RAM DASS:   Reflections

Transforming Compassion into Service

MM: Can you tell us about some of your early reflections? When did you first start to question, and what were the questions you were asking?

RD: For the most part, I never pushed against the edge—until my last few years of prep school, when I started intellectually to question authority, values, and such. But it wasn’t spiritual, or concerned with consciousness.

            My first book, Identification in Child-Rearing, was in collaboration with Robert Sears, who was at the time dean of Stanford. It was concerned with experimental studies of Freud’s theory of identification in children, of how they develop their identity and of the relation between the parents’ training behaviors and the child’s development of a strong super-ego. That was my focus in those days.

MM: When did you become dissatisfied with the intellectual approach?

RD: In my final years at Stanford, I discovered through my research some people who didn’t fit my hypothesis; and I wanted to know why. The interviews with some of these people got deeper and deeper, until I realized I was engaged in therapy. In analysis myself at the time, I was intrigued with the whole process.

The more I pour myself into service, quieting the mind,
the more I feel I am what I really am – not what I should be.

            My first patient, in 1956, was Dick, a beatnik. His poetry was obscene; he was always dirty. He was living out on Perry Lane, which is where Ken Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – where a whole group of people lived at the time. This first patient of mine was involved in the writing of the book. Here I was, becoming a professor, complete with tweed jacket and pipe, getting invited to their parties, finding myself associating with them. Clearly, they knew something I didn’t. They were all taking drugs, of course. I wasn’t – I was getting drunk all the time.

            The beginning of the change occurred when Dick turned me on to grass. I started to understand that they were playing with reality. Until then there was only the reality of the conceptual mind for me. Everything else was irrelevant. Suddenly it was flipping around. I went to the North Beach, to listen to Alan Ginsberg. Before this, the area had been an alien place to me.

            For me, that was the point of transition.

MM: Were there some key players in this transition?

RD: Yes, Dick was one. And a funny thing happened – we reversed identities. Dick became a psychologist; I shifted further out. Seven years later, I was visiting in the San Francisco area, and I borrowed a motorcycle to go to Stanford to see Dick. He was practicing therapy in my old office! I put my feet up on his desk, my dirty, sandalled, bare feet – and there he was in a tie and jacket! We looked at each other and broke up laughing.

MM: So, under the influence of Dick and others, you began to see the mind in a different light?

RD: Yes, but that was just the edge of the process. It wasn’t strong enough to really break me out of the mold, but it was part of a softening process that prepared me for Timothy Leary, the next heavy player in the game.

MM: And this occurred at Harvard?

RD: Yes. Tim—ten years my senior—came along a year after I arrived at Harvard. He was a happy-go-lucky, very avant-garde intellectual, also very creative in psychology. He was brought in to add juice to the department. We were both unmarried members of the faculty and became friends. He was a lecturer. We started to teach a course together called “Existential Transactional Analysis,” a first-year clinical program at Harvard.

            We cooked up a scheme to go to South America that year, arranging to meet in Mexico. When I got there, Tim had just taken hallucinogenic mushrooms. He said of his experience, “I learned more in six hours than I have in all my time as a psychologist. This is very important.”

            Tim started his research with Aldous Huxley (who was teaching at MIT and had written Doors of Perception on the subject of psilocybin), Ralph Metzner and others. When I returned in February, the project was already underway. In March, I had my first experience with a hallucinogen.

            I remember a moment when I suddenly realized I’d been going in the wrong direction. I described this experience in Be Here Now, my first book as Ram Dass. After the initial reaction of fun, I went off by myself and was sitting alone on a couch. I looked across and saw this person standing there in the darkness.

Looking closer, I realized it was me in one of my roles, a professor. I decided to let that image go, and it changed. Next it was me as a pilot, then me as a lover, and me in all my different roles. One by one I let them all go.

            Then I saw a person that resembled all my images of myself from childhood, of who I thought I was – that “root” personality. The others were just social roles, but this one was my identity. I thought: If I give this up, I won’t know who I am. Maybe this drug is going to produce amnesia. But then I thought: Well, okay, at least I have my body.

            I looked down and there was no body. The couch was there, I could see all the way across it. But where I had been was just…couch.

            There was nothing in my background that prepared me for that moment. Up ’til then, I kept saying, “Interesting hallucination. Fascinating.” I’m a psychologist, you see, and I had that safe place of rationality where I was standing. But suddenly; no body. And I lost it. I was about to scream for help, when another thought came; Who’s about to cry for help? Who’s minding the store?

            In that moment, I made contact with a part of my being that had nothing to do with my identity, nothing to do with my psychology, my social roles, even nothing to do with my body. I felt, It is. It was the first connection to that place that had been in me all the time but had been completely masked by my mind. I got so elated I went running out to roll in the snow. I was in ecstasy, just from that recognition. It marked my first moment of independence from the establishment – ultimately leading to my getting thrown out of Harvard.

            Psychiatrists in the United States were using these drugs as psychotomimetics – inducing a schizophrenic-like psychosis in the subject – so they could study craziness. In Mexico, the drugs were used for religious and divinatory experiences.

            We embarked on a two-year period of research, among which was a project testing the religious significance of hallucinogens. Following this study, Time magazine came out with an article encaptioned, “Instant Mysticism.” The controversy was on. We were up against the prejudices and fears of the culture.

            For us, who’d had these experiences, they were real, valid. Suddenly The Tibetan Book of the Dead and aspects of Hinduism made sense. Previously, as a psychologist, I wouldn’t have read this material if you’d paid me. It was unscientific. But now I understood some of it.

            I moved out – as fast as my mind would take me. And Tim was a great teacher for me, leading me through the steps. Our group started to split [on the issue of drugs] – those who did, those who wouldn’t. [Those who did] were labeled a cult.

After two years of research, the psychedelic scene got too hot for Harvard. Reasonably so. Harvard’s a temple to the rational mind. And we were saying the rational mind is a limited sub-system of a broader consciousness. That didn’t sell at Harvard. It was like walking onto a tennis court wearing football cleats.

            At the press conference when Harvard terminated me, all the reporters regarded me with pity—as if I’d lost the Big Fight…was going to be sent to the gym to be the sweeper…Harvard had publicly chastised me…I’d blown it. Looking at their minds, as they were watching and questioning me, and I felt that I won, that I finally had the courage to stand on my beliefs. I thought to myself: This is the definition of psychosis – when you think one thing, and everybody else thinks another. By cultural standards, I was crazy at that moment, but I didn’t feel crazy – only that I was hearing a different drummer, playing a different tune. I felt absolutely right about what I was doing. That moment of confrontation with “the establishment” was scary, yet tremendously liberating. It was difficult – for a long while afterwards, every time I went through Harvard Square, I had a feeling of loss.

            [Tim and the rest of us] set up a psychedelic training center in Mexico. Our purpose was to do naturalistic research on drug-induced altered states of consciousness. We found that the mind determines the nature of the experience for everyone. People from all walks of life came to try the drug. We asked only that they report their experiences to us. Instead of imposing a model, we collected their reports as data. Now from a scientific point of view, that looked pretty flakey. It was just too loose a game for a research center.

            From Mexico, we returned to Boston and from there moved our research team down to Dominica, an island in the Caribbean. By the time I arrived, Tim and the group had been thrown out.

            From Dominica we moved to Antigua. It took us only two weeks to get thrown out of there. Of course, by then we had Time magazine, Newsweek and the press in general, on our backs. And the officials on these islands had read the stories about us.

            One of our group offered us the use of a 63-room house on 3,000 acres in Millbrook, N.Y. We moved in, set up shop and, for the first year, did well. After that, it became unstable. Tim was such a creative visionary, but our enterprise was lacking responsibility.

            So we separated. Tim married, went off to India. Alan Ginsberg had gone to India. I was doing research in mathematics, education, to earn money. I had no particular interest in India – except that some of the books I’d read were fascinating to me.

            By ’66, I felt bankrupt. I had done two books on the drugs – one with Tim and Ralph Metzner, The Psychedelic Experience, and another with Sidney Cohen and Larry Schiller, LSD, a dialogue accompanying pictures of people in drug-induced states. I saw that no matter how many times we took the drugs, or how different the settings, it was where your mind was that determined what happened to you, more than which chemical you used. I tried every possible setting, and again and again I glimpsed the thing: a greater reality. But always, I’d get cast out.

My life has been a balancing process between heart and mind:
my devotional practices have opened my heart,
the meditation has quieted my mind.

 The coming down was as if – like the quote from the Bible – you’re barred from the wedding because you’re not wearing the wedding garment.

            We hadn’t purified ourselves sufficiently in our own lives to earn that high state of consciousness. I was engaged in the exploration of the peyote ceremony of the American Indians, which kept showing me another metaphor, another motive, for using hallucinogens. But the experience was astral, rather than transcendental.

            So – by 1967, I had nowhere to go. I was “Mr. LSD, Jr.” and had nothing to say. What I really wanted was to go further in my inner work. I couldn’t use these drugs as methods; they were not working for me.

            A friend of mine asked if I wanted to go to India. We had a Land Rover flown in and started from Iran, went through Afghanistan and from there through India – looking out at the hoards, in a total intellectual panic – ending up near Nepal. Nothing had happened; so at that point he wanted to go on to Japan. I ran into a surfer from Laguna Beach who had been in India for six years. He had charisma, he knew something I wanted to know. He was a barefoot sadhu [ed.: a renunciate] with beads and hair all piled up and matted.

            When it came to a choice, I decided to stay with the sadhu in India, rather than go on with my original companion. I found myself on foot with this guy. For two or three months we visited Buddhist temples. I did some meditating.

MM: Is this the first time you’d ever meditated?

RD: I had done some but had never studied meditation in any systematic way. I had met some meditators – lamas and such – but had not gotten close to any of them. I’d been through some initiations by lamas during these three months in India, but we were smoking a lot of hash and I was getting kind of burnt out. I thought: This is all lovely, but it’s not amounting to anything. I’ll just go back and admit defeat, figure out what to do with my life.

            My friend’s visa was about to expire. He said, “I’ve got to see my Guru.” Prior to this, he’d never mentioned a guru. What I’d seen of Hinduism in India had really turned me off. It was all fluorescent lights, schlock, calendar art – not my trip at all. I liked the Buddhist traditions. So I said to him, “I don’t want to do that.”

            But he wanted to use the Land Rover, which was in my charge at the time, so I had to go with it.

            We drove into the foothills of the Himalayas, to his guru – whom I didn’t want to meet at all. I was in a really lousy, hung-over mood. We came to this little temple. People around welcomed him and pointed up the hill. This guy went running up a rocky path; I followed along behind, very angry and bent.

            There was an old man sitting on a blanket under a tree, surrounded by about ten or twelve people. He looked up at me. The Westerner was lying flat, with his hands on the old man’s feet. I thought: I’m not going to touch his feet! What the hell’s this about?

            The old man said to me, “You came in a big car?”

            “Yes.”

            He said, “You give it to me?” Now this was in Hindi, with a translator.

            “Well –” I was taken aback. I mean, I could hustle, but never this fast!

            My travelling companion looked up and said “If you want it, it’s yours.”

            I started to flip out, protesting, “You can’t give away David’s car!”

            Everyone was laughing at me, which made me angrier than ever. You can imagine what I was feeling.

            The guru continued, “You make a lot of money in America?”

            In those days – yes – so I said,

            “Well – I’m doing all right.” (My ego got involved, too.)

            “You’ll buy one for me?” he asked.

            Shrugging, I replied, “Maybe. I don’t know.” It didn’t seem likely, though.

            Then he said, “Take them and feed them,” gesturing towards us.

            After we were fed, they brought us back to him. He told us to sit down. I sat in front of him.

            My mother had died six months before in Boston from an enlarged spleen. On the previous night I had experienced a closeness with her. Now, a day later, I was in front of this Indian guru. He looked at me and stated, “You were out under the stars last night.”

            “Yes.” It was no big deal to me – anybody could be out under the stars at any time.

            Closing his eyes, he said, “You were thinking about your mother.”

            Now I was still a hardened professor, and there was a part of me saying: O-o-h – that’s good one.

            Then he said, “She died last year.”

            There was no way he could have known that.

            The old man continued, “She got very big in the belly before she died.” Then he leaned very close to me and added, “Spleen.”

            It blew my mind. Like a cornered rat, my mind searched for a way to handle it.

            I couldn’t. I just broke. And when I broke, I went from my head down into my heart. I felt an excruciating pain—as if a door long shut was being ripped open. I mean, ripped. I started to cry – to sob and sob.

            They took me to someone’s home and cared for me for a day. After that, I just wanted to touch his feet. My heart had opened. In looking into his eyes, I had experienced a love I hadn’t been familiar with.

            They put me in a temple, and I didn’t leave for about five months. It was winter, cold as hell. There was a coal stove you got sick from, blankets, one meal a day. I was given a teacher, a yogi who taught me Raja Yoga. I was doing four or five hours of Hatha Yoga a day, pranayama, meditation on various topics. I was alone. I was silent; for six months I didn’t speak. I lost fifty to sixty pounds doing nine day fasts.

            I seldom saw my Guru. He was off in other places, travelling. He’d just disappear into the jungle for periods of time. I saw him maybe once every two to three months each time. He’d say something, and then he’d throw me out: “Go, go on.”

MM: How did you come by your name – “Ram Dass”?

RD: The teacher assigned to me came in one day and wrote, “Maharaji said your name is Ram Dass. It means servant of God.” Hanuman, the monkey god, lives only to serve Ram. His way of being with God is through service. In devotional yoga, there are nine different ways. For this Hindu lineage, service is the major vehicle, versus Love which is Krishna’s vehicle, for instance.

            After six months, I was a different person. Something profound had happened.

MM: And no drugs during that period?

RD: No. I felt completely at home, and I also knew it was time to go back to the West while my father was alive. My Guru and the teacher assigned to me agreed.

            We took the Rover and headed into the mountains, eight of us, including the Guru. We went to this building run by the Forestry Department (full of his devotees). Everybody sat out on the lawn, and I was called in. through the translator, he said to me, “You like to feed children?”

            “Well, yes.”

            “You make many people laugh in America?”

            “Yes.”

            “Good.” And he hit me three times on the forehead. When I left the room, there were tears streaming down my face and I was full of light. I didn’t experience this myself. Others saw it and reported it to me. That might have been an initiation, I don’t know. I have no idea whether he ever initiated me or not.

            I left the temple and the village and came back to America. I settled into a cabin on my father’s farm in a little town in Franklin, New Hampshire. I wanted to keep that special place within. I fasted, cooked my own food, and lived just like I had in India. I didn’t want to come back into the West. I would be here, but I wasn’t going to do it.

            One day I borrowed my father’s car (a Cadillac), to drive into town for something. Some kids saw me. They’d been waiting for someone from Boston – a drug pusher – and spotted the Mass[achusetts] plates and me with a beard. They came over and asked, “Are you the connection?”

            I said, “Well, it depends on what kind of connection you want.”

 Trust your heart. I’m not a guru,
just somebody on the path.

             Something about the way we made contact prompted them to ask where I lived. Three of them ended up coming to visit me. They sat in the little cabin. Then they brought their friends, and their friends brought their parents, and the parents brought their ministers. On and on it went – until pretty soon there were 300 people coming on weekends, just to hang out on my father’s farm. People asked if they could camp out. I said I didn’t think so, but Dad said, “Sure.”

            It was a 300-acre estate, and people were camping in the woods, dancing on the golf course, helping my father. It turned into something incredible, and marked the beginning of my teaching.

MM: So, you were the connection!  

RD: [smiling] Yes…very funny, in view of my history. I did some lecturing. What came out of me was so intense, after the fasting and the silence. During that period when I returned from India, from ’68 to ’70 or so, I was very far out. I was a sadhu, a renunciate, and couldn’t collect money for what I did. So I was just giving it away, living simply.

            [The Guru] had said I couldn’t come back [to India] for two years. I was scheduled to go back in September of 1970.

            In August of ’70, I met Swami Muktananda at a retreat in upstate New York. He was a very powerful fellow, Muktananda. I was only there to get “a Hindu hit” before going back to India.

            When we met, he put the Shevite marks on my forehead, the marks of Shiva. [ed.: God of destruction and reproduction; a member of the Hindu triad along with Brahma and Vishnu. The mark is placed on the forehead between the eyebrows.] In Hinduism, there are Shevites and Vaishnavites. My name, Ram Dass, placed me with the Vaishnavite tradition. The Shevites follow the Shiva tradition. I said, “Baba, I’m a Vaishnavite.”

            Muktananda said, “No, no. This is in honor of your Guru. Your Guru and my Guru are both avadhootsiddha yogis, which means beings beyond form.”

            That made me feel okay.

            During the weekend, his henchmen tried to persuade me to join them in support of him. My response was not totally enthusiastic. I said, “I’d like to, but I’m going back to my own Guru in September.”

            The next morning, around four a.m., we were chanting the thousand names of Vishnu. I was playing the tamboora. Muktananda was there also. He was a fantastic musician – so good. Suddenly I felt my Guru’s presence.

            He was standing right in front of me. And he said, “Go with this man. Help him.” It was so real– just like you sitting here – that there wasn’t even a doubt.

MM: Had you taken any drugs?

RD: No. He was just there.

            So the next morning, I told Muktananda I would be honored to help him on the tour. For three months we moved this guy around. He was like a king: he had a throne and the whole scene. I introduced him in Boston, LA, San Francisco, Hawaii – all over. We did Singapore, Australia, went on to Madras and back to Bombay where his place was.

            By now all I wanted was to see my Guru. I had done my gig and was finished but had to stay there a few days. They were honoring me. He was very appreciative of my assistance on the tour. I had a throne next to his throne. Thousands of people were coming to pay respect to him, to touch his feet, and he made them touch my feet. There were servants, the whole bit. At the Ashram, people were saying to me, “You should stay on. He’s never treated anybody this way.”

            But I had my own funky Guru – simple stuff. Muktananda’s scene was very posh.

            After about eight days, I took a train from Bombay. The day I left, the head of the trustees in Ganeshpoori got a call from my Guru. He wanted to know: “Where’s Ram Dass?”

            They said: “He’s gone looking for you.”

            “He’s a fool. Didn’t he know I’d come for him?”

            There I was wandering around searching for him! It was then December, and it took me ‘til April to find him.

            When I reached the mountains, with the Guru away, the group of us waiting decided to take a Buddhist meditation course elsewhere.

 When you’re really quiet,
you hear exactly what is to be done in a situation.

             There were four 10-day courses in a row – 40 days total. This started my systematic Buddhist meditation. By the 40^th day I got a little burnt out. The meditation was a bit dry – just following the breath. I was used to imagery, chanting, devotional stuff, and my mind rebelled against this limited focus. I hadn’t given in to it yet; it’s taken me many years to do that. But those 40 days were the first big hit of it, and I had two fine teachers.

            At the end of the 40 days, I wanted to go to Delhi, where Muktananda had invited me to attend a big Shiva celebration. Thirty to thirty-three of the course meditators decided to go along.

            A bus driver happened to be fond of one of the women, so he agreed to take us all. One of the fellows on the bus – now a major writer for the New York Times – had been to a celebration at Allahabad, half-way to Delhi, on the plains below the Himalayas. A major festival takes place there once every twelve years and draws holy men from all over. Five million people try to bathe in the river at one time – just at the point where two rivers meet. And this guy wanted to stop there.

            We were all tired. I wasn’t eager to stop, and he didn’t insist. But then I thought to myself, that’s what I was in India for, after all – a spiritual purpose. As we approached the point, I leaned and said to the driver, “Turn right.”

            We went in, looking for a place to park, and who should be walking alongside the bus? “It’s Maharaji!” I shouted.

            Only about three or four people on the bus knew who my Guru was, but everybody got very excited. I leaped off the bus to greet him – we all did.

            He looked totally bored and said, “Follow us,” as he and the devotee with him got into a bicycle-rickshaw. The rest of us piled back into the big, long bus and proceeded down these little roads, behind the rickshaw. We came to a little house – it was now about five in the afternoon – and on entering, were hit by the smell of Indian cooking. They’d been at it since 7:30 in the morning, having been instructed by my Guru to prepare food for thirty or forty people.

            So who was really making the choice back in the bus? (“Oh, well, we’ll go right…..”)

            Incidents like that dislodged the preconceptions of my thinking mind, that instrument with which I had so unfailingly identified myself all those years.

MM: This is quite a progression we’re seeing here. First, the drugs opened you up, prepared you for the next step.

RD: Yes, and he opened my heart. Then the meditation started to quiet my mind, and the Hatha Yoga got my body into a refined condition. All the kundalini energies began to rise.

            After the meal, my Guru sent us on our way: “Go be with Muktananda. He’s a good man”

            So off we went.

            Muktananda wanted to do a pilgrimage of southern (Shiva) temples with me along – a gift, he said, for my being nice to him.

            During the trip, in itself a potent experience, Muktananda approached me in the middle of the night. We were in a small southern Indian town. He pulled me out of bed around 3:30 in the morning, dragging me along to… I wasn’t sure where. We didn’t speak the same language; it was dark; we were half-running; and I’d just come out of a deep sleep. He took me up to this little temple in the top of a building. He sat me down, whispered a mantra in my ear and started to do a puja over me.

            I lost consciousness. I don’t know where I went, but it was out. The next thing I knew it was nine in the morning, and somebody was shaking me: “Baba wants to see you.”

            As I headed back down, the mantra was in my head, I couldn’t get rid of it – a Shiva mantra. I asked Muktananda. “What’s that all about?”

            “This will give you vast wealth and vast power.”

            “I only want vast wealth and vast power,” I said, “if you promise me an equal amount of love and compassion.”

            He looked disgusted, “Just do the mantra.”

            There was a part of me that did want wealth and power, and Muktananda had it. He could bring people back from death. People on his board were indebted to him for retrieving them from death.

            I did the mantra day and night: I slept with it. When we came back to his temple, he said to me, “I don’t want you to meditate with the others. Use the little inner room for your meditations.” This was where he did his puja.

            Around two in the morning, I went in there to meditate. It was hot, maybe 110 degrees. I took off all my clothes; it was really black in there. I lay down doing the mantra, and suddenly I ripped out of my body. I experienced myself on another plane, at a doorway. I looked inside, and there was Muktananda sitting on a table or a bed. I went in and sat in front of him. As I looked into his eyes, I started to lift up and fly above his head. I thought: Wow, I’ve always wanted to fly. Now where will I go?

            I couldn’t figure out where to go, and at that point I started to tilt. I righted myself, and that brought me back into my body.

            It was about 2:20 in the morning. The energy from that experience was so intense I couldn’t stay in the room anymore. I walked into the open courtyard, and there was Muktananda. He approached me.

            “How did you like flying?”

            I continued doing the mantra, but I knew I had to go back to my Guru. With this intent, I began to head north and went into some caves to do a few weeks of meditation first, as I needed to cool out. Again, it was hot in the caves, I took off my clothes, lay down and left my body. Same scene. I was facing a doorway, looking into the same room – only it wasn’t Muktananda I saw, but Maharaji. I fell at his feet, looked up at him, and he looked at me. Then he pulled his blanket around him and breathed three times. I felt like my body was an inner tube being filled with air. Right after the third breath, I was back down in the cave, and the mantra was gone. I could remember it, but it had no power anymore. It had lost all its juice.

MM: Why?

RD: When I got to him in April of that year, all he said was, “It’s good to meditate without clothes on.”

            About Muktananda he’d only say, “He’s a good man. He holds on to too much, though.”

            I think he gave Muktananda to me for teachings about power. I started to experience it and see that it was all wonderful, but…I wanted something else. He was taking me through stuff in myself – power, sex. He set me up with various teachers along the way. He’s still doing it.

            I spent some months with him after that. It was the last time I saw him alive. I went back to the States in 1972, and he died in 1973. In 1979, I published a book, Miracle of Love, based on my experiences with Maharaji.

            When I returned to the States in ’72, I was teaching and taking meditation courses. For the past 15 years, I’ve studied with six or eight meditation teachers of different traditions. Most recently last summer I was two months in Rangoon, Burma, studying at a Burmese monastery.

            My life has been a balancing process between heart and mind: my devotional practices have opened my heart, the meditation has quieted my mind and deepened my concentration. I keep feeling them feed into each other. Now my meditations soften me a lot. I came out of Rangoon feeling more loving than ever; the compassion is coming from a deeper place now.

MM: What do you see as the differences between your approach back in the ‘60s and your approach today?

RD:  In the ‘60s I was trying to get high. Somewhere along in the ‘70s, I asked Maharaji, “How do you get enlightened?”

            He’d say, “Feed people.” He only knew Guides who served people.

            I thought: That’s pretty tacky. I only want to do meditation to get out there.

            He kept disrupting my meditation all the time, saying, “Go. Take care of people.”

            A shift took place: I realized being in incarnation wasn’t an error. To be what Christ talks about– “Be in the world, but not of the world” – I had to honor my incarnation to be free. I would be free through form, not in spite of it. At the moment, my life is about 90% service – taking care of my father and I’m Chairman of the Board of the Seva Foundation, which does work in third world countries. I travel for Seva, raise money for it. I work with AIDS patients here and in California; I do therapy for people.

            I do service, as purely as I can. We’ll see where it leads me. Service is what it’s all about.

 Service is what it’s all about.
…..
The purity of service maintains the level of meditation.
It’s how you do the service, not that you do it
–– although that you serve is important.

MM: What is the Seva Foundation?

RD:  It’s been around six years – a combination of the idealism of the ‘60s hippies and the pragmatism of the 80s, integrated. Our Board has diverse members: doctors from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, the Public Health Office from the WHO in Geneva, Wavy Gravy, the clown from the Hog Farm in California – a mixture of people who meet together out of a love of service. We don’t really care which service we do as individuals, we just get off on service – doing it together.

            We took on the project of blindness in Nepal, for instance. There are 100 thousand people who are blind in Nepal, because of cataracts in both eyes. A cataract can be removed in field camp in about four minutes.

            Someone might be blind for twenty or thirty years for want of an operation that costs only 15 dollars. It is a suffering you can do something about – some are not so simply eliminated.

            Our organization came out of a group of people who had worked together in the smallpox eradication in Southeast Asia. Smallpox is the only disease that mankind has ever wiped off the face of the earth. The last case, in Bangladesh, India, is gone. The Seva founders were involved in wiping it out. They got so juiced from doing that, they wanted to keep working together.

            Seva is a Sanskrit word meaning service. We’re based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and have offices in India.
We have an endowment covering our overhead, so that all donations go directly to the field. We’re a legitimate organization now; we get funds from United Way, from governments, and from the Grateful Dead.
MM: In your book, How Can I Help?, you made a statement: “Any model of the self limits our capacity to help.”
What in yourself has been your greatest limitation in helping?

RD: I constantly deal with attachments. I had years of tremendous anger, for example, and then it just drained out of me. Maharaji said, “Give it up.” So I started giving it up. It’s pretty much gone now. I still remember it and can get a little angry at times, but it’s very quick and fleeting.

            The things that have held me back the longest have been money, sex, power. My ego wanted something. Every time you want something, you’re attached to that want, and you start to manipulate the universe to satisfy that want. To transmit dharma you have to extricate yourself from identification with those wants. [ed.: Dharma: in Hinduism and Buddhism, the ultimate law of all things, hence, individual right conduct in response to that law. Or to some: spiritual duty.] The saying is: “The truth waits for eyes unclouded.” When you want something, you only see the outward containers. It causes us to continue to isolate ourselves from each other. It’s not a question of not having desires – I’m human and have them – but it’s rather that I’m not going to be caught or trapped by my desires.

MM: When you find others who have an attachment to money, sex, power, how do you help them deal with it?

RD: I can’t help them at the level of being free of it myself. [If I were] I could mirror their attachment to them, from a place of non [-attachment]. [As it is] I can get into a conspiracy with them, where we both get caught in it, because I’m vulnerable to it. So all I can do is share this truth with them – tell them what I’ve been doing to get out of it, but not to trust me.

            Trust your heart. I’m not a guru, just somebody on the Path. I can feel my ego get caught and welcome these occasions. They show me where my work lies. See, at certain stages you just want to get high. Then you want to get free, you don’t want to get high. So I want to move towards the things that scare me, rather than away from them. I don’t want to just go into a cave and stay out there.

MM: What do you consider your greatest act of service?

RD: I genuinely love people. People feel it, respond to it. In a climate of love, people can flower. They can change.

MM: As your Guru said, “Feed people.”

RD: Yes, and there are many levels of feeding. He said to me once, “God comes to the hungry in the form of food.” But when you’re putting food in someone’s mouth, from what level are you doing it?

MM: Whom would you cite as an outstanding server of today?

RD: [without hesitation] Mother Theresa. Many people serve today, some with impure motives. Still, they have improved the lot of others, so there is service rendered. It is a natural thing, service.

The more I pour myself into service, quieting my mind, the more I feel I am what I really am – not what I should be.  

          The phone rings, and a guy says, “I’ve got AIDS, and I wondered if you’d talk with me, because I’m frightened of dying.” I go, because it feels right. There’s a way in which you just die into service.

MM: What role do you think meditation plays in service?

RD: You meditate to hear how to use the energy properly. Ofttimes people do service out of fear, guilt, what have-you, and those motives lead to a distortion of hearing as to what can be done and what can’t be done. “The quiet mind is master of the deed,” goes the saying. When you’re really quiet, you hear exactly what is to be done in a situation. You use your energies optimally. It empties me of my models as to what I think is necessary. I listen more to hear what there is to be done.

At certain stages you just want to get high.
And then you want to get free.
…
I honor my incarnation to be free.
I am free through form, not in spite of it.

            In deep meditation you see how the form changes. You actually see it. There are three things the Buddha taught you experience directly in meditation: one, the suffering inherent in form, the second is the impermanence of form, and the third one, annata: the state of no-self, recognition that you are a set of events. Once you [have that recognition], you’re no longer special, you’re a part of what’s happening. Everyone is unique, with a part to play. I have my part to play. This is the reality of what happens when you meditate.

            All my early life I was busy trying to become special, and then I saw through it. I acquired fame in the ‘60s and ’70s, I was the “American Folk Guru,” thousands of people throwing flowers at my feet. In the midst of this adulation I was starving to death. It was empty.

            Meditation has become more and more a cornerstone of my whole program. The deeper I get into service, the deeper I get into meditation. The purity of service maintains the level of meditation. It’s how you do the service, not that you do it – although that you serve is important.

MM: In How Can I Help?, you talked about becoming the model of humility, and aspiring to selflessness. How does one do that? 

RD: By seeing yourself as a part of the process, no better and no worse than anybody else. Ego is somebody, it has no humility. The training is studying and understanding who you are.

            And then love – as you open your heart to people, you start to treasure and appreciate their beauty and uniqueness, what they’re doing with their lives. It changes the dimension of your relationship with people. It’s a quality of life that comes with love, you find it’s hard to be arrogant.

MM: Can you describe more specifically your practice of letting thoughts go during meditation?

RD: I deepen my concentration by focusing on a primary object. I have something specific, but it doesn’t really matter what one chooses. The primary object is like the center of the flower. Each thought goes out like a petal and takes you away, but you come back to the center of the flower. I notice this process, let the mind go, and then come back to the center. With practice the mind no longer rushes out – it just flickers. Eventually it stays there, not even flickering. Then the mind becomes like a laser beam and starts to penetrate into deeper levels of awareness.

            I’ve noticed, from this practice, that my mind is less cluttered. I used to be thinking all the time, the mind jumping all over the place. I see the thinking mind as a sub-system of a greater, vaster wisdom. I try to tune into that – in answering questions, during lectures, and so forth. It’s a process of emptying the mind, to let wisdom fill it. You empty the mind by letting go of thoughts.

            Service balances the meditation process. Service will show you your stuff – meditation helps you deal with it, makes it all somehow lighter.

For anyone wishing to contribute to the Seva Foundation, you can find them online.

 For more articles from the Meditation Magazine Archives, please visit this link:
http://livingpurposeinstitute.com/articles-2/meditation-articles/

For information on Living Purpose Institute: life coaching, life coach training and certification, workshops, classes, meditation ceremonies, ceremonial sweat lodge ceremonies, retreats, videos, and much more, please visit:
http://livingpurposeinstitute.com/