Grist for the Mill: Awakening to Oneness

by Ram Dass

“spiritual materialism,”

“Perennial Philosophy,”

In India when we meet and part we often say, “Namasté,” which means: I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides; I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace. I honor the place within you where, if you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us.

We have imagined that the end was reached when it was merely the first mountain peak—which yet hid all of the higher mountains in the distance. Many of us got enamored because these experiences along the way were so intense that we couldn’t imagine anything beyond them. Isn’t it a wonderful journey that at every stage we can’t imagine anything beyond it?

“Out of inductive reasoning, I hypothesize that we will be able to disprove the null hypothesis.”

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.

If we don’t get lost in the words—for the words are like birds—they fly in from one horizon and fly out toward the other.

All the rational mind can do is get to the point where it is pointing and it says, “It went thatta way!” But to have what we seek, we have to go beyond knowing and become it. It is a peculiar predicament, that this knowledge can only be known by transforming ourselves into the knowledge itself.

It is a fallacy to think that any form of life is necessarily more spiritual than any other.

This game is much more subtle; we have to listen to hear what our trip through is, moment by moment, choice by choice. Is this one getting me closer or isn’t it? And then we’ll learn how truth gets us closer, how straightness gets us closer. We’ll learn how simplicity of mind gets us closer. We’ll learn how an open heart gets us closer.

Pain and suffering awaken us more, because the only reason we experience pain or suffering is because we are clinging to something or other.

Compassion, sometimes, is simply leaving other people alone. We don’t lay trips. We exist as a statement of our own level of evolution. We are available to any human being, to provide what they need, to the extent that they ask. But we see that it is a fallacy to think that we can impose a trip on another person.

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.

This journey is based on just two very simple concepts. Total honesty with ourselves, total honesty. If we make a mistake, admit it and get on with it. Don’t cover errors. The whole spiritual journey is a continuous act of falling on our faces.

There is another rule for this game: we may never use one soul for another.

And we keep listening for what the Quakers call the “still, small voice within.” We listen deeper and quieter, deeper and quieter—the more we enter a meditative space, the clearer we hear our dharma, our flow, our way home, our route back to the source.

But the predicament is that enlightenment is not an achievement; enlightenment is a transformation of being. And the achiever goes as well as the achievement.

And we didn’t really want them—we wanted to want them. That’s a different level of the game. For most of us, it has been quite enough to want to want God or to want to want enlightenment.

We love without clinging; we help without identifying ourselves as helpers; we protest without getting lost in our protests; we care for our children remembering that, behind it all, here we are: the truth, the caring. We honor our bodies; we honor our society; we honor our whole game; we change it in the way it needs to be changed. We listen to hear what our particular karmic predicaments are in this round, and we find our dharma, the way to live this life in perfect harmony with the forces inside and outside of us in order to bring us home.

Believe me, if there’s nothing that we want, the city is the same as the Himalayan peak. All the city is showing us is stuff in ourselves that we wish we didn’t have.

Then, when somebody gets us furious, we know that the only reason we got angry was because we had a secret hidden model of how we think it ought to be that we were holding on to. We realize that the person who got us angry is a teaching, and in our minds we thank him. We get so eager to root out the stuff in us that’s keeping us from getting on, from awakening, that we start to look for situations to force us to do it.

We are pushing against God. That is the sacrifice. The sacrifice that Christ made is not the crucifixion. The chance for a conscious being to leave his body is bliss. The sacrifice was leaving the Father in the first place and becoming the Son.

When the dial is set on the first channel, when we look at the world, we see the physical material environment.

Or if we’re preoccupied with our bodies when we walk down the street, you know what we see? Everybody else’s bodies. People who are busy being short are preoccupied with how tall everyone is.

Flip to the second channel, and we’re in the psychological domain.

We are now looking at happy, sad, achievers, anxious neurotics, manic-depressives, enthusiasts, spiritual seekers. Eager, depressed, hearty, happy, sad, lucky—a whole lot of psychological attributes. For many of us, that is the reality in which we live. And who we are is our personality. We spend time analyzing and therapizing them, patting them, damning them, feeding their guilt, their shame, their unworthiness.

Then there’s another channel. Flick. Now the world is twelve categories and their various permutations. There’s a Leo; there’s an Aries.

Heinlein, in Stranger in a Strange Land, called it grokking.

I figured I’m a Jewish Hindu in a Catholic monastery, so I’ll give him a Tibetan answer to a Japanese koan.

Ram asks Hanuman, “Who are you, Hanuman?” Hanuman answers, “When I don’t know who I am, I serve you. When I know who I am, I am you.”

over one thousand stories in the book Miracle of Love.

So at the beginning is eclecticism, at the end is universality, and in the middle is the lineage.

deeply influenced by studies of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Aldous Huxley’s description of dying in the book Island

The statement, “If it be Thy will, O Lord,” is “If it be in the nature of things, if it be in the Natural Law, if it be in the flow of perfection of form.” God, or the Natural Law, or the Divine Law, does not have to be judged by us. It has to be understood by us and heard by us and felt by us, and heeded by us.

There’s nothing to do. Our whole life is a meditative act. There’s no time we leave meditation. It’s not just sitting on our meditation pillows, our zafus. All of life is a big zafu—no matter whether we’re driving or making love. Whatever we’re doing, it’s all meditation.

A skillful use of the intellect is contemplation. For example, every morning, work with a thought. Take a holy book. Don’t read pages, don’t collect it. Take one thought and just sit with it for about ten or fifteen minutes.

Sri Ramakrishna said, “If you meditate on your ideal, you will acquire its nature. If you think of God day and night, you will acquire the nature of God.”

We begin to develop the power of our minds through concentration, through one-pointedness. Following the breath, following the mantra, whatever is our dharmic choice, we develop the capacity to put the mind on one thought and keep it there and let everything else flow by. We don’t stop our minds. We let them flow. But we bring one thought constantly to the surface. We keep coming back to one thought all the time.

It’s not a law that we can grok with our intellect. It’s a law that we can become, but we can’t know.

The intellect is useful as a servant, but not as a master. It is available to do analytic work when we need it. It’s as beautiful and powerful an instrument as our prehensile skill, as our ability to oppose thumb and index finger, an ability we’re delighted we have.

The compassion is to let people be as they need to be without changing them.

For if we are busy being somebody trying to change someone, we’re just creating more anger.

Or we might pursue the path of Ramana Maharshi—Atma Vicharya, “Who am I?” We simply ask, “Who am I? Who am I?” And slowly we watch ourselves be other than all the ways in which we identify ourselves—as a body, organs, emotions, social roles—we see it all. We keep dissociating from it until we are left with the thought of I. “I am the thought I.”

Study, of the Bhagavad Gita, of The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, of Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu. Of the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching, of the New Testament and the Old Testament, and on and on.

Are all methods to be avoided? It doesn’t seem so. But it does seem useful to see them in perspective. Methods are the ship crossing the ocean of existence. If we’re halfway across the ocean, it’s a little silly to decide methods are unnecessary if we don’t know how to swim. But once we get to the far shore, it would be useless to keep carrying the boat.

The game seems very simple: methods are not the thing itself; methods are traps. We entrap ourselves in order to burn out things in us that keep us from being free. And ultimately the methods spew us out at the other end, and the method disintegrates into nothingness. Every method: the Guru, chanting, study, meditation, practices, all of it. For the end result is “nothing special.”

The word God is not God, the word Mother is not Mother, the word Self is not Self, the word moment is not the moment. All of these words are empty. We’re playing at the level of intellect, feeding that thing in us that keeps wanting to understand.

We don’t have to know anything; that’s what’s so funny about it. We get so simple. We’re empty. We know nothing. We simply are wisdom. Not becoming anything, just being everything.

I am very attracted to the simplicity and cleanness of Theravada and Zen Buddhism. So on the one hand, I’m faced with the Zen part of myself, which finds the concept of God an unnecessary addition to a simple universe.

In Buddhism we learn about anicca, dukkha, anatta—the changeability, unsatisfactoriness, and emptiness of all phenomena.