How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflections on Service

by Ram Dass

These insights don’t come easily. It takes a great deal to detach ourselves from our vested interests and opinions long enough to take in and really feel the views of those arrayed against us. It’s hard to find a place where we can meet other than as opponents. As fellow sake drinkers, parents, football fans? Hawks and doves—we’re both birds? Perhaps, but it’s not always that easy in the midst of a struggle. Finally, it’s the work of that natural human compassion which comes into play only when the mind isn’t so busy reacting and justifying itself. We can’t fake it, we’ve got to feel it. And that’s possible only when we’re quiet behind it all—engaged and active where necessary, but rooted in a greater appreciation of concord behind all the immediate evidence of confrontation. We reach for that state because we’ve an obligation not to miss whatever possibilities there may be for reconciliation. We also do it to make sure that if the battle must be waged, we’ll be most likely to win, and with the fewest possible casualties.