Silk Scarf

“Imagine a mountain three miles wide, three miles high, and three miles long. Once every hundred years, a bird flies over the mountain, holding a silk scarf in its beak, which it brushes across the surface of the mountain. The time it would take for the scarf to wear down the mountain is how long we’ve been doing this.”

This is a quote that Ram Dass uses to emphasise the unimaginable amount of lives that we have lived up until this point. Throughout this vast amount of time we have been accruing karma, also known as cause and effect where our individual actions influence our future. The ultimate aim is to clear this karma and return to who we really are as a soul and finally on to God. So this life can be seen as a vehicle for your awakening process. Believe it or not you actually chose to be here based on the karma that you needed to clear in this lifetime. In order for you to achieve that you needed to forget who you really were and then eventually remember again. This is a process that has been going on for longer than you can possibly imagine but as you are reading this, there is a good chance that you are now on the path to awakening. This may have started multiple lifetimes ago or in the middle of this current life, but your journey towards unity has begun. The final point to mention is that there is no rush. People wake up when the time is right. Someone else could spend the next thousand lifetimes getting to the point where they start to lose interest in the human experience and look for something more. That’s their path and there’s no need to interfere.

So who are we really? What exactly is the soul? For most people those are questions that only get answered at the point of death. Death is the releasing of who we think we are, the mind and body that takes up so much of our consciousness. However there are techniques like meditation that you can use in life to get a glimpse of truth and ultimately better prepare you for that moment of physical death. What meditation trains you to do is to observe your human experience rather than to get lost in believing it all. It is only at the end of the identification with the experiencer that we finally end our interest in experiences and realize our true nature.

Still with me? These are profoundly deep subjects that are very difficult for the mind to grasp, but ultimately the meaning of life is to prepare ourselves for the moment of physical death. To not go kicking and screaming into the afterlife, but to leave happy and grateful for the experience, ready for the next incarnation whatever that may be. I’m sure I’ll spend the rest of my life working to fully understand all this, but this is the true beauty of Ram Dass. His ability to bring ancient teachings to life and explain them in a way that even someone at the very beginning of the path can understand and benefit from. In a recent New York Times article Ram Dass was asked when he knew he was ready to die. I’ll leave the final word to him:

“When I arrived at my soul. Soul doesn’t have fear of dying. Ego has very pronounced fear of dying. The ego, this incarnation, is life and dying. The soul is infinite.”

If you’d like to explore the full landscape of Ram Dass’ teachings, Being Here Now is a nine week online course with bonus content that covers 40 years of his inspiring wisdom.

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