Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart

by Ram Dass

The key quality of the human soul is the ability to reflect on its own existence.

I honor the place in you Where the entire universe resides. I honor the place in you Of love, of light, of truth, of peace. I honor the place in you

Where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, There is only one of us. Namasté.

Meditation stems from the truth that who you really are is more than who you think you are. The more you desire to know who you truly are and why you

are here on earth, the more you are drawn to that truth. As you are pulled inward, you begin to leave behind the kinds of clinging and attachment that keep distorting and narrowing your vision.

The reality of oneness is greater than what is available to you through your senses and your thoughts.

Attachment to the melodrama of your ego is what keeps you from being here now. This model of who you think you are and

how you think the world is constantly brings you down into separateness. These are habits of mind. Because of the nature of these attachments, you can see only what you can see, which from the ego’s standpoint is ...

If we reflect on the qualities of Christ’s love, or of equanimity, kindness, or compassion, we begin to take on those qualities. Sri Ramakrishna said, “If you meditate on your ideal, you will acquire its nature. If you think of God day and night, you will acquire the nature of God.”

When you begin to awaken to your predicament—that you are trapped in illusion—you begin to see through the dreamlike quality of the veils of illusion. Everything you thought was real you now see as māya (illusion).

Motivations and desires affect our perceptions. We don’t necessarily see things as they are. We see them as we are.

Hari Dass, my yoga teacher at the ashram in India, once wrote on his chalkboard, “If a pickpocket meets a saint, all he sees are his pockets.” In The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment, Thaddeus Golas says, “You never have to change what you see, only the way you see it.” Gurdjieff, a great spiritual teacher who taught in Europe and America in the early decades of the twentieth century, noted that if you think you’re free and you don’t know you are in prison, you can’t escape. Gurdjieff saw us as being in a prison of our own habits of mind. Unless we understand how we are conditioned by our desires, we remain stuck in the reality they create, like a television program with an ad that keeps repeating over and over, implanting a subliminal message while we watch the show.

We are constantly preoccupied with the creations of our minds. Einstein again: “The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.” What we strive to be liberated from are our habitual thought patterns about ourselves and the pull of our sensory experiences. Lightening up in these areas allows us to refocus on centering and calming the mind with meditation, mantra, or the practices of bhakti yoga. As these practices deepen, the higher wisdom comes.

If we are to live in that state of pure being, something within us must die.

What you seek is already within you. This reality is subjective, not the outer objective reality. You may experience it as focused in the center of your chest. It can be called the soul, or in Hinduism the Atmān, or in Buddhism the pure Buddha-Mind. Jesus Christ said, “The kingdom of God is within you.” This is the space of full awareness that is in harmony with the universe; this is wisdom itself. The full spirit of God is inside each of us. When you want to approach God, go inward.

Offering up or cleaning up the ego stuff that distracts you from the spirit is called purification. Purification is an act of letting go that is done out of discriminative awareness—that is, you understand that you are a soul passing through a life in which the entire drama is a script for your awakening and that you are more than just the drama. You are a spiritual being having a human experience. Your life experience is a vehicle for coming to God, for becoming conscious, for becoming liberated. Ultimately that’s what you are doing here.

As you become more aware of what gets you to God and what doesn’t, you will naturally let go of what doesn’t. That’s purification. You do it to get to God, not for the sake of being pure.

The illusion keeps pulling you back into forgetting. Lost in your melodrama, you keep forgetting into it. Sometimes you spill the water. You will keep forgetting and remembering and forgetting and remembering. And every now and then, you remember. Keep your eye on the mark.

Your romantic attachment to your own story line and how it comes out fades.

“Who am I becoming?” and “What will I be when I grow up?” are irrelevant when you are just being.

Aldous Huxley reminds us, “The body is always in time, the spirit is always timeless and the psyche is an amphibious creature compelled by the laws of man’s being to associate itself to some extent with its body, but capable, if

it so desires, of experiencing and being identified with its spirit.” Your whole life becomes a meditative act.

Because of the purity of your seeking, many incredibly high beings are present, and with them comes the spiritual substance out of which all form derives. You can imagine that substance as a golden mist that fills the air. With every breath, don’t just breathe in air; imagine you are pulling into yourself this golden substance. Fill with it; let it pour through your entire body.

Each time you breathe out, breathe out all of the things in you that keep you from knowing your true Self; breathe out all the separateness, all the feelings of unworthiness, all the self-pity, all the attachment to your pain, whether it’s physical or psychological. Breathe out anger and doubt and greed and lust and confusion.

wisdom. It’s sitting quietly, silently, perfectly poised in your heart. Feel its compassion and its love. Let yourself be filled with its love. Now, slowly let that tiny being grow in size until it fills your body, so its head fills the space of your head, its torso, your torso, its arms, your arms, its legs, your legs. So now in the skin of your body sits this being—a being of infinite wisdom, a being of the deepest compassion, a being that is bathed in bliss, a being that is self-effulgent: a being of perfect tranquility. Let this being begin to grow in size. Experience yourself growing until everything in the room around you is within your body. All of the sounds, all the sensory experiences are coming from inside you. Continue to grow. Feel your vastness, your peace, your equanimity. Your head extends into the sky. Expand until your town, your environment, and all those beings within them are contained within you. Experience the human condition; see the loneliness, joy, caring, violence, paranoia, a mother’s love for her child, sickness, fear of death—see it all. It is all within you. See it with compassion and with caring and, at the same moment, with equanimity. Feel the light pour through your being. Let yourself grow still larger. Feel your vastness increase until you are sitting in the middle of this galaxy, the earth deep within your belly. All humankind is within you. Feel the turmoil and the longing. Feel the beauty. Sit in this universe, silent, peaceful, comp...

being free. See how close it is to knowing who it is. Look within that being and see the purity of its soul. Reach down and, with your mind, very gently place your hand on the head of this being and bestow upon it your blessing that in this very life it may fully know itself. Experience simultaneously that which blesses and that which is being blessed. Now come back down into the body you thought you were when you began. You are still flesh surrounding a being of radiance and wisdom, a being of compassion that comes from attunement with the truth, with love for all that comes from being that vast One. That love and peace are pouring out of you to all beings everywhere, like a beacon for all those who suffer. Remember those people toward whom you have felt less than loving. Look to their souls and surround them with light, with the love and peace of this moment. Let go of the anger and the judgment. Send the light of love and peace out to people who are ill, who are lonely, who are afraid, who have lost their way. Share your blessings, because only when you give can you continue to receive. As you journey on this spiritual path, accept the responsibility for sharing what you receive. That is part of God’s harmony, of becoming an instrument for the will of God. Let the radiant, perfect being within you again assume its diminutive form, the size of a thumb. See it again sitting on a lotus flower in your spiritual heart, in the middle of your chest, radiant with light, peacefu...

Love is more than an idea. We can’t just sit down and intellectually figure out what bhakti or devotion is about. It has to do with the heart, and heart trips are experienced in a realm that’s not necessarily conceptual.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They are in each other all along. RUMI Many of us are afraid to let go of our judging minds to fall into love, to be absorbed into the liquid flow of the universe. In the case of divine love, faith makes it easier to let go.

Loving God is totally safe because the object of love is ultimately your true Self.

If you see everything in the universe as a way to work on your own consciousness—even if it’s showing you where you’re unconscious or where you’re asleep—then everyone and everything in the universe becomes your teacher and a means of awakening. My own teachers have come in all kinds of packages. Some years ago I was invited by John and Toni Lilly to swim with their dolphins, Joe and Rosie. Everybody wanted to swim with dolphins, and I wanted to swim with dolphins too, although I wasn’t quite sure why. When I got to the holding tank, it was a cold, gray day. I thought maybe this was really not for me. But other people were watching, and after all, this was Ram Dass swimming with the dolphins. I got into the water, and these huge beings zoomed by me very close up. They were quite intimidating. I was treading water and feeling out of my natural

medium. After a while, one of the dolphins, Rosie, was sort of hovering just to my left, and I reached out and touched her. I assumed that when you touch a wild creature it would be startled or irritated and swim away. But Rosie didn’t swim away. I started to stroke Rosie’s back. It was amazingly soft, like silk, very porous. I stroked some more. The wild creature model of who I had thought she was had stopped working. In that model, she wouldn’t have allowed me to stroke her because I was doing it with considerable pressure at that point. In that moment, my mind let go, and I started to experience ecstasy just being with Rosie. Then she dove to the bottom of the pool, but I stayed on

the surface. When I didn’t follow her to the bottom, she came back up to get me. When I finally let go, Rosie turned herself upright, vertical in the water, and pressed her stomach against my stomach. I noticed everyone watching me with my stomach pressed against this dolphin’s stomach, and I wondered, “Is this legal? Is it ethical?” I found myself putting my arms around her and kissing her on the mouth, saying, “Oh, Rosie!” I was going into such states of ecstasy. I realized that Rosie, a...

The guru constantly reflects back that part of us that is beyond form. That process also illuminates the dust on our own mirror, the impurities and imperfections of our individuality that keep us

from becoming one, from living fully in that place of pure being and unconditional love. Sometimes, for a moment, the guru will blow it away to give us a glimpse.

Your own leap—your leap into life, into death, into the next moment, into freedom—comes from giving up the model of who you think you are. Who are you? Are you a straight person? Are you a clown? Have you been laughing forever? Have you been sad long enough? Is it all very heavy and important? Or is it kind of light and playful? How does this round work for you? It’s all wide open this time. It’s all wide open.

The essential work of developing a spiritual consciousness is quieting the mind and opening the heart.

Your attachment, wishing your loved ones to be different than they are, keeps them the same. Just allow them to be the way they are and love them.

Just keep working on yourself until you are radiating love for each of the beings in your life.

The essence of karma yoga is to free yourself from attachments to the events of your life, to stop creating more karma

that gets you more stuck, and to get free of your existing karma.

Action arising from awareness not identified with attraction or aversion creates no karma. Karma is the residual effect of an attached act. No attachment, no karma.

you wish to know the truth, then hold to no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.

Desire creates your universe; that’s just the way it works.

You have to honor your own path and be able to trust that there is a place in you that knows what is best.

In trying to decide what to do with your life, listen to your heart. The more you live in your spiritual heart, the more you see yourself and others from the soul perspective.

Don’t take your melodrama so seriously. Let’s remember who we really are—that is, souls, not egos. The ego is who you think you are. Who you think you are will die with the body because it’s part of this incarnation. But your soul, which has these qualities of deep wisdom and love and peace and joy, is just here, watching it all go by.

Ego is neither good nor bad. The ego has a function. It is the vehicle through which you relate to the external world. But the ego is a collection of thoughts, and to the extent you identify with your thoughts, they keep you from being here now. Once you let go of the identification with your thoughts the melodrama goes on, but it’s no longer your melodrama. Appreciate the experiences but don’t get caught in them.

If you can admit that you can’t see or hear clearly because of attachment, then the full wisdom of things will begin to shine through. As long as you have some desire about how you think it ought to be, you can’t hear how it is.

In the yoga of relationship, two people come together to find that shared love but continue to dance as two. In that union, both people are separate and yet not separate. Their relationship feeds both their unique individuality and their unity of consciousness. Love can open the way to surrendering into oneness. It gets extraordinarily beautiful when there’s no more “me” and “you,” and it becomes just “us.”

At a certain point, you realize that you see only the projections of your own mind. The play of phenomena is a projection of the spirit. The projections are your karma, your curriculum for this incarnation. Everything that’s happening to you is a teaching designed to burn out your stuff, your attachments. Your humanity and all your desires are not some kind of error. They’re integral parts of the journey.