If You Think You Are Enlightened, Spend A Week With Your Family - Ram Dass

If you think you are enlightened, go spend a week with your family, Ram Dass says. And I agree completely. When I am by myself roaming about the world, I feel like I am so mature and awakened, and then I go to my family and I realize, oh boy, I still have such a long way to go.

Transcript

Hey guys,

I hope that you guys are doing amazing wherever you are in the world.

My name is Boomshakha and I welcome you to my channel.

I'm really grateful for all the support that you guys have been sending my way.

And in this one I wanted to speak to you guys about enlightenment and a quote that necessarily I don't know who actually said it.

I don't remember now but I've heard this repeated many times.

Something like,

If you think you're enlightened,

Go and spend a week with your family or with your parents and you'll realize soon enough that you're not.

And I've been actually noticing this within myself.

It's one of the best things about my life that I actually get to go visit my family whenever I want.

I'm really lucky that they allow me to visit them and then live with them,

Stay with them whenever I want.

There's no compunction about it,

There's no problem with that,

I can always come visit and they're really open to the idea of it.

But I really do notice that even though I can pretend,

Pretend is really the true word for it,

Even though I can pretend to be mature and knowing and awakened when I am on my own,

When I'm surrounded by friends or acquaintances,

When I'm in Chiang Mai,

When I'm eating vegan food and walking around being kind and generous to the people around me,

Even though I can pretend very easily to be all of those things,

To be awakened,

To be spiritual,

To be generous,

To be mature when I am around that situation.

As soon as I come back home,

I realize that I slip right back into that zone of immaturity and knowing that I have a long,

Long way to go before I ever reach any form of awakened,

Wickedness or of enlightenment of any kind,

It's actually so far away from me and I'm so far away from it that even though I've made a lot of progress,

And yes I will not negate that,

I have moved,

I've come a long way I should say that,

I have made progress but I do realize as soon as I come back home and I deal with my parents and my family and all that triggers all the past issues and traumas come up,

I notice that it's very difficult for me to maintain my mature,

And I'm saying this in quotation marks really,

My mature stance because I don't feel that way anymore,

I feel like a child again,

I feel like all of those different issues that come up make me feel like a child or bring me back,

Pull me backwards again.

So any kind of progress,

If I've made any progress through the meditation I do or all of the work that I do upon myself,

All the healing and all of the TRE and all the different things that I take upon myself every single day when I am in Chiang Mai,

Thailand,

I notice that I really step backwards when I come back to my family because they really know me so well and they see me truly to be who I am and they also know who I was in the past and they know where I've come from and so in that regard it's very easy for them to not only trigger me obviously but to make me feel more emotional,

To bring up stuff that makes me feel more emotional,

To bring up things that makes me feel like I'm stepping back in time and I realize that no matter how mature or spiritual or whatever I thought of myself,

Whatever high opinion I had of myself,

Wherever I'm in the world,

I know all I need to do to become humble again,

To come back down to the ground,

To come back earth to earth,

To be very not arrogant at all is to come back and visit my family and that's one of the things that I like to do on a regular basis because it really truly teaches me who I really am.

I notice that I can switch off a lot of that stuff when I'm around friends or acquaintances,

When I'm far away from family but I notice that as soon as I come back here,

As soon as I come back to Toronto where my family is,

I notice that all of that stuff comes up again.

Now,

What's the point of this?

Why am I talking about it?

Because I notice that a lot of the tenants about meditation is to take it off the mat,

Right?

We're not just doing it,

We're not just doing yoga or we're not just meditating in order to stay on the mat and be these perfect accomplished yogis to have these beautiful sleek bodies or to be able to concentrate with attention on one particular thing for the rest of eternity.

They're not really doing that for that.

In the beginning,

It might feel like it's the only reason we're doing it and we want to run away from the real world and we want to move to an ashram somewhere,

We want to give up all of our worldly possessions and we want to hide from the universe,

From the real world and we want to just meditate all day long.

I know I have these moments as well where I think I wish I could just give up everything,

I wish I could just move to an ashram somewhere in Chiang Mai or to a monastery,

To a Buddhist monastery with monks surrounding me and just meditate all day long,

Forget about everything and just stay there and just immerse myself in that lifestyle.

I have had moments like that where I think I wish I could do that.

And then I realized that the reason why we meditate,

Why I'm meditating is not so that I can run away from the world,

It's so that I can actually live in the world in a better way.

I want to be able to have a better relationship with everyone around me.

I want to be able to use my meditation,

Use the person I become because of the meditation in order to remain calm,

In order to remain serene,

In order to remain Buddha-like when I'm in a situation which would have triggered me in the past.

There's many situations where I come into where normally in the past I would have started yelling and fighting and screaming and running away and all that stuff.

But now I still yell and scream a little bit but less so.

And I still maybe have these moments where I'm like,

I wish I could just run away but less so.

And I have a few more moments of being present and a few more moments where I am calmer than I was before.

And a few more moments where I look at myself and think to myself,

All right,

Yeah,

You know what?

Yes,

You have a long way to go but you have also come a long way.

You forget that sometimes.

I know I forget that as well.

A lot of times I will come to my family and I'll visit them and be like,

Oh my God,

All of this work that I'm doing on myself,

Did it do anything?

Have I changed anything about myself?

Am I still the same person that I was before?

Have I not changed at all?

And I really feel bad about myself and I feel terrible.

I think to myself,

What am I doing?

Why am I wasting so much time meditating and learning and growing and doing all that self-healing work?

Why am I wasting all that time and I'm still the exact same person?

But then I do notice myself doing certain things that I do differently than I would never have done before.

I do notice myself calming myself down a little bit more,

Being more present,

Saying certain things that I would never have said before,

Not saying certain things that I would have said before.

And little by little,

Certain things are changing.

And so I really wanted to not only congratulate myself,

Which I am doing right now,

But also congratulate all of us,

All of us on this journey that we're meditating every day,

Or we're doing all the self-healing work,

All the work that we do on ourselves.

Yes,

It's not going to make us perfect.

And we're a long way away from that enlightened being that we wish to be,

If that's what your goal is.

But you have to realize that the person that you were 10 years ago is definitely not who you are right now.

That person that I was when I was a teenager,

Where I would throw a temper tantrum and I'd run around and I'd cry and I'd slam doors and do all that stuff,

At least I'm not doing that anymore,

Right?

I mean,

I have made progress.

And so a lot of this journey is just about those little incremental progress moments where you sit down and suddenly realize,

Yeah,

You know what?

Okay,

Many things are the same.

I have the same hair color and I look almost exactly the same,

Or I have the same way of dealing with relationships.

But in this particular way,

I have improved and I have been able to use this journey,

This meditation or whatever might,

Whatever you guys are doing with yourself,

I have been able to use it to improve myself by that little smidgen,

That little bit that I can really notice makes a difference in my relationships with my family and my friends,

With my acquaintances.

Now,

Of course,

I'm not saying that again,

We're not perfect and the changes sometimes seem so slow.

I mean,

Sometimes I look at myself and I think to myself,

I've been meditating for 12 years now,

I should be much better than I am right now,

But I'm not.

And there's a lot more that I have to learn,

A lot more than I am going to grow towards.

And if I am alive for a period of time in the future,

I would like to keep on meditating,

Keep on growing,

Keep on learning,

Keep on becoming more and more calm,

Keep on becoming more and more present and keep on losing a lot of these triggers that used to trigger me before,

But don't anymore or don't as much anymore,

Right?

And that's the only thing that you can really do on this path.

All you can say to yourself is,

Yeah,

You know,

I have a long way to go,

But look at how far I've come.

Look at how far I've come from where I was in the past,

That individual that I used to be,

Oh my God,

I'm so different right now,

Right?

And so that's all I want to keep on telling myself because it's very easy for us to see the long,

Long way that we have to go before we get to be that perfect being that we want to be,

That enlightened being that we want to be.

But we forget to look back and look at how many hundreds of thousands of steps we've taken away,

Far away from that person that we used to be.

The real reason why we started doing this,

The meditation,

The self work is because we looked at ourselves in the past and we realized this is not who I want to be.

I want to be better than this.

Well,

You are better than that now and you're going to keep on getting better and better and better every single day.

That's what this whole thing is all about.

That's the fun thing about it.

You're never going to stop growing.

You're never going to stop changing.

It's only going to get better and better and better.

And that's why we're on this path.

So I want us all to congratulate ourselves in this moment and take this moment to say,

Yes,

I have made a lot of progress.

Yes,

I am a different person.

Yes,

I have a long way to go,

But I can congratulate myself on all the progress that I have made till now.

I hope that you will do that for yourself as well.

And again,

Thank you for listening.

If you have any questions,

Obviously,

Please comment below and I shall see you guys next time around.

Bye for now.

Reviews

Loved this! Meditation as a way of life. Appreciating where we are in this moment and knowing it's forever changing. Thank you🙏😊