Tag Archives: Ram Dass

Dealing with the Hard times

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Why is it so important to face our low points on the path?

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We have all been enchanted with getting high and having a free awareness, and so we have tried to repress or deny lows when our awareness once again gets caught in this or that.

We love the illusion of being high but we are afraid of coming down. As your journey proceeds, you realize that you can’t hold on to your highs and deny your lows. Your lows are created by the remaining attachments that blind your awareness. Facing your lows – your anger, loneliness, greed, fears, depressions, and conflicts – is the most productive fire of purification you can find.

As your connection with the spirit deepens, you might even choose to seek out those things that bring your attachments to the surface, so that you might confront them and free your awareness from them.

It’s a tricky business – playing with fire. You must feel your own way, unless you have a guide to say when to go and when to stop. If you don’t have a guide, trust your own judgment. For example, if anger still traps your awareness, you might put yourself in a situation which usually elicit anger and then attempt to maintain clear awareness.

If you confront your attachments out of guilt, out of “oughts” or “shoulds,” or through some externally imposed discipline, it won’t work. For these confrontations are difficult and your motives to confront them must come from deep within.

It takes the innermost resolve to resist your powerful temptations, or separate your awareness from your strong desires, be they lust, anger, or whatever.

Your gains through meditation give you the enthusiasm that can bring a breakthrough into another plane, or the heartfelt desire to go in deeper, or the hunger to change your life. But it still takes much courage and fortitude to face the deepest attachments head on.

When you feel that your life is committed to the spirit you can no longer avoid confronting these weaknesses. Your strategy changes, you seek to move faster, wishing to confront head-on the things that bring down your awareness. You can no longer let them have their way. So you ask for a hotter fire, a fiercer confrontation. Even though this is often painful rather than pleasurable, it’s all right, for you are reaching toward that freedom which lies beyond pleasure and pain.

When you want to burn away the grip of your ego on your awareness you’ll endure whatever is needed to clean up your life.

 

– Ram Dass, Journey of Awakening: A Meditator’s Guidebook

from:    https://www.ramdass.org/low-points-on-the-path/

Ram Dass on Mantras

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Open Heart Extra – Mantras

OM-Mani-Padme-Hum-Mune-Wall

Mantras

A mantra is a phrase, or it could be a sound or a phrase. It is a phrase that you repeat over and over and over again. Take for example the phrase Om Mani Padme Hum. This phrase is perhaps one of the most widely used mantras in the world today. In fact in Nepal you’ll see rocks 20 feet long and 10 feet high with Om Mani Padme Hum written in tiny letters all over the whole rock, so you can just read it like a letter. And there are prayer wheels at the temples where written in them ten million times is the phrase Om Mani Padme Hum, and you see lamas going around stupas saying Om Mani Padme Hum. 

Now, when you first start to say a mantra, the first involvement is in hearing it outside, through your ears, saying it aloud and hearing it and thinking about it’s meaning. That’s the first game you play with mantra. So, if I give you that mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum, you think about it and you think, “Well, what does it mean?” Now, there are many meanings – there’s a whole book written about its meaning by Govinda. One of the ways of understanding its meaning is that Om means, like Brahma, that which is behind it all, the unmanifest. Mani means jewel or crystal. Padme means lotus, and Hum means heart. So, on one level what it means is the entire universe is just like a pure jewel or crystal right in the heart or center of the lotus flower, which is me, and it is manifest, it comes forth in light, in manifest light, in my own heart. That’s one way of interpreting it. You start to say Om Mani Padme Hum and you’re thinking, “God in unmanifest form is like a jewel in the middle of a lotus, manifest in my heart.” You go through that and feel it in your heart – that’s one trip.

Ok, that’s the first, and lowest level of operation of mantra. It’s putting one set of thoughts into your head in place of another set of thoughts. Instead of thinking, “Gee, it’s hot out. Shall I have a milkshake at the next stop? Gee, this engine sounds a little strange. Those new Chevy’s don’t look very good at all. Boy, I’ve been on this trip!” Instead of that, all of that stuff, which is terribly profound and important, but isn’t really that relevant, you go into the mantra. Once the mantra has been going on that way for a while, it starts to change in its nature. You stop thinking about what it means; you just sort of get hooked or addicted on the Tibetan sound of it. And then it starts to move into your head, and then from your head down into your chest, until pretty soon it’s going around like a little wheel, going around inside your chest, just Om Mani Padme Hum, right?

Now, at that point it has stopped meaning anything to you. Any time you want to bring it back into consciousness, you can rerun its meaning, which will do that thing for you again, but you can keep it down in the place where it’s just running off. Now it’s got another quality to it. That is, when a mantra is done sufficiently it gets into a certain kind of vibration or harmony with the universe in a certain way which is its own thing. The conscious beings who evolve certain languages such as Sanskrit specifically evolve the sounds of these languages to be connected with various states of consciousness – unlike the English language- so that a Sanskrit mantra, if you do it over and over again, will take you to a certain state of consciousness.

The idea of a mantra is that it just sits there, and all that stuff goes by. It’s like a bridge on which you stand, looking down into the water in which you see your own life going by. It’s a training device to break you out of your attachments. When I’m driving and doing mantra I’m not attached to my driving. I’m doing mantra, and driving is just happening. So in other words, the mantra is a technique for bringing me into a place in myself which would be called the eternal present; that is, a place where nothing is literally happening at all. It’s a device for calming my mind.

Mantra gets so far out, that after I did it for two days and two nights solid in Nepal once, I stopped to go to sleep and of course it continued going. But instead of it continuing going just in my voice it continued going, what it sounded like was a cross between the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the O Heavenly Day Chorus. It’s that huge of a thing except it was made up of all old voices and they stretched back in time and space in infinite direction, you know, distance. All I heard was Om Mani Padme Hum and the wind was Om Mani Padme Hum and the air conditioner was Om Mani Padme Hum, the whole thing. I had tuned in on that place where that was all I could hear. But it was no longer my voice. I went rushing to a yogi and I said, “What’s happening, I’m going crazy!” He said, “You’ve tuned in on the Om, that’s that place. You’ve tuned in on that place. There it is. That’s where they’re all hanging out.”

– Ram Dass, excerpt from the book Doing Your Own Being, 1973

from:    https://www.ramdass.org/mantras/

RAm Dass on Change

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Making Friends With Change By Ram Dass

 

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A lot of people ask me, “How do you know about incarnations?” I haven’t experienced my past incarnations, but from being with my guru, Maharaji, who’s farther up the mountain, I have an understanding of how it all works. He would speak of reincarnation as a reality, and I and the other people around him had a very deep relationship with him and each other that clearly had not come from our family backgrounds or upbringing in this life.

Our human forms are composed of and surrounded by an infinite myriad of forms, all in constant motion, from the subatomic to the cosmic in scale. This is the lila, the enchanted dance of existence, the divine interplay of consciousness and energy. Amid this divine play we seek fulfillment, perfection, flow, freedom, enlightenment, Oneness.

The dominant quality of form is change, because all forms are in time. That’s another way of saying we don’t know what will happen from one instant to the next. Or, as one of my guru brothers is fond of saying, “Don’t be surprised to be surprised!” For instance, I didn’t anticipate I’d be living in a wheelchair today. The way to live with change is to be completely present in the moment (remember, Be Here Now).

We cannot cling to forms or our experience of them, because they decay and dissolve back again into their formless state. Attempting to hold on to anything in time is ultimately futile and a cause of much suffering. What is really there to hold on to? In reality there is nothing permanent, nothing solid, nothing constant except relativity and change themselves.

When we realize how finite are the limits of gratification or possible fulfillment within the play of forms, then despair arises. That despair is born of the world-weary understanding that nothing in form can provide ultimate meaning. It also forces and demands awakening and seeks transcendence of suffering.

If futile clinging to impermanence creates our suffering, letting go and making friends with change is joy, liberation. In youth our lifetime seems to stretch infinitely before us. As we age, the accumulation of our experiences seems to have occurred in the blink of an eye. Even now that I’m seventy-nine years old, I realize there’s plenty of change to come before dying – change in the body, change in friends and family, change in memory. These experiences lead to deepening wisdom and freedom and to diving deep within to the realm beyond form.

Long before recorded history, human beings were awakening out of the illusion of form or separateness that the Indians call maya. A tiny fraction of humanity, but still many beings, finish their work and complete the process of realization, the integration of form and the formless. These awakened beings pass beyond the illusion of birth and death and attachments to this physical plane and every other plane. Their hearts fill with the bliss of that realization and with the infinite love that permeates the universe the way that dark matter permeates the space between stars. That love is the subtle texture of our material world, the unseen energy, the fullness of emptiness (sunyata).

When they finally emerge from the illusion of separateness, these free beings can either merge back into that formless state or remain in form on one plane or another, or they can continue their evolution to the point where it makes no difference. They may or may not take birth again on the physical plane.

– Ram Dass (excerpt from Be Love Now, co-authored by Rameshwar Das)
— www.ramdass.org —

fromhttp://www.newrealities.com/index.php/articles-on-eastern-spirituality/item/3334-making-friends-with-change-by-ram-dass

Ram Dass on Saying Grace

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Ram Dass, The Only Dance There Is, Part 3

 

What I mean by the word consecration is bringing into consciousness the nature of the act in a cosmic plan. For example, in the old days people would say grace. Grace was a thing you waited for before you ate the turkey.

Norman Rockwell characterizes the kid reaching while everybody’s head’s bowed. It’s that time, “Let’s say grace.” “Grace.” Now, when I bless food, the statement I say, when I say grace, is an old Sanskrit one. It means “This offering of this little ritual I’m performing, this is part of it all, part of Brahma, part of that which is eternally all. He who is making the offering means, that which is being offered is part of it all. The hunger to which you are feeding . . . the fire which you are feeding, that’s all part of it all. Whoever you are offering it to is part of it all, too. He who realizes that all of it is interrelated, all of it is one, becomes one with it all.”

There is a very lovely short story by J. D. Salinger calledTeddy, in which Teddy is like an old lama who has taken a reincarnation in a kind of middle class western family by some quirk of cosmic design. He is about ten years old and on a ship with his sister and his mother and father.

He’s out on deck and he is meeting this man who has begun to see that this little boy isn’t quite like a little boy, and he says to him, “When did you first realize that you … how it was?” And Teddy says, “Well, I was 6 years old. I was in the kitchen and I was watching my little sister in her high-chair drink milk. I suddenly saw, that it was sort of like God pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.” Well, that’s exactly the same thing as that Sanskrit mantra.

from:    http://www.spiritsite.com/writing/ramdas/part6.shtml