Excerpt 1 from "From Bindhu to Ojas" with Ram Dass

"From Bindhu to Ojas" are talks offered by reknowned teacher Ram Dass in 1969.  We are so delighted to have access to these talks and to be able to share them with you.  Following is a transcribed excerpt from these exciting talks.

Everything up to there describes the western culture and 99.9% or whatever absurd number of the people of the world never have energy available to them at any center higher than those three, except in just moments, rare moments.

Everybody’s got rare moments. It’s like for almost everybody, it’s all available in the first, second, and third chakra. So you meet somebody who is primarily a first chakra person and what you’re doing is you’re really helping them come into the second chakra. And when they are in the second you are helping them get into the third. You are helping a lustful being develop an ego. And that in a sense is what western religions have become about, the super ego, the super third chakra. 

According to the Freudian system, it treats one, the first chakra as id, as uncontrollable animal impulses, the second chakra as sexual desire, and the third chakra as super ego. That’s in that system. I’m just translating systems just for the fun of it, because many people think in these western systems and it is fun to make these translations of them. So Freud talked about religion being perverted sexual energy and the reverse side of that coin is that sexual energy is blocked religion. Pay your money and you pick your chakra. Pick your center that you want to be dominated by. 

Now the critical place is the opening between the third and the fourth chakra in this system that I am presenting to you now. Because the third and the fourth -- and it is interesting that that is the key place like in an octave in doe, ray, mi -- between mi and fa is a half note and all the rest up till then have been whole notes. And there are two critical places between three and four and six and seven on an octave and those are the same things in the chakra system. In fact the whole octave model applies in chemical analysis, in atomic structure, in music --  its like one of the lawful sets of relationships in nature, and Gurdjieff points that out, and this is when you start to get into seeing how it all is in the lawful ways of the universe you see that the octave plays a very key role. The octave is more than a manifestation of man’s rational processes. 

What do you say? Let’s have an octave. Should we have a seven note or a twelve note? You can do rationale innovations and get to the twelve note and so on, but the seven, those seven major distinctions, or at least that three to four and six to seven is all I know at this moment. I don’t know how many breaks there are in between. 

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Ram Dass bio and links