FINDING FULFILLMENT IN EVERYDAY ROLES

Ram Dass: And you’re blown away. And that’s what I would like to see the media focus on, taking people and taking their lives where they come into the studio thinking that they’re stuck in something. I got one good story. Sorry, can I have one more story?

I was taking a meditation course and there was a business, a guy on the upper berth on the upper where you had a double deck bunk, and in a previous course—you’re on silence during the whole 14 days of the course. And I have been in a room with a guy who, I came late, and I didn’t meet. And all the time I kept thinking, he doesn’t like me and he’s, I’m snoring and I’m a slob, and all that stuff. And I spent hours thinking about how much he hated me. At the end of the course, he said it was such an honor to be with you and it helped my meditation so much and I saw it with my own paranoid all the time.

So, this time I decided quick, before the course begins, I better get to know this guy right away. So, I said, who are you? What do you do? He said, I’m a vice president of industrial loans in a bank. I said, what are you doing in a meditation course? He said, well, it’s an interesting story, he said. In the 60s I was a vice president of industrial loans and I thought, gee, everybody’s having more fun than me. So, I dropped out. I left my family. I took drugs. I lived in the mountains. I threw pots. I drummed in India. I traveled. I did all these things. You know, did hot tubs, I did all and he said. Well, poetry, he said.

Then around nine years later, he said, I was in San Francisco again, I was walking down the street, and I met the president of the bank. And he said, amazing I should meet you. He said your desk is vacant again. And he said you were the best vice president of industrial loans we’ve had. Would you consider coming back to work? And I thought, why not? So, I went and bought a necktie, and I went to work, and I said is it any different? He said it’s entirely different, he said. Before I was busy being the vice president of industrial loans. Now I go to this place, and I hang out with people all day. The vehicle for us being together happens to be industrial loans. That’s what I’m hearing. You don’t change the form. You change the nature of the being in the form. And that’s available to everybody, just and they’ll even somebody that’s dying of starvation. And that’s where I learned—That’s scary, but I’m pushing the edge.
That’s where I learned with Ramana Maharshi, for example, dying of cancer. And everybody’s freaking and they say don’t leave us, don’t leave us. Don’t be silly, where can I go? And it’s that quality where when you’re in Benares, the city of dying in India, and you’ll look into the eyes of somebody and they’re right here looking back and they’re machinated leper, leprous, waiting to die, and they’re right here and they are not caught in there. And you look and you get caught and they’re not caught. They free you.

And many of the people I work with in my dying center free me. Because it’s so seductive to get caught in suffering. And to be clear and not get caught in suffering, understand the way suffering’s grace, and at the same moment do what you can to relieve suffering. If you don’t have a right to be presumptuous, all suffering’s good. You know that’s too—that’s not, that’s not in the human heart. The balance of the heart and the mind of the higher awareness, from the higher awareness it’s all perfect, including the suffering. From the high point (he meant “low point), the suffering stinks. And you do everything you can as a human being to relieve the suffering at the same moment a part of you understands that suffering’s great. And that this perfection, including the suffering and including you and doing what you can to relieve it. That’s the subtle balance that you expand to. That allows you to relieve suffering without creating another kind of suffering through your own judgment of God about suffering.