Grist for the Mill: Awakening to Oneness

by Ram Dass

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.