How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflections on Service

by Ram Dass

The power of their compassion has been rooted in the fact that they themselves have overcome the entrapment of suffering. They have broken the link between painful circumstance and mental resistance. They have gone beyond it. This doesn’t mean that they have denied the experience of pain. In Gethsemane, on the cross, throughout his life, Christ surely felt and understood the burden of human incarnation. In his humanity, he experienced it. But in his divinity, he transcended it and transformed it into redemption and liberation, a possibility for all. So too the Buddha, having seen what he saw, could look across all the fields of human existence with “the Smile of Unbearable Compassion.”

Many helpers, when they themselves are suffering, are incapable of accepting support, or at least receiving it easily. Yet they may be impatient with those they’re working with for not accepting aid or counsel readily enough. Chances are, if you can’t accept help, you can’t really give it. While all of this is an extremely complicated psychodynamic interaction, one thing seems obvious. The more conscious we are in dealing with our own suffering, the more sensitive we will be in treating the pain of others.

Reckoning, judging, evaluating, leaping in, taking it personally, being bored—the helping act has any number of invitations to reactiveness and distraction. Partly we are agitated because we so intensely want to help. After all, someone’s in pain. We care. So part of the time we are listening, but we may also be using our minds to try to solve the problem. There’s a pull to be efficient, to look for some kind of resolution. We reach for certain familiar models or approaches. In order to be helpful, our analytic mind must stay on top of it all. So we jump between listening and judging. But in our zeal to help, we may increase the distance between the person and our own consciousness. We find ourselves primarily in our own thoughts, not with another person. Not only are we listening less, but the concepts our mind is coming up with start to act as a screen that preselects information. One thought rules out another.

A big, tough samurai once went to see a little monk. “Monk,” he said, in a voice accustomed to instant obedience, “teach me about heaven and hell!” The monk looked up at this mighty warrior and replied with utter disdain, “Teach you about heaven and hell? I couldn’t teach you about anything. You’re dirty. You smell. Your blade is rusty. You’re a disgrace, an embarrassment to the samurai class. Get out of my sight. I can’t stand you.” The samurai was furious. He shook, got all red in the face, was speechless with rage. He pulled out his sword and raised it above him, preparing to slay the monk. “That’s hell,” said the monk softly. The samurai was overwhelmed. The compassion and surrender of this little man who had offered his life to give this teaching to show him hell! He slowly put down his sword, filled with gratitude, and suddenly peaceful. “And that’s heaven,” said the monk softly.

the needs of others are what bring us to a state of sharp concentration. Whether it’s because we feel very secure with those we’re with or because we are functioning under conditions of extreme crisis, we find that in this state of intense concentration helpful insights arise on their own, as a function of our one-pointedness. In these experiences we meet a resource of remarkable potential. While we may be frustrated in not having access to it all the time, these experiences lead us to inquire whether there might be something we could do more regularly and formally to quiet the mind, strengthen its concentration, make available the deeper insights that often result, and bring them into closer attunement with the empathy and compassion of our heart. How immeasurably this might enhance our ability to help others.

Meditation may be frustrating if we think we can stop this process right away. We can’t. But by penetrating and observing it, we can free ourselves from being carried away by our thoughts.

Our thoughts are always happening. Much like leaves floating down a stream or clouds crossing the sky, they just keep on coming. They arise in the form of sensations, feelings, memories, anticipations, and speculations. And they are all constantly calling for attention: “Think of me.” “Notice me.” “Attend to me.” As each thought passes, either we attend to it or we don’t. While we can’t stop the thoughts themselves, we can stop our awareness from being snared by each one. If you are standing by a river and a leaf floats by, you have your choice of following the leaf with your eye or keeping your attention fixed in front of you. The leaf floats out of your line of vision. Another leaf enters … and floats by.

But as we stand on the bank of the river and the leaves float by, there is no confusion as to whether or not we are the leaves. Similarly, it turns out that there is a place in our minds from which we can watch our own mental images ...

LETTING GO Find a position in which you can comfortably remain for ten minutes with your back straight but not rigid. This time, instead of picking an object of focus such as the breath, just observe thought itself. Simply let things happen as they do. Just watch. Be aware, as thoughts arise, that the thoughts are there, without getting involved in the content of the thoughts. Let all images, thoughts, and sensations arise and pass away without being bothered, without reacting, without judging, without clinging, without identifying with them. Just keep letting go of one thing after another. The thoughts that arise are not obstacles or hindrances. They are just the objects of our observation. Keep the mind sharply aware, moment to moment, of what is happening, what the mind is attending to. If you feel tense from trying to watch your mind, relax. The sky doesn’t get all tense trying to see the clouds. Everything is just as it is. Keep in mind the idea of letting go. As thoughts or sensations, images, memories, whatever, rise into your awareness, notice them, witness them, and then let them go. Keep letting go again and again. And of course, once you are really comfortable and at home in pure awareness, then you can let go of the thought of letting go as well.

Our own mental reactions are equally objects to be observed as anything else in our field of awareness. So

it is possible to notice a single thought, sensation, or situation arise, but not get totally lost in identifying with it. We observe the cloud but remain focused on the sky, see the leaf but hold in vision the river. We are that which is aware of the totality. And our skills develop with practice. First, we have to appreciate the value of such qualities of mind and desire to develop them. Next, we have to have faith in the possibility that we can indeed make progress. Finally, we have to explore and practice appropriate techniques. Twenty minutes a day of such practice can lead to results and the incentive to go deeper still. Continuous practice brings about great transformation of mind and leads to a new quality of service.

Ultimately, this kind of listening to the intuitive mind is a kind of surrender based on trust. It’s playing it by ear, listening for the voice within. We trust that it’s possible to hear into a greater totality which offers insight and guidance. Ultimately, but really ultimately, we trust that when we are fully quiet, aware, and attentive, boundaries created by the mind simply blur and dissolve, and we begin to merge into All That Is. And All That Is, by definition, includes answers as well as questions, solutions as well as dilemmas.

To rest in awareness also means to stand free of the prejudices of mind that come from identifying with cherished attitudes and opinions. We can listen without being busy planning, analyzing, theorizing … and especially judging. We can open into the moment fully in order to hear it all.

In other people we hear what help they really require, what license they are actually giving us to help, what potential there is for change. We can hear their strengths and their pain. We hear what support is available, what obstacles must be reckoned with.

When two people are at one in their inmost hearts, They shatter even the strength of

iron or of bronze. And when two people understand each other in their inmost hearts, Their words are sweet and strong, like the fragrance of orchids.

The ability to avoid being entrapped by one another’s mind is one of the great gifts we can offer each other. With this compassionate and spacious awareness, and the listening it makes possible, we can offer those we are with a standing invitation to come out from wherever they are caught, if they are ready and wish to do so. It is as if we are in the room of experience with them, but also standing in the doorway, offering our hand, ready to walk out together.

The sage helps the ten thousand things find their own nature. Tao

Through concentration, we are able to establish a more intimate contact with one another. Through spacious awareness we can sense the totality of situations and allow insight to come into play. More and more we are a vehicle for service. All of this may seem as if we are acquiring something new, but that is not so. Rather, we are clearing away obstacles that have prevented us from using our natural abilities.

To dissolve agitations and attachments of the mind is to remove the veils from our heart. It allows us to meet one another in the purity of love.

If it’s prison we’re in, we righteous helpers, what are we charged with? Breaking and entering with the intention of doing good? Felonious assumption of personal responsibility? Selling water by the river? And what is our defense? Early conditioning? “They made me read Helper Rabbit every night until I was eight, Your Honor. In my house, the cry ‘Help!’ was an order, not a plea.” Or later training? “I offer as Exhibit A, Your Honor, this diploma”:

Once we come to associate it with rewards, we start to use helping in the service of a wide range of personal motives other than the expression of natural compassion. We might empty the trash in order to get the use of the family car, or go to the store to fetch ingredients so that Mother will make our favorite cookies. We might be seeking to compensate for a lack of self-esteem, for feelings of unworthiness or incompleteness. Need praise? Help out. Or perhaps we’re looking for a form of atonement: there’s guilt to assuage. For many, the ability to aid others can provide a needed sense of power or respectability. Maybe some of us help out as a way of compensating for a deeper sense of helplessness; we don’t have to face our own quite so much when we’re busy treating someone else’s. Or maybe we’re just plain lonely. Intimacy is what we’re looking for, and it’s often there to be found in a helping relationship. Rare indeed is the individual for whom the helping act does not arise in part out of some personal motive. To the extent that it does, however, what we are looking for is a role that meets a need … our need. We’re looking to be helpers, not simply to be helpful. A personal agenda leads us to invest in the position, not simply the function. And we invest in others’ reactions to it as well.

The condition of helplessness is one that we tend to push away, deny, or stigmatize as a society and as individuals. Our cultural myths neither encourage us to accept a common helplessness nor teach us how to act upon it. When it’s suddenly thrust upon us, we’re unprepared.

many of us feel resigned to helplessness as citizens. In a society that so inordinately emphasizes power, many of us feel we have little influence over conditions beyond our most immediate circumstances. We may see injustice and neglect or sense the sterility of mass culture. The quality of education, the organization of work, the anonymity of community life, all may distress us. But we frequently feel impotent to change these conditions. The choices we’re given often seem empty and hollow. Half of us don’t vote for president; even fewer elect local officials. We’re offered thirty brands of blue jeans; everyone knows they’re really the same. The program on television is a bore; we switch channels—some choice. Frustrations accumulate, resignation reigns. “What are we going to do?” we sigh. What’s the point in dwelling upon it? It only makes us feel worse.

we shun helplessness, and when faced with it, bemoan our fate. We cling to notions of “independence”—it’s the name of our national holiday—as if it were an essential condition of all well-being. The last thing we want is to be robbed of power and placed at the mercy of others. Under any circumstances that’s a challenge. But in our society the most helpless among us are often consigned to a separate class: ghettos, “golden age” communities, hospitals, wards. They’re put or kept somewhere. The rest of us are freer not to face what they represent.

For fear of not recognizing ourselves, we refuse to look into the mirror of the present moment.

Because our power is so threatened and our ability to control our environment so curtailed, we may explore ways of using our helplessness to gain power. Perhaps we get others to focus on our predicament. Controlling attention is power. Or perhaps we play on people’s pity, guilt, or sense of duty. Instinctively, we seem to know that we can pull those strings. We remember, after all, how we ourselves used to feel in the presence of someone else’s helplessness.

When we see that service is not a one-way street, we find that those we are helping give us a continuous stream of clues to help us escape the prison of our self-image. More than simply letting us know what might be working or not, they help us when they question our very models of ourselves. They snap us to; they may even see right through us. And if we can take it, it’s a blessing. We may feel a little foolish, but ultimately, we’re grateful. The struggles of those we are helping confront us with life at its purest. Their suffering strips away guile and leaves what is real and essential. The deepest human qualities come forth: openness, yearning, patience, courage, forbearance, faith, humor … living truth … living spirit.

As we explore our resistances and fears—everything we’d been so busy fighting before—new understanding and resources are revealed. Our old models of ourselves start to dissolve, leaving us open and receptive to the new moment. Now we can begin to work creatively with the unknown. We’re ready to listen and accept guidance and grace, because we’ve made room in ourselves. We may be exhausted, yet at the same moment we feel fresh. Having surrendered into helplessness we can now get on with help. But as active participants. Before, we had to be helped. Now, what we are ready for is support, for a process we have set in motion ourselves. So we reach out and receive it eagerly. It’s become part of a dialogue with life, a dialogue in which we have things to say. We want to keep the conversation going. Help has become collaboration. In this collaboration we see just how much we ourselves have to offer: our own perseverance, honesty, openness, gratitude, humor.

And so at a certain point “helper” and “helped” simply begin to dissolve. What’s real is the helping—the process in which we’re all blessed, according to our needs and our place at the moment.

“My dharma [religious duty] is to surrender to God’s will. Only God can decide who gets sickness and who does not. It is my duty to resist your interference with his will. We must resist your needles. We would die resisting if that is necessary. My family and I have not yielded. We have done our duty. We can be proud of being firm in our faith. It is not a sin to be overpowered by so many strangers in the middle of the night. “Daily you have come and told me it is your dharma to prevent this disease with your needles. We have sent you away. Tonight you have used force. You say you act in accordance with your duty. I have acted in accordance with mine. It is over. God will decide. “Now I find you are guests in my house. It is my duty to feed guests. I have little to offer at this time. Except this cucumber.” I felt numb and torn. For an instant, I wondered if I was on the wrong side. Mohan Singh was so firm in his faith, yet there was not a trace of anger in his words. I scanned my teammates’ faces, looking for someone to respond to Mohan Singh’s challenge. All stared at the ground, humbled by the power of Mohan Singh’s faith.

People instinctively back off. They feel like they’re being told, being “should” upon. Social action, they understand intuitively, ought to be fully voluntary if it’s to have power and endurance. But we’re not quite leaving them enough room when we set about trying to change their minds. We don’t have the inclusiveness, the steadiness, the real willingness to listen that is critical at the outset of any action.

A coffeehouse. An encampment. A free zone for whoever shows up. We’re an environment, not an argument for social change. Our aim is to awaken together and see what follows, not to manipulate one another into this action or that. We do so by recognizing the integrity of one another’s experience. “What have you been through? What did it look like to you?” The most effective political action often grows out of telling one another our stories. We’re out to share not to convince; action follows. So two policemen, talking off-duty, discover they both feel uncomfortable with racist jokes at the station; they agree to call people on them from now on. A group of women employees, chatting at lunch, find out they’ve all been sexually harassed by men with power over their jobs; they’ll raise the issue at the next union meeting. Parallels of private experience become the ground for common initiative. What’s been dealt with in solitude becomes the basis for solidarity.

None of this means that we turn away from what is: oppression, hatred, fear. We have to look at it all head-on, without fantasy, denial, or selective perception: the brutal as well as the gentle, the ugly as well as the beautiful, the greed as well as the mercy, the death as well as the life. This takes guts, and judgment. But it can be the source of equanimity because we’ve pushed nothing away. We’re ready to take it all in and then move beyond it. So we can let our hearts be broken by the spectacle of cruelty and allow our anger to arise at the evidence of injustice. Yet we can be whole and expansive enough to retain a sense of compassion and quiet determination—a fuller heart, a deeper will. Others—those we would encourage to join us in action—will recognize in us the possibility of unifying genuine passion and quiet purpose.

When we’re free of self-righteousness, grounded in a kind of inner clarity and quiet self-assurance, we’re less likely to rush in simply to prove our point—only to contribute to a chain of reactiveness in which the issue gets lost and the polarization makes it harder even to start over again. We just don’t get sucked in.

We may have to wait and let those we’re confronting run through all their reactions. We are putting them up against themselves and their habits, after all. It is a little unexpected; sure, they feel they’re on the spot. But the point is not to force any change of heart; hearts usually don’t change under external pressure. What we’re doing, at least at this stage, is giving people a chance to hear for themselves. We’re looking to win a little space for our message to work on its own. So their reactiveness needn’t throw us. In fact, it gives us a chance to demonstrate that we ourselves are ready to listen. Conflict isn’t an obstacle. It’s an opportunity to move forward. You don’t push against it; you move to work with it.

It takes the split-second timing of the quiet mind, working in harmony with the open heart, to know just when and how to say “Hey!” to a potentially dangerous opponent. So we work to be clear enough to seize the time.

This applies particularly to one’s opponents. We can’t afford to get lost in reactivity and polarization. Quite the contrary, in fact. To hear the best possible labor settlement, you somehow have to be “in” the corporate negotiator opposite you at the bargaining table: what’s it like to have to worry about chief executive officers, stockholders, the hierarchy and narrow options of corporate life? To hear the best possible strategy to bring about disarmament, you have to understand the mentality of those who plan for war: what fears, what models of mind, engender and support planning for nuclear destruction? Ultimately, you must somehow know your opponents as you know yourself in order to deal with them most effectively as opponents.

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.

But “The British must leave as friends,” said Gandhi. There must be freedom for oppressor and oppressed alike, taught King. “Sit down here and tell me about it,” said the old Japanese man to the violent drunk. What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated? Another turn in an endless cycle of victors and vanquished; power to this one, then to the other; different players, same game? Do we just want to be right, or do we all want to be free?

We’re here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.

Nothing may be more important, in all this, than being gentle with ourselves. Whether we’re professionals working a sixty-hour week or simply family members called upon to care daily for a sick relative, facing suffering continuously is no small task. We learn the value of recognizing our limits, forgiving ourselves our bouts of impatience or guilt, acknowledging our own needs. We see that to have compassion for others we must have compassion for ourselves.

Reperception itself, we’ve found, has the power to transform situations. Things change as they are seen differently, not necessarily because we are busy altering circumstance. From these shifts in perspective, in turn, we ourselves change. As we reach a deeper sense of who we are, we discover how much more we have to give.

In this process, we’ve come to see the value of the Witness—that stance behind experience in which we merely acknowledge what is, without judgment of ourselves or of others. It is simply a fair witness to our humanity. For it to have sufficient power to penetrate the deeper and perhaps darker recesses of the mind, however, it has to be infused with a steady, conscious commitment to truth. This may reveal insights that are either unsettling or reassuring. But these are simply our reactions, there to be noted and let go of.

The ability to remain quiet and open—simply to observe, never to judge—is what prevents the Witness from becoming reactive and self-conscious. As we become more grounded in this practice, turning it to one or another area of helping activity, we discover shifts of perspective t...

Under the persistent scrutiny of the dispassionate Witness, we may observe that seeds of burnout are often sown in how we enter into the helping act and in what we bring with us—our motives, our needs, our expectations, the models we have for ourselves. On the one hand, for example, we can recognize the natural impulse of the heart as it reaches out to those who suffer, seeking to ease their pain without concern for cost. This is the recognition of kindred spirit, born of inherent compassion. How good it makes us feel, how true to ourselves. But we also observe that there is more going on in the helping act than the spontaneous generosity of the heart. In the presence of the suffering of others and their insistent needs, we observe the mind’s fear and defensiveness. We also see how uncomfortable we may be about many of the desires situations call forth—our needs to appear responsible, useful, powerful, moral, worthy, needed, and so on. We might prefer to deny these or hide them in the shadow of the unconscious, but our experiment in truth calls upon us to witness what is. So we must acknowledge the reality of a house divided against itself—the inner confl...

So perhaps we might go on to witness ways in which our ego’s agenda colors our working relations with others, perhaps even preselecting those we choose or are willing to work with. If we need to be seen as wise, we might be drawn to someone who likes to ask us questions. We might avoid someone else, needier but prouder, who might challenge us or force us to face our confusion. “Sure I’d like to help. I’d like to help that one, help her—the one who needs my guidance.” Called upon to spend time with people who don’t gratify our needs, we watch ourselves tune out, lose patience, and get bored. Or we may notice how often, in the guise of service, we try to impose our values on another. Perhaps we give them a little sermonette—“Don’t you see, you’re really God’s child, my dear?”—when what they really need, if we’d bother to listen, is just a little empathy—“Yeah, I feel lousy too. Let’s take a walk and feel lousy together.” When they resist our wise words and don’t buy what we’re selling, we turn them off: “Well, Lord knows I tried. If they’d only just listen …” Looking more closely still, we might notice how we tend to manipulate people towards the fulfillment of our own motives and...

we want to assist our kids with their homework, but we’d like to help them become independent too: what to do, which to choose (and we’re tired to begin with)?

Pulled in two directions at the same time, if we identify with either one, another part of ourselves has become our enemy—still more potential for frustration and despair revealed as we witness the play of intentions and desires.

we take it all very seriously, because we are often so focused on how we’re doing that we lose a certain lig...