Grist for the Mill: Awakening to Oneness

by Ram Dass

Now, whether our wings are being singed, whether the fire purifies us or destroys us, depends on who we think we are, because the fire can only burn our stash of clinging. The fire doesn’t burn itself. And in truth, we are the fire.

When you sit in an auditorium and there is a speaker, or you read a book, you tune in a set of receiving devices—your ears, your eyes, and your conceptual analytic mind. But to receive this transmission requires much more than the mind. It requires a desire in us—to use this birth in order to become who, in truth, we are. It requires a desire to become free of the kinds of clinging and attachment that keep distorting and narrowing our vision. It requires that we truly desire to know what we are doing here, what our function is here on Earth. To say, “I want more than the reality of my senses and my thinking mind,” requires that we take those moments every one of us has had in our life when we have been in tune with the Tao, with the harmony of the universe, with the flow—when for a moment we set aside our separateness, our self-consciousness, and became part of the process, in the same way as a tree or a brook or wheat is part of the process, and bring them into the foreground at this moment and make them figure so that they stand out and put the rest of the forms of our life into the background.

We had in those few moments the answer to every question our minds could create and all the food our souls needed. It’s only that we didn’t know it. So we gather to remind one another who we are. What we’re looking for is who is looking; it’s happening all around us, and we are what’s happening. So that next time we sit waiting for something to begin, we realize that there is nothing that needs to begin, for the beginning, the middle, and the end are already who we are.

For someone who has grown in evolution to the point that she or he understands that this precious birth is an opportunity to awaken, is an opportunity to know and perhaps to be God, all of life becomes an instrument for getting there: marriage, family, job, play, travel—all of it. We spiritualize our lives. When Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita that you should do what you do, but offer the fruits of your actions to Me, he means that we should do it all in relationship to becoming enlightened.

The true marriage is with God. The reason we form a conscious marriage on the physical plane with a partner is to do the work of coming to God together. That is the only reason for marrying when we are conscious.

Other beings we are connected with, we can’t outgrow: parents, children, relatives of one sort or another. We don’t walk away. That is our given karma of the incarnation. We may grow at a different rate than they do, and they become the fire of our purification—because they will pull on us as we used to be, and our job is to deal with that until we get so even and clear that somebody can come up and say, “Hello, Dick,” or “Hello, Richard,” or whatever. And I’m right there. “Yes.” Not, “I’m Ram Dass now.” We

The best we can do is become an environment that allows every person we meet to open in the optimum way they can open. The way you “raise” a child is to create a space with your own love and consciousness to allow that child to become whatever he or she can become in this lifetime.

whole spiritual journey is a continuous act of falling on our faces. And we get up and brush ourselves off and get on with it. If we were perfect, we wouldn’t even go on a journey.

We can’t be afraid of making errors. We may choose the wrong teacher; we may get into a method that’s no good. Many things can happen. We make errors; we correct them if we can, without hurting another being’s spiritual opportunities.

Listen inward and be honest.