Ep. 135 – Creation, Creativity and Spirituality

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Please take a moment to check in with yourself. Whatever's keeping you up at night, it's easy to feel like you have to figure it out on your own. The truth is, no one has all the answers, but having someone with you to listen to understand can make all the difference. Therapy can be a place to gain unbiased insight and support. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served more than 6 million people globally. They do the initial matching work for you, so you can focus on your therapy goals. You don't have to be on this journey alone. Find support and have someone with you in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/Romdos. That's better, H-E-L-P. Dot com/Romdos. Teaching meditation is its own skill. You don't need to be a master practitioner to begin learning how to guide others, but you do need real training. Join Buddhist Teacher David Nickdern and Professor Robert Thurman for a free online discussion on Tuesday, May 26th at 6 p.m. Eastern Time, exploring the role of the teacher in the Buddhist tradition, why lineage and transmission matter, and what it means to skillfully support others in meditation practice today. They'll also discuss Dharma Moon and Tibet Houses' mindfulness meditation teacher training program beginning in June 2026. You'll have a chance to ask questions, meet the teaching team, and find out whether the program might be a good fit for you. Visit DharmaMoon.com/friend. That's DharmaMoon.com/friend for more information and to reserve your spot for the free event on Tuesday, May 26th. [Music] Hi again, this is Raghub and this is Ramdas here and now. I've got a podcast from October 87, Creation, Creativity and Spirituality and before I get into a little bit of a description of what we're going to be listening to. I want to mention a couple of things as I have been saying and as you well know, if you've been listening to the podcast, I'll be here now, Network, not just Ramdas. 1440.org, 1440. Multiversity. Wow, we've been partners with them now, collaborating for quite some time. They have this fantastic retreat center near Santa Cruz, absolutely gorgeous and there is such a plethora. Isn't that a great word? So many events of all kinds that take place there that I really do urge you to get up on their website, 1440.org and check it out. Now I always, not always but I sometimes say to people and myself, you know, it's good to break habits. Every once in a while do something that you wouldn't normally do. Now at 1440, they have all sorts of people. Many of them who appear on the podcasts, certainly many of them have appeared on my other podcast, Mindrolling, which is on the network and they're just fabulous Dharma teachers. But suddenly I saw something. I don't know these people, but if 1440 is hosting them, they've got to be experts in their field and they're doing a retreat called immersive movement, Tom Myers and Karen Gertner. And why I caught my eye is on the subject line, they talked about body movement can change our inner state. And I thought, wow, that is so right. Of course, yoga provides that. Of course, Tegung provides that. But this seems like a really unique thing. It's taking place at the end of November, November 25 to 30. So just, hey, here's an opportunity, perhaps to change the habitual patterns of saying, I don't do that kind of stuff. Well, take a look at that, will you? Okay, that's 1440, everybody. To go to 1440.org. And also, I want to remind, Ramdoth's book came out just a few weeks ago from when this podcast airs, walking each other home with Ramdoth's and Mirabai Bush. And it is a conversation around love and death. And it is absolutely a wonderful book. And right here and now, I am suggesting you all think about not only getting the book for yourself, but this is a perfect holiday gift for a loved one or anyone, a coworker. And you can go to, and help out the foundation, love to remember foundation by purchasing it through Ramdoth.org and go to the shop. Okay. All right, creation, creativity and spirituality. Ramdoth starts this thing out, talking about Maharaji. And he tells you, this is not a new thing, but it's certainly a worthy thing of us to continue to delve into. What do you see, Ramdoth? It's all perfect, which is probably the toughest thing that Maharaji ever said to us, to fathom. Perfect. What's going on in this world? Sure doesn't seem perfect. And of course, that is from the relative duality, separation, paranoia, fear base that we live in a lot of the time that we could never see it as perfect. So he talks about this. So I think this is something in it here for all of us. And the perfection is in the perfection of the unfolding of the law. And in regards to one's own human heart and the nature of suffering, which is, this is what we all are faced with on a day-to-day basis, both our own and others who are suffering in the world. And if you embrace it enough in your being, in a different context, a context of compassion, joy, that process is one that allows you to be quiet enough so that you can look around and see it all and say, yes, it is all happening in a lawful way. Now admittedly, I ain't there and I'm railing out at the horrific stuff that's going on and I am not in any kind of equanimity and I am reacting. And again, what I believe I need to do and we all need to do is move to a place where we aim at something and that's why Maharaji who is for us in that body and without that body, the pinnacle of what a human being can be. And that is somebody who does perfectly harmonize with Dharma, with the law, with what is rather than what we want it to be rather than railing out against the suffering that we, and I mean collective humanity, cause. So there is something to aspire to and that's a bunch of what Ram Das is talking about here. He talks about, well once you realize this, you don't stop doing it, you know, the answer is not doing nothing, it is not doing nothing. The opportunity here is that beings that we have is we have the opportunity to choose to create out of this darkness, to work with this darkness, work with this stuff that you take birth with and that your, of course karma is an important byword here and you take birth into your own creation, Ramdas. As you realize, you are caught in your own creation and you work towards transforming that. And he talks about riding the edge between chaos and cosmos. You'll have to listen to this. I'm just, I'm spouting out a sound bite here, but there's a depth to what he's trying to say around that. And the same with talking about karma and grace being one. And that's around intervention of a being like Maharaji and lawful unfolding. How are they one and when are they not one? Oh, by the way, there's this great story. I think it's been in other podcasts that we put out. Ramdas on masculine at the jazz fest with Maynard Ferguson. I mean, it is such a great story. I guess I just like listening to them over and over. Maybe somebody out there is like, okay, we heard that one. Skip it if you don't like it, though, you know, there's nothing to do. So in terms of the work of transformation, in terms of talking about taking birth into your own creation. So extricating oneself from the personality is just lightning and loosening happen. So your personality becomes style rather than root identity. That's a huge one right there. And that's extricating is a great word. Just extricating yourself from clinging, reacting, fear. And suddenly you don't change into another person, but you are more of the style of that personality rather than identifying with it. That's a biggie right there. You know, how we talk about how we look, our model of reality, we look through that model to confirm everything in the world reflects our model, which is a problem. And he talks about a computer that is empty, that only optimizes, that optimizes on a constant basis. That was Maharaj. So as our minds get less grabby about what reality is, you feel the creativity that is available just out of the non-attachment to a model of what it is you are seeing all the time. You're not reacting constantly to phenomena. So this is a wonderful talk again. Can you imagine we've been doing this for years? And I know I say this over and over. How can he keep coming up with either different ways of saying the same thing or different explanations or completely different unique creative ideas? Talk about creation, creativity and spirituality. So this is Ram Das from October 1987. It's marvelous that we have this medial library that's so vast that they recorded everything he did just about, I think. Okay, Ram Das here and now and here we go. As your meditative practice or your devotional practices or your whatever your practices are for transcending your normal waking consciousness, transcending your identity with your body and your personality. As those techniques work and you are pulling back into the context in which you exist rather than identifying with your form. Your awareness becomes more embracing of the broader gestalt in which you are or the context in which you are operating. And that breath includes a deeper understanding, an intuitive understanding, not an intellectual understanding, an intuitive understanding of the laws under which you as a form are functioning. It's like the statement when Christ said, "Head you but faith you could move mountains." He didn't add if you had that faith and that wisdom you'd understand why you put them out in there in the first place. And you wouldn't be in such a rush to move it. You see that if you could, my guru used to say to me an interesting thing, he'd say, "We'd be sitting there." And this was at a time when Bangladesh was in a chaos, a turmoil, just terrible. And I kept wanting to take my Volkswagen microbus and drive over to Bangladesh and to help the people in Bangladesh. And Maharaj would call me up and he'd say things to me like, "Ram does, don't you see it's all perfect." Perfect? Perfect? What about Bangladesh? What about Biafra? What about, and I'd start a list. What about, what about the Holocaust? All the horrible things of inhumanity and suffering and torture and all that stuff I could think of. And he'd go, "Oh, like, don't you see it's all perfect." Now, most people, they'd say that, they'd be embarrassed to say that. What I heard from that was because he was so kind and he was so caring for people at the same moment, his awareness had stood back to the place where he could see the perfection of the unfolding of the law. And he could see that the way in which you as a creation were unfolding was as it could be and as it should be. It was all following funk. There wasn't an era, nobody had blown it. There wasn't a mistake. See, that's like the Job dialogue. And I have worked to quiet my mind enough. And I'm very much in the process of it and I fall on my face and I get up and I fall on my face and get up. But I have moments when I understand the perfection of it all. It's a certain way that one is with regard to one's own human heart and the nature of suffering in the world. That you have embraced it enough into your being in a context of joy. And this is too complicated to go into this morning. I don't, I think we can't go into it all. But that process is one that allows you to be quiet enough so that you can look around and see and say yes, yes. It's all happening in a lawful way. And then the question is, if you are a creator and the creation is all going along fine, what do you do? What's to do? One of the answers is there's nothing to do. There's nothing to do. And just the, now, if the manual threw me a curve one day, he said, well of course, he said, all of your systems are only relating to the beings which are working within the realm of karma. I said, you mean there are other beings? And he said, oh yes. It was like negative numbers. He said, oh yes. He said, these are only the beings that have chosen to create out of working with darkness or with resistance to light. He says, that's the creative choice to work. You create by working with darkness because the light is what you start from. And in order to have the thing manifest, you form resistance and stuff. And that's the stuff you mold with and you play with. And then as you awaken out of it, you come back into this, this, the totality, the light, the love, the truth, the harmony, whatever you, however you want to play with it. Now, I'm leaving little flaws in this discussion, but we'll leave them for the moment. You can raise me questions if you can find them. If you can see the whole circle of the game now, that you take birth into your own creation and in the course of the creation, one of the things that happens perfectly within the creation is the realization that you are caught in your own creation. That is a product of the whole process. That is, in other words, your awakening is lawful. It isn't on outside of the event. It wasn't some-- it wasn't-- it's interesting. At one point I said to my guru, aren't karma and grace the same thing? You can hear this question. It's a very interesting one. I mean, because in the system of grace, all of it is done through some divine intervention through grace. And karma is all just lawful unfolding. And I said, isn't it lawful? Like the fact that I met you, Maharaji, isn't that-- somebody says, what grace did you met your guru? I said, what do you mean grace? It was the lawful unfolding. It was my time to meet him and his time to meet me. And there was no grace about it, which is not a good thing for a bhakti to say, devotional yoga. And his answer to me was when I said, aren't grace and karma the same thing, he said, it's not something I can discuss in public. And he never talked about it after that. So I guess I was too public for him to talk. I wasn't ready. No. Join the club. The best questions you don't have answers for, I'll tell you. So the circle is that you take birth, you get lost, you go through the curriculum in the process of the curriculum, you start to see through. It starts to have-- the fabric starts to have a kind of a thinness to it where you start a stick your nose through it and you can see through it with one eye. Now, this is an interesting moment when you start to see through the veil and start to come back into your own creativity as opposed to your own creation. Because there's an ambiguity as to which side is the right side to be on. I once went to a jazz festival in Newport, Massachusetts some years back with a friend they made in Ferguson, who was a jazz trumpeter and his wife and Tim Larry. And somebody had given us a little bottle of pills, which they told us were something called masculine. And we'd never had that before. And most of the chemicals we'd had acted within about 20 minutes. So masculine didn't, however. And so before Maynard went on stage and we were going to walk around, we were all backstage with the musicians. And there was a great big curtain around, big canvas thing. And then the audience was inside. And we passed out the masculine and we all took some masculine. And then I was left with a bottle. And so after 20 minutes nothing happened. So I figured it didn't work. So I took another dose. And then nothing worked after another 20 minutes. So by the time it worked, it was a different realm for many days, actually. And so I was walking around the outdoor-- I was walking around the outside, which is where all the band members were. And it was the in place to be, you understand. I mean, you had a past that said you could be back with the musicians. And I came to this little hole in the canvas. And I looked out. And there was somebody else looking back at me. And he said to me, do you want to get in? And I said to him, I'm in. [LAUGHTER] See, and it was exactly that's the place you get to. Where people that are deep in their personalities say to you, when you start to get out of it, dissociation, don't you want to come back into your personality? And you're in another place. And you're saying, I'm getting out of my personality. And the question depends. And it's interesting, because, I mean, in a way, Esteline is right at the interface of that. You have people going in both directions. People that absolutely are delighted with their personalities. And they're changing the chair arrangements. And they're changing the drapes. And they're changing the-- if we put the vase over there, and I went away, and I want an Esteline experience I had, I redid the sofa. [LAUGHTER] And it's like they just changed the nature of their prison cell all the way. And-- because as you start to extricate yourself from identification, you begin to see the whole nature of the history of his story unfolding. It's like, to me, whatever this awareness is, I mean, because I'm speaking through this mouth, and I have this charming personality, you identify me with this personality and this body. But that's merely the vehicle through which we're meeting. And your confusion about me makes you treat me. And if I am not very conscious, I'll buy into your projections, and I'll start to identify with my personality again, or with my body, because that's what we keep doing to each other. And what I notice has happened to me is that as I extricate myself from my identification with my personality variables so strongly, they start to-- that process, which is, again, lawfully happening, has its effect on the tenacity with which the personality variables stayed a certain way. That is, that has its effect, and those personality variables start to change. And they start to lighten and loosen and be in relationships to things in a different way. And as I said last night, they become style. They become your style rather than your root identity. They're merely stylistic ways for you to be informed. As the awareness pulls back, one of the things you see is the way in which your mind creates models of reality and expectations about what's going to happen next, which is a way in which you keep control as a somebody. And you notice yourself creating these models, and the minute you have a model of reality, then you look around in the universe to see what-- everything you look at either in supports or in firms that model. And that's the way you see the world. In other words, it's as if you have a computer program in your head that processes data in a very limited way based on your software. Now, imagine a computer that has a software that constantly optimizes the data that's presented to it. Just imagine what that would be like. A computer that is so empty that it takes in the data and it moves it around, and it gives you all the possible options. Some computer programs add, some subtract, some computers give you spreadsheets. One that gives you spreadsheets doesn't usually write poetry. How about one, that takes in the data and gives you and it's writing poetry and spreadsheets and all of it? It's just a liquid-- I mean, I'm just playing with it. The idea. But I notice that as my mind gets less grabby about what reality is. Like if I look at somebody's face, for example, and I do a lot of things where I focus on the point between the eyes of another person, and I look directly at them, and they look directly at me. And we just sit there. It's a meditation. It's a concentration meditation to them, and then I use to it. And you just turn into a gargoyle. And you can watch their face turn into something. They're trying not to show it because you're so horrible looking. See any of them going? They try to tighten up so that you won't see. And you begin to notice that in your perception, the minute you relax, a lot your expectation, oh, I'm looking at a human being, and they're going to look like this. It turns back into lights and shadows, and then you'll notice that as you put your focus on this part of the cheek, it'll turn into one form. If you focus on that part of the nose, it'll turn into another form. And you will just start a C. You'll start a work with the sensations that are available to you in a kind of a liquid way, and they're constantly changing. And you'll feel the incredible creativity that's available to you again, just out of the non-attachment to a model of what it is you're seeing all the time. I remember I went to a-- this is the other end of that perspective. Is this too much, are you? I went-- this was way back in the early '60s. It's another drug story. Tim and I were going to do an all-night show in New York called The Long John Neville Show, I think, or something like that. And we drove in from Millbrook, which is about, I don't know, 100 miles, 80 miles upstate. And in those days, LSD came in sugar cubes, and people had dropped a drop of acid into the sugar cube. And so we broke a sugar cube and split it, but it turned out that my part had more. So he carried the first half of the show. So I couldn't even find the microphone. But before we got to that stage, we went to a-- [INAUDIBLE] So before that, we went to a party. And at this party, there was a woman who was painting various people. She was painting their-- doing their portraits on the walls. And she had done various portraits. And so when I came in, she said, could I do your portrait? And I said, certainly. Now, my consciousness was in a very liquid state. So she started to sketch me, and I thought, who am I? And I thought, well, I'm a young man looking into the future. So I just sat there thinking myself as a young man looking in the future, and she sketched and sketched and sketched. And then I got kind of bored with that image. And I thought, she said, now, don't move at all. And I said, I won't move. And I thought, who am I now? I thought, well, I'm her lover. And I just thought, I'm her lover. And I started to sit there. And she took her gum or racer, and she erased this, and then erased that, and she started to sketch again. And then I kind of got tired of that one. And I thought, well, I'm really an old wise man. And she took her gum or racer, and she started to erase again. And I hadn't changed. I mean, I wasn't doing anything. I was just sitting there, just thinking. And after what she said, she raised-- I'm sorry, I can't do you. The face is just like silly potty. It just keeps changing all the time. And I began to hear the way in which our models of ourselves start to determine the nature of our muscular structure, which is our projection outward, which is what gets other people to see us a certain way. You can feel the whole way the game is locked in. And that as you quiet your mind down about who you are, so that you're not busy being her lover or a man looking in the future or whatever that is, you just are a presence just here. See, it's the difference between I am and whatever it comes after that. See, I am, and then there's a little line. Fill in the blank. Whichever one you fill in the blank is a limiting condition. Anyone, I am God. I am a man. I am a seeker. I am a spiritual person. I am old. I am young. Whatever you are. Whatever you fill in that blank, it starts to limit you, it imprison you. And finally, behind that is just I am. And you rest in I amness. And then you see this incredible liquid creative, lawfully creative process occurring. And you're aware of the lawful nature of it. And you're also aware of the incredibly beautiful unfolding of it all. When you get over your panic about life, because you're not so stuck inside of it, you begin to delight in the way it works. But you delight the joy has got to embrace suffering. And that's the one that most people block it. Because they can't extricate themselves themselves from their human identification enough to be able to allow suffering without reacting against it, whether it-- especially if it's someone else's-- they go into, oh, it's terrible, because they just can't be in the presence of someone else suffering without doing something about it. That's the human part of it. That's because we're afraid of death. And because we don't see suffering as part of growth. And yet, when you look back at your lives, every one of you has suffered. And you tell me now whether you're sure you would have given up all that suffering when you understand wasn't that part of what's got you in this room at this moment. Isn't that part of the conditions that prepare you to be ready to be compassionate and to be ready to grow and to be ready to hear? And do you want to take it all away? Is that you're sure? You're sure? It certainly stinks when you're having it. But in retrospect, it's a whole other ball game. There is a-- that as the mind gets quieter, there is a way in which your awareness is present. You see the edge between chaos and cosmos. You see the way in which the law and the dissolving back in is all right at the edge. And you sit right with that place. And you watch it all. And you learn you're able to be in the presence of chaos much more, of confusion much more. Somebody comes up to me and says, I'm really confused. And I say, wonderful. They see that as a problem because their mind isn't in control. And I see that as it's like beginner's mind. It's a great place in which to see the possibility is again. There are other ways of getting yourself extricated from your personality and from your identification with your manifestation. So you get back into that kind of creative realm where-- your life is-- you begin to appreciate it as you are creation. And all of it is this incredible creative abundance pouring forth. You see your mind as this incredibly just pouring abundance of stuff coming out of it. And you begin to delight. You experience the term game or play or dance. All those words which are used-- Lila or dance or game. Don't you see it's all a game or a play? Hessa says in "Driven the East." Leo says, don't you see it's all a game with a HH? I don't think it's a game. It's a game. It's a play. And you're at that interesting stage where you are creative except that the creation itself is so awesome. All you can do is stand finally in reverence in awe of the breathtaking nature of the creation of every bit of it. And the quieter your mind, the more the moment itself is so much because in it is everything. There was a moment I was doing a book with Sidney Cohen who was the good guy in LSD research back in the '60s. He was ahead of the drug administration, the government, DEA. He was the bad-- depends on where you're looking, bad or good. And he and I did a book together with a photographer. And the photographer brought out 200 pictures for us to pick from. And he picked all the pictures that showed people in acid trips going, you know, the fetal and all this kind of stuff. I picked pictures of people playing flutes and fields and making love. There was only one picture, both of us picked. And it was a picture of a guy on the kitchen floor down like this looking at some spilled Coca-Cola. See, he picked it to show the triviality of the this quote psychedelic mind state, you know. They take drugs and you know, they'll look at anything. (audience laughing) I hadn't looked at that Coca-Cola. I knew that in everything is everything. I mean, as above so below, I mean, the whole thing was the creation was in that Coca-Cola. And I was just with that guy right in there. And I, you know. (audience laughing) And I began to see that the quieter you are, the more the moment, all of it is so thickly rich with every place you look is like a doorway into this incredible wisdom of the universe. And so you keep emptying in order to just be with the moment. And the moment is so enough that the future and the past are just their parts of the present moment. But you're not any longer waiting for anything or wishing, but I don't wish for the '60s or I'm not eager for the '90s or nothing. This is enough, this moment, this is it. This is what it's about. The fullness of this with all of the uncertainty and confusion and potential chaos at all of this stuff, it's enough and it's so rich. And the quieter I am, the richer it becomes. And I remember sitting in meditation cells where you board, you're so bored, you wanna climb the walls. I mean, and you know, you've been meditating and you're bored and you started at three in the morning and it's only 4 30 in the morning and you've got 'til 11 at night and you're bored already. And you just say, "Ah, boredom." And you start to look at the incredible beauty of boredom. Ooh, boredom. Ooh, am I bored. What is the nature of boredom? And it gets so thick and rich, the dynamics of boredom until, "Wow, can I be bored today? Would you let me be bored for a few hours?" 'Cause it's so rich, instead of, "Oh my God, I'm bored!" 'Cause we're always so busy reacting. I'm bored, let's turn on the television. I'm bored, let's go to the movie. And you begin to look at all your states that way. All of your states that way. And all of your states just take on this very rich, thick process of unfold and it's like you are a witness. So you go from being the creation to being the witness of the creation. And then finally, when you have surrendered even soul into it, you are the creation. You are the creator. You are the creator, but you're not self-conscious. It's not, "Hey, I'm the creator." 'Cause that term is the creation. All it is is the creator. And you are the creator, but you're unwitting. I mean, out of my guru would pour miracles. I mean, he just didn't even know what he was doing. And they were just pouring out of him. And he had no consciousness about it. He wasn't busy saying, "I think I'll do a miracle." That'll blow his mind. He at one point, I'll just, we'll take it back. He said at one point, "That's it." (audience laughs) I'll just give you one miracle story, and then I'll stop. Most of the people in Christchurch. 'Cause they're there. I got a whole book of them right here, thousand. A sadhu comes to visit Maharaji. That's a holy man in India, seeker. And he's somebody that knew Maharaji from years back. Maharaji used to be in the jungle most of the time, naked, or he used to be known as crack potbaba. And he had a piece of crack pot. He'd pick up of somebody pot they threw away. And he'd stick it on his head, and that was all he had. And he'd use it for water, or to go to a toiletting, or a begging, or whatever. And then when it would break, when he throw it away, and find out the piece of broken pot. So he got to be known as crack potbaba. And that was one of, that's my lineage. That's, I have a way to go, as you can see. And so now in his later years, I didn't know until he was a 78 or something like that. But in his later years, his devotees, who would try to grab him and hold him, 'cause he just walked off into the jungle and disappeared, nobody knew where he was, and he couldn't control him or anything. They'd build temples in the hopes that they keep him there. And he'd stay there for a few weeks at times, or something, and then he'd just go walk away. He'd either walk down the road, or somebody would send a car to get in and drive away. And he had business, who knew what his business was. I mean, he had business like, he'd drive all night long to come to a woman's house and for in the morning and knock on the door, and she'd say, oh, Baba, I was just sitting praying to you. And he said, well, what do you think I'm here for? You know, that kind of stuff. So he was at the temple, and this side-do came, and the side-do looked around at this big temple and said, oh, whatever you could crack potpot, but whatever you was calling him in those days, Lakshmana, or Nim Krali, you certainly fall, and you were a great side-do, because you didn't have it, want anything, but now look at all these material possessions you have, you must really want stuff. And of course, all the devotees will listen to this, and they were furious that this guy was critical of Maharaji, and not only that, but he sat right down in Maharaji's target on his bed, instead of on the ground in front of him. And so all the devotees were furious in Maharaji saying, cool it, cool it, and finally, and the guy was just abrating Maharaji, and the man was holding a chalagram, which is a stone that is used in Apuja, in prayer, and it comes from a river, a certain river, and it's usually a black stone, it's very smooth and oblong stone. And he was holding it, the sadhu, and Maharaji said, oh, what a beautiful chalagram, let me see it. The guy gave it to him, Maharaji said, can I keep it? And the guy said, see, I knew, you just keep greedy, you're greedy, you want things, you're so attached, you're so attached, you want everything, no, I need it for my pooh-jip. So Maharaji gets it back to him, Maharaji says, I'll buy it from you. The thing is worth about five rupees, you could get it in the bazaar, which is about half a dollar. No, Maharaji, I need it, I can't sell it. Maharaji says, give you 40 rupees. So there's a moment pause, and the sadhu says, well, if you need it, Maharaji, see. And so he hands it to Maharaji, Maharaji borrows the money, who gets the money from somebody and gives him the 40 rupees, and the guy takes the 40 rupees. And Maharaji's sitting there with a chalagram, and Maharaji says, give me your money. Oh, the guy says, I knew you weren't gonna give me those 40 rupees. Here, here's your 40 rupees, I knew you were greedy. Maharaji takes the 40 rupees, and Maharaji says, no, give me all your money. Maharaji, I don't have any more money. Give me the money that's tied inside your jacket. So he unpins inside his jacket, he's got 500 rupees. He says, Maharaji, this is all the money I've got. Maharaji takes the money, and he dumps it into the coal brazier that's burning in front of him. And the sadhu loses it. Maharaji, that's all the money I've got. What are you all, and he's screaming, and yelling, and it's all right for you, you get this down. Yeah. Maharaji chanted when he said, oh, he said, I didn't realize you were so attached. And he takes a pair of chimpers or tongs, and he reaches into the fire, and he starts pulling out new rupee notes. And he pulls out 540 rupee notes and hands it back to the guy. And everybody is like, you know, when a thing like that happens, everybody is like, they're frozen, because they can't believe they're seeing what they're seeing. And they just go like, you know, and the guy got off the tucket and sat down. And a moment later, if you say to Maharaji, you just did a miracle. He looks to you like a child who has no remembrance or recognition of what he's done. It has nothing to do with him at all. He didn't know he did it. It's not like he thought, I'll teach that guy a lesson. It was merely a sequence of events. Greed, duh, duh, duh. And you see when the person is the creator, how mindlessly the creation really occurs. You begin to get a sense of the mindlessness of the creative act. that it's not mediated with, I think I will do a pass. of a tree. It is treeness manifests. It's a whole different realm and you can experience the way in which so many artists open the door of the awareness to go beyond their mind to be a conduit through. And you begin to wonder when I started to deal with the issue of creativity and law, whether or not there is creative act or just remembrance, whether it is merely transcribing that which exists or whether it's actually creation. One got a sense, for example, with Mozart, that the door was just open and he was copying it as fast as he could. And everybody was saying, "Oh, thank you Mozart." And he could have said, "I'll tell him if I see him." Because in fact he was merely a vehicle through which it came and you get the same with a lot of the great artists. It's enough. This podcast is brought to you by the Love Serve Remember Foundation and Ramdas.org. We appreciate you listening and we appreciate all the support that you've given us. Please continue that support and donate at Ramdas.org. 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