Homage #5

Transcript (Download)

He said, I am without form, without limits, beyond time, beyond space.

I am in everything.

Everything is in me.

I am the bliss of the universe.

Everywhere am I.

I am absolute existence, absolute knowledge, absolute bliss.

Tat Twa Ma Si, I am that, I am that.

And he also said, and this is a mind blower for you I suspect, he says, I have no scruple of change, nor fear of death.

I was never born, nor had I parents.

Nor had I parents.

Do you understand the predicament you are in? What man is really all about is on a sequence that is moving towards consciousness, towards awareness, towards full understanding, towards becoming one with God, towards knowing himself.

And this is the business of waking up.

And as Gurdjieff, the Russian philosopher, says it very beautifully, he said, you don't realize your predicament, you are all in prison.

But he said, if you are to get out of prison, the first requirement is you've got to realize you're in prison.

I mean if you think you're free, you can't escape.

See that? I mean if you think, man, well this is the best of all possible worlds, and I'm grooving and I want to have this chick and this family and this scene, and I'm going to get a really good car and have a good home and a good job and plan my future, and that's really what it's about, go do it.

Do it for another hundred lifetimes.

It's okay, there's no rush, there's no time.

It is outside of time what I'm talking about.

Everybody is becoming conscious.

At the rate everybody can become conscious.

In any one lifetime, you may wake up or you may not.

Now you notice I'm sneaking in all kinds of references to reincarnation, which almost all of you have been trained to reject.

And it got rejected out of Christianity in the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople, and it did not come into, except for some of the Platonic and Pythagorean thinking, it did not come into the Greek -Roman tradition.

But I will now give you another one of those perhaps unpalatable facts.

Reincarnation exists, and you are at this moment merely going through one round of a series of rounds, and you've elevated into being a real big deal, and your ego is the only way nature works because you've got to understand that who you are, and this is a hard one, who you are is not part of nature.

Nature is the package in which you are living at this moment.

Nature is the temple.

You honor nature, you love nature.

Nature is the divine mother, and nature is beautiful.

You need nature in order to have the temple, in order to do the work.

You honor nature.

You honor all of beauty.

Nature includes all your desires, the desires for reproduction that keep the species going, the desires for food that keep the temple alive.

You need them as long as you need them.

But don't confuse who you are with the temple.

Once you understand the yogic systems of India, the Buddhist systems, the Taoist system of China, the Greek Orthodox Esoteric Christianity, the Kabbalah and the Zohar, the American Indian mysticism.

I mean, here's Black Elk Speaks, the beautiful book about an old Oglala Sioux Indian, who's describing his first visionary experience when he's eight years old.

He says, it was the pictures I remembered and the words that went with them.

For nothing I have ever seen with my eyes was so clear and bright as what my vision showed me.

And no words that I've ever heard with my ears were like the words I heard.

I did not have to remember these things.

They have remembered themselves all these years.

It was as I grew older that the meanings came clearer and clearer out of the pictures and the words.

And even now I know that more was shown to me than I can tell.

The fact of the matter is that what we are talking about cannot be talked about because talking is symbols.

And symbols plays to your rational mind.

And what we are talking about is behind the rational mind.

It is meted to the rational mind.

It is not knowable rationally.

And the problem is that what I am talking about you cannot know you know.

You can only be.

Identifier

F.2013-01-0034

Date Of Production

1970

Abstract

An experimental short that pairs live action film with a recorded lecture on reincarnation by Baba Ram Dass, an American spiritual teacher and the author of the seminal 1971 book Be Here Now. The footage deliberately resembles outtakes, a lot like those accidental moments in life that can throw a new light on our understanding. An exercise of the non-literal relationship between image and sound.

Run Time

0:05:47

Format

16mm

Extent

200 feet

Color

color and B&W

Sound

Optical

Reel/Tape Number

1/1

Has Been Digitized?

Yes

Language Of Materials

English

Element

Master

Genre

Experimental

Form

Short

Subject

Religions

Related Collections

Larry Janiak Collection

Related Places

North America ➜ United States

Main Credits

Janiak, Larry (is filmmaker)

Participants And Performers

Dass, Ram (is participant)

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