Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart

by Ram Dass

Taming the mind is fraught with paradoxes. You have to give it all up to have it all. Turn off your mind. There is a place in you beyond thought that already knows—trust in that. Jesus tells us that unless we become like little children, we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. That child mind, sometimes called beginner’s mind in Zen, is the innocence of pure being, of unconditional love.

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.

So how do you become conscious of all these unconscious influences? Go within to your spiritual heart, your hridayām, and watch the drama that is your entire life. When you quiet your mind enough to transcend your ego, you can begin to hear how it all is.

The witness doesn’t evaluate; it doesn’t judge your actions. It merely makes note of them. It’s a subtle thing, the watcher watching him- or herself watching. It’s actually two planes of consciousness simultaneously, the witness and the ego. The witness is connected to the soul plane.

“Who am I becoming?” and “What will I be when I grow up?” are irrelevant when you are just being. All of these models just fall away. You start to sit simply, live simply, just be where you are, just be with whomever you’re with when you’re with them. You listen for your dharma, the spiritual way of living your life.

All of life is a big zafu, no matter whether you’re driving or making love or whatever you’re doing. It’s all meditation. It is the practice of being here now.

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.

Breathe in the energy of the universe, the shakti of the universe. Breathe in the breath of God. Let it fill your whole 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. Breathe in God’s breath, and breathe out all the impediments that keep you from knowing God. Let the breath be the transformation.

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, compassionate, loving. All of the creations of human beings’ minds are within you; look upon them with compassion. Continue to grow until not only this galaxy but every galaxy is within you, until everything you can conceive of is within you. All of it is inside you. You are the only One. Feel your aloneness, your silence, your peace. There are no other beings here; all planes of consciousness are within you, and all beings are within you. You are the Ancient One. Everything that ever was, is, or will be is part of the dance of your being. You are the universe, so you have infinite wisdom; you feel all of the feelings of the universe, so you have infinite compassion. Let the boundaries of your being dissolve, and merge yoursel...

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.

This is really just a symbol of the leap of faith that each of us has to make, to have faith in ourselves and faith in the universe, faith in the flow of things, to go beyond ourselves.

What a glorious leap! A leap into the unknown, a leap way beyond Hanuman’s capacity, a leap way beyond who he thought he was. 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 Chalisa inspires us to make the mirror of our heart as clean as Hanuman’s so that we can become aware of the great beauty and love that lives within us as our own true nature.”

ONCE YOU GET that first glimpse of living Spirit, once your heart opens even for a moment to unconditional love, everything in your life becomes grist for the mill of your awakening. That awakening is from ego consciousness, your limited self, to the Self, the universal Spirit present in each of us, the God consciousness. It’s such grace to share this path of the heart together.

How you go about your work in the world determines whether your work is a vehicle for your spiritual awakening or for getting more caught in māya, increasing the illusion of separation. Karma yoga uses selfless action and service as a way of bringing your life into harmony with the One.

To use your daily life and work as a conscious spiritual path means relinquishing your attachment to the fruits of the actions, to how they come out. Instead of doing it for a reward or a result, you do your work as an offering, out of love for God. Through love for God, your work becomes an expression of devotion, of bhakti.

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.

Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection to the universe. If you try to dominate people, you are already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict, not how to start it.

You and I are in training to become conscious, compassionate beings, in the truest and deepest sense. Become an instrument of joy, an instrument of equanimity, an instrument of presence, an instrument of love, an instrument of availability, and at the same moment absolutely quiet.

Use every situation you have with other people as a vehicle to work on yourself. See where you get stuck, where you push, where you grab, where you judge, where you do all the other stuff. Use your life experiences as your curriculum.

I became somebody because my parents wanted me to be special and my educators wanted me to be special, and they trained me how to do that. It’s called ego structuring. I really made it. I was really somebody. My parents were proud of me. I could look in their eyes and see pride and appreciation. That part was very gratifying. The only problem was, inside I felt lousy. I felt like somehow I should be happy. But I wasn’t. I thought, “Well, happiness isn’t everything, is it? As long as I am what everyone wants me to be, isn’t that enough?” But it wasn’t, and I felt very weird.

you don’t appreciate me, that’s your problem. If I need your love or your approval, then it’s my problem. Then my needs are giving you power over me. But it’s not your power—it’s the power of my desire system. The power other people have to shake you out of your equanimity and love and consciousness has to do with your own attachments and the clinging of your mind.

And he said, “Money and truth have nothing to do with one another.”

The Tao Te Ching says, “Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.” Often we don’t fully hear the truth because of our mind’s clinging or attachment; we hear only the projections of our own desires. So again and again we make decisions that end up not being in the deepest harmony with the Way of things. Working through an attachment means you have to work with that desire until you are no longer attached to that desire. The desire may still be there, but you are no longer attached to it. When we see without attachment, truth becomes self-evident. When we are fully present in the moment, truth just is.

with the universe, where lover and Beloved merge. It’s a place to be fully in the moment, to feel completely fulfilled, to just be in love.

When somebody provokes your anger, the only reason you get angry is because you’re holding on to how you think something is supposed to be. You’re denying how it is. Then you see it’s the expectations of your own mind that are creating your own hell.

“The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and who, though distant is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.”

Aging brings personal changes that are both physical and psychological. It’s painful and confusing when the body doesn’t do what it used to do, and starts to do a lot of things it didn’t used to do.

When you experience fear or are unsure about your situation, there’s a beautiful and very powerful mantra you can say: “The power of God is within me. The grace of God surrounds me.” Repeat it to yourself or to a loved one in need. It will protect you.

I’d like to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I’d have fewer imaginary ones. You see, I’m one of those people who live sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I’ve had my moments, and if I had it to do over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I’ve been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute. If I had to do it again, I would travel lighter than I have. If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.

Equally, trying to hold onto something you are done with will slow your journey.

death. It was soon after that Aldous Huxley gave The Tibetan Book of the Dead to Tim Leary and me. Lamas read aloud from this book to their fellow monks when they are dying and in the days following death. The book is centuries old, yet described the same experiences I had with the mushrooms, bringing me full circle to the universal nature of these experiences.

This is about where you stand in your awareness, in a place that allows you to be with suffering in the world without closing your heart. If you close or armor your heart in order to be in the world, you become a crippled instrument for the healing of the universe. So you do all you can to relieve suffering and work to keep your heart open.

“We’re celebrating because it’s today and we’re together.” We weren’t being facetious. We meant to recognize the everyday sacredness of everything—everything.

Think of the kinds of experiences that give you a feeling of contentment. Maybe your contentment comes from being in nature, listening to the birds or the sound of the waves meeting the shore, looking at the sunset or the stars in the night sky, or contemplating a rose in the garden. Maybe it comes from singing or listening to music, sinking into a warm bath, or being touched in a way that eases the body. Maybe it comes from watching your child or being with your dog or cat. Maybe you experience it when looking into the eyes of a loved one. Those are experiences that touch your soul.

All that is the ego, who you think you are, the cluster of thoughts about how you identify yourself, thoughts about different roles that you play in society. When we meet someone we ask, “How do you do? And what do you do?” But is what you do the same as who you are? Every one of our roles is a thought form. We confuse our souls with our roles. You don’t see me as a soul. You see me as Ram Dass, as a body, a role. What does it matter whether I am a cellist, or a pilot, or a teacher? When you strip away the roles, this outer form is just the body. Who I am is just here. Instead of “How do you do?” how about, “How do you be?” Our inner being is beyond form.

My Western life had always been about achievement, wanting, desiring, doing more, getting more. I always felt as if I were in the wrong place at the wrong time because there must be something better. I was forever collecting the next achievement. But those people in Benares had something I hadn’t been able to collect: contentment.

Only love comes from the soul. When you identify with your soul, you live in a loving universe. The soul loves everybody. It’s like the sun. It brings out the beauty in each of us. You can feel it in your heart.

You have to graduate from a deprivation to an abundance model. It’s abundant because you are it; you are radiating love wherever you go. As you become love, when you walk down the street, everyone is the most beautiful person all over again. You look and appreciate. You may meet another’s eyes, and you both recognize the love, but you don’t have to do anything about it.

Practices are designed to put you back in touch with your true nature, the Self, to polish the mirror of your mind and heart so they truly reflect the spirit.