Ram Dass

How do you free up your consciousness for people who are suffering?

…Because when you look around, and you see somebody suffering, you feel it in your heart, and you would like to do something to relieve their suffering. You begin to see that not only is it what you do, but ‘who does it’ and ‘how you do it’ matters when you look at whether you exacerbate their suffering or end it.

I walk into a room with somebody with advanced AIDS symptoms. There’s social ostracism, economic hardship, loss of dreams, youth, everything, and the heart breaks, and the empathy goes out to this fellow human being, and as I sit there, I start in doing my inner practices, turning channels, until I am resting as a soul who has taken birth. I am somebody who is here to visit somebody who’s sick and to be with them, and I am a soul doing that, and I am seeing another soul who is busy having AIDS, and suddenly my consciousness is available to that person on both levels.

-Ram Dass