9

Social Aspects of Sadhana

When we look back at where we’ve come from, we see that we have been constructing a whole new outlook on our lives, a perspective that transforms our acts into karma yoga, and that leads us to develop practices like meditation and purification and devotion. But as I reflect on all that, I find that it feels as if there’s a place where we’ve left some work undone, an area to which we’ve given short shrift thus far. It has to do with all the personality stuff, with all the emotional/interpersonal/cultural stuff in our lives. It’s what I’m calling, for want of a better word, the “social” aspects of our sadhana. I think it’s time now to go back and take a closer look at those parts of our lives, because they, too, will have to be transformed in the course of this journey. Nothing can be left out of this particular stew.

When we talk about “personality” in the way we usually think of it, we’re looking at a peculiarly Western invention. Personality has much less pizzazz in a society like India, where everyone relates to everyone else much more in terms of their roles and their souls than in terms of their personal identities. But we in the West are completely in love with personality.

To focus on personality means to focus on individual differences: I’m me because I’m like this and not like that. The sum total of all those differences is what defines us in our own minds: “I’m depressed.” “I’m self-confident.” “I’m such a good mother.” “I’m laid back.” The process of cultivating those “personalities” for ourselves meant that we grew up preoccupied with individual differences—our own, and everybody else’s. Now, if our attention to our individual differences were simply neutral, if we were just noticing them and appreciating all the myriad ways God can manifest, everything would be fine. But instead of that quality of appreciation, our discrimination more often than not has an edge of judging connected with it, and that leads both to a lot of tsk-tsking about other people and a lot of neurotic self-concern about ourselves.

It seems as though many of us—maybe most of us—have come through childhood with some deep sense of inferiority, or impotence, or incompetence, that’s built deep into the core of who we see ourselves as being. It’s so deep that it has an almost theological quality of original sin associated with it. It’s at an emotional, nonconceptual level—just some gut feeling of not being good enough, which came out of our early childhood training. We don’t have to get into the dynamics of how it developed, but it certainly seems to be a pretty common thing.

Now, instead of searching for a source of that feeling within ourselves, instead of tracing the roots of it in our personality development, we accept the feeling as a given, and then look around and attach it to some particular characteristic in ourselves. We take one of our individual differences, and blame it for our feeling of inadequacy or wrongness; we find some quality or trait in ourselves that we can blame for the way we’re feeling. The trouble is, that leaves us working against what a psychologist would call a negative core-ego concept.

When I was a psychotherapist, I was always amazed by the fact that each person had his or her own “Thing.” Each person said that if it weren’t for that Thing, their lives would be OK. If I didn’t have a nose that was shaped this way. If my breasts were bigger. If my breasts were smaller. If I were having better orgasms. If I had come from a richer family. If my parents hadn’t broken up when I was young. If I hadn’t fallen and gotten this terrible scar when I was little. If my hair were a different color. If I’d lived in a neighborhood where I’d had more kids to play with. If I’d had a more compassionate father. Everybody’s got their Thing. I may not have hit yours, exactly, in that list, but I’ll bet I hit at least a good 40 percent of us there—and the other 60 percent of us get the idea.

We get so emotionally preoccupied with the thing that is “wrong” with us that it starts to color all the ways we see the world around us. If you are preoccupied with your nose, then you notice noses. You notice all the successful people and what particularlynicenoses they have, and so on. Each one of those negative self-descriptions is a way of expressing the feeling that who we are isn’t enough; and if we feel that who we are isn’t enough, it makes us very vulnerable to any unflattering perceptions of ourselves that come to us from the people around us.

Let me tell you an interesting sequence; this happened back around 1964. Tim Leary and I had been colleagues for several years, but we had come to a point where we were disagreeing about a lot of strategies of one sort and another. We had, in fact, separated for a while, but we still had a lot of involvements in common; I was the treasurer and director of our nonprofit, and we were jointly running Millbrook, our commune in New York. And because Tim had been away traveling a lot, I was at that time the legal guardian of his children.

I came back to Millbrook in 1964, after spending some time in Europe. Timothy was running Millbrook at that point, while I was away; I had run it during the previous year, while he was traveling in India. Although Timothy and I were at great odds with one another, I was very close to his kids. He came in one evening while I was sitting there with them and he said, “Kids, there’s something I have to tell you. Uncle Richard [which is who I was to them] is evil.” His son said to him, “Oh, come on, Dad! He may be a schnook, but he’s not evil.” Tim said, “No, no—Uncle Richard is evil.” Well, I lost my cool at that point (which I was prone to do back in those days), and I said to him, “Well, Timothy, if I’m evil, you are psychotic.” Which got to him, just as I knew it would. So then we were both totally freaked.

I left Millbrook at that point, and went out to California. But Timothy’s statement started to work away inside my head. Those deep feelings of inadequacy inside of me had been awakened full blast. I thought, “Gee, maybe it’s true. I’ve certainly done my share of rotten things in my life. Do you suppose that I am evil? Do you suppose there is something just basically corrupt and depraved in me?” I kept turning it over and over in my mind.

That fall, I took an LSD trip with a woman I was living with at the time, and in the middle of the session, I told her the story about Timothy. I said, “So Timothy thinks I’m evil.” She looked at me, and in the state we were in at that moment I can’t imagine what she saw, but she said to me, “Well, you know, maybe you are.”

That was pretty much the end of that relationship; I became impotent with her, and she ran off with another man. But her statement had reinforced what Timothy had awakened in me, and now it really kept gnawing away at me: Do you suppose I really am evil? Two people have said so—I guess maybe I must be.

Then, in the late winter of the following year, I took a very deep acid trip, all by myself. I went in and in and in, going for the place in myself where I felt truly evil. I stood in front of a mirror and I became as evil as I could; I went through every one of my evil thoughts. I was really scaring the hell out of myself—literally!

But I didn’t stop there. I kept going in, deeper. I went beyond the place where I saw myself as evil. I went back and back and back . . . and I came to the place in me where I just am. I just am. I do a lot of crummy things, and I do a lot of beautiful things, and I’m neither good nor evil, I just am. There is good, and there is evil, and here I am.

I had touched that place before. But I had never before been in a situation where my friends had said that I was evil, so I had never before had the opportunity to work with my “evilness” as intensely as I did then, and so I had never before experienced that placebeyond good and evil quite so clearly. From then on I was pretty much liberated from the whole issue of the good and evil in myself, so the whole episode turned out to be a very great gift for me.

It was about a year and a half later. Timothy had been busted in Laredo, and I was working with a group of people who had set up a defense fund for him. Tim and I were still very cold toward one another, but we were working together. I was living in NewYork City then, and Tim was up at Millbrook. At about two o’clock one morning, I got a phone call from someone at Millbrook who said, “Tim has taken a trip and he’s been calling for you all night. He wants you to come to Millbrook, so he can talk to you.” At that point, I hadn’t seen Tim for probably six months or so.

So the next morning, I rented a car and drove up to Millbrook, and I went in to see Timothy. I walked into the room; Timothy was lying on the floor. He got up, and came over and embraced me. Then he said to me, “Richard, I just want you to know one thing.” I said, “What’s that,Timothy?” He said, “You’re not evil.” I said, “Well, thank you, I already found that out. But I appreciate what you did for me. Because if you hadn’t laid that trip on me, I would never have done all the work that brought me to that understanding.”

This may be something of an aside, but since I’ve opened up the whole psychedelic can of worms, we might as well take the occasion to talk about psychedelics, and about the way they fit into a spiritual journey. Their use goes back further than most of us may think. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says, “I am the Soma.” The “Soma” that Krishna is referring to was a plant extract used by the ancient Hindu yogis to achieve mystical experiences. We don’t actually know anymore exactly what Soma was; that knowledge was lost centuries and centuries ago. Whatever its chemistry, it was the elixir, the ambrosia of the gods, the drink that transmutes, the drink that “Spirit-izes.” In the Rig-Veda, there is a poem honoring Soma, calling it “a drop of crystal with a thousand eyes.” The poem goes on to describe what a Soma trip was like; it says.

We have drunk Soma
And become immortal;
We have attained the Light,
The Gods discovered.

Those of us who were involved in research with mushrooms and LSD in the sixties experienced similar effects through those psychedelics. They opened us up spiritually; they were a sacrament, really. Aldous Huxley said they were “a gift of gratuitous grace.”

Soma-like substances are mentioned in many Hindu systems. In Patanjali’s ashtanga yoga, for example, there are references to the use of chemicals for altering consciousness. Some have speculated that psychedelic mushrooms were at the very root of yogic practices. That’s Gordon Wasson’s theory, at any rate. Gordon Wasson is a mycologist, but before he was a mycologist he had been a vice president of Morgan Guarantee Trust Company in NewYork City.Then he got interested in the sacred mushrooms, known in Mexico as Teonanacatl—“the flesh of the gods”; they are the psilocybe mushrooms, which, like a few other varieties, are able to bring about altered states of consciousness. After he started working with Teonanacatl, Wasson retired as vice president of Morgan Guarantee Trust Company, and started traveling around the world studying mushrooms and their religious uses. He found that there were “mushroom stones”—stones carved into mushroom shapes—that were connected with very, very ancient religions. His thesis was that the original yogi mystics of India were mushroom eaters from the mountains in the north who’d come down into the Indus Valley; but the sacred mushrooms didn’t grow there, and so they then developed all the yogic practices—pranayama and hatha yoga and raja yoga—to try to reproduce the same states of consciousness to which the mushrooms had originally given them access.

Nor was knowledge of such things limited to India. Carl Heinrich, an ethnobotanist in Santa Cruz, California, suggests that the “bread” Jesus offered at the Last Supper was, in fact, a psychedelic mushroom called fly agaric, which looks somewhat like pita bread and was appreciated for its taste as well as its effects. Psychedelic substances were used in the West as well.There no longer seems much doubt that rites among the ancient Greeks included ways of altering consciousness for “better living through chemistry.” It seems that an ergot-based potion called kykeon was used in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Some three thou

Kirtan Dancing: Dancing was a common accompaniment to the evening kirtan sessions. The energies of a group chant become very powerful, so for many people kirtan became a highly charged experience. Very often the energies expressed themselves through beautiful, spontaneous, ecstatic dance.

sand people at a time would take part in the rituals at Eleusis, and Plato and Aristotle were among the initiates.

And, of course, in the New World there was peyote—the psychedelic cactus. I have taken part in the peyote ceremony, a beautiful ritual that comes out of the Native American tradition. The value of ceremonies like that is that the psychedelic experience is totally ritualized; there are social forms to it. So if you start to get uptight and have a bad trip, for example, there are ways for the group to help you work with that. We spent many hours one night, all of us together, working with one person who was stuck, because the sun couldn’t come up until that person was clear. It was four in the morning; it had been a long, cold night, and everyone yearned for the sun to rise, but it couldn’t happen until that person broke through. It became the task of everyone in the group to help make that happen, and the intensity of the love and attention that were directed toward that person was incredible. It’s a powerful ceremony.

Not long after I first met Maharajji, he asked me one day about what he called my “yogi medicine”—LSD. So I rummaged around in my bag, and I pulled out the box of pills I was carrying, and I showed him the three LSD capsules I had with me—about nine hundred micrograms, a very respectable dose. He took the pills from me, and I saw him seem to toss them into his mouth; and then afterward, all afternoon long, he just continued talking and doing what he always did, and nothing seemed to happen.

Later on I came back to America, and I wrote about that experience, and talked about it in my lectures. But inside of me was this gnawing little doubt: Do you suppose that, through sleight of hand or hypnotic suggestion or whatever, he hadn’t really taken the pills at all—that he’d actually just tossed them over his shoulder or something? (See? There it was: My thinking mind, busy at work!)

When I went back to India the next time, Maharajji called me up to his tucket one day and he said to me, “Did you give me some medicine the last time you were in India?” I said, “Yes, Maharajji.” He asked, “Did I take it?” I said, “Well, I think so.” He asked, “What happened?” I said, “Nothing.” Then he said, “Jao, jao!”—go away.

The next morning, Maharajji called me up to his tucket again and he said, “Got any more of that medicine?” I said, “Yeah, I do.” He said, “Bring it, bring it.” So I brought the LSD that I was carrying in my bag. This time I had five pills, one of which was broken; he took the four that weren’t broken, which was a very high dose, some twelve hundred micrograms of pure LSD. He took the tablets, and he very elaborately placed each one on his tongue, doing the whole thing almost in pantomime, so there could be no doubt at all in my mind that he had taken them.

When he had swallowed all four of them, he asked, “Pani?” (Can I take water?) I said, “Yeah, sure.” He called, “Pani, pani”—bring me some water—and he drank a little. Then he asked, “Will it make me crazy?” I said to him, “Probably. Whatever you want, you can do.” (You’ve got to remember whom you are talking to, you know.) He asked, “How long will it take?” and I said, “About an hour.” So he called an old man over, and the man had this huge pocket watch, like an old railroad watch, on a chain. Maharajji had the man sit down next to him on the tucket; he was hanging on to the man and staring at the watch—it was a whole Marx Brothers routine! At one point, after half an hour or so, Maharajji ducked down under his blanket for a few minutes, and came up looking absolutely deranged, with his tongue lolling out and his eyes crossed. I thought, “Oh, my God! What have I done? He really hadn’t taken the LSD the first time, and because he’s a good mind reader he knew that I knew that. So he figured he’d better really do it this time—but he didn’t know what he was letting himself in for, and now he’s gone crazy. This nice old man—I’m going to have all this on my head!” At that point, Maharajji looked over at me, and he started to laugh. He laughed and laughed at the way he’d put me on. Then he went back to doing the things he always did, talking to people and tossing fruit at them.

At the end of the hour, Maharajji pointed to the man’s watch and said to me, “Well, what do you think?” I said, “I guess it’s not going to work.” He asked, “Don’t you have anything stronger?” I said, “No, Maharajji, I don’t.” He just shrugged. “Most yogis would be afraid to take that medicine,” he said. “Those things were known about long ago, in the Kulu Valley, but all of that has been lost now. They don’t know anything about this anymore.”

Later on, I asked him, “Maharajji, is it all right to use these chemicals?” He said, “If you were to take it in a cool place, and your mind was feeling much peace, and if you were alone and turned toward God, it could be useful. It would allow you to come into the room and pranam to Christ.” (Meaning, you could come into the presence of Spirit.) “But you can only stay two hours,” he said, “and then you have to leave again. It would be better to become Christ than just to pranam to him, but your medicine won’t do that for you. It’s not the ultimate samadhi.”

However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. Maharajji said, “That kind of experience can be very helpful. To visit a holy man even for a few hours will strengthen your faith. But, he added, “love is a much more powerful medicine than LSD.”

(I once told one of Maharajji’s Indian devotees the story about giving Maharajji the acid and he said to me, “That’s nothing.” He told me that a couple of years before, a sadhu had come to see Maharajji. In India, some sadhus take arsenic for devotional purposes.They take tiny, tiny amounts of it, and in those doses it’s not lethal, but instead it acts like a psychedelic; it gets you high. This sadhu was carrying something like a two-year supply of arsenic, which would be a lethal dose for maybe ten people. Maharajji said to the sadhu, “Where’s your arsenic?” The sadhu said, “Oh, Maharajji, I don’t have any arsenic.” Maharajji said, “Give me your arsenic!”The sadhu fished around in his dhoti and handed over the packet. Maharajji opened it up and swallowed the whole thing. Everyone started to cry and wail . . . and nothing happened.)

The first time I took LSD again after I came back from that second trip to India was at a motel in Salinas, Kansas. It was a cool place, I was feeling much peace, I was alone, and my mind was turned toward God. The conditions felt right.

I started the session with a total Grade-B melodrama—that is, I panicked. A “bad trip,” it’s called. I was just about to run naked out of the motel room and into the manager’s office and say, “You’ve got to help me—I’m dying!!” As I reached for the doorknob, I had a flash of what was about to occur. I saw myself running into the office, and I saw the manager sitting there, and I saw what I’d look like in his mind: Here’s this middle-aged, balding, naked man running out of Room 125 wailing, “I’m going to die.” Then I saw the police, and the psychiatrists, and the tranquilizers, and all that would follow. And I thought, “There’s got to be a better way than that.”

So I turned away from the door. I sat down on the bed and I thought, “Is there any way I can avoid dying?” And I realized that the answer was no—that there wasn’t any way at all. Some of the ways I thought about might take forty years or so, but still I would die. I really realized, deeply experienced, that it was absolutely inevitable: that as long as I thought I was anybody—anybody—I was going to die.

So I gave up. I said to Maharajji, “Since it has to happen, please let it happen now. I’m ready—I want to die.” I lay down in front of the television set. I’d taped a picture of Maharajji right in the middle of the screen, so it looked like all the images were coming out of his head. I lay there, and I waited to die.

In the session that followed, I had the darshan of Maharajji. He manifested in the exact way that is written about in the eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, and the room filled with the entire universe. Maharajji kept emerging into all these other beings, and absorbing everything back into himself. He was sitting there on the bed in the motel, laughing and laughing, and the universe was pouring into him and out of him.

Following that, there was a blank space—a moment of no-thought.

The first thought that occurred, after that interstice between mind-moments, was, “Wow!—you can be anything you want to be this time around!” And with that thought, I started to reincarnate again. That is, my karma made the state of no-thought only momentary, before the “I” reasserted itself. I’d had the darshan of Christ, but I hadn’t become Christ.

True. But . . . when I came back, I was freer than I’d been before.

Psychedelics have been a dominant theme in our cultural landscape for quite a long time now. I think they warrant our considered reflection, because for so many of us, they were a pivotal element in our journey. They certainly played a major role in my own awakening process, and I want to give them their spiritual due.

Well, going back to that story about Tim and me, you can see that I was beginning to take a different stance toward the way I related to my own feelings. I started out with Tim’s negative projections toward me, and with all the feelings in myself that those projections aroused. Then slowly, slowly, I let all that become my teaching, and that transformed all the personality games. At that point, instead of being something that brought me down, my personality stuff became the very vehicle for my getting free.

That’s the flip.That’s the way we turn our emotional games around on themselves. There are techniques like that that we can use to work with any of the stuff that catches us—with anger, with depression, with boredom, with loneliness, with whatever emotional state arises. Instead of trying to push it away, or getting angry with God about it, we invite it in, we appreciate the teaching it brings. We turn the situation around, so it frees us.

Take another example—anger. When somebody makes me mad, I am really fierce! But as I am doing my “fierce thing,” as the adrenaline is starting to pump, and I’m getting into my roaaaarrrrr!—suddenly, the cosmic humor of the situation starts to sneak in. I hear Maharajji saying, “Got you again!” Because we only get angry when someone disconfirms our expectations, when they upset our models of the way we think things ought to be. And since our strategy in this game is to ferret out exactly those places in ourselves where we are clinging to models of this or that, what more could we ask than for people to come along and wake us up yet again? If they can get us furious—isn’t that nice of them? Isn’t that a compassionate act? It’s not necessarily aconsciouslycompassionate act on their part, but from our point of view it’s a compassionate act nonetheless. “You really got me bugged. Thank you.”

Now, the question is, how long does it take me, in that sequence of little mind-moments, to go from the “Grrrrrrr!” (which is at the level of individual differences) to the “Ah—there I am in an incarnation going ‘Grrrrrr!’ ” (which is at the level of the witness)? Our practices are about shortening that sequence. We’re learning to wake up as quickly as we can, before we’ve created too much extra karma for ourselves through our reactivity.

(One little humorous aside on this subject of anger: A NewYork City friend of mine wrote to me and said, “Downtown on the East Side, I saw an angry woman leaning out of the window of her car, shaking her fist at a truck driver who had cut her off. She was sputtering with rage, trying to find words adequate to her fury. Finally she shouted, ‘You . . . you . . . you . . . weird expression of God, you!’ ”)

So we can use unworthiness as a practice, and we can use anger as a practice. How about loneliness? There’s one that’s familiar to a lot of us. If we wanted to look at it from a strictly clinical point of view, we could say that we feel something we callloneliness,when we get into certain psychodynamic psychological spaces where we don’t have contact with others. Describing it that way already strips it of a certain amount of its juice, doesn’t it? Just seeing it in those totally detached terms loosens its grip on us.

Loneliness is part of the personality’s melodrama. Say you’re alone in your room; everybody’s left you, and nobody cares; you feel unloved and full of self-pity. From a spiritual point of view, what do you do with all that? If you have some centering practice, like meditation, it will give you some purchase on the situation; and then, as you quiet down, you’ll begin to hear the little voice of cosmic humor inside yourself that says, “Wow—just look at that self-pity.You can cut it with a knife.” That is, once you look for it, you see that right there, along with the loneliness, there is a connoisseur in you, appreciating the essence of the loneliness, savoring the intense quality of the suffering. It’s right there, all the time, that other part of yourself.

If we start to work from that kind of perspective, our notion of loneliness begins to shift.We discover, for example, that there is a difference between being alone and being lonely. On a spiritual journey, there are points when we will enter into experiences of the most intense aloneness—because it turns out, in fact, that we are all alone. Sometimes, very early in our spiritual practices, there begins to be a flickering recognition of that “all aloneness.” If, when we have those experiences, we perceive them through our old patterns of thinking, they arouse old emotional patterns in us, and that often creates a kind of reflexive pulling back—because “all alone” is very scary to who we think we are. If we have a practice that lets us put a little space around the fear, one that lets us relax a little and examine it, we discover that it’s a different kind of aloneness altogether, one in which “loneliness” plays no part. We aren’t lonely—not because there are others there, but because there is no one at all, including us.

Many of us who are reading this book are in a peculiar predicament.We have built a whole ego structure about who we are and how we function in the world that’s based on the emotion-laden models about individual differences that we’ve been taught to think define us. But now we’re experiencing realms of the universe and perceptions of ourselves and others that are totally inconsistent with those old ways of thinking. How do we bring the two together? How do we understand what’s going on? How do we respond?

Let’s play a little game. Let’s imagine that our whole perceptual field, everything that we might be experiencing from moment to moment, is like a television set, where we can change our reality by flipping from one channel to another. If we look at another person when we’re tuned to channel 1, we see them the way we’ve habitually seen them, which means we’re seeing them first and foremost in terms of the way they fit into our own desire systems. So, as I’ve said before, if you’re horny, you see who’s makeable, who’s a competitor for who’s makeable, and who’s irrelevant. That’s your way of dividing up the universe. If you’re an achiever, a power-oriented person localized in your third chakra, you see everybody in domains of power and control.You see who’s beatable and who’s going to beat you out; you see who’s where in the power hierarchy. If you are a gymnast, you look at people in terms of their body development. If your preoccupation is with the color of your skin, that’s what you’re aware of. All of that is on the first channel.

Now give the channel selector one little flip.We look a little deeper into other people, and what we begin to see now are their personalities: that’s a cheerful person, that person is very surly, that one seems depressed. Those of us who are preoccupied with the planes where our personalities exist are inclined to see other people that way as well: “That person was kind to me—she’s a nice person, sort of motherly.” Those are psychological variables, and when we’re focused on them in ourselves, we’re also looking for the psychological dimensions in other people.

If we flip channels once more, we come into the astral planes. That’s where our perceptions of ourselves and one another have to do with our mythic story lines—with things like our astrological types, for instance. Then there are only twelve basic permutations in the world, and we see everybody as a Leo, or an Aries, or a Libra. When we look at another person, that’s who we see.We say, “Well, I can tell I’m seeing a Sagittarius here.” The person may say, “I’m not a Sagittarius—I’m Fred!” We say, “Well, that’s whatyouthink, but really you’re a Sagittarius.” That’s reality on that plane.

As we start to experience the whole show from channel 3 and up, and to discover that behind the physical plane there are all these other planes on which we also have identities, it’s easy to get seduced by all the new possibilities. They all have more shakti connected with them than this plane does, so when we get into one of them it seems even more real than this one did, and we get sucked right back in. The minute we start to acknowledge our identities on other channels, there’s the immediate tendency to start casting the new identities in starring roles as part of our romantic image of ourselves. We finish with our physical-plane identity; we say, “Well, I know I’m not Joe anymore.” But then we immediately follow that with “Who I really am is the Messiah.” A lot of us, through various means, have moved into other planes, flipped TV channels, and then gotten very much enamored of our new identities. We’ve traded in one costume for another. The new ones may be more fun, but we’re still just as much caught in individual differences as we were before. The game isn’t to create exciting new roles to inhabit, but to keep letting go, letting go, letting go.

Channel 1—physical identity; channel 2—emotional identity; channel 3—astral identity.

If we give the channel selector one more flip, we come to what we could call the soul level. And now what we’re seeing when we look at another person is another soul looking back at us. We look in another’s eyes and we see another being, just like us. “Are you in there? I’m in here! Far out.” We can still see the packaging—the packaging that includes the body, the personality, the astrological sign, all the individual differences. There is still somebody separate from “me” in there, but the individual differences now are more like veils, like packaging for the real product. Here we are: We are two beings; we have our individual characteristics, and we are also just alike.

So you take a relationship—say, to your parent, or to your child; someone you have a long history of treating solely as her or his role: “That’s my mother.” “That’s my father.” “That’s my son.” “That’s my daughter.” “That’s little Mary Jane—hello, little Mary Jane.” Now flip the channel. You look at Mary Jane, and suddenly there is another being inside Mary Jane who isn’t Mary Jane at all. It’s not not Mary Jane—it’s not like it’s Sarah Lou or something. It’s the soul, another part of her being, saying, “I’m in here, and I’m just like you.”

What we’ve described are four channels—four different “takes” on reality. For efficiency’s sake, so we can sleepwalk through our lives, we generally confine our perceptions to channel 1, or maybe channels 1 and 2. Furthermore, we make the assumption that our individual differences, whatever they might be, are a constant, and that we can therefore treat everybody as being exactly the same today as they were yesterday. If you were Mary Jane yesterday, I’m going to assume that you’ll probably be Mary Jane today, which means I’m going to deal with you on the basis of past history. If I have pigeonholed you as someone who is a slob, I might as well continue to treat you as a slob, because it’s most likely that if you were a slob yesterday, you will be a slob today. That’s known as “efficiency of social relationships.”

But what if, when I meet another person, instead of being preoccupied with our individual differences or with who I remember her as being last time, I go beyond all that, I see the soul, I see that other being who is just like me? Then every moment is a fresh moment. And then it’s a whole new ball game every time we meet. Now it gets interesting: Who are you this time?

Once we discover we can look at the world on channels 3 and 4, we start consciously trying to spend more time hanging out on those planes with other people. We don’t demand that the other person be there—that’s up to them. It’s a perspective we begin to cultivate within ourselves. We see the other person as a fellow soul; we don’t have to say anything to him, it’s just who we are. But in the process of seeing ourselves and the other person from that perspective, we create a space in which the other person is free to join us, should they wish.We become the environment in which optimum growth is available to all the beings with whom we come in contact. And from that perspective comes the recognition that in every relationship, it’s all possible, all the time.

Take, for example, my relationship with my father. My father was always busy thinking he was my father. He knew who he was, right? He had all his identities solidly in line. He was a Republican, he was somebody who loved his family, he was somebody who owned this and that; and when he and I were together, he was first and foremost my father. That meant I had to be the son. But from where I was seeing it, he was just another being, one who happened, in this particular round, to have taken on an incarnation that made him my father and made me his son. It was our karma that we would be in that relationship; we were each other’s karmic predicaments, if you will. But behind it all was “You here? I’m here! Far out.”

That’s what it was from where I was sitting. Now, were I to say to him, “You here?” he’d have said, “Oh, you’re talking that nut talk again.” And it wasn’t my job to try to foist off my views on him. Chapter 3 of the Gita says, “Let not the wise disturb the mind of the unwise in their work. Let him working with devotion show them the joy of good work, and those who are under the delusion of the forces of nature bind themselves to the work of these forces. Let not the man who sees this, disturb the one who sees it not.”

So my job wasn’t to say to my father, “Look, you’re not really my father”; he had the birth certificate, and that was his reality. My role was to add an additional dimension to our relationship within my own perception. I saw him as my father, and I also saw him as another soul like myself—but a soul who was in an incarnation in which he was totally identified with the thoughts connected to that incarnation. He was so deeply identified with those thoughts that they were completely real from where he was sitting. That’s OK. I didn’t have to tell him how I was seeing it. We’d sit down together and talk father-and-son talk, and all the time I’d be doing my mantra. I’d be talking father-and-son talk, but I’d also be sitting in that place inside myself where we were just two souls, doing this dance together.

Of course, the plane that I added was merely one more plane. It was no better or no worse than the plane my father was on, but at least it did present an alternative. My mind was creating a space in which, if he chose, he was free to give up the limiting conditions of his role, which were making him think that that was all there was to him.

And what would sometimes happen between us in that space was very far out. We would talk father-and-son talk for a while, and then we’d run out of that, and we’d just sit quietly together. If you’re caught in your roles, you freak when the role material runs out, when you’ve exhausted the script lines. But Dad and I got so we’d just sit together in silence, and pretty soon it was as if we were at some meditation retreat together. We’d left the words behind. We were just there, together.

When operating from channel 3 and up we automatically start to change the way we deal with one another. There starts to be a certain evenhandedness in the way we treat other people. Whatever our relationship is with someone, the same general rules will apply. It doesn’t matter if it’s our parents or our child, our enemy or our friend; we start treating them all the same way. Everybody becomes “Uncle Henry.” We treat everyone with appreciation for the fact that we are all beings who are in incarnations, and that we are all God at play as the many. The Gita says, “The man whose love is the same for his enemies or his friends, whose soul is the same in honor or disgrace, who is balanced in blame and praise, whose home is not in this world, and who has love, this man is dear to me.”

Kirtan in the Park: Afternoons in the Main Hall were often very warm, so Krishna Das moved the kirtan class to a nearby park and conducted the chanting circles there.

When we’re seeing other people on channels 3 and 4, we aren’t nearly as likely to be judging them all the time. We see the perfection of their being exactly who they are, and we stop laying so many trips on everybody. We’re not always sitting around saying, “You should be this way,” or “You should be that way.” “If you were a good father, you would . . .” “My child is going to be a . . .” “I’m hoping my therapy patients will . . .” “A good employee would never . . .” Can you hear all the judgments, all the expectations? “I think my husband should . . .” “I expect a wife to . . .” What could be more corrosive in a relationship than that?

If we go out into the woods and we look at all the trees, we don’t say, “I wish that oak tree were an elm.” Somehow, we can allow trees to be what they are; we can grant that each tree is perfect just the way it is. But when it comes to people, if everybody isn’t the way we think they ought to be, all hell breaks loose! We sit around judging and judging, having opinions about everybody.

See, the predicament with all our judging is this: Everybody is always doing the best they can. Maharajji kept saying to me, “Ram Dass, don’t you see it’s all perfect?” Everyone is perfect, exactly as they are. There are all these gunas, these strands of the universe, weaving back and forth, interacting with one other. And in each individual manifestation, those strands have woven themselves together in a unique way so as to produce yet another perfect statement of the unstatable. So someone comes to you, and she’s hung up, uptight, and angry.You see the perfection in that.You say, “Far out! There’s God as an angry person.You weird manifestation of God, you.”You give each incarnation the space to manifest exactly as it needs to manifest.

When we’re just beginning to remember that we have identities on those other planes, it’s helpful to be around other people who are engaged in the same game we are. It’s fun to play with other beings who are working on themselves, who are getting conscious, like us. We call those people members of our satsang, or our sangha, or our fellowship, and they’re so important in the journey that Buddhism makes them one of the three “jewels”: “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the dharma, I take refuge in the sangha.”

Satsang is important because it keeps us from getting so lost on channels 1 and 2.When you’re with satsang, you may go “Grrrrrrrr!” and the other person may go “Grrrrrrrr!” but at the same moment you’re both thinking, “Far out! Look at this one!” That’s why it’s so juicy to hang out with satsang. There is an assumption that everybody is on the trip together, and that we are all really here to help each other wake up. We may still get caught in incredible melodramas, but at the same time we know that behind them there lies the cosmic joke.

It turns out that we can have, that we are beginning to have, a satsang, a community of the spirit, that isn’t based in space and time.We are so habituated to thinking of our relationships with other people in terms of time-and-space dimensions that we keep running through our old dramas, even though we’ve used them up. Say somebody leaves; that person is going away, and we run through a whole melodrama: “Good-bye! I’ll miss you!! It’s horrible that you’re leaving!!!” And we’re really deeply caught up infeeling all of that.Yet a few minutes later, we are fully involved in whatever it is we are doing right then, with no more thought of the melodrama; and when we see the person again, it seems like only a moment has passed.

One night I phoned a fellow in Texas. I had last seen him maybe twelve years before, I’d visited then, with him and his wife. I called him, and we started to talk on the phone, and within two minutes— we were right here. Those twelve years were like—swoosh! They were gone. But the fellow kept saying to me, “It would certainly be wonderful to hang out with you again.” I thought, “Would be? What do you think we’re doing right now? Here we are!” Do you think if our bodies—these big, grotesque, decaying bodies—were to get together and hug, that it would somehow be more “real” than it is right now? (Or what about the telephone in that situation: Was it really necessary? They were here, and I was here, so . . .)

I tell people, “There is nobody I could ever miss again.” That’s because nobody could ever get away from me again—nor I from them. See, I don’t live exclusively on the physical space-time plane anymore, and when you break out of that identification with channels 1 and 2, you realize that our comings and goings never really were what it was all about. When you’re experiencing the world as channel 3 and up, you can never be lonely again.You couldn’t possibly be lonely—where could you go to be alone? How can I get away from Maharajji? I’ve already told you what his trip is all about—do you think that if I go in the bathroom and lock the door, I can be lonely? How silly.

It’s always just one thought away. The living spirit, the community of our consciousness, the guru within—whatever you want to call it, is always just one thought away. One thought! If you’re busy being lonely, all you’ve got to do is to sit down and meditate. One thought away—no loneliness! The moment you give up the thought of yourself as separate —which is the one that’s lonely—here we are again. And in the “here we are again” there are other beings just like me— and there is also only one of us. Because it turns out that channel 4— that “You’re here? I’m here!”—isn’t the ultimate channel, either. It turns out that if you want to go even further still, mystically speaking, and you give the dial another flip, you’ll discover that when you are looking at a “somebody else,” you are really looking at nothing but yourself. All form, all separateness, is just passing show. All emotion, all relationship, is just illusion. Bodies, personalities, astrological signs, souls—it’s all just yourself dancing with yourself, by making believe that you are separate.