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Ram Dass: Every experience is a vehicle for awakening or a vehicle for going to sleep. This is the bizarre thing that you're dealing with. The paradox, [outlined in] the Bhagavad Gita, which is a very good Hindu text, cautions about two things that keep catching you: One is the identification with being the actor, with being the doer, and the other is the identification with the fruits or the attachment to the fruits of the action. Like at this moment there is talking going on, and if I identify with being the speaker that forces you into being the listener.
People say to me, “Should I get psychotherapy?”
And I say, “As long as the therapist doesn't think they are only a therapist, because if they think they're a therapist, then you've got to be the patient.”
I mean, I remember when I was a therapist, when my patients got better, I used to punish them because I needed them [so I could] be a therapist. I needed them for me to be a therapist.
I'll be the therapist, you be the patient, you'll be a therapist, whichever doesn't matter. We'll play whatever parts we have to play, but we won't get lost in the drama of the action. We won't get lost in the actor.
Like, if I go outside and just walk down the street ahead of you all and then hide in the bushes and listen to what you say, what you think you heard me say, I'll absolutely climb the walls because I'll hear people saying that I said exactly the opposite things of what I thought I said, because each person is receiving what I'm saying through a set of filters based on their own needs and desires and perceptions.
This is an old story of psychology, that motivation affects perception. Like if three of us are driving through a town and you are hungry, but you don't want to admit it because none of us wants to eat. At the other end of town, if I say, “What was in that town, what was it? What do you remember about that town?”
You say, “Well, there was a McDonald's and there was a health food store I saw down the street.” And now I'm an old car buff, you see, and so I'm driving my car and I'm listening for the squeaks and I'm figuring where it's going to have to be towed to next. So, if you ask me what was in the town, I'll say, “Well, it was a Shell station and there was a foreign car service.”
And if the third member is horny, what they will remember is who was standing under the clock. That's what they'll remember of the town. Each of us went through a different town...
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