Selfhood: Spirit and Personality

BY Ram Dass

There are many stages of the process of transformation.

There is a stage where you feel something in you that is behind your social facade and your social relationships to people. You feel a somebody-ness which we call a soul. You feel yourself as an entity. Then, as you get deeper into the transformative work, that thing starts to dissolve. Then there is no self, there is nobody, there is only one. So then you ask:

How do you incorporate that understanding into existence? How do you live with no continuity?

The continuity is the result of karma. 

It’s that who you were started an inertial process, that leads to you being this person. As your awareness is less attached to that person, you’re just aware of the processes going on. 

Just as I’m aware of my body aging and decaying, I’m aware of my awareness getting lighter and less attached to forms, and I’m aware of personality processes. I’m aware that when somebody 

awakens an impulse within me a reaction will also awaken, 

but I can see it almost in slow motion as just these processes going on. All I end up being is just these processes: 

there isn’t somebody there. All the form of me ends up being just these processes, and behind it all there is not somebody being aware, there is just the awareness; which is even subtler.

We keep projecting our own solidity into everybody else. So it’s very hard for me to convey to you the kind of nothingness that’s going on in here, and to say to you that you just keep delicately approaching and just playing with watching the way in which you need that reassurance of being somebody. 

Watch that need, and see that need as a phenomenon that exists in the universe, lawfully existing, then keep quieting the mind and deepening the connection to just that part of you that is just with it all, just this spacious kind of awareness.

Its called spacious awareness. It’s the sky, just the sky.

How Do We Move Beyond Our ‘Ego Software’?

Ram Dass

Much of the practice is to continually remember to extricate yourself from the identification of your awareness with your desires, fears, hopes, and thoughts. The goal is not to stay out in lala land, but to get established 

in other planes of consciousness, and then connect fully back into life. 

So that you are, as Christ said, 

“In the world, but not of the world,” 

so that you are simultaneously dancing in life as a human being and at the same moment you are 

absolutely spacious and empty. 

It’s a very interesting thing, because generally we don’t stretch our consciousness that much. We tend to move in and out of planes 

sequentially, not simultaneously, 

because it takes a certain discipline to open to the fact that we are like strudel; that we are multi-layered; that we are not a single layered entity. We underplay who we are so much, even by our language, because we tend to polarize the getting high, and the coming down. Even the word planes is ultimately a hype because it’s all one thing. What we’re really doing is, with the practices, taking our conceptual mind, and using it in order to take us beyond itself… so that we are then using our conceptual mind in a delightful way.

The ego – you can’t function without an ego here.

It’s your control room for your space suit that you’re wearing as an incarnation. You need it. It’s your software. But you aren’t software. 

Your ego is basically your software for functioning on this plane, and appreciating that. 

In order to appreciate it, you have to extricate yourself from an identification with the software, with the ego. Not because the ego is bad, but because it’s a beautifully articulated functional technique for playing.

I watch people come up to me for mala beads and sometimes they’ll say, “Good morning!” and they’re defining a certain plane of reality in that. Then I’m just sort of sitting there, and some of them don’t quite know what to do, because I say, “Hey, there’s another plane here!” It’s fun, because if you look into people’s eyes, then the rest of their face becomes like putty. They come up and say “Hi” and then you watch as this interesting thing happens. Slowly their face, the smile dissolves, and you suddenly meet back in behind the smile. “Hey, you in here? Far out! I’m here. What are you doing here?” It’s like we’re old beings hanging out. We just met through the social form, and the interesting thing of having the social forms is being able to use them and then let go of them. 

Use them and let go of them. Use them and let go of them. So you don’t get trapped in them. You don’t get trapped in the projective dance of each other’s projections of each other.