Ram Dass Here And Now

  On this special Here and Now podcast, we feature our new book ‘Love Everyone’, stories of the Westerners who heard about Neem Karoli Baba through Ram Dass and went to meet him. The author, Parvati Markus, introduces some of the stories from the book from her interviews that form the backbone of ‘Love Everyone’. Raghu introduces a very special Ram Dass talk from a radio interview after he just go...

Everybody that has asked to be free has called down upon themselves Grace; that is through their Guru, Guide, Guardian Angel or Spiritual Friend. That being, whomever it may be, is your guide to liberation. This is called forth by your genuine asking- if you don't ask they don't even notice you.   But the minute you do ask to be free- you call down Grace and your whole life becomes a dialogue with...

It takes but a flick of a look in a person's eyes to see who it is you are to them. Which level of reality you exist upon. A conscious being has no attachment to any level, neither busy denying nor affirming, neither saying "I am this" nor "I am not this" - neither protecting nor justifying. Once you get a peek at the reality of who you really are, you cannot go back to your former identity, try a...

Ram Dass’s precise enquiry into the real nature of purification and liberation – jumping into your own individuated Dharmic fire, not ignoring your weaknesses and neuroses.  The bliss is one part, the reality of life on Earth at this moment is another – he firmly suggests embracing all of it.  There is “no irrelevancy in the whole system” he says and this includes suffering and loss and major diff...

Ram Dass takes a number of questions on how to navigate our paths in life. He talks about how to deal with fear and sit with it, watching our reactivity, wanting to create resistance against what we are afraid of. Allow yourself to notice the resistance and keep softening, embrace it into yourself. The resistance against something makes the fear more intense. See the fear as a process that comes o...

When we have any kind of mystical or ineffable experience, it upsets our apple cart. It upsets the security of our separateness. We get attached to our separateness and become afraid of losing it. And out of that comes greed, lust, anxiety and fear. The main quality of that separateness is suffering, which is why it’s called “the vale of tears.” This birth, which looks to you as a k...

Ram Dass takes questions from the audience on a variety of topics including letting go of boundaries, "What is the Guru?", psychedelics, methods as traps and the human agenda to name a few. “Trust your intuitive heart - everyone has an inner guide. Maharaji is my inner imaginary playmate - I talk to him all the time - He turns out to be real and I’m the imaginary one.” “We move in and out of our r...

We keep closing off the door of entry to a higher state of consciousness because of the fear of the implications of a true spiritual journey. We have embarked on a game that is much more profound than we usually think we are in - we’re ready to slip by and make everybody feel good. As in the metaphor for the Bhagavad Gita - Arjun fights an army of attachments - attachment to family, to a secure an...

The soil into which spirituality from the East was planted was not so rich in the early days. In India, everyone believes in re-incarnation and sees life from that perspective. In the West words like "Guru", "devotion" and "surrender" have a hard time being digested. Most of the people who are Saints in India would be hospitalized in the West. Now there seems to be a shift where we can honor these...

In this episode Ram Dass' satsang family Mirabai Bush, Raghu Markus and Danny Goleman hang out and talk about Danny's new book with HH Dalai Lama- A Force For Good- which coincides with HH's birthday. Also remember the days they spent together in India with Neem Karoli Baba and what transmission they brought back to the West and how that has affected their individual offering in their work and liv...

When you begin to awaken, you are not coming from such a needy place when you enter into a relationship, not looking to “lock in” so quickly. Your need is still there as a human incarnation - but you are not so identified with that need and because you are already resting in a place of love, and you can experience the sharing of love and oneness without fear.  You don’t need a person to get into t...

"Renunciation is internal dropout, not external dropout" This is often in direct contrast to the Western model of achievement oriented success. But we are not required to move off into a cave in order to find enlightenment. Through complete devotion to our work and our love for that process, we can absolutely move in the direction of realization. "By letting go, everything gets done. The world is...

Ram Dass answers questions from the audience on the predicament of Grace and Karma- the predicament of judging- the predicament of social responsibility. Also same sex relationships and the relation to divinity. “Only when you are honoring the plane on which it is all totally perfect just the way it is, can you assume on the other plane the responsibility to change it; recognizing that the desire...

Dan Ellsberg tries scare tactics to get Ram Dass to take social action. Ram Dass says –“In fact nuclear weaponry are out of balance with the way of things - The Dao - so you don’t have to cajole or coerce people into acting. You can’t milk it through fear. You can just trust people’s gut. They will react through their own intuitive sense of being in tune with the way.” “Quiet mind-open heart- we d...

In this wide ranging interview by Radio For Peace, Ram Dass talks about satsang/community and how it can uplift us as well as become a trap. “The possibility is there in spiritual community to die into the truth. But people die very hard and as a result fall back on structures that can enhance separateness.” There is pressure in satsang to conform to the median and that pressure to conform can get...

In this podcast, Mickey Lemle, filmmaker and director of the Ram Dass documentary Fierce Grace, talks with Ram Dass about the power of storytelling. Writing sometimes doesn’t allow spiritual concepts to come across fully. Storytelling can convey the direct human experience of spirituality in a more personal and immediate way. Join Ram Dass and Mickey Lemle as they relive their stories together. Se...

Surya Das joins Ram Dass for a puja side chat at Ram Dass' home on Maui. Surya Das is a bhakta as well as an American Lama. They explore questions like, "What is our true sadhana (spiritual practice)?" - "Are we egos or dharma masters? Or are we simply two brothers on the path to the Guru's feet?" Ram Dass talks about doing practices consciously, giving the example of yoga, where each pose is "sha...

How far do you have to go to get through the layers of psychology, of defenses, of personalities in order to get to the root of a being, behind those veils where the spark is - the overriding faith in reality beyond the senses. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We are both separate and one. Creator and created. The question is, “Can we allow for free will and at the same time acknowledge that everything is determined?” The trick is to neither identify nor deny either of them. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The confusion of the paradox you find yourself in is that you are in an incarnation that’s totally dedicated to the preservation of it’s own separateness, and at the same time you are awakening to the realization that the entire domain of separateness is but another illusion. So you find yourself marching in the opposite direction of everything you've learned, against everything your body is telli...

Forms are created and exist and disappear into the formless. Methods are the ship crossing the ocean of existence. You entrap yourself in them in order to burn out karma that keeps you from being free. You know that the method works when it self-destructs. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

As long as you perceive love as a verb, you are thinking of another person as a separate object to give love to. When we are truly in love, we are in a simple state of “being” love. As an incarnation, you have to understand what it means to live outside of time and space. You have to understand what it means to see a continuing process of which a human birth is but one very minor segment… See Priv...

We can be the biggest somebody in the world when we have no attachment, but we have to start from somewhere, we can’t start out being nobody. The force of “somebody-ness” that develops the survival mechanisms (social, physical, etc.) is our starting point. It is in the freedom of non-clinging to models about self and other that you begin to tune to and hear the way of things, called the Dao or the...

Each of us has in us a psychic DNA memory of the quality of life in the Sat Yuga (the age of truth and purity), where people generally and naturally help each other. This represents an organic flowing of a healthy human heart. Episode Outline: - We are living in the Kali Yuga (Age of Destruction) not the Sat Yuga, where truth does not abound, but isolation, fear and separateness is prevalent. Stil...

Change is an opportunity for growth, but it requires consciousness that holds an inner quality of equanimity and openness to the unknown. A certain way in which the chaos of the moment doesn't undercut you because you are not dependent on the external for your equanimity. You and I are in training to be instruments in a society where we can be stable in the presence of change, not holding onto the...