhi scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it out the window and it said, “My life is my message.” I assume you’re saying the same thing. I would like to be. I would like to have the integrity that everything I know to be true inside is manifested at all the levels outward. I’m not. But I see that, until I am, every message I send is a mixed message. Every message I send is not only a message of love, but it’s a message of fear.

Ram Dass also known as Baba Ram Dass, was an American spiritual teacher, guru of modern yoga, psychologist, and writer. His best-selling 1971 book 'Be Here Now', which has been described by multiple reviewers as 'seminal', helped popularize Eastern spirituality and yoga in the West. He authored or co-authored twelve more books on spirituality over the next four decades, including 'Grist for the Mill' (1977), 'How Can I Help?' (1985), and 'Polishing the Mirror' (2013).

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