Break the Cycle of Addiction - Ram Dass
Aug 23, 2023
The Love Serve Remember Foundation (LSRF) is dedicated to preserving and continuing the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba and Ram Dass. The foundation facilitates the continuation of these teachings through online courses, blog content, films, podcasts, social network channels and collaborative projects with conscious artists and musicians. To learn more or support, please visit https://www.ramdass.org/
Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert; April 6, 1931 – December 22, 2019), also known as Baba Ram Dass, was an American spiritual teacher, guru of modern yoga, psychologist, and writer. His best-selling 1971 book Be Here Now, which has been described by multiple reviewers as "seminal", helped popularize Eastern spirituality and yoga in the West. He authored or co-authored twelve more books on spirituality over the next four decades, including Grist for the Mill (1977), How Can I Help? (1985), and Polishing the Mirror (2013).
Ram Dass was personally and professionally associated with Timothy Leary at Harvard University in the early 1960s. Then known as Richard Alpert, he conducted research with Leary on the therapeutic effects of psychedelic drugs. In addition, Alpert assisted Harvard Divinity School graduate student Walter Pahnke in his 1962 "Good Friday Experiment" with theology students, the first controlled, double-blind study of drugs and the mystical experience. While not illegal at the time, their research was controversial and led to Leary's and Alpert's dismissal from Harvard in 1963.
In 1967, Alpert traveled to India and became a disciple of Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba who gave him the name Ram Dass, meaning "Servant of Ram," but usually rendered as simply "Servant of God" for western audiences. In the coming years, he founded the charitable organizations Seva Foundation and Hanuman Foundation. He traveled extensively giving talks and retreats and holding fundraisers for charitable causes in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. In 1997, he had a stroke which left him with paralysis and expressive aphasia. He eventually grew to interpret this event as an act of grace, learning to speak again and continuing to teach and write books. After becoming seriously ill during a trip to India in 2004, he gave up traveling and moved to Maui, Hawaii, where he hosted annual retreats with other spiritual teachers until his death in 2019.null
When we were born, like Elizabeth Spring Dow,
who was born here yesterday,
we come into the world,
we come from being fully at home
and feeling that release that comes.
We have a little shadow of it
when we come home at the end of the day,
those of you that have a home,
and put your feet up or relax or have a cup of tea
or whatever that is, that feeling of coming home
or coming to a safe space
or feeling back at peace or at one.
And when we get separated from that,
which, and that separation, I want to keep reiterating,
is created by the mind.
That's what the basic issue of the ignorance
that is the root of suffering
that the Buddha keeps pointing out.
The basic root of suffering is thought,
the clinging of the mind
to things which separate one from all of it.
Now, once that separation has occurred,
there is incredible pain.
We can call it being thrown out of the Garden of Eden,
we can call it original sin, whatever you want to call that.
I mean, there are different metaphors
within different systems.
But there is incredible pain.
And in some profound way,
all of our actions henceforth
are an attempt to return to that
being, for me, under Maharaji's blanket
or in the heart of God or in the hand
or being the one, coming back into the one.
And we develop a whole set of techniques
that we say make us feel good,
make us, give us a feeling for the moment of yeah, ah.
And some of those give us that moment so intensely
and the rest of our life is so,
so much pain of our separateness
and so devoid of that feeling
that once we find one of those things,
for example, it might be a moment of sexual orgasm,
it might be a moment of surfing
when you transcend the dualism between you and nature.
It could be when you're doing something like cooking,
the way you turn into just the joy of the process.
It could be, it could be any number of things,
it could be any number of things.
That when that occurs and it works,
it reinforces the behavior
and you start to do that behavior more and more
because it feels good,
it takes away the pain of the separateness.
And the use of drugs, the use of material possessions,
the use of relationships, all of it,
when you get busy and get obsessed with relationships
and wanting to get closer and closer to somebody,
it is trying to get to the place
where you come back into that oneness.
It is, it's that yearning and you can feel it permeate
the universe of people's consciousness.
So when you look at addictions from that point of view,
you see that it's not like evil,
it is just an attempt to get back.
The problem is that most behaviors that get you back
is like what Maharaji said about drugs.
He said, it will allow you to be in the presence of Christ,
but you can only stay two hours.
He said, it would be better to become Christ than visit him.
And that's what you find out with most addictive things,
that they give you a short rush,
but they don't allow you to remain at home.
They just allow you the taste of it.
And then the minute you get thrown out
because you weren't wearing the wedding garment,
the minute you go back to heaven, but you can't stay
because you didn't come in through the right way,
you end up feeling like I did something wrong, I'm bad.
And then that starts a reaction of mind
so that you come down, then you feel guilt,
I must be bad, I should have done something else.
Why didn't I do the practices
that would have allowed me to stay there
rather than the thing that's short term?
Because you see your predicament.
What happens is that the opportunity
for the immediate gratification,
it's like what's called in the psychology,
the choice of the little candy bar now
or the big candy bar later.
And with little children,
they'll always grab for the little candy bar now
because they want what they can get now.
They don't have any delay of gratification.
And spiritual practices compared to having sex
or compared to taking Coke or something
is more like delayed gratification
versus immediate gratification.
So when you start to stand back and see your predicament
and see what you're doing,
there is a way from a spiritual perspective
in which you begin with that slight bit of awareness
to extricate yourself from the chain of reactivity
that we're talking about.
The chain of reactivity that goes from
I'm feeling this hunger
and then I'll go for the gratification
and then, ah, and then the coming down
and then, oh ----,
and then I should have done it the other way
and then I'm bad.
And there's a whole chain of thoughts that go on.
Every one of those is just keeping the whole process going.
And as you develop the spaciousness,
you start to look at where you can intervene in the process
of the sequence that goes on.
As the awareness gets deeper,
you intervene at different places in the sequence.
For example, the yearning, the hunger starts
and like for me, for example,
I can, I've had strong addictions to food
so that when I am feeling unloved,
I'll eat and I'll get fat.
It's a pattern.
And then I'll hate myself.
Loathing because of my body and so on.
And I'll go through it.
Now I understand the psychodynamics of that at one level,
but let's take it from this point of view
of the mind for a moment.
The first place I began to intervene
was when Manindra, my meditation teacher, said,
Ram Dass, don't you see
that it's just old karma running off?
And I began to break in at the point
that after I had eaten too much to reduce my anxiety
because my mother fed me food when I was upset
and I learned that pattern and all that stuff,
I start to, instead of going into I'm no good
and revulsion and all the sequence,
I break the chain at that point
and then I just go back into my spiritual practices.
Okay, instead of carrying out that whole sequence,
I shortcut there.
As the witness gets stronger,
you start to go back in the chain further and further
until as the separateness is starting to come
and the feeling of hunger,
and as you're about to eat,
you start to notice the fact that you're about to do that
and your mind anticipates the whole sequence
and you, in a sense, begin to see the emptiness
of the form you're about to take.
And generally, when people come to me with addictions,
I'm inclined to say start doing spiritual practices.
Start doing the studies that will allow you
to see yourself in a new way,
that will allow you to understand
what that hunger is you're feeding in a new way,
to just get a little different perspective on it.
Don't worry about the addiction.
It will fall away when it will fall away.
And when you do it again, just notice it
and the one, the line I always use,
how poignant I am.
How poignant the human condition.
You know, I'm so gentle with myself.
And what I have watched is the patterns
of my obsessions and addictions have changed over time.
There's no doubt about that.
And yet I didn't deal with them directly head on
for the most part.
Because what you see is,
and this is something that I'm sure I create a lot of waves
in many people, including people that I love very dearly,
that I'm close to,
I see that a lot of the programs to deal with addiction
end up creating a new addiction to being not addicted,
that is as bad as the addiction itself.
That, I mean, when you meet somebody that says,
I haven't smoked in three years, two months,
10 days and four hours,
you realize that their mind is as stuck
as their mind was stuck in smoking.
Maybe they won't die of cancer,
they'll probably die of uptightness.
I mean, I'm being a little facetious,
but in general, I'm saying that dealing with things
that are, which you're caught in,
the minute you start to stop them,
you invest them in a way.
And so my suggestion is
that you just keep cultivating the practices.
And every time you don't,
see, when I, if I get up in the morning
and I got up and I decided to stay in the dream state
and not get up to do my sitting,
that could start a whole sequence of,
you're no good, you'll never get to God.
But in the time I'm saying,
you're no good, you'll never get to God,
I could have been doing mantra.
And when I realized, and I began to sit in meditation
and watch the sequence of my behavior,
I saw that all my recriminations
didn't help anything in particular,
they weren't really functional,
except trying to make me feel comfortable with myself.
And the better thing would be,
the minute I noticed that I've lost it,
or I've gotten caught, or I'm stuck,
or I just start to do something,
just pick up a holy book, do a mantra,
think of Maharaji, whatever, sing a song.
I mean, I'll start driving to town
and I'm gonna give a lecture,
and I start to get uptight.
Oh my God, do I know what I'm gonna talk about?
And it's all, it's a neurotic pattern,
I know it from years back, it's my,
I mean, I can give you a whole psychodynamic storyline
about what that's about.
I look at it and I think, ah, there it is.
At that moment, I start,
Shri Guru Charanasurao Jaraja Nijamanu Mukuru Sudari
Bhadano Raghubara Bhima Lajasu,
and six minutes later,
I'm in a different space than I was before.
Now, you could say from a psychological,
that's denial and you should work with that.
But the fact is that thus far,
what's happening is it's getting less and less,
and I'm able to hang in here now
with very little of that old anxiety
that used to be crippling.
It used to be crippling.
I've worked with some of it, but psychologically,
but a lot of it is just, it's become uninteresting.
It's just become uninteresting.
And I just flip gears immediately.
I flip gears because the minute you get lost
in identification with your personality
to the exclusion of identification with your soul,
right, that's what's happened.
You've lost it.
And there are a thousand times each day you lose it.
And if you get caught in your soul
to the exclusion of your personality,
you lost it equally as much.
And that's the balance of us as human beings.
Hello, I'm Mark, animator of After School.
I hope you enjoyed this inspiring message from Ram Dass,
who is one of my favorite speakers to illustrate.
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Thank you.