Ram Dass. - The only dance there is talks given at the Menninger Foundation, Topeka, Kansas, 1970, and at Spring Grove Hospital, Spring Grove, Maryland, 1972.

Editors' Statement

Chapter One

THE PATH OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Chapter Two

MEHER BABA AND BHAKTI YOGA

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

KARMA AND REINCARNATION

About the Author

Back Cover

This book came into being in steps. Ram Dass gave a lecture to a group of health sciences professionals in Topeka, Kansas, in 1970. After it was taped, it seemed desirable to make it more available. It was transcribed and the lecture was published in two issues of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology in 1970 and 1971. We felt that Ram Dass's amalgam of Western training and Eastern experiences would be highly valuable to our readers. Their response from the beginning has been very gratifying.

In 1972 Ram Dass gave a different lecture to another professional group at Spring Grove State Hospital in Baltimore. We were sent the tape and given permission to transcribe, edit, and print the lecture. Again response was so impressive that we decided both lectures should be made available to a wider public. Doubleday agreed to publish them in the present volume, thus assuring a comprehensive distribution at a reasonable cost to the reader.

Historically, one spiritual system after another has been assimilated in another culture in such a way as to modify the form of the discipline without diminishing its essence. In this respect, Ram Dass has been especially effective in helping Americans and other Westerners feel "at home" in what has been considered a "foreign" tradition.

The Editorial Staff and Board of Editors are deeply grateful to Ram Dass for having given us permission to publish these lectures and for his generosity in turning over all royalties to the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.

ANTHONY J. SUTICH, Editor, and

JAMES FADIMAN, Associate Editor,

Journal of Transpersonal Psychology

Last evening, here in Topeka, as one of the journeyers on a path, a very, very old path, the path of consciousness, I, in a sense, met with the Explorers Club to tell about the geography I had been mapping. The people who gather to hear somebody called Ram Dass, formerly Richard Alpert, have somewhere, at some level, in some remote corner, some involvement in this journey. All that I can see that we can do with one another is share notes of our exploration. I can say, "Watch out, because around that bend the road falls off sharply to the left ... stay far over on the right when you do that."

The motivation for doing this is most interestingit's only to work on myself. It's very easy to break attachments to worldly games when you're sitting in a cave in the Himalayas. It's quite a different take you do of sex, power, money, fame, and sensual gratification in the middle of New York City in the United States with television and loving people around and great cooks and advertising and total support for all of the attachments. But there is the story of a monk who got very holy up on the mountain until he had some thousands of followers. After many years he went down into a city and he was in the town and somebody jostled him. He turned around angrily and that anger was a mark of how little work he had really done on himself. For all the work he had done he still hadn't clipped the seed of anger; he still got uptight when somebody pushed him around.

So that what I see as my own sadhana (my work on my own consciousnessit could also be called my spiritual journey) is that it is very much cyclic. There are periods of going out and there are periods of turning back in, periods of going out and periods of going back in. Just as living here in the market place is forcing things into the forefront, so sitting in a room by myself for 30 or 40 days in a mountain is forcing other things to be confronted. Each hides from the other, each environment hides from the other sets of stimulus conditions. For example, in the commune we've been designing up in the mountains of New Mexico, where I ran an ashram for awhile this winter, the design has four components to it which are roughly related to the solstices.

THE FOUR COMPONENT DESIGN OF ASHRAM

For one period, a person would be in the hermitage on the top of the hill where he would be going deepdiving deep within. He would be totally alone in solitude in a hermitage. The food is left outside the door. In the one I ran this winter, the people would go in for up to nineteen days. The first time they went in I let them take books and pictures and weaving and all of their things (their pet kind of cream cheese or whatever it was they needed). For the second round we changed the game a little and all they took in was their sleeping bag. They walked into a room, closed the door, and for the next ten days, fire and wood and food were left outside and there was a jug of water. They were all protected, all taken care of. There were no phones to answer, no mail. We were protecting them and giving them that chance to get free of all the stimuli that keep capturing consciousness all the time so that one keeps saying, "If it weren't for ..." Well, we did that. We created that place.

A second part of the four-point cycle is that a person lives in a commune, an ashramite lives in the commune ... that is, he takes care of the gardens, the babies, the goats, cooks the food, chops the wood, does Karma Yoga. That is, Karma Yoga among what's called satsang or sangha, that is, a community of other beings who consciously know they are working on their own consciousness. In Buddhism there is a traditional thing you do which is to take the three refuges. There is a chant, which means, first, "I take refuge in the Buddha," I take refuge in the fact that a being can become enlightened, that is, a being can get free of any particular state of consciousness (attachment). Second, "I take refuge in the Dharma," I take refuge in the law, in the organization of the universe, the laws of the universe, you can also call it karma. And third, "I take refuge in the Sangha," in the community of other people, of monks on the path, the community of other people who are seeking. Thus, when you define yourself as a seeker after sensual gratification then you surround yourself with other people who are seekers after sensual gratification. When you define yourself as an intellectual you often surround yourself with intellectuals. When you define yourself as a seeker after consciousness, you start to surround yourself with other seekers after consciousness, because in that phase being around such people really gives you a kind of environmental support.