Learn from one of the most influential divine beings of all time.
In an old lecture, Ram Dass explained a disturbing theory about levels of reality.
Ram Dass asked the audience to imagine their mind as a television set that could change channels.
So that by changing the channel, they would see a deeper level of reality.
This was the programming for each of those channels 🙂
Channel 1
According to Ram Dass, you can see reality as it is on channel one: physical bodies, men, women. And their specific characteristics: tall, short, ugly, handsome, old, young, etc.
Channel 2
In this channel, according to Ram Dass, you can see the personality of each human being: achiever, hysterical, depressive, cynical, selfish, as well as their social roles: teacher, supermarket stocker, doctor, mother, father, son. That is to say, the little engine that moves each person’s life. Their mindset. Their mental identity.
At this point in his theory, Ram Dass says that 99.9% of the people who inhabit the world treat the above channels as real because people define themselves from a socio-psychological and physical point of view.
But you can still go deeper into reality.
Channel 3
This is the astral plane, where people identify with their birth chart and zodiac sign, while others believe that all that astrology is lies.
My opinion,
Suppose one sees what the moon can do to the sea, which goes up and down the tides depending on its cycle. Human beings’ body is 60% water; they may react to the influence of the planets.
JP Morgan once said, “Millionaires don’t need astrologers, but billionaires do.”
According to Ram Dass, the point is that as people begin to realize that the astrological plane is real, they discover that what is relative are the planes above 1 and 2, the socio-psychological and the physical.
Channel 4
In this channel, Ram Dass tells us that when you look another person in the eye, you discover another being “just like you, looking back at you,” just packaged in a different body.
It’s a person packaged in a different body, a different psychology, another astrology, but behind all that is a being exactly like you.
This must have motivated Mother Teresa of Calcutta to undertake her crusade to give love to the most excluded. She understood that I am you, and you are me. That we are all the same being, under different disguises.
Whoever comes to this conclusion, the first thing he does is to help the most disadvantaged because, deep down, he is helping himself.
Channel 5
According to Ram Dass, in this channel, by looking again and again at oneself inside and at the other beings that come packaged in different bodies but deep down are the same soul, one discovers that there is only one being.
For me, this channel is like a story I wrote about an Indian boy who wanted to meet God, and after much searching, a blue giant appeared before him, took him in the palm of his hand, and said, “I am God. And you are me. And the young Indian asked the blue giant, “And why have you created me so fragile and in such an imperfect world?” and the giant answered, “I am eternal. And I live eternally alone. And it hurts. That’s why I became everyone who inhabits the world; to be able to feel accompanied; fragility is just another of my self-deceptions.”
Channel 6
The void. In this channel, Maya disappears.
In Hinduism, Maya is the illusion of reality or the universe of phenomenal things.
In this channel, the world disappears, reality disappears, you disappear, and only nothingness remains.
Conclusion
Ram Dass warns us in his lecture that this is not a ladder system where one ascends to higher planes of consciousness to stay there.
One wanders between channels 1 and 6 in one’s spiritual pilgrimage to understand that all the lower channels are relatively authentic rather than absolute.
But to be free, you can’t always stay in the higher channels, and you must combine it with planes 1 and 2.
This reminds me of microscopes. You think that reality is physical, but when you use a microscope, you discover everything is made of atoms and a vacuum. It is energy. But at the same time, we are flesh and blood.
At the same time, we are emptiness, energy, and matter.
And that is something that blows my mind.
A virtual hug
AG