What is Your Reality?

The first thing my Hindu teacher wrote on his slate in teaching me was the statement, “Desire is a trap; desirelessness is moksha, or liberation; desire is the creator, desire is the destroyer, desire is the universe.”

If you understand that statement, you understand it all. That is exactly the same statement as the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. Remember, Buddha went and he sat under the Bodhi tree, and he said, “I’m gonna sit here until I become enlightened. I’ve had enough of all the rest of this business. Finally, he became an enlightened being, and he decided the first people he would teach were the guys he had traveled with before, so he found them and they said, “Why should we listen to you when you haven’t done the austerities?” And he said “Well, I never before told you I was enlightened, but now I am telling you, and this is the way it is,” and he told them the Four Noble Truths.

The first truth he said was, “All life is suffering.” By which he meant that birth involves suffering, death involves suffering, getting what you don’t want is suffering, sickness, and even getting what you want involves suffering, because it’s finite; because it’s in time and it will be gone. You want to be the most beautiful chick in the world, you go ahead, but remember five years from now. What is it that you can grasp out there that won’t turn? Jesus said, “Lay not up your stores where rust and moth doth corrupt.”

The second noble truth is that the cause of suffering is craving.
The third is to give up craving.
The fourth is the eightfold path of how to give up craving.

So now, on this chalkboard, this Hindu has written that desirelessness is moksha, or liberation. Desire is the creator. Desire is the destroyer. Desire is the universe. Well I was working with that for a year and a half or two years, and I’ll tell you, I’m still working on it. It just gets deeper and deeper, as I begin to see how we create our own universe. What I mean to say is, “All is an illusion.” What is your reality? What is this reality? What is the reality of all of us and this sanctuary, and the street outside, and the whole business? It is but one particular frequency of vibration, and it is created by our desire.

Specifically, if you have a television set standing right here in this room, channel 7, and 9, and 11, they are all hanging out in that TV set. You turn the set to channel 7, and then as far as the TV is concerned, the other channels don’t exist anymore. Switch the channel to 9, and channel 7 doesn’t exist. In the same way, this frequency, at which the physical universe exists, is but one channel.

As you start to do methods or upayas, or what’s called yoga or union, you start to learn how to alter your frequency, your receiver, to open your nerves to change the frequency of reception. Now all those things Maharaj-ji did, which sound like to us in the West like miracles, but a miracle is just a word that covers our ignorance.

-Ram Dass