The Only Dance There is

Doing Your Own Being
By Ram Dass

The only thing you have to offer another human being, ever, is your own state of being. You can cop out only just so long, saying, “I’ve got all this nice stuff, I know all this and I can do all this.” But everything you do, whether you’re cooking food or doing therapy or being a student or being a lover, you are only doing your own being, you’re only manifesting how evolved a consciousness you are. That’s what you’re doing with another human being. That’s the only dance there is! When you’re protesting against somebody, the degree of consciousness with which you’re protesting determines how well they can hear what it is you’re really saying. And consciousness does not mean attachment to polarity, at any level. It means freedom from attachment. And once you see that the highest mother is the mother who is the most conscious mother, the highest student, the highest therapist, the highest lover, the highest anything is the most conscious one, you begin to see that the way you serve another human being is by freeing him from the particular attachments he’s stuck in that turn him off to life. You realize that the only thing you have to do for other human beings is to keep yourself really straight, and then do whatever it is you do.

It’s easy to know this when you’re sitting up in a cave. It’s quite easy to sit and meditate and realize how all this is, to see how you get stuck in roles and how the life process, the spiritual contact, turns off the minute you think you’re somebody doing something. As long as I think I am speaking to you and I’m doing something to you – forget it! – I’m just keeping you out there as “them.” The question is, are you them or are you us? If I think of you using any model in my head that keep you being them, I end up turning myself off. My consciousness, my concepts of the universe have turned me off because I know that the higher consciousness state is a state of unity. It is, “Here we are.” I have experienced that. I know that. That’s valid. It’s absolutely obvious, now, that every time I perform an act which increases the distance, that kind of subject-object distance, I am taking myself one little jot further away from that unitive state which I now know, is. Only an idiot is going to bring himself down.

“Truth lies within ourselves; it takes no rise from outward things, whatever you may believe. There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness and to know rather consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape that in effecting entry for light supposed to be without.” – Robert Browning


https://www.ramdass.org/doing-your-own-being/