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.

Ram Dass -- The Cost of Denying Suffering

In the ascent and descent between planes of consciousness, there are two kinds of fears that people often face.

On the way up, there is the fear of dying or surrendering or losing control, giving up what you are familiar with. When you’re starting to move into these other planes of consciousness that have a different perspective, the one you were holding onto has to let go before the new one can enter in. That moment of letting go is like when you’re climbing, and you have to reach for something but you have to kind of let go of the last thing to reach for the next thing, and there’s a moment of tremendous anxiety in that – so is the anxiety of dying into the next plane of awareness.

Now with coming down, with re-entry and coming back and facing what you left behind when you started, there’s a certain amount of not wanting to come back into it, because it’s not appealing anymore, because you feel trapped by it and a lot of people, after having very high spiritual experiences, even something like a near death experience, they say, 

“What shit is this, man? I don’t want to live here, I want to go back there. I want to get out of here.”

There is sometimes a very deep depression for people who go through that, before they 

realize that the art form is to integrate these planes together, that’s the process of awakening.

When you have been in the higher planes of expanded awareness, where you see the lawful nature of all things, you see the beauty of it, and then you have to come back into a limited consciousness, into your own human heart and separateness, you’ll still have some of that opening of awareness, and you’ll sometimes be overwhelmed by the nature of suffering in the world around you.

You’ll see that you cultivated a defensive stance to protect yourself from that suffering – I mean if you’re in New York, you’re walking over people sleeping on the streets, you turn on the TV and there’s immense suffering all the time, and most of us, in order to function on Earth, is use massive denial as a device to keep the suffering under control so we can handle it.

When we use the word “unbearable” to describe suffering what we really mean is “Who I thought I was, the container I thought I was, the somebody I thought I was, can’t handle this amount of suffering without breaking apart.”

… And there are choices at that moment.

You can go into denial mode, which is 

“I won’t think about that suffering. I’ll push it away.” 

And the cost of that is very heavy. See, if you go into a denial mode, what you do is you armor your heart from the world, and when you do that, you are keeping something out that is going to overwhelm you, but you’re also 

keeping something out that you need, which is the nourishment that comes from the emotional interaction with the world around you. 

You become armored, you become ‘professionally warm’, you become able to handle the crises moment after moment, the horror of it all, by just going up into your head, closing your heart. 

So denial has an incredible cost.

– Ram Dass, Detroit, Oregon – 1994

Ram Dass -- Trusting Your Intuition vs. Your Analytical Mind

You are creating a structure to be able to support the fullness of our humanity. And different people have different unique opportunities to play in that. The art is to listen for the part you play. When one person writes a book of poetry, is that book of poetry any less of a contribution to the wellbeing of humanity than somebody who’s out on the line fighting the fire?
Now, the fire people will say “Look, it’s important that you fight fire. Don’t worry about the poetry book.”

But if not poetry, then something very precious is lost that humanity needs for its own feeding as well.

So there are all these balances and you don’t need to judge,

but rather

tune to hear what part you play.

And which part you play has to do with your skills, your capacities, your opportunities, and the environment you live in.
The yearnings and desires are all part of the play. And the job is to keep quieting the mind to stand back further and go within to hear more clearly the way it all works. And then out of that

comes the next action.

You may go sit on a rock by the Rio Grande and watch the light on the back of a Robin, and you’re sitting there and you’re feeling like, “What difference does it make?” and then something comes into you and says, “This isn’t totally fulfilling.” And then you leave that and you go back to someplace and the telephone rings and somebody says, “Will you do this?” and you don’t know why, but you say, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” It starts a whole other course of life.

I have no idea why I do the things I do. I trust my intuitive wisdom.

I get many letters. Some I answer, some I don’t.

There’s no way I can decide what’s the worst and what’s the best. Sometimes I need to get into the hot tub. Sometimes I need to pick up the phone and offer to do a benefit.

I’m allowing myself more and more to trust my intuitive wisdom rather than my analytic mind as to how I should do it.

Cause the more analytical mind can’t really handle the complexity of the situation so you go from moment to moment just listening. The fact that you had that job and then gave it up for this job, that’s all part of what’s feeding into this moment. Then you’re looking for the dream, and then the model of the dream, and finally you keep letting go of the model into just what is.
I was at a point where my father was ill and I needed some help. This fellow called and he had read ‘Miracle of Love‘. 

He wrote me a letter saying he had read it and cried and wanted to meet somebody who had known Maharajji, and could he come see me. He came over and saw me and we sat and talked for several hours. I asked him what he did and he said he had been working with mentally disabled adults for much of his adult livelihood, but was kind of tired from that, and didn’t know what he wanted to do. I told him I was going to Burma to study meditation and needed somebody to hang out with my father and my stepmother, and would he consider?
He said yeah, he would do it, and at first my step mother said, “He’s too weird,” but then he hung and she mellowed and pretty soon got cancer. Then she died and he took over. He took care of my father until my father died. And that was three, four years. He had no plan when he came to see me about Maharajji, of doing that thing.
I had no plan of having somebody like that. Dad had no plan. And there they were, and their whole lives all changed and served and worked just that way. Who knows whether the next message comes at the laundromat or whether the message comes through... you know, who knows? 

Dying Consciously ...

By Ram Dass

My view has evolved to seeing death — the moment of death — as a ceremony. If people are sitting with you to help as you are going through this dying ceremony, help them to see you as the soul you truly are, not as your ego. If they identify you as your ego, during the last part of this ceremony they will cling to you and pull you back instead of facilitating your transformation.

Sadhana, either a specific practice or your overall spiritual transformation, begins with you as an ego and evolves into your being a soul, who you really are. The ego is identified with the incarnation, which stops at the moment of death. The soul, on the other hand, has experienced many deaths. 

If you’ve done your sadhana fully, there will be no fear of death, and dying is just another moment. If you are to die consciously, there’s no time like the present to prepare. Here is a brief checklist of some of the ways to approach your own death:

• Live your life consciously and fully. Learn to identify with and be present in your soul, not your ego.

• Fill your heart with love. Turn your mind toward God, guru, Truth.

• Continue with all of your spiritual practices: meditation, mantra, kirtan, all forms of devotion.

• Be there for the death of your parents, loved ones, or beloved animals. Know that the presence of your loved ones will remain when you are quiet and bring them into your consciousness.

• Read about the deaths of great saints, lamas, and yogis like Ramana Maharshi.

• If there is pain at the time of death, try to remain as conscious as possible. Medication for pain offers some solace but dulls your awareness.

• To be peaceful at the time of your death, seek peace inside today.

Death is another moment. If you’re not peaceful today, you probably won’t be peaceful tomorrow. Sudden death is, in many ways, more difficult to work with spiritually than a gradual passing. If we are aware that death can happen at any moment, we start to work on ourselves more constantly, paying attention to the moment-to-moment content of our minds. If you practice being here now, being fully in the moment during your life, if you are living in that space, then the moment of death is just another moment.

Cultivate the Awareness

One way to get free of attachment is to cultivate the witness consciousness, to become a neutral observer of your own life. The witness place inside you is simple awareness, the part of you that is aware of everything — just noticing, watching, not judging, just being present, being here now.

The witness is actually another level of consciousness. The witness coexists alongside your normal consciousness as another layer of awareness, as the part of you that is awakening. Humans have this unique ability to be in two states of consciousness at once. Witnessing yourself is like directing the beam of a flashlight back at itself. In any experience — sensory, emotional, or conceptual — there’s the experience, the sensory or emotional or thought data, and there’s your awareness of it. That’s the witness, the awareness, and you can cultivate that awareness in the garden of your being.

The witness is your awareness of your own thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Witnessing is like waking up in the morning and then looking in the mirror and noticing yourself — not judging or criticizing, just neutrally observing the quality of being awake. That process of stepping back takes you out of being submerged in your experiences and thoughts and sensory input and into self-awareness.

Along with that self-awareness comes the subtle joy of just being here, alive, enjoying being present in this moment. Eventually, floating in that subjective awareness, the objects of awareness dissolve, and you will come into the spiritual Self, the Atmān, which is pure consciousness, joy, compassion, the One.

The witness is your centering device. It guides the work you do on yourself. Once you understand that there is a place in you that is not attached, you can extricate yourself from attachments. Pretty much everything we notice in the universe is a reflection of our attachments.

Jesus warned us, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt . . . For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Desire creates your universe; that’s just the way it works.

So your first job is to work on yourself. The greatest thing you can do for another human being is to get your own house in order and find your true spiritual heart.

- Excerpt from Ram Dass’ newly released book Polishing the Mirror: How to Live From Your Spiritual Heart 

Unbearable Compassion

The supreme purpose and goal for human life ... is to cultivate love.

______________________________

We all know our humanity all too well. That is why we put the focus on recognizing that part of us that isn’t in the human-ness. Not to deny the humanity but to bring a balance about. Because that’s what you offer another person. 

When I look at some of you and I know you have problems with addiction and problems with sexual obsessions and problems with loneliness and problems with anger and problems with diseases and problems with frigidity and tightness. And I look and I see the whole sea of stuff or you tell me about it. And I just see curriculum after curriculum after curriculum after curriculum.

And I just see a group of beautiful souls on earth each having its own karmic work to do. At the same moment when you present it to me, my heart hurts. You don’t protect your heart from breaking because in a way a broken heart is like cracking a shell to let the deeper heart come forth. 

Because compassion is like the monk who is crying because his son has died and the student comes up and says, “What are you crying about? You know it is all illusion.” He says, “Yes but the death of a son is the greatest illusion.” And Maharaj ji crying when I was hurting.

You don’t close off your humanity by any means but you balance your humanity and if you don’t balance your humanity you burn out. And if you don’t balance your humanity you armor your heart and if you armor your heart you starve to death and that’s why you burn out because you are not getting fed.

You have to avert your eyes from the suffering of the world. You can’t look. You can’t look at the have-nots in the world.  You can’t stand it. You have to look away all the time. You have to avert your eyes from Central America and from India and from all those places because you just can’t stand it. Because you feel so impudent to do something to take away the suffering.

If you are going to be free, your freedom means that you do not avert your eyes from anything, in yourself or in anyone else. Freedom means to be a free awareness with what is. No aversion no attachment. They say that for a saint, all the world are their children and you feel the suffering of another person the same way you would as if it was your own child. It’s almost unbearable.

What makes it bearable? There is a little statue of the Buddha and it has a little smile at the edge of its mouth and it is called the smile of unbearable compassion. Sounds like a paradox. The smile of unbearable compassion. It is the unbearable compassion. 

It is beyond bearing and if you were somebody you couldn’t bear it, but you are the universe and that is what you are. You are all of that and it is that balance inside yourself. The smile of unbearable compassion. And that ability to embrace the suffering into yourself, to just keep taking it in and taking it in and look towards it instead of away from it, and look towards it and then take the way in which it reacts in you and keep doing that delicate balancing number. 

To balance that you still feel the humanity and at the same moment you allow, you don’t sit around judging God like what have you done to me, I am a good guy what are you doing this to me for. 

You don’t apply your rational criteria to the universe because the way karma works is not understandable by your rational mind since your rational mind is a product of karma and a system cannot understand something that is meta to itself. It is a logical impossibility. You don’t hear the full universe.

Here’s where the faith comes and the faith is deepened through your own practices, through your own direct experiences. It’s not belief that someone hands you. It is faith that comes from your own direct experiences. So you learn to keep your heart open in hell. Finally.

- Ram Dass

Being in Love ... Part 1

By Ram Dass

The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving: it’s in the being. When I need love from others, or need to give love to others, I’m caught in an unstable situation. Being in love, rather than giving or taking love, is the only thing that provides stability. Being in love means seeing the Beloved all around me.

I’m not interested in being a “lover.” I’m interested in only being love. In our culture we think of love as a relational thing: “I love you” and “you are my lover.” But while the ego is built around relationship, the soul is not. It wants only to be love. 

It’s a true joy, for example, to turn someone whom you didn’t initially like into the Beloved. One way I practice doing so is by placing a photograph of a politician with whom I intensely disagree on my puja table – my altar. Each morning when I wake up, I say good morning to the Buddha, to my guru, and to the other holy beings there. But I find that it’s with a different spirit that I say, “Hello Mr. Politician.” I know it sounds like a funny thing to do, but it reminds me of how far I have to go to see the Beloved in everybody. 

Mother Teresa has described this as “seeing Christ in all his distressing disguises.” When I realized that Mother Teresa was actually involved in an intimate love affair with each and every one of the poor and the lepers she was picking up from the gutters in India, I thought to myself, “ That’s the way to play the game of love.” And that is what I have been training myself for the last past quarter century: to see and be with the Beloved everywhere.

One of the interesting aspects of seeing the Beloved in this way is that it doesn’t require the other person to see him – or herself as the Beloved. All that’s necessary is that I focus on my own consciousness properly. It’s interesting to notice, though, how warmly people respond to being seen as the Beloved, even if they don’t know what’s happening. (Of course, it all assumes that all your feelings are genuine and that you aren’t compelled to act on them or to lay any sort of trip on the other person. The idea is simply to live and breathe among the Beloved.

The way I work at seeing others (like the politician), as the beloved is to remind myself, “This is another soul, just like me, who has taken a complicated incarnation, just as I have. I don’t want to be in this incarnation any more than he wants to be in mine. But since I want to rest in my soul and not in my ego, I would like to give everybody the opportunity to do the same.”

If I can see the soul that happens to have incarnated into a person that I don’t care for, then my consciousness becomes an environment in which he or she is free to come up from air if he or she wants to. That person can do so because I’m not trying to keep him or her locked into being the person that he or she has become. 

It’s liberating to resist another person politically, yet still see him or her as another soul. 

That’s what Krishna meant when he said, “I’m not going to fight, because they are all my cousins on the side.” We may disagree with one another in our current incarnation, but we are all souls. ---  Ram Dass.

________________________________

The reason is, the ego always fights or loves another person with our bias and selfish motives, but love from pure Soul (higher or subtle mind) is unconditional, without motive, and just being in love impersonally ... there is no burden of loving.

So, it reflects; the good, the true and the beautiful.

(真, 善, 美) 

Wind

Being in Love ... Part 2

By Ram Dass

A story I have told many times reinforces this point. Some years ago I put out a set of records called Love, Serve, Remember. The records – which had music, readings from the Gospel of John, and all kinds of neat things – came in an album with a beautiful booklet with text and pictures. It was a wonderful package, and we sold it by mail order for about $4.50.

I showed the album to my father. Dad was a wealthy Boston Lawyer – a conservative Republican, a capitalist, and, at the time, the President of a railroad. He looked over the album and said, “Great job here! But, gee, you know – four and a half dollars? You could probably sell this for ten dollars – fifteen dollars, even!”

I said, “Yeah, I know”

“Would fewer people buy if it were more expensive?,” he asked.

“No,” I relied. “Probably the same number would buy it”

“Well I don’t understand you,” he pressed on. “You would sell it for ten, and your selling it for four-fifty? What’s wrong, are you against capitalism or something?”

I tried to figure out how to explain to him how our approaches are differed. I said, “Dad didn’t you just try a law case for Uncle Henry?”

“Yeah,” he replied, “ and it was a damned tough case. I spent a lot of time in the law library.”

I asked, “Did you win the case?” And he answered, “Yeah, I won it.”

Now, my father was a very successful attorney, and he charged fees that were commensurate with his reputation. 

So I continued. “Well, I bet you charged him a hand and a leg for that one.”

Dad was indignant at the suggestion. “What, are you out of your mind? That’s uncle Henry – I couldn’t charge him.”

“Well, that’s my problem,” I said. “If you find anyone who isn’t Uncle Henry, I’ll rip them off.”

The point I was trying to make is that when you see the Beloved all around you, everyone is family and everywhere is love. When I allow myself to really see the beauty of another being, to see the inherent beauty of soul manifesting itself, I feel the quality of love in that beings presence. It doesn’t matter what we’re doing. 

We could be talking about our cats because we happen to be picking out cat food in the supermarket, or we simply could be passing each other on the sidewalk. When we a being love, we extend outward an environment that allows to act in different, more loving and peaceful ways than they are used in behaving. Not only does it allow them to be more loving, it encourages them to be so.

In 1969 I was giving a series of lectures in New York City. Every night, taking the bus up Third Avenue, I got the same extraordinary bus driver. Every night it was rush hour in one of the busiest cities in the world, but we had a warm word and a caring presence for each person who got on the bus. He drove us as if he were sculling a boat down a river, flowing through the traffic rather than resisting it. 

Everyone who got on the bus was less likely to kick the dog that evening or to be otherwise hostile and unloving, because of the loving space that driver had created. Yet all he was doing was driving the bus. He wasn’t a therapist or a great spiritual teacher. He was simply being love.

Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another. 

Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is a supreme creative act. --- Ram Dass

Be Here Now

Search for Self?

Ram Dass, born as Dr. Richard Alpert, April 6, 1931, a spiritual leader and the author of the book, Be Here Now.

A transformative and inspiring book, stressed on the importance of spiritual side of human nature. Ram Dass takes the wisdom of the East and express it on the way that ordinary people of the West can understand. Take it as some kind of 'revealed the Truths' book, with open mind, rather than confine to certain religion. It has so many inspiring truths in it and make life better in every way. I only re-discovered it on my bookshelf today, recalled that I bought it through Amazon.com, 11 years ago.

The central message of this book will blow out you mind, has profound effect on your life ....

Ram Dass, as an ex-Professor at Harvard University in the 1960s, for his travels to India, and his deep relationship with his Hindu guru, Neem Karoli Baba (better known as Maharaji), for founding the charitable organizations Seva Foundation and Hanuman Foundation. Some quotes from Ram Dass;

“We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.”

“The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.”

“Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it!”

“The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving: it's in the being. When I need love from others, or need to give love to others, I'm caught in an unstable situation. Being in love, rather than giving or taking love, is the only thing that provides stability. Being in love means seeing the Beloved all around me.”

“The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.”

“In our relationships, how much can we allow them to become new, and how much do we cling to what they used to be yesterday?”

“Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.”

“We're all just walking each other home.”

“We're fascinated by the words--but where we meet is in the silence behind them.”

“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.”

“It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.”

“As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.”