This is Rambdas here and now, and I'm Raghumarkas.

Back with another episode and this one hails back to 1974, May 18th. It's fun for me to look at these dates and see when Rambdas has done these talks and think about where was I then?

In fact, I was living in Montreal where I'm from. I was living outside in the countryside about to have a child, my first child, with my wife at the time.

And Rambdas was about to go to Naropa. The Naropa session started, I think, just a few weeks after this talk. Pretty interesting.

A little historical anecdotes. Before I get into anything here though and tell you about what this talk is about, I want to remind everybody to, we have a couple of new programs that have come out on Rambdas.org.

One in particular, I think that you'll all really enjoy and can take great advantage of. It's from a retreat that we did in Maui, early last year actually. And that was with Sharon Salzburg and Rambdas. And I moderated a session with them around compassion, truth, and adversity.

And actually, the actual retreat was called compassion and adversity. The adversity part Sharon wanted to bring to the table. And then as they got into it, Rambdas talked a lot about truth and the necessity of truth in dealing with adversity and how that combines also with being able to be a compassionate human being.

It's a terrific talk, or it's not a talk, it's a conversation. Workshop-ish kind of conversation that had some great highlights in it and some wonderful information that will help everybody day to day.

Because it's all very, very plain spoken and interestingly enough, Rambdas, talking about truth, he talks about something that he mentions quite a bit, which is Maharaj, telling him love everyone and tell the truth and how in that moment it was an impossible thing. And he talks about it in this talk as well.

The other thing is Rambdas did a great little webcast a couple of weeks ago with Lama Suriyadas. And the exchange between the two of them is precious. So you can find both of these things, just go to rambdas.org. And I think it's pretty easy to navigate the site.

We've really been working on this site over the years and it's really getting to a great place, which is we want to be able to make all of this material available to everyone in the most efficacious way. How about that?

So this talk, it didn't have a title and I'm going to call this part of the talk the confusion in the paradox.

So what the paradox is here, if you're ready for the confusion of the paradox and that is that you are in an incarnation that's totally dedicated to the preservation of its own separateness and you are awakening to the realization that the entire domain of separateness is but another illusion.

And so you find yourself marching in a 180 degree opposite direction to everything you learned, you've learned in your life, everything your body is telling you and all of the deepest structures of ego.

And the reason he says is a lot of confusion these days is that we are not comfortable with paradox. We are still trying to be reasonable about it all, make it all logical in the intellect.

Of course, we know it's an exquisite instrument but a lousy master. So this is really a really a great part of what Rambdas goes through in this talk is self revealing.

And again, so that thing that we really loved when we first heard Rambdas talk, which took a lot of us, took the initiative at that point to go to India, was that self honesty and he tells some really funny stories about him going through a period of like getting up and talking in front of people and not being the least bit connected.

And with being quote unquote a spiritual person, a Baba Rambdas, you know, somebody comes up to him and says, wow, you've really changed my life. This has been fantastic. You'll see, oh really, well, that's your problem.

It's dealing with, oh my God, he talks about how that doesn't seem to be a very compassionate response, but an honest one in, you know, in that moment and that has been his fierce commitment for him, and which is why many of us really appreciate we all appreciate him in that way.

So what this is really this talk is really and talks a lot about the Gita, which is another precursor to where he was going a couple of weeks later to do this course on the Bhagavad Gita at Naropa to Trump, a Rinpoche's first summer that Naropa was open.

The real battle is with our own inner feelings and beliefs about how it ought to be clinging to spiritual methods is no more or less than a junky clinging to his connection. I love that. That should be a good tweet. I was just trying to figure out if it's the right character length.

So a lot about how we can really appreciate the confusion that takes place as we get onto the spiritual path and as we navigate the spiritual path and think things ought to be a certain way.

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