# Ram Dass: Cultivating the Heart of Compassion <iframe width="390" height="230" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/76zZZmN1XhE" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> %% when I like you was born I donned a spacesuit for living on this plane, and it was this body this is the my spacesuit and it had a steering mechanism my prefrontal lobes then all the brain motors coordinating stuff and just like those rusty Schweickart and the others that go to the moon and they wear their uniforms and they learn how to grab things and lift things so I did that you know I learned my prehensile capacities and I got rewarded I get you get little stars and kisses and all kinds of things when you learn how to use your spacesuit and you get really good at it you get so good at using your spacesuit that you can't differentiate yourself from your spacesuit anymore you think your your spacesuit and everybody comes up and says what a nice suit and you're constantly looking into other people's eyes to find out if you're really wearing a nice spacesuit it's what I call somebody training that when you're born you go into somebody training because your parents know who they are and they're gonna make you somebody - my parents were very intent on making me somebody they wanted me to achieve be responsible be healthy be successful bring pride to them and if it didn't interfere with any of those I should be happy the problem that I experienced though was that the suit that I was wearing it was like you're in it one of these suits that doesn't quite fit and you're a little uncomfortable and you're constantly trying to readjust yourself the suit didn't fit but everybody kept saying beautiful suit really impressive suit you must be very happy but I wasn't now if everybody you look into their eyes and they tell you you're happy and you're not because the suit feels so weird what do you conclude it's like those experiments in psychology where they have a group in a room and they have it's all done all the group are plants except for one person and they show two lines in which one was shorter than the other and everybody in the room says that the shorter one is longer and then they asked this other person this poor sucker who's the subject is that longer a shorter and about 90% of the time the person gives in to the rest of the group even though it's obvious that the line is shorter than the other one because if you don't you're so deviant and who wants to be deviant oh my god life's hard enough coping so I felt when everybody said what a nice suit I was wearing that I must be sick so I went to an analyst now he was wearing another kind of weird suit thing and what he did was he said that for a pittance he would teach me how to wear his suit instead of my suit his thing so so I learned how to wear his suit which had even more status connect I mean more people said beautiful suit part of learning how to wear that suit was you didn't see people anymore you just saw psychosexual stages of development you saw anal-retentive x' and early phallic sand things like that and I really wasn't very happy in that suit either in that suit I was a therapist and I really needed to be a therapist because I was so identified with my needs at that point that everybody else had to be a potential patient so and if you wouldn't be my patient I didn't have much use for you as I needed to be a therapist full-time so that suit felt weird as well well then through the kindness of a rather wild Irish fellow I am ia I took off my suits entirely and I stood naked an elf let's put a little Irish gnome I took off my suit and I stood naked and it felt wonderful absolutely wonderful I felt at home I felt at peace I felt content I felt like this is where I had always I knew in my inner being this is where I really was but somehow I'd never been able to get there ever since I'd been born into somebody mnestheus had always short shrift ado I was as my friend pointed out you have to go out of your mind to use your head and that what I had been trained in was an ego structure a conceptual structure that defined who I was and who everybody else was and most people learn these structures and they're like huge mind nets that come out ahead and you walk down the street and you're somebody say you know who you are and you dress like somebody your face looks like somebody everything is somebody nice this is who I am this is who I am this is who I am this is wine this is who you are the suit you are you everybody is reinforcing their structure of the universe over and over again and they meet like two huge things meeting this is who I am this is who you are any we enter in these conspiracies I'll make believe you are who you think you are if you make leave I am who I think I am and we just kind of bump against each other like a huge smooth ism big mental mind nets that keep walking down the street you can see them and everybody I mean everybody's busy being somebody well so when I got out of my somebody nassif is very cramped I mean it was like a prison to me I didn't want to go back to prison it's like you go out and you see the stars and you smelly air and then they say okay chemicals we ran off back into prison and you don't want to go you say no no but you go anyone and you go back into your suit and you feel weird again you feel doubly weird now because you know that that isn't who you are but you're caught in it