Ram Dass Love Serve Remember

I have never had the pleasure of meeting Ram Dass in person. When I was 13, my parents sent me to yoga and meditation classes because they thought I had insomnia and it would help. (What they didn’t know was that I was desperately bored in school and reading science fiction books by flashlight all night!) But the classes took, and I started reading more about the traditions surrounding meditation and yoga. My father, a Unitarian Universalist minister, had an extensive library on world religions and various philosophical/spiritual traditions, so I had a lot to read in my own attic on the ranks of utility shelving that housed the thousands of books in my dad’s library!

I also started sitting in satsang with the devotees of Maharajji, in Montpelier, VT (almost all of whom were associated with the UU church!). I never took this group very seriously, as I found more centeredness in my yoga/meditation teacher, and my modern dance teacher. The satsang was practicing in near isolation, and with not much experience.

My father had a copy of Be Here Now on his desk in his office, and I picked it up one day. I was very arts-oriented, as well as heavily into the sciences and social sciences. The story of Ram Dass, and the nearly animated book, resonated with me. I remember thinking it was pretty wild that my dad had this book living on his desk in the white-clapboard fussy New England church. I approached the book different ways at different times, working my way through it, puzzling through particular bits, showing pieces off to friends and asking their thoughts, using it for “bibliomancy” (opening to a random page, and assuming that’s your lesson for the moment).

Many miles passed, 33 years along. I have studied with the Kagyu Buddhists and many other groups. I have been a yoga therapist and helped people who experimented with things they couldn’t handle, like taking kundalini yoga classes thinking they were like aerobics (context-less and without possible disruptive consequences), I have danced with neo-pagans, and studied Ken Wilber, but mostly I’ve been engaged for 30 years in helping at the intersection of computer technology and social issues, as a profession and a jnana path of sorts.

Recently, an old friend said he thought that of all the people he’d ever spoken to, Ram Dass would perhaps best understand the work I am doing now. I’ve recently started a company that helps people get some of the benefits of meditation through a computer game environment. The day after that, I ran into Ram Dass’s Twitter account (very funky). Today, at a used bookstore, I ran into an old copy of Be Here Now, a bit dog-eared, and it followed me home. I’ve started to re-read the book. Amazing how different a book it is at 50 than at 17, yet very fresh and fun! I thought, someone should do a flash animation of this book, and animate it as I have always seen it in my mind’s eye, cascading and dancing on the page. Maybe they already have? So I plugged in “ram dass be here now multimedia” into Google—and here I am! The modern version of bibliomancy: plug a search into Google and assume that the page that comes up is your lesson for the day. ;)

Excerpt from Remarkable Encounters with Ram Dass Enhanced Ebook – now available on iBooks, Kindle and  Nook.

Original Article

Question:  Is there a special technique or methods to help when we are overtaken by emotion?

Ram Dass:   The question was, are there spiritual techniques when you are overcome by emotion?  Well, I’ll tell you, as your practice gets more and more powerful, what happens is you see the stuff as it starts before it gets so overloaded and so invested with adrenaline and all of that.  You don’t let it get so intense.   By the time it gets out of control and so immense, then you just wait.  You wait.  The best thing to do at that point is to sit quietly and to let it pass.  Now when an emotional upset starts, it may start out of a thought process, but then it starts to involve all of the body — the adrenaline and all kinds of chemical reactions.  Then often, one of the ways out of it is to work with the body.  For example, running or movement.  Taking a walk.  Doing things which start to release the energy, the kind of chemical buildup.  Because you get that kind of nervous energy when you are emotionally upset. Then there is meditation—quieting down and allowing yourself to see how lost you’ve gotten.  I mean on the deeper devotional path, there is the offering of the emotion to God.  Saying, “Here, You take it.  I offer it to You.”  There is appreciating your humanity.   “Yea, here I am.  I’m human.  I just lost it again.  Ah so!”  There’s the Ah so — Right?  “Okay. Once more. Boy, am I hung up.”    These are all spiritual techniques.  See, it’s the upleveling.  It’s the ability to see it without denying it.  Not saying, “I’m not really upset.”  “I am upset.  Far out.  Here we are again.”  It’s like talking with God and saying “Oh, look at how deliciously human I am.”  Not to milk it.  Not to keep feeding it, but not to push it away.  That’s the quickest way through.  To acknowledge it, allow it, and then use body energy to keep working out the chemical stuff that’s built up and the tension in the body that’s been built up.  And then get on with it and just keep letting go, letting go, letting go.  Sometimes music does it.  There are a lot of techniques that do it.

And then you see that it’s your expectations of your own mind that are creating your hell.   “I expected you to be…”  When you get frustrated because something isn’t the way you thought, examine your thinking, not just the thing that frustrates you.  And you will see that a lot of your suffering is created by your models about how the Universe ought to be.  And your inability to allow it to be.  If I meet somebody that is a liar and a cheat, they are like an elm tree.  They are the essence of lying and cheating.  If I have a model people shouldn’t lie and cheat, then I am immediately in opposition to that person. I don’t have to play games with them.  I may say “In the future, you and I can’t play together, because you are a liar and a cheat and I can’t play with you” but I at least appreciate and allow them their lyingness and cheatingness.  That’s their problem, not mine.  My problem was my expectations.  If you have a model that everybody is good and then somebody isn’t, then you end up hating the world and being all upset about the world because it isn’t the way you expected it to be.  It’s like you come here and it’s a beautiful day, so you expect the next day is going to be beautiful.  Then it rains, and you are disappointed.  Isn’t it funny that when it rains, you should be disappointed?  To take nature and allow nature, when it’s in its natural state, to make you miserable.  It says something about you.  It’s like decaying and dying.   If you are upset about decaying and dying, you’ve got a problem.  You really do.

Original Article

Just a few weeks before the construction of the house started, Baba arrived. Since the old lady had gone away, the atmosphere was peaceful. Ma and Maushi Ma had already become very close to him. For them, Babaji was a very wise and dear member of their household. His talks with them would always be intimate and affectionate.

Ma and Maushi Ma and Didi were deeply religious and became close with Baba from the first day he came. He actually began asking about each and every detail of the family and advising them. My mother and auntie would discuss even the minor things of the household with him and he would solve all their problems, family or financial or material. He could be so very affectionate, behaving just like a son to his mother. “Ma, bring me food … I am feeling hungry. Kamala, please scratch my back.”

Babaji at first called me by my name, Sudhir, or just “Profes­sor.” It was in 1961 that one day he started calling meDada [elder brother]. Others followed, but not my Ma and Maushi Ma. He asked them why they called me by name and not Dada. When they said that a son is not addressed so, he said, “When he is my Dada, he is your Dada also.”

One day I was alone with him and he asked me, “Your friends are not coming now. They must be warning you about the danger of coming under the influence of a baba and being close with him. They love you and therefore they warn you for your own good. Am I wrong?” I had no reply to give. He was right.

I was rather an outsider at the beginning, and I was not psychologically or mentally prepared for the difficulties and disturbances his coming created. I was quite interested in social and cultural life, going to the pictures, making friends, addressing various kinds of cultural gatherings, meetings, debates, and I had a very large circle of friends. They would come and gather together just like members of the family. Now when Babaji began coming, there was no place for them to come and sit. Also, many of my friends did not like the idea. “Oh, you have become the victim of some baba!” When his visits contin­ued, they would say I was wasting my time. In spite of all their solicitations, I could not change my new way of living. I was losing my interest in my old life, but I could not think that Babaji had anything to do with it. For me it was just like dry leaves falling from the tree, without anybody’s hand behind it.

Excerpt from By His Grace

by Dada Mukerjee

Original Article

It was 1970 in Washington, D.C. When friends played a tape recorded lecture in which Ram Dass described his journey to India and his transformation from Harvard professor to intrepid explorer of the mind to spiritual seeker and discoverer in terms, tenor and language that confirmed tenets i knew to be true, but had never heard anyone utter so convincingly.

The words were bright and clear, without artifice or guile, delivered free of personality through the heart of a being whose life had been profoundly opened to a mystic reality.

The words gave certainty to ideals long taught and believed but infrequently seen in a post-war western culture dominated by conspicuous consumption and separation from its underlying unity. They offered the possibility of attaining those ideals. They gave impetus to the search for realizing them.

After reading Ram Dass’s book, Be Here Now, and the cookbook for a sacred life it contained, the path had become clear and the effort worthwhile. And so I embarked. I left an impending career in law in abeyance, to be resumed in a few years but from a much different perspective.

Later, after many months of meditation and yoga practice, I learned that Ram Dass was speaking one evening at a nearby university. As Is entered the auditorium there on the stage was a chair, a floral arrangement and a color photograph of Maharajji large enough for anyone to see his beaming presence from any place in the audience. The lecture was moving, almost as if Maharajji was delivering the meta-message through Ram Dass.

And after it ended, way beyond the scheduled time, many people lingered to hear more, myself included, but mostly to stay in the presence of that moment. Upon taking leave and thanking him, the same light emanating from Maharajji’s picture could be seen radiating from Ram Dass in a most impersonal yet transcendent manner that made his words seem superfluous. That was my first meeting in person with Ram Dass.

Many months later I saw him at the Lama Foundation after a retreat in which I had been advised to set out for India. I told him that story and asked what he thought of this advice. His reply was wise. I was exactly where I needed to be for the next step in the journey. After a lengthy pause in which he undoubtedly could see the disappointment in my face, he suggested that if I happened to find myself in India that summer I should seek out S.L. Sah and tell him that Ram Dass sent me.

So that’s what I did. And three weeks later I found myself facing Maharajji. It was like looking at the sun. Here was the source of what we all came to understand as the unconditional love that had transformed Ram Dass. And there I remained for months in a timeless state of bliss and discovery, and in the profound experience of being always in Maharajji’s presence.

All this is because of Ram Dass.

Excerpt from Remarkable Encounters with Ram Dass Enhanced Ebook – now available on iBooks, Kindle and Nook.

Original Article

Question:  I am the father of a three year old.  It appears that, given the current trends, the planet will become uninhabitable before he can live out a normal life span.  There will be a lot of suffering if human life on the planet comes to an end.   I understand that it is all supposed to be perfect, but how do you view this situation from a cosmic perspective and what should we be doing at this time?

Ram Dass: I think that more than ever we are beginning to awaken to the fact that we are part of an eco-system and that we are entities in that with some responsibility for the nest we live in and the maintenance of the nest.   In the same way that we clean up our house, we also have to clean up our environment.  That consciousness seems to be slow in happening because the motivation to keep it from happening  — because there are economic costs in that awakening — not in the long run, but in the short run – causes an economic realignment of power.  And the people that have the power have a lot of inertia.  I mean the stockholders of a company like General Electric are not ready to do dramatic shifts unless they are forced to do it because it changes the amount of dividends that come.  And all of us aren’t quite willing to change our lives that much in the little ways.  I mean we don’t have to make those big guys the bad guys, because we’re all part of that web too.  But there is an increasing consciousness now about rain forests, about air, about water, and so on.   It is hard to access what the outcome will be.  You can’t extrapolate from what is now to what will be, because the unknown factor is the creative awareness and what happens when that is mobilized.

I point out how creative awareness at a certain moment created the bomb.  Mixed blessing.  But it created the bomb.  We can also see how creative awareness at a certain moment informed the way we live day to day.  For instance when most of us were growing up we got vaccinated, because prior to that there were these incredible small pox epidemics that ravaged the Earth.  And we still saw it in third-world countries.  And we saw in our life time the eradication of the last case of small pox in the world by vaccination, and that there is now no more small pox in the world.  When people ask me “is Armageddon coming?”  or “is it going to be the Aquarian Age?”. In other words “is this the end of the Kali Yuga?”  or “are we just entering the Sat Yuga?”.  I say that no one is privy to that knowledge.  But when I stand back and think about it, I realize that if we are all going to die, then all my training in how to die leads me to understand that what I must do now is to quiet my mind so I can hear most clearly, open my heart deeply so that quality of compassion and feeding is at its optimum.  And be fully in this present moment.  That’s the best preparation I can do for the moment of death.  And I would train my child to do the same thing.  If it’s going to be the Aquarian Age, and I am going to help the new age come into existence, the best way I can help the new age come into existence is to quiet my mind so I can hear more clearly how to help- and I can open my heart to express my compassion as deeply as I can,  and be fully in the present moment so I can hear it all clearly.

(featured image credit: http://moure.deviantart.com/art/Environment-Project-01-65283914)

Original Article

Babaji could be so very affectionate, behaving just like a son to the Mothers. His great power, the miracles and such, no doubt were there, but the very soft, delicate, sweet and innocent impressions left by him provided a perennial source of joy—that human aspect.

At night in Allahabad, Baba would take his food in his small room and the Mothers would sit with him. Didi would be busy prepar­ing the chapatis and my duty was to carry them one by one to him. After he finished his food he would go on talking to those Mothers in a very relaxed mood. Sometimes he would take two spoons and begin to play on the head of one of the Mothers. Once Didi made some curd and gave quite a large tumbler of it to Babaji. He took a whole spoon­ful and put it on the head of one of the Mothers. Fortunately, her sari was over her head. Such kinds of things would go on.

One time when Babaji was at our house, he went for his toilet and gave me his blanket, “Here, you hold it.” I put it on the cot and was standing near him because he was talking. He began abusing me, “What have you done with my blanket? You have left it there. Look what they are doing!”

I turned and saw that Didi, my mother, my auntie, and Siddhi Didi had picked up that blanket and were actually smelling it. When I came to them they said, “Look here. It has the odor that comes from the body of a newborn child.”

Babaji shouted, “Where is my blanket!”

One day in the house, Baba stopped before a picture of himself as a younger man. “Whose photo is this?” he said. Since it was a photo of himself, of course, I did not reply. Then he whispered, “How did you recognize?” I suddenly realized that this photo was of Maharajji as I had first seen him so many years ago in Dakshineshwar.

One day when Maharajji was not in Allahabad, my mother prepared khir, a delicacy that is often offered to the gods or god­desses. My mother put it in a big bowl and said, “If Babaji comes today, it will be very good. I will have this khir to serve him.” Of course, she was not really expecting him.

Much later in the day after we had taken our food, Babaji suddenly came. “You have prepared khir? I have come for it.” Ma was so happy to see him eating it. When he was finished, he said, as if suddenly remembering, “Oh, what a mistake I have made! Today is ekadasi [a day of fasting], and here I am eating khir!” Now this was Babaji’s way, the sweetness that we remember.

Excerpt from The Near and the Dear

by Dada Mukerjee

Original Article

It was a perfect storm of sorts when I found a craft that would carry me through it all. In 1975, I was 25 years old—just coming into my adult life. I completed college, had a job, a husband, friends; it was all exciting, lovely really … and it felt empty. During this time I was enjoying adventuring with the chemicals that were around.

It was the end of the 60s and beginning of the 70s and the “cultural revolution” was alive, though flickering. I was the right age at the right time with the right food for discovery. I was finding my experiences in psilocybin and LSD, especially among the drugs I tried, a vibrating, shimmering reality set in a sense of timeless peace in which I felt at home, empowered, and yet rudderless and with no compass in hand.

My heart, though, was opening wide. The natural state of loving that I enjoyed my whole life poured forth with my students, friends, and every being with whom I came in contact. After all, I could see them in me and me in them and us all in the hands of God. Yet I was alone, not quite singing the same songs as my friends and family. Then the little purple book appeared on a table at a youth organization where I gave my time and love to high school students who were in pain.

The leader of this group was Alan Cohen, a Yeshiva-trained, young holy man who loved Jesus. It was Alan with whom I first felt this gentle, open, loving, accepting, non-judging embrace like no other; it was not familial, not romantic, not even a friendship, but deeply unattached loving that allowed me to feel nakedly exposed and awkwardly slowly calm in his love. Alan brought Ram Dass to me.

I read the book voraciously—the brown pages, not the white. The brown pages were experiences. They were my experiences, well, most of them. So much was a mirror of my inner and outer life that I naturally thumbed past the pages I was not ready to understand. I am not alone! I am not crazy! Deeply heartfelt loving in a world of the spirit is real and possible! It doesn’t belong clamped with the heavy doors of churches and dusty, crackly pages of bibles. We talked for hours about Be Here Now, rosy with joy. We visited spiritual teachers such as Hilda Charlton and others who came to the Church of St. John the Divine in NYC. I studied Kundalini at an ashram in Princeton and gathered up books mentioned in Be Here Now, reading each one with care to know, I wanted to know, had to know, how to live with this newly awakened restless snake within me.

I was blessed into this life with a deeply passionate heart and joie de vivre that led me to take an enormous leap and walk away from my life as it was to explore the REAL world, or a less distorted illusion than the one I was raised in. I left my job where I had just gotten tenure. I left my friends and family to move to California. And I left my good, kind, handsome, hard-working husband because I had learned just enough to be dangerous and unable to grow personally within our marriage. So off I went, by myself, driving across country to stay with friends.

Without going further into my life, I’ll just say that I went into a pit of suffering, though it did not appear so to most of those who looked on. The book was with me, deep inside my backpack along the way where I had forgotten about it for a time. I went to the very brink of death as I searched, teacherless, to resolve the meaning of this life. Then I rose up, purged of all the illusions of the cultural and personal expectations into which I was born.

Excerpt from Remarkable Encounters with Ram Dass Enhanced Ebook – now available on iBooks, Kindle and Nook.

Original Article

Babaji was known as a great saint — a highly realized soul with all the spiritual powers. Writing about Baba, Swami Vijayananda, a disciple of Anandamayi Ma, called him “a yogi whose name radi­ates an aura of mystery and miracle.” We saw many of his miracles coming one after another; they continue even now. They are excit­ing, often entertaining, but sometimes disturbing. Once at Kainchi, after what had been for me a very painful experience, I had to tell him that I was not interested in his miracles; he was Baba, and that was enough for me. His acceptance came in the form of one of his ineffable smiles. So far as the mysteries are concerned, not only have I not been able to solve any of them, but they have become more mysterious day-by-day.

One morning Babaji was in his small room in Kainchi. A sadhu with a half-dozen of his disciples came for Baba’s darshan. I took them to his room. After they had taken their seat, Babaji said, “This is Mahant Digvijaynath, a great saint. Bow at his feet.” When another person came, Babaji made him bow as well. Babaji smiled and asked people to bow low to the saint instead of touching his own feet. But when the third one came and Babaji repeated his words, the Mahant stood up and clasping Babaji’s feet, with tears in his eyes, said, “Baba, you are the saint of saints sitting before us, and you are making people touch my feet, taking me to be a saint.”

“A saint can be known only by one who himself is a saint.” That is what has been said by the wise. So we cannot have — at least speaking for myself — any pretension of knowing Babaji, the great saint. In the Bhagavat Gita we learn that a saint is a person with a dual personality — the divine and the human. Many of us have seen the human person in Babaji, but that doesn’t mean that we can claim to have seen the divine person in him.

In a saint, the divine person is encased in the human frame but is not entirely identical. The bottom of the human and the top of the divine stand far apart from each other. There is a co-mingling in the inner space, and in noble human beings, some of the divine qualities merge entirely with their human qualities, destroying all distinction between human and divine. I am saying this about Baba from my own experience of him. I have never seeing him wearing his divine crown, but I have always seen his divine qualities of love and compassion. He was always ready and alert to mitigate the sufferings of the helpless by taking their pains upon himself. His body became a honeycomb of diseases. This was the price he had to pay for his compassion and his readiness to help.

Every individual suffers from some kind of physical and men­tal pain. But with many, hunger or disease of body or mind become acute. One of Babaji’s visible methods of helping people was by feeding the hungry, arranging medical treatment for the sick, and giving money and materials to the helpless. The brief interlude of his life in the ashrams was spent in caring for the hungry and curing the sick, like the head of a household busy with his large family. Those who visited his ashrams, especially Kainchi, saw how prasad was being served throughout the day to all and sundry without any dis­crimination. For some it was prasad, an auspicious token of spiritual elevation, but for many more it was a whole meal for the stomach.

Seeing that food was being given in such large amounts, some persons complained that the food was being wasted. Babaji was un­relenting and continued to ask us to give in plenty. “Give more, give more, Dada.” No doubt Babaji would never allow food to be wasted or abused, but his idea of abuse and waste was different from ours, so the bhandara continued, giving food to the needy.

Some persons have suggested that one of the reasons for his - choice of Kainchi and Bhumiadhar for ashrams was to be in direct contact with the helpless — particularly the shilpakars, the forsaken ones. They fell easy victim to the allurements of the preachers who approached them with loaves of white bread, biscuits, etc. After sev­eral bhandaras at Bhumiadhar, he said one day, “Dada, the preachers do not come anymore because they have seen that their ‘double rotf (white bread) and biscuits cannot fight with your puri and halwa.”

There were also other methods of mitigating the sufferings and hardships of the people coming to him. They were seldom done in the public gaze, but they were going on every day. Some poor farmer would come and say, “Out of my one pair of bullocks, which is my only source of living, one has died and I have no money to purchase another.” An old woman would come and say, “My daugh­ter has reached marriageable age, but I have no money to pay for her marriage.” Another comes with his tale, “My brother is suffering from tuberculosis and I have no money for his treatment.” Such things would go on all the time. Few would leave disappointed. It was never publicized, but help was always coming from him in some form or other.

Excerpt from The Near and the Dear

by Dada Mukerjee

Original Article

Question:   How do you visualize taking compassionate action into the field to those that appear to be creating suffering?

Ram Dass:  In doing social action, you are often dealing with people who, by the nature of the way they are living their lives, are creating suffering.  And how you do social action is like Gandhi said “I want the British to leave, but I want them to leave as friends.”

There is a way in which you oppose somebody and you define boundaries and limits and you are even willing to lay your life on the line to stop them from doing something.   At the same moment, you don’t close your heart to them.  And what they experience because they are in their minds, is they see you as an enemy.  But their hearts know differently.  And what you are doing is giving them messages, which are slow to be heard, but are still the optimum thing you can do as a human being with another human being.  When somebody is hurting another person, to the extent that you can, you stop it.  Say “I can’t let you play this game out.”  But how you stop it is really as critical as that you stop it.  I mean the first thing is you’ve got to do is stop it. You see the place you stop it from is the appreciation that what is in the person that is being hurt and what is in that person that is hurting the other person are both in you.  You see the minute you get into a righteous thing of “I couldn’t molest that child” you are using them in order to enhance your feeling of goodness.  And that is causing much more hardship than if you just stop them.  But stop them from an appreciation of “Look, we all have this stuff, but we can’t act on it.  I understand why you are in this position, but we can’t act on it.”  That’s a different place.  And it’s again the question of aligning yourself with one part of a being at the same moment as setting limits to another part of their being.

Original Article

I first met Ram Dass about thirty-five years ago at the Hilda Charlton Thursday night teaching and kirtan. A hundred seekers at St. Luke-In-The-Fields Episcopal Church on Hudson Street in Manhattan. Ram Dass had taken my friend and neighbor, Danny Goldberg, to the meeting a week or two before, and Danny had so immediately fallen in love with it that he strongly exhorted me to go. Despite my lingering British bloody-mind skepticism, I went.

It simply changed and rearranged my whole life, no hyperbole. Out of the visions and wisdom of Hilda, the Masters came through that meeting in a line, from Maharajji to Yogananda, from Ramana Maharshi to Shirdi Sai Baba, from Anandamayi Ma to St. Francis of Assisi, and all the other saints in between. It put me on the path. I was swept up in the Maharajji satsang very soon after that, and instantaneously, felicitously, became a happy part of their amazing multi-dimensional, multi-talented, multi-devotional family. And, kinda crucially for me, they were the most fun, wisest, and wittiest spiritual types around.

I was so so FORTUNATE to have this happen to me. I wasn’t there, in India with Maharajji. But I was present at countless meditations and kirtans where it felt like the guru was there. And Ram Dass’s experience became ours for free, and his very presence elevated my mood and left me with an altered, richer awareness. Krishna Das’s killer chanting was the cream in the coffee.

When Ram Dass returned to Hilda’s, after Maharajji’s mahasamadhi in 1973, his words were precious and moving. Nothing sentimental, just solid sentiments. How do you go on when your guru is gone? The loss was inestimable, but Ram Dass effortlessly assured us of His continuing presence that night and has ever since.

In May of 1976, I went to a Bob Marley concert at the Beacon in New York City. Ram Dass and other friends were there, and by the end of an astonishingly riveting and healing show, we all literally fell out on to Broadway. Ram Dass was so completely elated and inspired by Marley’s music that he just took off on to the street divider and danced and leaped around like Nijinsky. We followed him, equally stunned by Bob’s brilliant high chakra reggae music. Then, in that moment, that being there then, still in the magnetic trance of The Wailers’ music, Ram Dass became yet again the light-filled Pied Piper, leading us out of our conditioned rodent-like repressions, like he often did and does as a friend, as an unparalleled orator, as a seminal author, as a blessed and eloquently communicative witness of the guru.

Ram Dass was just totally taken by Bob’s music that warm night and was so innocent yet grown-up about the way he danced on the street. There was nothing remotely hippie dippie about it. It was the dance of the human carbon-based upright biped totally in the present, being here now big time, and the whole tableau of all of us high as kites stays with me to this day, this second.

Towards the end of the Seventies, I went through an extraordinarily painful decline-of-marriage and then divorce. My head was on fire with anger; my body was feeling the effects of depression, despair, Debbie Downer par excellence. One night in our Upper West Side apartment, I just was having a time of it with crowds of tamasic, unpleasant thoughts rolling around in my mind, got freaked out and nervous, and felt like I needed to talk to someone. I called The Hanuman Foundation (had never done this before), twenty blocks uptown, and Ram Dass answered the phone. He knew my basic situation but when he heard the sadness and low energy in my voice, he unhesitatingly suggested we talk immediately at the Foundation. I cabbed up there and Ram Dass spent a potent two hours with me, going through my shit and cleaning up a lot of it. It helped me immeasurably. There are millions of others who have been helped, need I add.

I have never gotten over how G-R-E-A-T a public speaker Ram Dass is. His chock-full-of-anecdotes talks were sometimes a rollicking, verbally genius journey down something that was going on with him back then and sometimes they were pure teachings of bhakti realization, the balm-like directness of the effects of guru and kirtan, the ineffable but tangible power of darshan. So Ram Dass’ lectures were as exquisite as Proust, as smart as Lenny Bruce, as gentle and healing as Yogananda. Even though I hung out with Ram Dass, when he spoke in front of lots of people, his insights penetrated my psyche and cleared up the emotional statics of guilt, remorse, disappointment, confusion, on and on.

So what you got was the mix of high plane consciousness articulation and absolutely down-to-Earth exegesis of daily, erring human life. Ram Dass’s honesty was always like a flash of lightning for me—it cut through the confusion and allowed you to release yourself from unnecessary anxiety. The two streams of Ram Dass’s speeches at that time created a unique whole, holy guide diary for us all. It amounted to a medicine man transformative effect. A shaman with the verbal skills of Spalding Gray, the flashing, incisive humor of Richard Pryor. No kiddin’. You left the place clearer and lighter than when you came in.

That frighteningly gifted side of Ram Dass was one side of the coin. Talking about Maharajji was the other, lovely and thought-provoking side—putting you right there in India during the days of the guru and the Westerners. Replete with Maharajji epiphanies. And always the interlaced funny side, just to keep things in perspective…

In recent years, I have been extensively filming Ram Dass in Maui and what a pleasure! What a total pleasure! Still learning and laughing with him, still here with his guru and mine.

Excerpt from Remarkable Encounters with Ram Dass Enhanced Ebook - now available on iBooks, Kindle and Nook.

Original Article

How can we use our emotions positively on our spiritual path?  We can look at the practice of what is called devotional yoga, or Bhakti Yoga as it’s called in Hinduism. For example, if your relationship is to say Christ- you could take a picture of Jesus and then think about the qualities of his life; and the qualities of his compassion; and the qualities of his beauty of being; and the qualities of his reminding people about God.  And you could look at that being and it would generate in you, if you allow it, emotional responses.  These emotional responses are relational.  They are warm, human responses of Love, of caring, of tenderness.  Then if you stay with that picture of Jesus and keep being with Jesus, you will go beyond those into a deeper way of being with him.  Of just being with him in the presence sense.  And that presence includes more and more of the essence of love.  But you go through the emotional doorway.  You use your emotional heart as a vehicle to getting into that deeper way of being with God.  That’s one way.

Then there are other kinds of emotions that are generated — emotions like anger, sadness, joy, that whole range of emotions.  What one cultivates is spaciousness or an awareness that allows you to acknowledge the feelings, and it comes back to the word appreciating again.  Acknowledge the feelings and allow them and see them as part of the human condition. They are like subtle thought forms.  Emotions are really subtle thought forms.  And they all arise in response to something.  They are reactions that come.  If somebody goes like that, you have a certain emotional response.  If they go like that, you have a different response.  And you can feel how reactive your emotions are to situations.  So you cultivate a quietness in yourself that just watches these things coming and going and arising and passing away.  And you learn not to act out your emotions, but just to appreciate and allow them.   That’s part of the way in which you use them spiritually.  Spiritually, you don’t act out your emotions.  You just acknowledge them.  You don’t deny them though.  You don’t push them down.  You acknowledge that I’m angry, but you don’t have to say “Hey, I’m angry.”  That’s different.  But you acknowledge it; you don’t deny it.  That’s the key thing.

So the way you would use emotions like love and caring is in devotional practices, you aim them towards God.  And for the other kinds of emotional realms, you witness them and you sit with them and you watch them change and come and go but you don’t deny them- you allow them to be burnt in the light of awareness.  Because that’s part of your human condition.  I mean when we talk about service, you will see how we deal with suffering.  And you will see that it awakens intense emotions.  And your heart is breaking.  And you have to let your heart break.  But you’ve cultivated another plane of reality which is the one that notices and allows it and behind it all is the quality of equanimity.  So, emotions work best when you also have another plane that is not emotional, going simultaneously with it actually.  Because getting lost in your emotional reactivity just digs a deeper karmic hole.  But allowing your humanity, that’s really part of it.  Allowing your humanity.

Original Article

Once Maharajji had gone from Allahabad to Jagganath Puri with some of the devotees. I could not go because I had to run the household. At about four o’clock one afternoon I was relaxing, my mother and auntie were resting in their room, when I heard some noise from behind the house. Some children were shouting, “Baba, Baba, let us have the flute!”

A man’s voice came, saying, “I am hungry, give me some food.”

I looked out and saw that many children were surrounding a tall fellow with long hair, wearing a long coat. He had a brass flute in his hand. Seeing me, he said, “I am hungry.”

He came and sat just before the door and I went to get some chapatis and dal. I brought them and said, “These are not fresh, they were cooked at noon, but eat them and after that you can have some sweets.”

He would not lift his head, just looked down and said, “Araharki dal, araharki dal. I have not eaten araharki dal for so many years.”

I remembered that Maharajji had brought some sweets from Vrindaban, saying, “This is Biharaji [Krishna] prasad.” I brought some to the man. When he had finished and was getting up, I said, “Wash your mouth, wash your mouth,” as there was dal on his beard. But he would not, and when I insisted he only washed his flute. When he was leaving I said, “Baba, you can come whenever you like. If I am not at home, my mother and auntie will welcome you.”

He said, “I have been searching long for the house where bhakti [devotion] and Lakshmi live.”

During all this, Ashoka had been standing nearby. Just like a statue. Later she related that while recently in Delhi, she and a friend had gone out in a car with Maharajji. They had stopped at the house of a very wealthy man and Maharajji had gone inside, telling them to wait at the gate. While they were waiting, a man came who looked exactly like this man, except instead of a flute he carried a big stick. He said he was very hungry and asked for food, but the gatekeeper would not let him in. He said, “I have come to the house of the richest man in the city and I must return disappointed.”

Two days after that, Maharajji returned. He said to me, “Biharaji gave you darshan.” When the story was narrated, Jivanti Ma asked me, “Dada, on what day did that person come who ate the araharki dal?” I said it was Thursday. Then she said, “We were in Jagganath Puri then and Maharajji had already taken his food. Suddenly at about four o’clock he said, ‘I shall eat chapati and araharki dal.’ He does not eat araharki dal, you know that, he always eats mung dal. So we were rather surprised. Didi said, ‘This is not the time for your food, you have eaten already. Besides, you do not eat araharki dal.’ But Babaji kept saying, ‘I am hungry and you do not give me food.’ So we had to go and get araharki dal to cook for him. That was the same time you were feeding araharki dal to that man with the flute in Allahabad.”

Excerpt from By His Grace: A Devotee’s Story

by Dada Mukerjee

Original Article

“If there is one day in a life that was the end of one thing and the beginning of another thing that was the day I met Ram Dass. Before that I was running around to every yogi who came to America. I remember doing asanas with some guy, some crazy yogi, on the floor of this lower East Village apartment with cockroaches running over my body and mice scampering around with some guy, some crazy yogi. But nothing ever really touched me.

I was living in upstate New York with these maniac Jungian acid-head mountain climbers. And they were saying they were going to see Richard Alpert who had just come back from India and did I want to come? Now they call him Ram Dass. American yogis? Come on, give me a break. I said I’d stay and take care of the goats. So they left. I can still see their car. They had this old beat-up Jaguar sedan. English racing green.

They were supposed to be gone two days and they were gone like three or four days. They returned and drove their car across the dirt road through the field just as I came out of the goat shed. We had two goats: Alice Bailey and Madame Blavatsky. I had just milked them. The car pulls up and stops and the guy whose place it was comes out of the car and he’s like totally insane. There was light shooting out of him. I just said, “Write down the directions. I’m leaving now.” I ran out to my cabin, got back into my old Volvo, and I hit the road through the coldest snowstorm night of the year. It was freezing. I had to drink hot mocha coffee all night long just to stay up. It took me like 14 hours to get there. It was a five-hour drive.

I pulled up. It was a beautiful snow-covered scene. I pulled up in the driveway, turned the engine off and it was like silence. Total silence. My heart went blump. It just leapt, you know. I thought, that was weird. What was that?

Then I went up to the door and knocked. This guy opens the door and he just smiles and points upstairs and I thought I’m getting the fuck outta here. This is too weird. Anyway I went upstairs and Ram Dass was there and we spent the whole day together.

The minute I walked into that room, I felt something that I had never felt before. It was an inner knowing. Without a word being spoken, I knew that whatever it was I was looking for, and I didn’t know what to call it at that time…EXISTED. It was real and was in the world. I didn’t know if I would find it or not, but just knowing that it was real changed my life.

And then it was late afternoon and he said, “You can stay for the evening if you want or you can leave, but whichever it is now is the time to do it.”

I said, “Well I have to drive my school bus in the morning so I have to drive home.”

He had given me a mantra at one point during the day and he says, “Whatever you do, your mantra will protect you.” I thought that’s a weird thing to say. I had to go.

I get in the car and I hadn’t slept the whole night before. I started driving and I got really tired. I drove for maybe an hour or so, then I pulled off the road and I set the alarm clock and put it on the dashboard. I set it for an hour and I went to sleep. The next thing I know I am driving along the road and I dont know where I am. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know where I came from. I don’t know where I’m going. I woke up driving!!! I had woken up in my sleep, turned the alarm off, and hit the road, all the time totally ssleep. Finally I realized I was driving and I remembered him saying, “Your mantra will protect you.” I screamed that mantra all the way from New Hampshire to New York.

But the thing was my whole life changed that day because everything I had dreamed of and hoped was true. Everything that I longed for and wanted but couldn’t really believe was real I realized was real when I met Ram Dass. I didn’t know if I would ever really get a piece of it or not, but I just knew it existed in the world, you could find it, that it really was there. And that made such a difference … It was completely different after that.”

Excerpt from Remarkable Encounters with Ram Dass Enhanced Ebook - now available on iBooks, Kindle and Nook.

Original Article

As I have said before, when I first met Babaji I was not at all interested in sadhus or saints. It was out of sheer grace that he visited our house. Although many unusual things were happening, we failed to realize their importance or to see his hand in them. His visits meant some thrill and excitement and we looked forward to them, but I still looked at him as a kind and affec­tionate guest. A new process started, however, when we moved onto the larger stage of the new house. Many miracles occurred, acting as shock treatments on me. But no less important was the association with some of his oldest and most trusted devotees, whose love and devotion for Babaji were really my eye opener.

The devotees who started coming to our house when it was built included Siddhi Didi and her husband, Tularam Dada, Hubbaji (Hira Lai Shah), and Umadatt Sukla. They were the earlier ones. We had already met Kehar Singh. Then came Mr. Sang, Inder, Thakur Jaidev Singh, and later Kishan Tewari, Jiban, Ram Narayan Singh, and Gurudat Sharma. When these persons started coming, we were un­known to each other. We were in different stations of life, with different professions and interests, but we were like different streams which come together, reach the ocean and become one.

The devotees would be in our house, not bothered by physical comforts or conveniences, but only interested in being close to Babaji, seeing him and hearing him. This did not mean that we were always trying to hang onto him. He might be in one room and we would be in another, talking about him. Whenever an opportunity came, we would sit together and compare notes—what everyone felt about him or whatever new experience anyone had attained.

After eleven o’clock at night we would be free. We would have finished our food and the whole floor would be covered with beds. Sometimes Maharajji would come out and take his seat on a bed. He would ask, “Are you having tea?” We would say no. “Why are you sitting here with no tea?” Then he would see the blankets on Sukla’s bed, and start counting how many were there. “You have got so many layers on your bed!”

Then Sukla would say, with tears in his eyes, “Baba, this is my Didi’s house, and she has given them to me.”

“Oh, your Didi is very generous to you, she gives you so much. But come and look at my bed and see how hard it is!” This was his way of talking. It used to be the most enjoyable time of the whole day—like the members of a family sitting around the loving and indulgent elder, talking and chatting freely, without any restrictions.

As far as these devotees were concerned, they had been with Babaji a long time and all their doubts, all their questions, had been completely answered. They were convinced and intoxicated. But I would not be intoxicated so soon. I was hearing them talking of Babaji as a saint and as God, but still I could not accept it in my heart of hearts. I would only say, “Yes, of course, it must be so,” but I was not believing that. He could not convince and convert me easily. I did not fall headlong like your Kishan Tewari or your Jiban Baba, saying that he is all in all, the divinity incarnate.

In January 1960, the Ardha Mela was taking place in Allahabad. The celebration spread over two months. Hundreds of thousands of sadhus came and set up camp in the area of the confluence of the Ganges and Jamuna Rivers. Babaji had arrived in the beginning of December. Some devotees, including Tularam Dada and Siddhi Didi came in December, but many more arrived in January.

One day in January he went out in the afternoon and got into a car, along with Tularam, Sukla, and a few more of us. We did not know where we were going. We crossed the bridge on the Ganges and reached the ashram of Prabhudatt Brahmachari, a celebrated saint. Babaji got down and I followed him; he asked the others to stay in the car.

Seeing Baba, Brahmachari came rushing over. “Baba, you are so kind to me. You have come!” He took Baba around and introduced him to many sadhus. Then he sat Baba down and brought various kinds of prasad from Vrindaban and Mathura and offered them to Babaji, who accepted them. “Baba, the Ras Lila party from Vrindaban has come, please do stay the night and enjoy the celebration.” Baba readily agreed, but Prabhudattji, who knew Babaji well, said, “Baba, I cannot accept your words so easily.” When he had to leave for a few minutes to take care of

something, he asked the people in the room not to allow Babaji to go. He warned them, “Be vigilant. He escapes very easily.” I did not understand fully what he meant.

Babaji sat talking to the people for some time and then told me that we would go out to urinate. I stood up with him. He told the people he knew where to go. Then he caught hold of my hand and began moving fast. Coming near the gate he asked me to run and get the car started.

When Baba got into it, Prabhudattji noticed and cried out, “He is running away, run after him!” The car started and we drove away.

It was a full moon night and the moonlight was reflected in the Ganges. The motor road was completely empty at the time and we stopped the car, got out and sat there. Babaji was sitting on the road with us around him. He said, “Look at this Ganga, this is not water, but milk. This is pure amrit [nectar].” None of us could actually believe that. After all, the saints and sages talk like that, a language we do not understand. The understanding was to come only after six years.

Babaji had a camp at the Kumbha Mela in 1966, feeding thou­sands of people every day. He stayed at our house and in the afternoon, after taking his food, would go to the camp. Many devotees were staying there.

One day in the afternoon, Babaji, Sukla, a sadhu named Omkar Baba, and I went to the mela and came to the bank of the Ganges near the sangam. There was a very big barge which was empty except for the boatman’s wife, who was preparing food. Babaji got in the boat and I spread the blanket we had brought for him. Sukla had a lota and Baba told him to fill it with water and keep it there. We sat for some time until it was getting dark and Babaji said, “Chalo! When you people sit somewhere you forget everything. It is getting late, let us return.”

I took up the blanket and Sukla took his lota. We got down from the boat and Maharajji, pointing at the lota, told Sukla to offer us a drink. When we looked in the lota we saw that it was fresh milk! Sukla wanted to bring some of the milk home for Didi and the others, but Maharajji said, “No! Throw it away! You want to bring disgrace to me? Throw it!” Then he had Sukla wash the lota out. I then remembered the 1960 mela when Babaji had said, “This Ganga is not water, it is milk.”

Excerpt from By His Grace: A Devotee’s Story

by Dada Mukerjee

Original Article