Ram Dass: The Progression of Your Journey

It’s so graceful to share the journey with you and we’ve gone through a lot of stages together.

As in any journey, some people have dropped along the way, have said, ‘Well, I think I’ve gone far enough for this round’ while others have been waiting for us to catch up.

The journey passes through the seven valleys, seven kingdoms, the chakras, planes of consciousness, degrees of faith. And often we only know we’ve been in a certain place when we pass beyond it, because when we’re in it we don’t have the perspective to know because we are only being. But as the journey progresses, less and less do you need to know. The faith is strong enough so it is sufficient just to be.

It’s a journey towards simplicity. It’s a journey towards simplicity and quietness. It’s a journey towards a joy that is not in time, a journey out of time. It’s a journey leaving behind every model that we have had of who we are. A journey that involves the transformation of our beings such that our thinking mind becomes our servant rather than our master. It’s a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body, through identification with our psyche, to an identification with our souls and finally to an identification with God.

Because many of us have traversed this path without maps, thinking that it was unique to us because of the peculiar way in which we were travelling although every historical moment has been unique in the same way. Often there has been a lot of confusion. Thinking the end was reached when it was merely the first mountain peak that we were looking towards which hid all of the higher mountains in the distance.

But isn’t it a good journey that at every stage of the journey you can’t imagine anything beyond it?

So that every point that you reach is so much beyond everything you’ve had up until then that your perception is full of that and you can’t see anything else but the experience itself. To say to a person who is a young person who is just learning to drive, there will come a time when driving will merely be a means of getting you from one place to another, it sounds totally absurd.

After a few valleys and mountains, quite a ways along, you begin to realize that there are silent guides and that what has seemed so random to you and even chaotic, may have a pattern. The journey that you thought was the journey, may in fact turn out to be a journey you could not imagine. It’s very hard for a being who is totally attached and identified with its intellect to imagine that the universe could be so perfectly designed so that every act, every experience is within the lawful harmony of the Universe. Including all of its paradoxes.



-Ram Dass