Ram Dass: Cultural Transformation

How can we create a culture that supports our process of transformation?
by Ram Dass
Posted February 9, 2018

You and I are a part of a process that’s going on in our culture at this moment.

And to that extent we are conscious of that process, it’s easier for us to let our acts support that process while simultaneously holding the confusion we feel because the process is leading us in uncharted ways into feelings we have not had before. It seems to me we are all traditionalists, we are all modernists, and we are all ‘cultural creatives.’ To the extent that you bring it all into consciousness, you can feel the way it affects all of it. I often feel like Kahlil Gibran, the prophet: “Speak to us of love, speak to us of pain, speak to us of child rearing…” all of the aspects of life that he taught about.

To the extent that you bring each aspect of your life under scrutiny, there is an opportunity to have that aspect of your life be something which supports transformation.

I mean a lot of people are incredibly generous in the world, but with their family, they are very, very tight, and yet they’re bringing offspring into the world. Many people have greed in one corner of their consciousness and philanthropy in another corner of their consciousness. I’m not knocking them, but just to be conscious about it, to cope with it, to be with it, that’s the first thing.

I’m not arguing for everybody to give up everything, It’s not gonna solve the problem.

I’m saying the psychic cost of disparity between the rich and poor is incredible, and there are other ways to have differentiated classes and structures in a society without it having the absolute toxic quality that it has in our society, in which there is guilt and denial and anger and righteousness and all this stuff.

At what point in our lives do we stop and say, “What is this about?” “What am I doing?” “what’s my vision?” “Where am I going?” “What part am I playing?” “What has this got to do with it all?” and instead of asking, with a litany of self-pity, “Who am I? What is this? Who am I?” seeing that it can all be answered from different levels.

We’re at a moment where science is pushing right up against the mystery. I love it, I absolutely love it, I love where we’re at with these new theories, the patterns, the systems are all delicious. They sound like I’m reading from the Vedas, these ancient books of old wisdom, we’re at such an interesting moment.

We’re at a moment when this kind of world-collective awareness is on us, and we haven’t figured out remotely what to do about it yet, and how to live with it.

We are about to have a world of unskilled workers who are being crapped upon in every place in the world, and then fewer and fewer number of people are enjoying the fruits of that. We are trying to bureaucratize against our own greed, which comes out of our own fear, which comes out of our own sense of separateness.

– Ram Dass