Ram Dass: Root Beer

Extricating Yourself from Attachment
https://www.ramdass.org/extricating-yourself-from-attachment/

Posted September 30, 2016

I often talk about one of my desires that is still very existent, the desire for root beer.

I would be sitting in the meditation room, being very holy, and I’m thinking about root beer. Now that’s an attachment. Sometimes I’m sitting in the meditation room and I’m not thinking about root beer, and the next moment I’m at my father’s refrigerator with a bottle tilted back drinking root beer, and I say to myself, “Damn you, you’re drinking root beer again, you’ll never become a Karma Yogi.”

Now you have to understand that statement, “Damn you,” and the drinking of the root beer are all attachments; the only part that’s helpful is the little witness inside that says, “Look at him drinking root beer, Look at him putting himself down for drinking root beer,” because the first step of karma yoga is to get free of the attachments to your own life by developing a witness.

Gurdjieff talks about the different ‘me’s’ in the body and how there is one ‘me’ that sets the alarm clock at night, and there is the ‘me’ in the morning who says, “Who the hell set this alarm clock?” We have thousands of these ‘me’s’ and there is one ‘me’ that watches all the other ‘me’s’. That’s it’s only game. It’s not trying to change any of the others, it’s not evaluating, and it’s not judging, it’s not the superego, it doesn’t care about anything, it just takes notes. It’s not even looking, it’s just noting, “Hmmm, there he is doing that.” That witness, that place inside you is your centering device, and that begins to be the work one does in oneself.

Once one understands there is a place in oneself that is not attached, the first job is to extricate yourself from attachment. Like I am doing a mantra now, it’s a Tibetan mantra and inside of me is going around “OM MANI PADME HUM; OM MANI PADME HUM.” That has been going on all day today, and that’s where I am living inside that place, and this guy that’s speaking to you is, “Look at him speaking; look at him speaking.” In other words, the path is the path of going, and I may be laying too much on you, but I’m really trying to share with you this stuff. The path is going from many subjects, and many objects, down to one subject, and all the rest object.

As long as you are in a human body, you are an illusion, but you can move in and out of various illusions, until finally you become “He, who is behind all illusion.”



– Ram Dass