AFTER SKOOL presents
FREEDOM of BEING NOBODY
by Ram Das
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Transcript
To the extent that I am anything at all, we could consider me as a separate entity. A set of predisposing characteristics – a program that is manifesting by taking a human birth at this time.
I have taken a birth into a body and that body has with it a personality. I have taken a birth into a personality and that personality is in a body. And I am going through a set of experiences which is called living life.
And these experiences have a certain function. These experiences if used consciously and intentionally by me, are vehicles through which I can awaken to who I am in truth.
Let me take you through an example, I often use just another little metaphorical image; an analogy.
Imagine, for example that next to your eyes is a little control switch and you look at another human being on channel one. And what you see when you look at the other human beings is a physical body; man, woman, old, young, fat, thin, pretty, handsome, ugly, interesting.
If you are a scientist you might call them mesomorphs, ectomorphs and endomorphs. It is a matrix of individual difference on the physical plane. It is the plane of standing on the corner watching all the girls go by. It is that reality.
Now, let us just say you are looking at another person and you flick your television receiver one channel. Now you look at another person and what you see is their psychological: You are a manic depressive; you are a happy person – I wish I was happy like you.
People in psychotherapy live on this channel usually. They are totally preoccupied with their own depressions, elations, fears, anxieties, loneliness, hopes, etcetera. And that is reality; that is the real you and the physical body is merely a carrier of that.
Well, let us flip it again. Flip it again and you look at another person and if you are so trained to be able to see on this channel you would say, I know who you are; you are a Libra – I can tell because of…
You are a Sagittarius!
On this channel, on channel three, there are only twelve beings in the universe and various permutations of them. You are now seeing what could be know as the “astral’ identity of the individual; you are seeing another plane of reality. You are seeing another way of looking at individual difference.
These are three ways of looking at individual difference. Three matrices if you will.
But now you flip the dial one more. Now if you flip the dial and look into another person’s eyes. What you see is another being is another being looking back at you. Inside an astral configuration, a personality in a body. “You in there?” – “I’m here, how did you get into that one?”
And you see what the Christians call soul. You see another soul; see another being just like you. No different, just like you, just another being.
And you see that all the individual differences are all of the stuff in which this being is encased.
Now, you could almost be comfortable with that one, but we unfortunately must flick the dial a few more times. I mean, I must take you the whole journey.
You flick the next dial and what you see when you look into someone else’s eye, is you see yourself looking at yourself, looking at yourself. Because on that plane there is only one of it. It is one awareness that is in a multiplicity of forms.
And finally, if you allow me to flick the dial just once more, if you have not given up completely yet.
You flip the dial once more and you disappear, and I disappear, and the dial disappears, and we are dealing with what the Buddhists call the void, or in the new testament, before the word. That is, before the vibratory uniqueness. Or why God is not able to be spelled in the Hebrew religion. It is unspeakable, unknowable, unseeable, inconceivable.
Now, of all of these channels on the television set, who are you? Which one do you want to settle for?
You want to be middle-aged, how about that one? I am middle-aged, I guess I am middle-aged; I have a 47 [forty-seven] year old body. It is like, I have also a 1974 [nineteen-seventy-four] dodge van. But you say to me – who are you? – and I don’t say I’m a dodge van. Why do I choose to identify with this?
Well, if I do not pick body, should I pick personality: I am somebody on the path; I’m curious about the future; I’m a responsible person: I’m kind of wild; I’m lazy; I’m working on myself.
These are all different psychological takes of who one is. Each plane – each turn of the dial – has a different statement of your identity, and each one is getting into a more and more profound place.
Now, when we come back to, ‘who am I’, which channel are we talking about? If we start from the top and go on down into the grosser planes; I am the void, who manifests as the one, who becomes the many, who has a unique set of factors to work out through a unique astral, psychological and physical body. That is what I am doing on earth.
I have taken a body to do certain work and when I finish that work I will drop that body. We are dealing here with the issues of Karma and reincarnation.
Now, in the west, after the councils of Trent, Constantinople and Nicaea, anywhere from 200 to 500AD, these ideas were roughly thrown out of Christianity because they did not make the church a workable situation.
When you had reincarnation and karma, every human being became their own priest, because it was between you and God. For the church to keep its own control and see its function as keeping people morally living properly, it had to get rid of those concepts.
Have I taken birth before? I have no experiential knowledge of that but from where I am sitting – undoubtedly thousands and thousands and thousands of times. Will I take birth again? Undoubtedly thousands and thousand and thousands of times.
I have to tax your brain with one more difficult concept. As long as we were dealing with your body, with your personality, with your astral identity, or with your soul, we were dealing in time – time passes, things change.
The minute we got up into the higher plane than that, in ‘the one’, there is no time any more – time is relative. Now we are dealing with the place where, when you know yourself as that you just are. You are going nowhere and you are coming from nowhere. The Zen master says, your ‘going and coming’ is nowhere but where you are.
Now, if you can start to sense – you do not have to believe what I am saying just because it is the way the universe looks to me. But if you could empathize just enough to appreciate how it would be to be looking at the world from this point of view. If you image what it is like to see your life as so functional to your awakening, and your death equally so. The whole process becomes merely a process of growth, awakening, opening, deepening, clearing and shifting channels, and there is no problem about transition; there is no holding on out of fear – it is just, opening.
