YT YouTube2Text

YouTube2Text → Transcripts → Ram Dass - Judaism and Spirituality

Ram Dass - Judaism and Spirituality — Transcript

by Baba Ram Dass · 13,720 words · 1,781 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

Open in transcriber Summarize with AI Download SRT/VTT

Full transcript

0:10Feels good to be here.
0:11Thank you.
0:15I also want to thank Lily Goldfarb.
0:20And where is she?
0:22You are.
0:22Thank you, Lily.
0:25And I want to thank David
0:27Gordon for hosting this event
0:30and the University of Judaism.
0:32I'm sure it was not.
0:35It's probably a mixed blessing.
0:42I want to thank George Fletcher for
0:47helping to create this annual event
0:49in honor of Jerry Goldfarb.
0:54I want to thank David Zeller for
0:56singing so sweetly.
0:58He just came back from Israel and I told him he's getting better.
1:03And Shlomo Schwartz,
1:07thank you.
1:15Shlomo was
1:17a close friend of Jerry Goldfarb, and
1:22I used to go to Shlomo House on Friday nights,
1:25and there Jerry would be Yakov.
1:29He said he felt safe enough to use that name.
1:33And I feel safe enough today so I can be
1:38Rubin.
1:38I am Yosef.
1:52I would like to
1:54share some personal reflections.
1:58I think that we can gain
2:00value out of sharing each other's stories.
2:03And what I notice is that as I keep changing,
2:09I look back on the events of my life.
2:13But some things that were figure have become ground
2:16and some that were ground have become figure.
2:18And I keep seeing it differently.
2:20And I.
2:22I just did a book that came out,
2:24I think, yesterday called Compassion in Action
2:28with Mirabai Bush, in which I did autobiography
2:31around the issue of where is compassion?
2:34How does it feel?
2:35When does it awaken, what isn't it, etc..
2:40So when I was invited to give this lecture
2:43on Judaism and spirituality, this gave me a chance
2:51to look back at my own life now with another perspective
2:56and I've delighted in doing it.
2:58I've done it for this past while in preparing for this.
3:02So my thank you to all of you for inviting me
3:06is not just the usual social.
3:09Thank you.
3:09It's a thank you that you were a
3:17you invited me
3:19with the respect that allowed my heart to feel safe enough
3:24to open to look at Judaism without a defensive stance.
3:29And so thank you for that.
3:36So let me start with a little
3:39going back just a little bit.
3:41Now, I would like to do one disclaimer
3:45is that I am very naive
3:49about a lot of very subtle issues about Judaism.
3:53So if you're keeping score,
3:57you'll do very well tonight.
4:00But just be compassionate because
4:03this is what you got.
4:15As I understand it, the earliest Jews to come over to
4:18the United States were Sephardic Jews, and
4:23they came
4:25as a result primarily of the Inquisition.
4:28Some of them were those beings
4:30that you know about that
4:33seemed to convert publicly,
4:34but privately continue to be Jews.
4:38They were few in number, but they they did very well
4:42in this new emerging society.
4:47Then in about 18, 18 or 22,
4:511860, 150,000
4:55more Jews arrived in the United States.
4:58These were Jews primarily from Germany
5:01and surrounds.
5:04And they also were they were getting away from economic
5:08hardship and anti-Semitism.
5:14They were treated
5:16very badly in many cities in Europe.
5:18They weren't even allowed into the cities without permission.
5:25When the German immigrants came here,
5:29they very, very quickly adjusted.
5:33In fact, they did very well.
5:36And they
5:37it was within their midst that the reform movement, Judaism, started to emerge
5:43in the United States
5:46between 1860 and 1920,
5:50realize there were few more than 175 200,000 Jews
5:55between 98, between 1860 and 1920.
6:00So many people came in that by 1920 there were 4 million Jews
6:04in the United States.
6:06Most of these people were from Poland and Russia and
6:11Latvia.
6:12All those different places that go back and forth
6:19of my family.
6:23Two of my grandparents came over from Poland or Russia,
6:28and two were born in the United States and previously had come over from Poland.
6:35So I am descended from that particular wave that came to the United States
6:40in the late 1800s.
6:46There's an interesting description of
6:49the kind of world that I was growing up in.
6:52It's a hard assessment,
6:55but Podhoretz called it
6:58the time of the brutal bargain.
7:02It was a time when Jews
7:05were becoming Americans by learning how to be ashamed of their parents,
7:10and their parents were conspiring in it for their children.
7:15Can you feel the pain of all that?
7:29My ancestors settled in
7:33Boston
7:36in those days.
7:37Very few Jews came to Los Angeles.
7:39In fact, they said the only reason an Orthodox Jew came to Los Angeles
7:44was because he either had one lung or two wives.
7:58I'd like to explain tonight about the rules of tonight.
8:02I'm going to go slowly
8:04because I really savor this material.
8:07And it's interesting.
8:09But, you know, when you've had enough,
8:12so when you've had enough, just get up and leave.
8:15I will not take it personally because I'd like not to have to rush
8:19to make you comfortable. Okay.
8:22So you're free.
8:23You're completely free.
8:29Oh, now, my dad was the oldest in his family,
8:35and his father was a secondhand furniture
8:38salesman called an antique dealer.
8:42And there was tremendous pressure on my father to succeed
8:48because this was just getting settled.
8:54So he went to went from high school
8:57to law school, at which time my grandfather died.
9:00So my father supported his
9:03five brothers and sisters and his wife and new baby and his mother
9:08playing the violin at night and going to law school in the daytime.
9:15And he was incredibly motivated to achieve and succeed.
9:22But the
9:23predicament was that in Boston, as a lawyer,
9:26the the inside of the law scene
9:29in Boston was all Yankees.
9:32The power was in the Yankee Group in Boston.
9:40And also the wealth was still concentrated
9:44among the German Jews.
9:47So during my growing up period, my father did
9:52two strategies really.
9:56He became active in the Jewish community
10:00and he was a lawyer. So he spoke well.
10:02So he started speaking for the local UJA
10:07and he found a patron among the Yankees in Boston,
10:16a Supreme Court judge who gave him a receivership,
10:20which put him into the law field in Boston
10:28during the time of my growing up.
10:30We started out as
10:33Orthodox and became liberal conservative, I would say,
10:38where you only ate pork in Chinese restaurants.
10:50The pain for my father and
10:52mother was that they went through that transition.
10:56I never knew the other end.
10:57They went through knowing what the laws were and then choosing
11:00not to follow them.
11:09We moved to the suburbs
11:11and I grew up in the suburbs
11:16in a large synagogue connected with a large synagogue,
11:18which my father was on the board.
11:22Now, as I see it, there were very clearly
11:26two Judaism at that time.
11:29There was the Judaism of the Torah, which is the Judaism
11:33of the spiritual longing and the dialog with God.
11:40And then there was the
11:43social communal,
11:48political.
11:52I call it the Holocaust and redemption
11:56of Prague.
11:59It was primarily concerned with Jews
12:02as a social group.
12:09These were not mutually exclusive, of course.
12:12And the power of Judaism in the United States
12:14was because it was a mixture of both of those.
12:20The track I grew up in was a social, political
12:22one, social, economic, political one.
12:28So in my bar mitzvah, in my confirmation,
12:32in singing, in the choir,
12:36all my family, etc., there was no spiritual feeling.
12:44There was sentimentality, but there was no spiritual feeling.
12:52I don't know whether I was looking for it.
12:53Maybe it was there and I didn't see it,
12:56but I would have seen it if my parents were focused on it.
12:59But they really weren't.
13:01They were focused on
13:03being part of the Jewish community,
13:06raising a good family, and they were good people.
13:10And they are in my mind and heart, good people.
13:17Nobody cared that I be religious.
13:19They just cared that I'd be a Jew.
13:26And it's interesting that out of my parents, my eight year old,
13:29my brother that's eight years older than me,
13:31who grew up much more in the Orthodox end of the continuum.
13:34He ended up as president of his temple in Long Island.
13:38And I didn't.
13:45Is this too slow or are you comfortable with this?
13:47It's okay.
13:48All right.
13:52Because it's fun and I don't really want to I want to enjoy it.
13:59So what that did was interesting.
14:01In the Jewish community,
14:04he started to speak for the joint distribution committee,
14:07which was an organization that had a large number of German
14:11Jews in it that raised money for children in Germany to relocate the children.
14:20My father was a hell of a good speaker.
14:24I watched him numerous times on that speech about the children,
14:30where he said,
14:31What would you give if it were your child?
14:34Well, I'll tell you,
14:37if it were my child,
14:39I'd give every penny.
14:41I could beg, borrow
14:46or yes, even steal.
14:53I once was doing a public
14:54speaking contest at prep school, and I was using that speech
14:59and my father walked in.
15:08So Dad took a page from Joseph Willems
15:12book in New York who was amazing at fundraising.
15:16And after the speech, he would have the cards and he'd say, Mr.
15:20Goodman, last year you gave $50,000,
15:24but you had a good year,
15:27and we'd like to know how you feel tonight.
15:31And then Mr.
15:31Goodman would say something with his wife looking up at him.
15:36And then my father would say, that's wonderful.
15:38And they'd all applauding.
15:39He'd say, And I understand that you have a new grandchild, Myron,
15:43that just had a wrist you want to say to give anything in honor of that.
15:46And you get another quick 10,000 just like that. But
15:53the reason it was so
15:54easy was because in the Jewish community,
15:58giving is not a voluntary act of grace,
16:02but it's inherent in one's membership in the community.
16:06And it's it's like taxes
16:10for membership.
16:12And there are a lot of pressures and psychic rewards
16:15used to raise money.
16:20In my mind are these eight levels of giving.
16:24They certainly didn't give grudgingly,
16:27they certainly didn't give inadequately.
16:31They did give.
16:31After being asked, which is the third type
16:34some gave before being asked, but very few.
16:40The fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth are interesting.
16:42The fifth one is not knowing who one is giving to.
16:49Giving anonymously is the next
16:53where it's anonymous both ways, it's the next.
16:58And helping another person to become self-supporting is the last one.
17:01That was a very profound
17:08and then that
17:09got involved in creating Brandeis University,
17:13which he was the founding father of,
17:17and he raised lots of money
17:18for Brandeis.
17:28And I remember him fighting with the board over
17:30whether there'd be three chapels or one chapel.
17:35He was arguing for one chapel.
17:37But now when I look at it from the Orthodox Jews
17:39point of view, it would have been difficult.
17:49On the other side, he worked his law work up and up until
17:53he was able, through his law to shift over in a business
17:57and he became president of the New Haven Railroad.
18:01So there we were.
18:03That was highly respected as a member of the Jewish community,
18:08and he was president of a railroad.
18:10We had JPMorgan's private railroad car
18:13for fun.
18:16Then it went into bankruptcy. Of course.
18:18I mean, everything changes, you know.
18:20But the moment was incredible.
18:23I mean, it's like you win both ways, you know,
18:25Dad was doing very well.
18:31It's heady stuff of assimilation,
18:36but you can even feel pain in it
18:44now. You can see
18:45in some way I'm a chip off the old block
18:49here I am speaking
18:51and I'm actually
18:56just setting forth to raise
18:58an endowment of $5 million for the same foundation,
19:02which is my favorite
19:05vehicle for the relief of suffering at the moment.
19:09But it's interesting that my strategy is different than my father's.
19:14My father raised money by working with emotions,
19:18with fear, with group identification.
19:26My strategy is different.
19:28What I say to people is
19:30I grew up in a culture where I'm really hung up about money.
19:35I'm so hung up about money
19:36that if I'm looking at five people and one of them is rich,
19:40I can see God in all four people.
19:42But when I look at the rich person, I see a rich person
19:46see the problem.
19:48So my exercise is to see God in rich people.
19:52Now there are rich people
19:56who have a problem too,
19:59because they're so paranoid that everybody wants their money
20:02and they're holding it.
20:03They don't know why they're holding it,
20:04but they don't want to let it go and all that stuff.
20:07They get guilt, everything.
20:09They got a problem.
20:10So they see everybody as an object to.
20:14So my bargain is one on one.
20:16Let's sit down and both of us grow spiritually till we can see
20:20God and each other through the fact that I'm a hustler and you're rich
20:25and it will
20:27roughly cost you $100,000 a shot.
20:31I may be as good as my father.
20:32Yet you're waiting for now
20:43my turning away from
20:46practicing Judaism
20:50was part initially of a large movement
20:55because I was trained as a social scientist
20:58and I was a neo behaviorist and I was on the Harvard faculty
21:01and I dealt with anthropologists all the time.
21:03And in addition, I taught Freudian theory.
21:07So from both ends, from Freud,
21:10religion was sublimation of sexuality
21:14and from anthropology,
21:18religion was an interesting folk ritual
21:21to ward off fear of death.
21:26So I, in a way lost my link if I had one,
21:31which I had only a sentimental one, but not a profound one.
21:34I lost my link again through my intellectual
21:37scientific mode.
21:42Then in
21:521961, I took the psilocybin mushroom,
21:57which was a
21:59mushroom that use by oracles and
22:04the divination in my Mexican Coronvirus
22:08and mushrooms go back in history.
22:10The mushroom stones.
22:11A lot of religions had mystical experiences through the mushroom
22:16and what happened to me in those few hours
22:23changed the rest of my life
22:27because up until then I had seen myself
22:31as a social entity, a set of social identities.
22:37In other words, my identification was in my life and my ego structure.
22:45But as I sat in the room in the semi darkness of that room,
22:49I began to see different roles of myself, about eight feet distant from myself.
22:54And one by one, I kept letting them go and letting them go and letting them go.
22:58Even down to the name Richard, which I watched, who that was.
23:02And I sort of let it go.
23:05And I thought, What's this chemical going to do?
23:07Am I going to have amnesia afterwards?
23:10Okay.
23:11And then I thought, Well, at least I have my body.
23:14And I look down on the couch
23:17and there was the whole couch.
23:18There was nobody sitting there. Now,
23:21remember, I'm a psychologist,
23:23so I'm saying interesting hallucination.
23:27But the predicament is you can intellectually try
23:29to make yourself feel comfortable.
23:31But if your eyes are open and there's no body
23:34and you're a philosophical materialist,
23:36it puts you in a peculiar position.
23:41And I was about to scream for help when I thought in a traditional way,
23:47But who's minding the store?
23:50And what happened was there was a discontinuous moment
23:53and a flip, and I entered a quality of being,
23:57which I would call soul or spirit or something,
24:02which was the essence of being.
24:06It had very little to do with my personality
24:09and I felt suddenly peaceful
24:11at home, like this is where I've been all night, all the time.
24:14I was just busy not thinking I was there or thinking I wasn't
24:17there.
24:22Intense ecstasy.
24:24I ran out, rolled in the snow.
24:26It was a huge snowstorm that night.
24:32The way I described the experience was, was that it was ineffable.
24:35It was indescribable.
24:39I experience the wonders of all things.
24:42I experience the beauty and radiance of the manifestation of God on Earth.
24:47I and I experienced feeling at home
24:51for the first time since I was probably in the womb
25:08the a way God says I am
25:10what I am.
25:14There was a sense of having touched something so divine.
25:17It was so powerful that it was stronger
25:20than my socialization. I'll show you.
25:24I walked through the snow at four in the morning.
25:26That night, snow was very high, big, strong.
25:29And I walked to my parents home where I had been staying for the weekend.
25:33I was at Harvard as a professor
25:35and the snow
25:36was piled up and I went and got the shovel and I went to shovel their walk.
25:40So when they woke up, it would be all shovel and it was four in the morning.
25:45Pretty soon my parent's faces
25:47appeared in the window.
25:50Come in, you little idiot.
25:51Don't you know what time it is?
25:53I could see their mouths making those words.
25:56You know, the winter.
25:59And I looked up at them
26:00and I realized that those were the voices I always listened to.
26:04You know, everybody was telling me who I should be.
26:07But, you know, in my heart of hearts, it felt perfectly
26:10all right to shovel snow.
26:12I wasn't disturbing anybody particularly.
26:15They didn't mind.
26:18So I laughed and waved at them.
26:20And when I'm shoveling snow,
26:22you hear what a
26:22revolutionary act that was.
26:27So later, when I got thrown out of Harvard, I wasn't surprised
26:31because once you learn how to stand up to an organization
26:35or trust your own intuitive heart,
26:38I remember when I was being thrown out of Harvard,
26:41there was a press conference and everybody assumed I was a loser.
26:45I was the first person in the 20th century
26:47to be thrown out of Harvard, and everybody assumed I was a real loser.
26:52I mean, it was like they were interviewing the boxer,
26:55the just lost the championship and was sufficiently brain damaged.
26:59So he would probably be sweeping the gym the rest of his life.
27:01You know, once I had seen that it was ineffable
27:06or indescribable, I started looking around for concepts, conceptual models,
27:10because what happens is you keep trying to organize these things.
27:14That's
27:16that's part of the
27:16way art we as separate entities work perhaps out of fear.
27:20We want control whatever we want to organize.
27:27And so I was looking around for concepts at that time to help me understand
27:32psychology. Had some of them.
27:34William James was extraordinary.
27:37He said at one point this was a very esteemed professor at Harvard,
27:43and he had said, Our normal waking consciousness is
27:46but one type of consciousness was all about departed from it
27:50by the film, the of screens, the other types of consciousness.
27:53We may spend our entire lives without knowing of their existence,
27:57but apply the requisite stimulus.
27:58And there they are in their completeness.
28:03And I just experienced the validity of what he had said.
28:08But certainly in my psychological world, my world of cognition and psychology,
28:13cognitive psychology and social psychology,
28:16I had no metaphors for what I had experienced.
28:19Psychology had nothing to say about what it was
28:22that I found to be the greatest truth of my being
28:31had, that at that point,
28:32had I been in a warm relationship with Judaism, it may well have been that
28:38I would have found through the Kabbalah, through
28:42the maps and the Zohar and the Book of Brilliance.
28:45I would have found the maps that would have given me some structure
28:50to what I experienced, but I didn't have that entree.
28:54And the result was that I
28:57we were given by all this the book, The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
29:00which had a whole structure about what I had experienced.
29:05It described it.
29:07See, when you say something is describing something that's ineffable,
29:10it's like naming God. You're never naming God.
29:12You're naming an aspect or an action or quality.
29:16So the same thing this every structure does violence,
29:20because the thing it's pointing at is much more than the finger that's pointing.
29:24But the mind wants a structure.
29:25And so I found that led to that led to that,
29:28and that led me to all of the Eastern literature,
29:31which had incredible maps for the things that I had experience.
29:37Now, I now realize that
29:42had I turned to
29:44Judaism, I probably, except in
29:49Hasidic circles, would not have gotten a very good hearing
29:54because there would be the question of false prophets
29:58or the question of whether the vision I had had
30:01and the experience was harmonious with Moses's experience,
30:06because it's what will be called
30:08historical mysticism.
30:13But when something is very valid in you, even though it may turn out to be Hotspur,
30:19you can't make believe it isn't.
30:21You just can't do it.
30:22I can't anyway.
30:30The experienced way Buber describes it, the experiences,
30:37the finality of all them, the shaking off of the last fetter,
30:41the release that comes from the dismissal of all that is earthly.
30:46When a person moves from strength to strength
30:48and beyond and beyond till he reaches the realm of all learning and law
30:54to the eye of God,
30:56to simple unity and limitlessness as He stands there,
31:01all the wings of Jewish law
31:03and of the commandments are folded
31:07and become as nothing
31:09for all.
31:10His evil desire is destroyed and he rises above it.
31:25He also described the way you deal with it in this quote.
31:28One more, if you don't mind.
31:31He said, It's the revolutionary moment when we when we encounter
31:35a dimension beyond the text, beyond the case, beyond the thought,
31:40beyond the immediate act, we confront God in the moment.
31:45It calls into question the laws, etc., It haunts.
31:50And this organizes us.
31:53Jewish life is giving a form to the spiritual life
31:57and not letting its anarchic potential render
32:01us incoherent.
32:06When I came back from India in 1968,
32:11there was the unveiling of my mother's tombstone
32:15and I went there.
32:19At the time I was wearing I had a long beard, I had lots of beads.
32:23I was wearing a dress, an Indian outfit.
32:27But that's what it looks like.
32:28And I had never met the rabbi, who was the rabbi of the synagogue,
32:33of which my father was a member of the board.
32:37And I'm in robes and the rabbi is there with his sunglasses and his soft hat.
32:41And we do the service.
32:44And then he comes up
32:45and he grabs me by the elbow, as rabbis are wont to do at times.
32:50And he says, What have you been up to?
32:53And whether he was there to save me or his curiosity got the better of him?
32:59I don't know. Maybe it was the dress, I don't know. But
33:02so I said, You really want to know?
33:04And he said, Yes.
33:04And so I proceeded.
33:05We leaned against two tombstones,
33:09and I proceeded to tell him all about these miraculous
33:12things that had happened to me in India with my spiritual teacher.
33:18And as I listened, I saw his face soften.
33:21And then he said to me, you know, when I was studying for my finals,
33:25I took too much. No doz
33:28and I was reading the Bible and suddenly it fell away.
33:32And I was on the Sinai Desert and it was all happening around me.
33:36Quick for you to experience that truth of we are all in Egypt.
33:41We were all escaping from Egypt and he was lit up
33:46and I said, What a wonderful, wonderful experience.
33:49I bet you've given a lot of sustenance to the congregation through that story
33:53and that experience.
33:55And he looked at me strangely
33:57and he says, you know,
33:58until now, I've never told it to anybody but my wife.
34:02He said, Judaism is a folk
34:04religion and I'm an interpreter of the law.
34:08Why don't we join the rest of the group?
34:11Can you hear that?
34:13That's when I reached out a little bit.
34:15That's what I got back.
34:19The question I had to ask myself was, is the experience I had valid or what?
34:28How do I deal with it?
34:33But I think that perhaps the first order of business was once
34:37you have touched something so divine, if you're connected with,
34:42I can assure you there is a desire
34:44to return to that experience.
34:48And in those days it was called getting high
34:52and I did everything I could to get high and stay high.
34:56I mean, everything that came as modern chemistry
34:58had created.
35:03But by 1966 or seven, I couldn't do it.
35:08I kept coming down
35:10and the pain of coming back from that space
35:14into your normal mind, the attachments and habits of thought was so painful.
35:20It's like going back in a prison cell.
35:24And I was so eager to find that all out that
35:27I took the existing maps I had
35:30and I thought, maybe I can't read these maps properly,
35:34but maybe there's a cartographer alive in India that can read these maps.
35:38So I went looking for a spiritual guide
35:41in India,
35:49and I met a being who was very much like what we would call exotic.
35:57I can just describe that he was a real man.
35:59He was a full being,
36:03a full being.
36:09I'll just take a minute for those of you that have the know
36:12me, have heard the story so many times, I'll give you the reform.
36:14But it's important here just for me to give you
36:18the feeling of the first visit with him.
36:24I am out the night before, down in the plains of India,
36:29and during the night I have to go to the bathroom
36:31and I go outside under the stars.
36:33And while I am urinating, I become very aware of the presence of my mother.
36:37You Freudian.
36:38You can do anything you want with that.
36:41But course I did it first and
36:48and she had died six months
36:50previously and I felt her presence very, very strongly.
36:54And then I went back to bed.
36:56I was with a fellow who had been in India for many years,
37:00and we were on the way up to the mountains about 100 miles distant,
37:04to see his guru to get a visa, to help him
37:08get a visa extension so he wouldn't be thrown out of India.
37:12So I told him nothing about this.
37:14And the next day
37:15we drove up to the mountains and this car we of Land Rover
37:19that I had borrowed from another friend
37:21and we came to this little tiny
37:24place by the side of the road shrine.
37:26So and this young fellow jumped up and ran up the hill.
37:30And I went up to see this.
37:32Whoever this was, I didn't want to.
37:34I thought Hinduism was very schlock and too much fluorescent lights and
37:39too many Day-Glo calendars. And
37:42it was offensive.
37:43I was a real Buddhist type person, you know, really empty, clean.
37:48And so here was a Hindu guru.
37:51I didn't want to meet him, but there I was.
37:54And I came up and
37:57he was sitting under a tree with about six or eight people.
38:01This young fellow was bowing to him.
38:03And I thought, I'm not going to bow to him.
38:05And that's so I was sort of just watching.
38:09And he
38:09looked up at me and he said, You came in a big car.
38:12You said this in Hindi.
38:14Now this was my friend's Land Rover.
38:16And I said, Yes.
38:18He said, You give it to me.
38:21I thought, Boy, I mean, I've been hustled before, but never like that, you know.
38:27So I said, Well, maybe I don't know.
38:29I don't. And the other fellow said, It's yours if you want it.
38:32And I said, You can't give away.
38:33And I really lost it.
38:48And everybody was laughing at me.
38:51And then he said, You made much money in America.
38:55I wanted some.
38:57I said a lot compared to India.
39:00Good, good.
39:02Then he said, Take them all and give them lunch.
39:04So we were taken off for lunch
39:07and I was called back and I was told to sit down in front of him.
39:10I sat down in front of him and I'm still I'm not touching his feet.
39:14I'm not doing any of that stuff, you know, I'm just listening.
39:17He looks at me and he said, Close his eyes.
39:20He said, You were out in the stars last night.
39:25Said you?
39:26I mean, anybody could figure that out.
39:28I mean, it's easy to go out.
39:31He said you were thinking about your mother.
39:35Now you've got to remember, I'm a professor, psychologist.
39:38Still, no matter how many drugs I've taken, you know,
39:40the part of me that's saying what is happening now?
39:44Because I didn't tell anybody that, you know,
39:47he closed his eyes and he said
39:50she died last year.
39:54And I'm getting more and more uneasy.
39:56I mean, agitated, uneasy.
40:00And then he closed his eyes and he said, this is all in Hindi.
40:03She said she got very big in the belly before she died.
40:06And what she had died for was a spleen grown to compensate
40:09for the fact that her bones weren't creating blood.
40:13I said, Yeah.
40:16And then he closed his eyes.
40:17Then he leaned forward and in English, which I had never
40:19I mean, later on I never heard speak more than a few words of English.
40:23He leaned forward and he came up close to me and he said, Spleen.
40:30And it just I mean, it went till
40:34I gave up.
40:36What was I to do?
40:38Because when he did that, I experienced a violent, painful, wrenching in my chest.
40:44Something opened like it had been closed for so long.
40:47Pain fully open.
40:50And I started to
40:51cry and I cried for two days solid.
40:54They took care of me and all that.
41:00In addition to being with Morarji and subsequent to that,
41:04and he started to subject me to various teachings.
41:09He had people teaching me
41:12various yogis.
41:15Yoga is a word which means coming to one with God.
41:19And I was learning various strategies for doing that,
41:23primarily what was called Raja Yoga from Patanjali
41:27work.
41:31And in the course of that I started to adopt
41:34a renunciation path
41:38because the the stress was on
41:41getting free of being bound to the earth
41:44in order to be back in the light with
41:49that was the model
41:51and the
41:53not that the earth wasn't fine, but that the power of the desires
41:56was so strong on earth that the most intelligent thing to do
42:01if you were really trying to become free or get to God, was to get as far
42:06from those desires, the gratification of those desires systems
42:10as possible.
42:14So I really did push away the Earth plane as much as I could,
42:20and in course of that I started to meditate,
42:24to extricate myself from the attachment to the thought forms in my mind
42:29that kept me trapped on this plane of reality.
42:39Nachman Rabbi Rabbi Nachman Russell
42:42says the days pass and are gone, and one finds
42:46that he never once had time to really think.
42:50One who does not meditate cannot not have wisdom.
42:54In truth, the one thing a human is afraid of is within himself,
42:59and the one thing he craves is within himself.
43:05And he also said
43:08a person can become part of God's unity
43:10only through forgetfulness of self.
43:14One cannot reach such a divine state except in aloneness.
43:19By withdrawing into intimate dialog with God,
43:24men can attain the abandonment of his passions
43:27and evil habits and return to his source.
43:33This is best done at night
43:36and in a place where people don't pass by.
43:40When a person attains this level, his soul becomes
43:44an existential necessity.
43:48That is, he ascends from
43:49the realm of the possible
43:53to that of eternal.
43:56Once he has become eternal,
43:59he sees the whole world in its aspect of eternity.
44:11So I have, since 1970, been practicing meditation.
44:16But using those techniques, I began to see that without chemicals
44:21I could extricate myself
44:23from my own definitions, including that of myself,
44:29and begin to penetrate into the vastness of truth.
44:32That was not conceptual, and I was addicted to that.
44:40I was addicted to getting high all the time
44:43through meditation, through being with my guru, through all of it.
44:46I mean, I did nine days of fasting
44:50with three or 4 hours of pranayama.
44:52That's the breath. The
45:01so you do that for about
45:02two and a half minutes holding your breath.
45:05Then you begin to feel a little buzzing at the bottom of your spine.
45:08And then you take you see there's a serpent three times
45:12with its head coiled down at the bottom of your spine,
45:15and you take it and you hit it over the head with your consciousness
45:20and it raises its head and starts up your spine.
45:23And it is so interesting
45:28and but around the middle of the seventies,
45:35we're up to the middle of the seventies now, around
45:41the middle of the seventies, I began to appreciate the difference
45:47between getting high and being free.
45:53But getting high was going from here to there and there.
45:57Everything looked beautiful and it would come down here.
46:00It's like landing in Los Angeles in an airplane.
46:03You're up in the sky, it's all blue.
46:07Then you come down through all of our excretion
46:11and that was what it felt like each time I would come down
46:16there.
46:18But around the middle of the seventies, I appreciated
46:23that getting high wasn't the same as getting free
46:26because I was still pushing away something.
46:30And as long as I pushed away something, I was attached,
46:33and as long as I was attached, I wasn't free.
46:37Now many of you will hear the word attachment as a positive thing.
46:43I'm not saying that one doesn't love and be involved with other people,
46:47but there is a clinging quality of the mind that I'm specifically
46:50referring to as attached to a thought form where you can't see the truth
46:54that's fresh in the moment because your mind is so locked in.
47:03And I heard the mystical statement
47:07There is nowhere to stand
47:11that any belief system or conceptual structure
47:14or lineage or anything you stand in
47:18is less than what it is.
47:21And you don't get high and you don't come down
47:23and there's no high and there's no low because you are living simultaneously
47:28in the realm where there is time and in the realm where there is not time.
47:33It's like Chavez is lasting seven days a week,
47:35but you're working two
47:46the Awakening.
47:47Two that made me turn around and see that from the language I would use
47:52my incarnation had within it a curriculum
47:59that I had been busy
48:00not taking the curriculum
48:05and the curriculum
48:06was to become human on Earth.
48:10Imagine that I'd spent all these years trying to get to God,
48:14and then the instruction is Go be human.
48:21So I turned around and I realized that I had to attend to
48:24that which I was avoiding until I was no longer avoiding it.
48:27In order to be free.
48:31So I looked at the existential nature of my life,
48:34and there were all these social and emotional and familial
48:37and political identities that I had.
48:49And I saw that what I had to do in being human was to honor them all
48:54in some way or other.
48:55There Wasn't any rule of how to honor it.
48:57I had to listen to hear how to honor these identity.
49:09There was one other thing that I saw as I turned around
49:13to approach life, and that
49:17was the immense amount of suffering I couldn't.
49:21And I realized that why I had pushed away
49:23the Earth was that suffering freaked me too much.
49:27I just couldn't stand it.
49:35The issue itself is pointed up exquisitely by a woman that I was.
49:40I was teaching a course in New York several years ago
49:44around homelessness, and all of the class people
49:47were participating in some kind of work in the community around homelessness.
49:51And there were homeless people in the class and so on.
49:55And we would keep diaries.
49:56And then we used an open microphone and this woman got up and she said,
50:00you know, she said,
50:02Every day I leave my apartment and I go to the bus stop.
50:06She said, For the past eight months, there has been a man
50:09standing on the corner and he's got a paper cup with coins.
50:12He's like our local homeless person, and everybody knows and says hello.
50:17And she says, I give him money now.
50:19And then she said, And then she smiled.
50:20And she says, Actually, I've worked out a budget.
50:23250 a week and I give it to him now
50:25and then, she said, But as a result of taking this course,
50:30I realized that I had never acknowledged
50:34his existence as a human being, she said.
50:38I realized that I was afraid
50:40and I thought, What am I afraid of?
50:42I'm not afraid he's going to rape me.
50:44I'm not afraid I can steal my pocketbook.
50:47So when I reflected that, I realized
50:51that I was afraid that if I opened myself to him,
50:54he'd end up living in my living room.
51:00Now, don't underestimate the power of that image for her,
51:07because the implication is
51:11that her heart's
51:13innate response is her enemy.
51:17If I open to my heart, I'll end up you know, the heart beats constantly
51:21saying, Here, you want to use it, you need my life, take it.
51:25The mind is saying, Now wait a minute,
51:28you've got health insurance
51:31because the mind is protecting
51:33the separate entity.
51:37And I looked around and I saw that there was so much suffering
51:40that the way I was dealing with suffering was closing my heart to it.
51:44And that's why
51:45I hated being on the human plane so much, because my heart was so hard.
51:49You hear that?
51:50Is that coming through her?
51:54You know, there are different ways of looking at suffering.
52:00Suffering is a drag. First of all,
52:02you don't want to suffer.
52:03You don't want other people to suffer.
52:06And often if you have a choice, you'd rather have them
52:08not suffer than you, even if you have to suffer.
52:15But the quality of suffering is
52:24the Hassidic prayer.
52:26God, do not tell me why I suffer, for
52:28I am no doubt unworthy to know why, but help me to believe
52:33that I suffer for your sake.
52:40What I have seen of the universe is
52:43shows me such exquisitely articulated law.
52:47And I'm not talking about the law of words.
52:49I'm talking about the nature of things, the way of things
52:54that even though I don't understand the suffering of a little child
52:58dying of diarrhea in a developing country,
53:03my faith in what lies behind that is is such that I see
53:10I do what I can alleviate it
53:13without doing
53:16the questioning of God,
53:22the job, even though he questioned and did it,
53:25he did it.
53:35The biggest suffering, of course, that
53:39you and I have
53:42experienced, and probably maybe we're lucky the world will never know it
53:46again, is the Holocaust,
54:01which a third of all the Jews in the world were killed.
54:09Just a little digression.
54:10Last summer I went to duck, and
54:16even now, the
54:19the horror of that space is so intense
54:22that it's like a physical force that beats against you.
54:29But there was there
54:30an interesting, very profound thing.
54:33There was the Jewish memorial.
54:36There were memorials from each of the religions,
54:37and there was the Jewish memorial. I'm sure many of you seen it.
54:42You go up to a
54:43an iron fence that is like barbed wire.
54:47You hold on to it and you look down a long, dark
54:51Quonset like tunnel, big, dark, very dark.
54:55It's depressing.
54:56It's dark, it's heavy.
54:57It's just like the camp. It's.
55:01And then at the end, as your eyes get accustomed to the dark, at the end,
55:05there are light stones against the far wall that lift your consciousness up.
55:09And at the far end, there's a little hole in which light is pouring down.
55:18And that's what I felt in that camp.
55:20I felt the immensity of the darkness
55:24and still the faith connected
55:26with that light.
55:51The way one responds to suffering
55:59is that you can recognize
56:02as my guru once said to a girl, he said, Do you like suffering or do you like joy?
56:06She said, Omar, I've only known suffering in my life.
56:10I've never known joy.
56:11And he kept asking her and asking her, and she kept repeating again and again.
56:14He finally said,
56:16you know, he said, I love suffering.
56:22It brings me so close to God.
56:26Now. That is such a
56:28horrible, horribly beautiful thought.
56:32That's what it is.
56:33It's horrible beauty.
56:38Now, I don't ever ask that another human being say, oh, boy, suffering.
56:43This is Graves.
56:45My job is to relieve their suffering as they experience it.
56:50But for myself, my own suffering is grace.
56:54It's something that helps me to work on myself
56:59and the joy of being with somebody else,
57:01even when they're suffering and they know that is immense.
57:06And that's partly why
57:08much of a lot of my time is spent with AIDS patients
57:12and with cancer patients, people like that, as they're dying
57:17because as people get close to death,
57:20there is an opening.
57:24And in that opening there is wonder again and
57:27wonder about suffering.
57:40One minute
57:41break.
57:50It was interesting that I had the opportunity
57:53in my role
57:55to be the son who took care of my father
57:59during his last years of life.
58:03I was unmarried and my other brothers
58:07all were busy with the world and I
58:10could move into the basement of his house as my base camp.
58:14I'm out of line, but make sure things were well taken care of with
58:17he and my stepmother.
58:21And then she died.
58:23She was much younger than he and I helped her die.
58:25And then
58:27I was with him until he died at 90.
58:32It was so interesting
58:35how I started out doing that with,
58:39you know, people would say to me,
58:41Oh, you are so good to be living and take care of your father.
58:44And I'd say something like, Well, somebody has to do it.
58:49That's the beginning.
58:51Then the next was,
58:54Well, I'm really taking care of my father.
58:56It's good.
58:58The next was mindfully noticing
59:01myself, taking care of my father.
59:04And then finally I was just taking care of my father.
59:07I had slowly.
59:09It's like going into a hot tub.
59:11I slowly let myself in to an identification
59:15with the role of being son honoring my father.
59:18After all, he's taking care of me.
59:19I owe him much more than I could ever repay.
59:25And at that point, taking care of him became feeling
59:28so right between us.
59:32And for a father and son who I mean what I put him through,
59:36you can imagine.
59:45But in the last years, we would just.
59:47I'd sit by the banner. We'd hold hands and just look at the sunset.
59:50He'd got very quiet inside.
59:53And it was so interesting that my,
59:56uh, one of my relatives
59:58would come along and he'd say,
1:00:01Hi, how are you doing?
1:00:02And my father would just smile at him and say nothing.
1:00:06This fellow would go outside.
1:00:07He'd say, He hasn't changed a bit.
1:00:08He still doesn't talk to me.
1:00:12And then my aunt, who loved my father,
1:00:16came in and said, George, how you doing?
1:00:18And he just smile better.
1:00:19And she said, Oh, George, what's happened to you?
1:00:21Where are you?
1:00:24And I realized that both of them were suffering
1:00:27because of the model they had of who he was.
1:00:32But he was happy and I was happy.
1:00:40And it was interesting.
1:00:41I've learned a lot about opening to what is with other people
1:00:45instead of having models of how it should be for them.
1:00:49And when my father finally died, I felt
1:00:53like I had
1:00:54completed and had been blessed
1:00:57to be allowed to do that.
1:01:01And I've said that in many of my lectures,
1:01:03and I can't tell you how many letters of people that said
1:01:07I was taking care of my parents and it was a real drag.
1:01:11And then I heard you and I began to think about it
1:01:14and I started to work with it
1:01:20because it's
1:01:20the moment when a parent and child can meet in the presence of God.
1:01:24It's possible at that moment when it hasn't been up
1:01:27until then, often
1:01:41I'll just finish a couple of more things,
1:01:43then we'll take a break on close.
1:01:46So by the middle of 73, I realized that I wanted to do service for people,
1:01:52but I was still an untouchable because of my drug history
1:01:55and because of being thrown out of Harvard
1:01:57so people wouldn't let me touch anybody that mattered in society.
1:02:01So I was allowed to work with prisoners
1:02:04and with the dying because
1:02:06those were sort of expendable groups.
1:02:10So I started a project called the Prison Ashram Project,
1:02:13because prisons are like, I mean, they give you clothes
1:02:18and a cell and food and they tell you what to do, holding.
1:02:22So I thought if I could get a group of inmates
1:02:24to really think they were in a monastery instead of a prison,
1:02:28they could really use their time to get free.
1:02:32They could escape right in prison.
1:02:35That was what we were marketing in that one.
1:02:39And the other one was the what was called
1:02:40the dying project,
1:02:44because whatever had happened to me through psychedelics
1:02:48and through meditation and through meeting my teacher
1:02:51and through my studies and the books I had read, my attitude to
1:02:56death was very, very changed from all the people around me
1:03:03because I saw death
1:03:05as transformation and I had no problem with it.
1:03:09And I didn't even feel it was a terrible loss
1:03:16because as I got to the balance
1:03:18between this plane and other planes,
1:03:21persons here that doing what they do, the persons
1:03:24they're doing, what they do.
1:03:29And it's amazing how few people in the presence of somebody
1:03:32that's dying are ever a quantum of
1:03:36everybody is always busy
1:03:38somehow reacting to the dying because of their own discomfort,
1:03:42whether it's religious people or doctors or nurses or family or something.
1:03:49And sometimes just going in
1:03:50and sitting with the person and allowing it all to happen.
1:03:53Yes, trees drop their leaves.
1:03:55Yes, death is occurring.
1:03:56It's okay. Here we are.
1:03:59Create a space or a field in which opening happens
1:04:06without it is 838.
1:04:08I'd like to say we stretch for about 5 minutes.
1:04:11This is not a going out stop.
1:04:13This is just a stretching.
1:04:15And David, will, will you say something
1:04:19and then we'll come back.
1:04:20And those of you that want to leave, feel free.
1:04:32So going to India, studying meditation, having a teacher
1:04:37yearning, yearning to be
1:04:39closer and closer to God,
1:04:43and realizing that when I said to my guru, my spiritual teacher,
1:04:49which is what it is, the term guru is like citing
1:04:53my Rebbe, when I said to him,
1:04:56How can I know God?
1:05:00He said, Feed people.
1:05:05So I figured there was something lost to the translation.
1:05:09So I thought I tried a different way.
1:05:10I said, How can I get enlightenment?
1:05:13And he said, Serve people
1:05:17now for a western,
1:05:19a head tripper like me.
1:05:22You go to India and you expect mysterious teachings,
1:05:25secret incantations.
1:05:29What I mean, what kind of jazz is that?
1:05:30Serve people. Feed people?
1:05:32You got to get enlightened.
1:05:35And I kept rejecting that.
1:05:37I thought, No, I'll meditate.
1:05:38What does he know
1:05:41about that?
1:05:45But slowly I began to see that my path through, because each of us
1:05:50there are different strokes for different and my path through was what?
1:05:55What in the East is called karma yoga.
1:05:58But it's the path of living life
1:06:02and compassionately
1:06:04in a way, to become free.
1:06:11So you can imagine with that kind of orientation
1:06:15that I've just arrived at in the past 510 years,
1:06:19that's how ripe I suddenly am
1:06:22to be
1:06:23invited to speak about Judaism spirituality.
1:06:27Because if it had caught me in my renunciation phase,
1:06:31no way
1:06:33was too esoteric for me to get hold of.
1:06:35In Judaism, in is obviously not one referring to it, but
1:06:39and there is a tradition, but it's very minuscule compared to mainstream Judaism.
1:06:44Now, what I'd like to share with you in all my naivete of fools
1:06:48rush in where angels fear to tread
1:06:51is how I am now hearing
1:06:56Judaism as a spiritual path.
1:07:00And I'm sure everything I say will be my putting both feet in my mouth.
1:07:04But that's the way life is, because you are
1:07:08part of my growing process.
1:07:17First of all, I saw that Judaism was revealed.
1:07:20Religion, which
1:07:23meant that it came from
1:07:28realms of
1:07:30UN manifest being into manifestation through word
1:07:35and the Torah is that manifestation.
1:07:41Now, in that sense, that manifestation, that vision,
1:07:45that prophecy, that whole body of material
1:07:50is the the Godhead
1:07:54coming into word directly.
1:08:00In that sense, it is not open to rational analysis, it just is.
1:08:04It's a given and it's the root and the base camp of the whole
1:08:10practice, because the practice is one
1:08:19of acting
1:08:25in such a way
1:08:27as to allow you to remember
1:08:30from moment to moment
1:08:33the divine nature of manifestation.
1:08:37That's what it's designed to do.
1:08:40It's a method.
1:08:41It is a love affair between God
1:08:44and an individual.
1:08:47And these are the rules of the game of how to make love.
1:08:51That's The closest I can get about what I understand from the halachic rules.
1:08:55And all of that
1:09:01and. The implication of the term chosen
1:09:06is interesting.
1:09:07What I hear is that for one reason or another,
1:09:12a group of people are defined as a class of
1:09:17who are in other traditions would be called the priest class.
1:09:21Those are people who are expected to live their lives in a certain way
1:09:26so as to stay very close to God,
1:09:30to the that you do that
1:09:34you're
1:09:36you are fulfilling the mandate of the pen.
1:09:41The net is spread very broadly
1:09:45in other traditions.
1:09:47For example, in in Buddhist tradition,
1:09:51there are laypeople and then there are monks.
1:09:54And the monks maybe have 218
1:09:58things they can't do,
1:10:00can't sleep on a hard bed.
1:10:02You can't do this, you can't do that.
1:10:05And The game is designed to keep you remembering all the time.
1:10:09And in a way it keeps you separate from the mainstream of the culture.
1:10:14Because in order to carry out
1:10:15all those to 18, you really can't hang out with everybody else.
1:10:19But that's only for a few people.
1:10:22That's not for the lay public.
1:10:24They only take a few of these
1:10:27five or eight.
1:10:30But for the for the Israelites,
1:10:34it was defined as my understanding that the entire population
1:10:39was the priest class,
1:10:41and therefore everybody was expected
1:10:45to realize in their own lives
1:10:48the covenant that God had entered into with the Israelites
1:10:52through Moses.
1:10:57In fact, in Judaism, the experience
1:11:01is that you, as I said earlier, you personally were there.
1:11:04You are part of that lineage, you are part of that covenant
1:11:07that was entered into.
1:11:13And that covenant is very much like a marriage. You
1:11:18and it's an interesting marriage.
1:11:20It says
1:11:22God and the individual
1:11:25will be partners
1:11:28in making the world just
1:11:32and in bringing love and the spirit
1:11:34to the world.
1:11:41That's interesting because you say, well,
1:11:44if God is all powerful, what does he need you for?
1:11:49And that's one of the wonderful contradictions
1:11:53in in theistic religion,
1:11:57that God is both all powerful and
1:12:01out of the all powerful.
1:12:03And this has been the creation of you
1:12:06as a partner to complete an act.
1:12:10And you are left in a position
1:12:13to choose.
1:12:20God is saying, Remember me and you will be redeemed.
1:12:24Meaning you'll come into me
1:12:28as a result of remembering me.
1:12:33All right.
1:12:33So as I said, when I came back from the South Pacific,
1:12:36the first thing I did was go to the Jewish community center and buy a position,
1:12:40and I stuck it on the door.
1:12:42I thought, Well, I'll start.
1:12:43I'll kiss the mezuzah every time I go out the door.
1:12:47That happened twice.
1:12:50So pretty soon I was so busy going somewhere
1:12:53I forgot the message of the minute I realized that
1:12:56I took a string and hung it over the door.
1:12:59It hung down, so it hit my forehead when I walked out,
1:13:02which reminded me the mezuzah was there, which led me to turn and kiss it.
1:13:06Because you've got to retrain.
1:13:08It takes a while.
1:13:21The key and profound issue here, if
1:13:29is that for the Jewish power,
1:13:33just as in Karma yoga,
1:13:35your incarnation is your curriculum,
1:13:39your life is your path, it's the playing field.
1:13:44It is life focused.
1:13:50Choose life
1:13:56said that God conceals is concealed
1:13:59in the dazzling hidden.
1:14:04It's an idea that creation has inherent sanctity.
1:14:07And there's the job to hallow life, the way in which
1:14:11what we are the system is sparks of divine
1:14:17that have been exiled from the totality
1:14:21and are somehow on their way back.
1:14:23But the way back is through living life fully.
1:14:27And so you nurture the spark and you see it in other people.
1:14:32But you look around and earth isn't something to be renounced
1:14:36in order to get high.
1:14:38It is the way to become free.
1:14:44Now I want you to notice the distinction between the thing I was saying
1:14:47about is nowhere to stand.
1:14:50And this path that says your incarnation
1:14:54is where to stand.
1:14:58But what
1:15:00Judaism
1:15:00does, from where I'm hearing it thus far, and again, I'm embarrassed
1:15:04because of my naivete, but I'm going to go on anyway
1:15:16is it says
1:15:19true?
1:15:19You will live in time on this plane,
1:15:25but they play with time such that every seventh day
1:15:31you will enter into eternity.
1:15:35I mean, if you can hear a more dazzling game,
1:15:39what it is saying is that for six days you get caught and hung up
1:15:43in all the traps of power, sex, all the stuff you're working with it
1:15:48by kissing the mezuzah and doing everything you can,
1:15:51but you're probably going under anyway,
1:15:54even if you're doing all 613 of the rules, it can all become rote to,
1:16:00which is the horror of a lot of it.
1:16:04But you're doing it. But then
1:16:07come the Sabbath,
1:16:09the whole game changes.
1:16:13Now, those of us that have been doing spiritual practice for many years
1:16:18have watched the way in which we spiral
1:16:21and cycle in the way we do our practices.
1:16:24Like I'll come out into the world and I'll serve
1:16:26and I'll sit by people's bed and I'll raise money, I'll do the whole thing.
1:16:29And then slowly the toxins build up,
1:16:33one of them being righteousness.
1:16:36I I'm so good.
1:16:38You can't believe it.
1:16:40I mean, even my mother is proud of me.
1:16:44But that's not free.
1:16:46That's a hard one to hear.
1:16:50Because this Galilee, Hall says, is a reference to God speaking one who knows.
1:16:56Not that the Prince of Darkness is, but the other face of the King of Light
1:16:59knows, not me, that the dark angels
1:17:05and the light angels are all part of.
1:17:17So here you have a situation in which uses time
1:17:22very powerfully, because what happens to when I get toxic is I pull back.
1:17:27I go to Burma and sit for a few months in meditation,
1:17:30or I go do something else and detoxify.
1:17:34I just did it in the South Pacific.
1:17:37You wouldn't think snorkeling is a spiritual path,
1:17:41but it is.
1:17:43It is because it breaks through stuff and it brings you into temples
1:17:47that are newly.
1:17:51And then after a while, I come back into the scene.
1:17:54Now what you also do, what I also do is that every day
1:17:58I sit for an hour meditation and I quiet my mind
1:18:03and I just listen more deeply
1:18:06to what is.
1:18:10So there's a quick spa.
1:18:11Let's a 24 hour spiral
1:18:14or cycle.
1:18:15I'd say spiral, because as you do these practices over a period of years,
1:18:20there is a transformation in your being doing it from a different level.
1:18:25So at first you're doing shop as well.
1:18:27It's shops, let's do it.
1:18:29Like taking care of my father.
1:18:30You're doing it out of righteousness and then later you're doing it because, wow,
1:18:36you're going to have a chance to go beyond time.
1:18:39You can have a chance to be with God for a whole day.
1:18:42And there's prescriptions about what you shouldn't do all day.
1:18:45You shouldn't talk about business.
1:18:49I mean, that,
1:18:52you know.
1:18:56So what I found in my studies
1:18:59was an exquisite practice
1:19:03for awakening
1:19:06in and I know it's Hotspur
1:19:08for me to be judging, but I'm just sharing with you
1:19:12practice.
1:19:13That said, take every part of your life how you go to the toilet,
1:19:16how you make love,
1:19:17how you keep your bills, how you make money,
1:19:19how you deal with your neighbor, all of it.
1:19:21We've got a rule
1:19:24that covers it.
1:19:26Now, the tricky thing about it is
1:19:29that if you lose the spiritual connection,
1:19:33those rules can become harsh law.
1:19:39And in some of the orthodox tradition, that is what has happened.
1:19:44And that's why many of us have seen those traditions
1:19:48very patriarchal, punitive, evaluative,
1:19:53threatening, fearful,
1:19:58as I understand it, within the Hasidic tradition,
1:20:02which has a
1:20:03Dionysian as well as an Apollonian aspect, there is a direct experience
1:20:11that is balanced with the imposition of the structure.
1:20:14And the more you like, if you say to me and I am an awakened
1:20:21don't steal
1:20:24and I'm hungry of steel
1:20:29unless you have a policeman on the corner.
1:20:33But if I awaken and see that when I steal, all of us get more paranoid
1:20:39and I have to live in it,
1:20:43then even if I'm hungry, I may not steal
1:20:47because I realize the implications of it.
1:20:50You're not doing it to them.
1:20:51You're doing it to us.
1:20:53And I don't want to live in a world of thief.
1:20:58And you start with where you are.
1:21:07So in that sense, as you start to have direct experiences
1:21:11of the intimacy with God or Spirit,
1:21:15then you the whole reason for doing the purification is change.
1:21:19Because the more you do of them, the closer you're going to get.
1:21:21And it's and it's you see that that's what your business is
1:21:25in life.
1:21:32Now, another part of Judaism that was somewhat I hadn't estimated
1:21:37as powerfully as I now think it is
1:21:40was the role of community
1:21:43and family.
1:21:50It's interesting
1:21:51that on the days of the Day of Atonement, when you're reciting those sins, it's we
1:21:58and other words, you're taking everybody's sins
1:22:00as we're all in it together.
1:22:09Fact There's a in the Talmud, there's a discussion of what
1:22:13you should do if somebody says, Look,
1:22:16because you're supposed to protect life, somebody comes along and says,
1:22:19I want to do this. And they say, look, it's dangerous.
1:22:21Don't do it.
1:22:21And they say, No, I want to do it.
1:22:23I'm going to do it.
1:22:24At that point, you are to flog them for rebelliousness
1:22:33because we're all in it together
1:22:36Now. In that sense,
1:22:39I realized that me, as somebody called
1:22:42Ram Dass, who was born of a Jewish mother
1:22:46and a Jewish father and was bar mitzvahed and confirmed
1:22:50It's hard for people to hear
1:22:54the way it is not a betrayal to the community
1:23:07and to the extent that it has.
1:23:11I mean, I read articles in which it says I have
1:23:14I have led more people away from Judaism than anybody else.
1:23:21And it was not certainly an intention
1:23:25to lead people away from Judaism.
1:23:29It was responding to the truth of my own heart,
1:23:33and I just don't have too much choice in that matter.
1:23:35And that is called lack of humility in Orthodox Judaism.
1:23:49Now, the light of the of the
1:23:54Jewish tradition is that there are different strokes for different folks.
1:23:59There is reformed Judaism and conservative
1:24:02and orthodox
1:24:07and the hazards and the reconstructions.
1:24:10And on and on.
1:24:16And I had a sense that when all the rabbis from many of these different traditions
1:24:19met with the Dalai Lama
1:24:22in India
1:24:26that Shlomo was
1:24:27referring to,
1:24:31I think that they saw from his point of view
1:24:35that although there are many Tibetan schools,
1:24:38there, Tibetan Buddhist,
1:24:43and he was saying to the different schools of Judaism,
1:24:46acknowledge instead of saying our schools better than your school,
1:24:50recognize that all the schools are there and they're part of Judaism
1:24:54and they're all there to bring people to God
1:24:57and appreciate individual difference
1:24:58instead of condemning it.
1:25:09Another thing that I always get when I get close to Judaism
1:25:12is the appreciation of studying.
1:25:17And when you think about studying the Torah at the four levels,
1:25:22the literal level, the hinted at level,
1:25:24the search for a level and the esoteric level.
1:25:29Can't you hear all those Talmudic scholars
1:25:34ferociously debating each other, wrestling with each other,
1:25:38searching for the meaning of the Torah?
1:25:45What it's saying is this is the word of God.
1:25:49If you keep studying it and studying it and studying it, you get into deeper
1:25:53and deeper understandings of it,
1:25:54and in the process of studying it, it will transform your life.
1:26:07And by following the external structures, because the net has been spread
1:26:11wide to involve all the priest class, it's saying
1:26:15do the behavior, even if you don't understand it.
1:26:18Heschel calls it spiritual behaviorism.
1:26:22If it doesn't have a direct experience, it's too superficial.
1:26:27It it's done out of fear instead of out of love.
1:26:30It's done out of fear that comes from separation rather than out of love
1:26:36that comes from
1:26:39recognizing the unity
1:26:41of all things.
1:26:46May my child's I shine with Torah
1:26:52the instruction
1:26:53to bring so much love to those words
1:26:56in the way you study
1:27:01what Orthodox Judaism offers
1:27:06is regularized, mystical experience
1:27:10it tries to find.
1:27:11And the hazards do this so beautifully.
1:27:14I think
1:27:16it tries to find the balance between
1:27:19the transcendent internal experience and the way in which
1:27:23you bring that back into the form of living your life in such a way
1:27:29that you are a collaborator with God
1:27:32in making the world
1:27:36tikkun olam and in redeeming the world
1:27:43you shall love the Lord
1:27:44your God with all your heart,
1:27:48with all your might, with all your soul.
1:27:51That's the practice right there.
1:27:53That's it.
1:27:57Once you have awakened and you understand it isn't the way you thought it was,
1:28:02what else is there to do?
1:28:06What else?
1:28:07Go ahead.
1:28:08Makes them more money, gets more power.
1:28:10Have some more. Do this, do that.
1:28:12But unless all that is part of this
1:28:15covenant,
1:28:19it's missing the mark, which is one of the definitions of sin.
1:28:23Missing the mark
1:28:26to the extent
1:28:27that you are celebrating your separateness instead of the balance
1:28:31between your separateness and your unity with God,
1:28:34you're out of balance.
1:28:37If you get too caught in the unity, you lose your uniqueness.
1:28:40Forget it. You blew it.
1:28:43You're out in la la land.
1:28:46On the other hand, if you get too caught in their individual differences,
1:28:50stuck to
1:29:00who says
1:29:03mysticism in theism
1:29:05is not dualism of subject and object,
1:29:08but the duality of the I and thou,
1:29:12the eye of the mystic
1:29:15that's you
1:29:16seeks to lose itself into the now of God.
1:29:22But this vow of God
1:29:25or after the eye of the Mystic has been merged in it.
1:29:29This absolute eye of God cannot pass
1:29:32away.
1:29:36The I am of the human must vanish so that the
1:29:39I am of God alone remains.
1:29:44Gandhi said, When you surrender completely into God,
1:29:47you find yourself in the service of all that exists.
1:29:50It becomes your joy and recreation.
1:29:55That's what the game is.
1:29:57That's what the processes.
1:30:12So the living edge in Judaism that I hear
1:30:16is the balance between the conditions
1:30:18that bring about direct experience, spiritual experience,
1:30:23and the external structures
1:30:25that optimize the chance you'll have.
1:30:30It's a balance
1:30:37about Shem Tov says.
1:30:40Reality is a series of meetings
1:30:42of which demands of the person
1:30:45what can be fulfilled by that person, just by that person.
1:30:50And just in this hour,
1:30:53the balsam tub saying, It's perfect, you're doing fine.
1:30:57You are the absolute
1:30:58perfect, neurotic underachiever at this moment.
1:31:02It's not some terrible error.
1:31:05Most people go around life thinking they are in some terrible error.
1:31:08If I was only standing here, I'd be free.
1:31:13The secret of Judaism is standing where you're standing
1:31:16and being free.
1:31:23And the beauty in Judaism of being carrying on a dialog
1:31:27with God, that your life becomes the dialog.
1:31:32And that's what I experience
1:31:33my life as a dialog, whether I call it with my teacher, my teacher is dead
1:31:38from 73 on, and what I experience now are the qualities
1:31:43of a liberated being
1:31:46and my life is in alignment with that process.
1:31:48Continually in everything I do that I can remember to do it
1:31:54because the suffering in the world is immense.
1:31:58And the only way one of the ways in which you must work to free
1:32:02others of suffering is for you to be free of suffering yourself,
1:32:07not of pain, not of adverse conditions,
1:32:11but of getting caught in suffering about it.
1:32:14Because if you're suffering, all you do is reinforce the trap of mind
1:32:19that somebody else has that has them caught in suffering.
1:32:23And one of the predicaments and I say this with all humility, I think
1:32:28one of the predicaments
1:32:29in Judaism is that it milks suffering rather than growing it.
1:32:35And I realize the power of the pain.
1:32:38I don't realize, but I, I understand
1:32:42the way which suffering has been part of the covenant with God,
1:32:46because in some ways God is saying, and I'm hearing
1:32:50many of you feel upset at what I'm saying, but that's okay.
1:32:57The Covenant is saying
1:33:00you are the priest class.
1:33:02Your purity is bringing you close to me and that you are living your life
1:33:07as a way of healing the entire world
1:33:10of everybody.
1:33:13And therefore you are suffering because you are chosen.
1:33:18Your sufferings are going to be really intense.
1:33:24And my understanding is you can be used by it
1:33:26or you can use it to get closer to God.
1:33:28And I choose to use my suffering to get closer to God.
1:33:31And the way I do it is by not getting caught in my own melodrama.
1:33:37And that doesn't mean turning off the pain of the broken heart.
1:33:42Finally, compassion is an action
1:33:45where your heart is breaking again and again
1:33:52and the incredible pain in another human being.
1:33:55And at the same moment inside you is a place of such equanimity
1:33:59and peace and faith in God
1:34:04and, strangely enough, joy
1:34:07to be part of the whole process of alleviating
1:34:09suffering.
1:34:14And all of that path is a potential in Judaism
1:34:18that is realized by some and not realized by many.
1:34:23Finally, I see that the tensions in Judaism are very constructive.
1:34:29I see that the tensions are quintessential for Jewish life.
1:34:34The tension of whether the Jews stay as a separate group
1:34:38or integrate, or simply
1:34:41because in a way it's the balance of those things that has given
1:34:44Judaism its staying power.
1:34:49It's a question of the tension between being separate from God
1:34:53and being one with God, which is what every Sadik is, is
1:35:02living moment by moment.
1:35:04The pain of the separation from the beloved.
1:35:10And yet you understand that we are separate and we are all part of God.
1:35:13And that balance of those two things is an incredible tension
1:35:17that is maximal creative.
1:35:23The tension between a traditional mysticism and an experiential mysticism,
1:35:33the tension between Torah, Judaism and social cultural
1:35:37Judaism, the tension between freewill
1:35:42and God's will.
1:35:53The tension, for example, in the state of Israel,
1:35:58between those that say
1:36:01that it is God's Word,
1:36:04that this land must be with the Jews,
1:36:09and that commitment to that land
1:36:11must take transcendence over
1:36:15saving human lives
1:36:18versus others who say
1:36:21if you read it right, God puts saving human lives
1:36:27ahead of having our land.
1:36:31It's interesting when the attachment to the storyline of the lineage
1:36:38leads one to act in ways that are not harmonious
1:36:42with everything one feels in one's deepest heart.
1:36:46That is a tension
1:36:49and are forces in both sides of that game
1:36:51that are very powerful and very deeply committed.
1:36:54If God came to you and said to you,
1:36:57Hold on to that house, even though other people may
1:37:00try to take it over, and somebody says, but that isn't fair.
1:37:07And you said, look, I don't know what's fair.
1:37:08God said it to me.
1:37:13That's a predicament.
1:37:15That's a tension in the system.
1:37:34So finally, one more thing I want to say is that
1:37:45those those there are people I've met in Montreal,
1:37:49in Vancouver, in New York that are in the Hoffer movement,
1:37:53in which women are playing a significant
1:37:55role.
1:37:58And I can see that there are movements afoot in Judaism
1:38:03that are reawakening the lightness
1:38:05and the joy of Judaism
1:38:10and bringing back the balance
1:38:11between the responsibility for fulfilling the laws
1:38:15in order to stay close to God and the joy of the direct experience.
1:38:21And all I know is that all the spiritual work I've done in myself
1:38:25has made me lighter and lighter and lighter in life,
1:38:29and that feels okay.
1:38:38I was in Santa Cruz a while back
1:38:39and a rabbi was in the audience and he said he raised his head, said,
1:38:44What have you gotten from your Judaism
1:38:46around us?
1:38:49And I thought about it that moment
1:38:53and I said, Well, there are three things that come to mind.
1:38:56One is that I understand that behind the many
1:39:00there is one.
1:39:04And the second thing is I understand that the mind, the intellect,
1:39:09the mind can be used as a path
1:39:12to bring one closer to God through study.
1:39:16And the third thing I've learned
1:39:19is how to live with suffering
1:39:22in a way that's compassionate.
1:39:28Now, as a result of preparing
1:39:31for this lecture, I see in Judaism
1:39:37the love affair between God and human.
1:39:42I see the role of support of community support, the strong
1:39:46or sangha of the community for Judaism
1:39:49and the family.
1:39:54I feel the path has one of balance between study of the Torah service
1:40:00and loving kindness to all things.
1:40:11I see that Judaism is a way of remaining
1:40:13in the present, and I think that Shabazz is great
1:40:22as a reminder,
1:40:23as a structured use of time to remind
1:40:26and awaken
1:40:31the boss.
1:40:32Shem Tov said.
1:40:34His father said to him as death approached,
1:40:37My child always remember that God is with you.
1:40:41Never let this thought out of your mind.
1:40:44Go deeper and deeper into it.
1:40:47Every hour and every minute
1:40:51and every place.
1:40:56That is an extraordinary beauty of this practice
1:41:00that is called Judaism.
1:41:03Thank you.
1:41:36Could we have some lights?
1:41:37More lights in the hall if there's anybody back there.
1:41:40Right. I'd be perfectly happy.
1:41:42If you want a few minutes of asking questions and
1:41:46I'll I.
1:41:48In the South Pacific, there was a girl
1:41:51that I was teaching English because it was a French island.
1:41:54And when she
1:41:56I point at the chair and she'd say chair and I point the table and she'd say, hey,
1:42:00when I point the floor and she looked at me, she'd say, I don't know.
1:42:05And I came back with that mantra
1:42:06from the South Pacific, so I'm ready to take your questions.
1:42:11I'm not.
1:42:14Yes, sir.
1:42:18I'll repeat the question for the other room.
1:42:20For anybody that didn't hear it
1:42:23the way in which you free
1:42:25yourself from personal suffering.
1:42:29Let's say you're growing old and you are suffering because you're growing old.
1:42:34It's an interesting one.
1:42:35Doesn't apply to anybody, but it's theoretically
1:42:39and now can you see that
1:42:42then lunch is ready and there's a wonderful
1:42:47vegetarian.
1:42:48Simmons
1:42:52and you get so busy
1:42:53eating it, you're not busy growing old.
1:42:56Okay.
1:42:58At that moment, you see your predicament.
1:43:00You see the way in which your own mind
1:43:04is what's causing the suffering,
1:43:07the phenomena of growing old, just growing all like I have
1:43:10these wonderful spots on my hand and I have these veins and bones.
1:43:15And I was 60. My body was 60 this year.
1:43:18I mean, have these spots that the poor Selena ad says
1:43:23and says they call these aging spots.
1:43:25I call them ugly,
1:43:28but for me, they call them ugly.
1:43:30I call them aging spots.
1:43:31And I think they're the appreciation of the phenomena
1:43:35of the universe as they're unfolding
1:43:38is possible when you are not clinging with your mind
1:43:42to how you think it ought to be for you to be happy.
1:43:45So ultimately, the way you work on yourself is to extricate your awareness.
1:43:51I'll give a technical answer. I can't go into it tonight.
1:43:53You extricate your awareness from identification
1:43:56with your own thought forms
1:43:59until are like depression.
1:44:02It's quite different from I'm depressed
1:44:05to this depression. Wow.
1:44:09Look At that depression,
1:44:11will he ever get over it or won't he?
1:44:14Poor Rubin.
1:44:17Ben. Hi, I'm Yosef. You hear that?
1:44:20You? Yeah.
1:44:26He asks
1:44:27how necessary it is to have a teacher or a
1:44:31a being.
1:44:32Obviously, if you can be around, it's not a jump at it, you know, grab it,
1:44:38hang out of the feet, watch him shout, tie shoelaces, the whole shtick,
1:44:41you know, If, on the other hand, you don't have that opportunity,
1:44:46that doesn't mean you've lost it.
1:44:48Because as the Barshim told said, you're in the perfect position
1:44:52that you're supposed to be at this moment.
1:44:54If you really trust the system you could spare, you could get enlightened
1:44:58through spending your life searching for your teacher.
1:45:01By the time you get your teacher, you don't even need it anymore.
1:45:04Okay?
1:45:05Because you finally realize you are your own teacher.
1:45:08Where are you going to be the final teacher that you say?
1:45:10That's a mensch?
1:45:11I really agree with As somebody who's resonating with that place in you,
1:45:14that's the deepest truth. That's how you know.
1:45:17And in
1:45:18the East, they say there are three ways to get to God.
1:45:21One is to God.
1:45:23One is to as a representative that you use
1:45:27for that, because that involves your human heart.
1:45:31And the other is to go inward, deep enough until you come to the same place.
1:45:35So you come to the spark of the divine
1:45:37right.
1:45:38So if you don't have an outside, go inside.
1:45:44Oh, she said that she's going to many temples and shows
1:45:48and she's never felt the juice or the shock or the energy
1:45:51she'd rather be out in nature.
1:45:55A President Elliott of Harvard
1:46:00said that the reason the Harvard is a repository of some knowledge is
1:46:04because the freshmen bring in a little and the seniors don't take any away.
1:46:09And and
1:46:16in the same way, when you go to shul
1:46:20to get it from an institutional setting,
1:46:24after a while, there's nothing left because everybody's taken it away
1:46:28as you yourself work on yourself.
1:46:30And yet spiritually connected, you come in and you bring it with you,
1:46:35and then you start to enlighten the space.
1:46:38You can take a prayer that you read.
1:46:41You go to a church or a temple and you listen to the prayer
1:46:43and people are singing it or reciting it like a shopping list.
1:46:47And then something happens to you and you begin to see that prayer is living truth.
1:46:52And you say it with that spirit.
1:46:55You invest the whole institution again.
1:46:57So your decision is whether that institution's worth saving,
1:47:00and if so, get on with it. Yes.
1:47:07The question is, do I think
1:47:08women need different practices from men?
1:47:12My my sense is that at the level of sexual difference,
1:47:20there are methods that most in harmony with the uniqueness of sex.
1:47:25And I think therefore, yes, there are different methods
1:47:30that a woman might find harmonious.
1:47:33It's interesting, like, for example, let me jump just to India for a second.
1:47:38In India, it's set up so that the
1:47:42the the man is considered somebody who gets into his mind a lot
1:47:48and he can do the practices
1:47:51that will get there,
1:47:56but he doesn't have the juice to do it on his own.
1:47:59The wife has the energy, the Shakti.
1:48:04She has two forces on her.
1:48:06She has a nesting grounding force in her.
1:48:09And she also
1:48:10he keeps fly it up and coming down and flying up and coming down all the time.
1:48:14And so the combination of the two of them is that her energy
1:48:19helps get him off and his getting off keeps both of them high
1:48:24and the two of them both are grounded enough through her
1:48:27to have babies and reproduce and keep the species going.
1:48:31So now I hear that and it's beautiful to me.
1:48:33It's not horrible. It's beautiful.
1:48:35And I mean, I can see how it can be used
1:48:37in a tremendously persecuted,
1:48:40bad way.
1:48:43But I do think there
1:48:44are individual differences and therefore I don't ever push anybody to do anything
1:48:48I'm doing.
1:48:49I say, this is what I'm doing.
1:48:50You've got to listen to your own heart. Yes.
1:49:00She said that she's noticed that in other in Eastern traditions,
1:49:04there is an inordinately large number Jews
1:49:07in the in the sixties.
1:49:09Many, many people, whether it was through chemicals or through the zeitgeist
1:49:13of the moment or what it was, many people had transcendent experiences
1:49:20and they experienced the living
1:49:22a connection to living spirit one way or another.
1:49:25And after that they started looking for systems
1:49:30that acknowledged what they were experiencing
1:49:32and gave them some help in working with that experience.
1:49:36And the predicament in Judaism is that although
1:49:39there are certainly exceptions to the rule, Judaism historically
1:49:43in the one Judaism
1:49:46that's available to most people in this society,
1:49:49has treated the
1:49:51the Kabbalah or the esoteric Judaism
1:49:55as available only to a few,
1:49:59and it has not been widely available
1:50:01in a living spiritual transmission.
1:50:04And so many of us went to other systems.
1:50:09My sense is that
1:50:17that the religion you grow up with
1:50:20is often the last
1:50:22in which you find the living spirit
1:50:27and that you got to go around
1:50:29the whole business before you can.
1:50:33Finally, if you were raised a Christian before you can finally find it,
1:50:37because you had a bad experience as a Catholic child
1:50:42or so on.
1:50:44And to me, just I when I am
1:50:47part of what you say, I'm returning.
1:50:50I don't know whether I'm returning the to practicing Judaism.
1:50:54I'm returning to my heart being open in the presence of Judaism and to loving it.
1:50:59Then I will do what practices are my practices in harmony
1:51:03with my intuitive heart
1:51:06questions?
1:51:07Yes, within
1:51:11Judaism there are obviously,
1:51:14as we've been talking about, methods for awakening.
1:51:18Okay,
1:51:21What I would like to do is bring people
1:51:25into the spaciousness of consciousness
1:51:29where they will be fully open
1:51:32to what is in their particular unique incarnation.
1:51:37And for somebody that was a Jew
1:51:40in the sense of in this culture with all that implies,
1:51:44that is something to be worked with
1:51:47in order to your incarnation.
1:51:50Just as taking care of my father was part of my honoring my inclination
1:51:55to honor and acknowledge Judaism does not necessarily
1:51:59mean that that ends up being your practice.
1:52:02But it might it may well be that as you open to your particular
1:52:07incarnation, you find that when you stop pushing it away
1:52:10within Judaism are practices that are profoundly
1:52:14in harmony with you because of the nature of your birth.
1:52:19But it also may be that as you study and open and honor them,
1:52:23you find that isn't particularly the path for you.
1:52:26And but if the denial it
1:52:29the denial of your of the fact that you have a lineage
1:52:33and that you were born into a Jewish lineage
1:52:37with that covenant has got to be explored in order to be free,
1:52:41you can't
1:52:42just walk away from it and make believe it doesn't exist.
1:52:46I have to honor my body,
1:52:49my family, my religion, my nation state, my ecosystem, all of it.
1:52:55I have to find peace at every one of those levels or I'm
1:52:58still stuck pushing it away or grabbing at it.
1:53:07Thank you very much.
1:53:08Great evening.
1:53:09Jerome Aleichem.

About this transcript

This page contains the full transcript of Ram Dass - Judaism and Spirituality by Baba Ram Dass, generated from the public captions YouTube serves with the video. The transcript has 13,720 words across 1,781 segments, with the original timestamps preserved so you can click any line to jump to that moment in the embedded player.

What you can do with it

Use the transcript to take notes, quote the speaker, build a study guide, generate a summary with ChatGPT or Claude via the YouTube Summary tool, or export it as a timed subtitle file with YouTube to SRT. You can also re-open it in the transcriber to translate the transcript into 100+ languages.

Free YouTube transcript tool

YouTube2Text is a free YouTube transcript generator — no signup, no daily limit. Paste any YouTube link and get the full transcript instantly, with timestamps, click-to-jump, translation to 100+ languages, AI prompts for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and exports to TXT, SRT, VTT, or Markdown.