Hey everyone it's Rago, I'm back with Ramdas here and now and this episode is a very interesting.

I never heard it, I know, I say to myself how could that happen but it did and this is interesting because it's the style of the talk that he gave which was all the way back in 75.

January 1975 it has him as his in his psychologist mode at least as to get the thing going and it's around reference groups and going to explain what that is because it'll be good to have a handle on that before one listens to this but before I go there.

I do want to say I mean this is what November of 2021 early November and I'm about to suggest a phenomenal Christmas present.

It's unbelievable, unbelievable that I would even think of such a thing but we have a fantastic book coming out this month, words of wisdom from Ramdas that was put together in a way that it's an easy reference to core teachings, key teachings of course.

Done so that it's very short quotes from Ramdas.

No, it's not that short, some of them are like couple of paragraphs or more but I do love the way it was put together so that you can just turn to a section and a topic that needs attention or that you feel could use some attention.

So it's one of those books you just have on the coffee table that you can just turn to and even set your day and so we are now taking pre-orders which all of this of course goes a long way to help support everything that we do.

But if you just go to Ramdas.org slash shop, just go to the Ramdas.org shop and you will be able to pre-order the book which does a lot because it helps in terms of getting more interest from people like booksellers and so on.

Barnes and Noble and Amazon and all of that they will make it easier for people who file into the stores to find the book.

So that helps. Words of wisdom from Ramdas and let us now go into let us pray.

Ramdas, reference groups are groups that an individual identifies with so it's a family group, it's a religious group, it's a business group, it's a union, a bowling group, a national group.

Now we are all very familiar, are we not with the various groups that exist and it has become tribal groups, even in our era as it is now of course with COVID and all of the different protocols and the solutions including vaccination

that we have as we well know in this country it's a very very prominent split, there's the anti-vaxxers and there's the pro-vaxxers.

And just look at how we think about each other, it's pretty far out.

And so he talks about us and them and our us and them of course it's so evident, it's like worldwide evident this is going on everywhere, although I think in the United States there's even a much sharper divide.

And of course that includes everything that's going on politically, socially, environmentally and all of this is based on reference groups.

And so I think that at some point we really do have to recognize this. I mean we are recognizing and there's a bit of malaise in my mind going on about just not how not being able to even think of how we can approach each other.

And it feels like such a dark wall.

Just when this whole thing with the, I mean of course the political thing it seems more obvious but with the COVID thing where people taking these kinds of very intractable stands around getting vaccinated or not getting vaccinated.

It's a very, very tough situation.

And Ramdas talks about, and this is key, he kind of loosens up out of his professorial.

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