Ram Dass

When you were born, who was born?

Posted September 19, 2017

When you are born, something is born into something. You are born into a body, and into prefrontal lobes, and a whole lot of stuff, and you start to learn and get socialized.

Well what was born?

You could say DNA got born, or if you want to integrate East and West, you could say ‘karmic’ DNA got born, a sort of psychic, free predisposition to be a certain way, to have energy and certain patterns of thought; all of our individual differences basically. But there’s another way to come at it. Just bear with me, it’s a little bit confusing, but I think I haven’t lost you completely. If you look at me on the physical plane, you see a 63 year old balding, handsome man, an attractive gentleman we are called at this age. Then, if you shift your receiver to another channel, and you look up here, you see a teacher, you see a psychologist, you see my social roles, you see a neurotic, you see whatever you see – humorous, playful, nice fellow. Shift it again, and you look and you see an Aries, and see, that’s sort of the low astral. You say, “Oh, he’s an Aries. Oh that explains everything. I wondered why I was feeling this strange thing about him, he’s an Aries, you know…

What time were you born?” Say that’s channel 3. You meet a lot of people on Channel 3 these days; and that’s where the “art” types are. Then we go up the next channel, where you look into the eyes, and it’s like the windows of the soul; that consciousness; the idea that there’s somebody in there, behind the individual differences, that’s just like you, like a fellow soul.

“You in there?”

“I’m in here.”

“How’d you get into that one?”

And you see a soul or an entity packaged in individual differences, packaged in an “art” type, packaged in a body, in psychodynamics, and you are fellow souls, and you’re meeting people as souls.

Well the seventh and eighth levels are all soul levels, that is, you experience yourself not as your physical, psychological self, but as your spiritual self – a separate spiritual self. Souls are separate from one another, but you also experience on these planes the wonder of the universe, the interrelationship of all things, but where you’re experiencing it from is still dualism. You’re still a soul experiencing the rest of it.

I’ve got to tell you that there are still nine and ten, we’re only up to eight, and we seem to have gotten pretty far out. We’ve certainly gotten into what people call the ‘spiritual realm’, which has to do with powers, wisdom, knowledge, interrelationships, seeing, etc. The predicament of why it’s in dualism is there is still somebody experiencing it. There is still something that is separate from something, and the predicament is what you as a group face…. I think it’s characterized by some snide thing a Buddhist says, “To seek the mind with the discriminating mind is the worst mistake.”



-Ram Dass