10/09/2026
The Karmic Predicament of Parents and Children
Ram Dass: Now, it gets very, very far out because, for example, in my relation with my father, my father is busy thinking he is my father. He knows who he is. He’s a Republican. He’s a man in his middle 70s. He’s somebody who loves his family. He’s a good man. He owns this and that, etc. He likes the ball games. He knows who he is.
The problem is that who that is is dying — sooner or later. He’s already beyond the actuarial age. And not only that, but if he is busy being who he is, and I’m then into the symbiotic role, the complementary role in relation to that, so I’m busy being his son. But the thing is, I’m 43, and it’s funny about what a son is at 43, you know. The limits of our relationship are very two-dimensional. They’re very flat.
But on the other hand, from where I’m sitting, he’s just another being. And it just happens that in this lifetime, we took incarnations in which this particular round, he was incarnated.
His karma was that I was his son. Heavy karma. My karma was that he was my father, right?
We are each other’s karmic predicament.
But behind it all, you here, I’m here, far out. Now, if I say to him, “you here, I’m here,” he doesn’t know what the hell I’m talking about. “Oh, you’re talking that nut talk again.” And so my job isn’t to come on to him at all.
And the Gita makes that very clear in the third chapter:
“Let not the wise disturb the mind of the unwise in their work. Let him, working with devotion, show them the joy of good work. And those who are under the delusion of the forces of nature bind themselves to the work of these forces. Let not the man who sees this disturb the one who sees it not.”
My job isn’t to say to him, “Look, you’re not my father, really.” Really. Really! Because he’s got a birth certificate and the whole thing from that reality, right?
But the point is that my perception of him is as another being who is in an incarnation in which he is totally identified with the thoughts that are connected with that incarnation. And he is so deeply identified with them that it is all totally real from how he’s looking at it.
So we will sit down together and we will talk father and son talk. But all the time I’m doing my mantra and I’m sitting in a place inside myself which is merely another plane. It’s no better or worse than the one he’s on. It’s just a different one in which we are two beings who are doing this dance together.
And what my mind is doing is creating a space which, if he chooses, he is free to give up the limiting conditions of the role that he has been thinking he is. And what will happen to us sometimes, “Far out!”
We will talk father and son talk, and then we’ll keep sitting with one another. And then we’ll run out of father and son talk. And we’ll still be together.
And because I feel so peaceful in that, while most people, if they are caught in their roles, get freaked when the role material runs out — when you’ve run out of script line. But I’ll sit with it, and pretty soon we will just be together, just as if we were meditating in the Naropa Center.
And we can’t have any words about it, because the minute we come into concepts, we immediately go back into models. But we have left words behind, and we’re just together, right?
— Ram Dass
