Sky, Spacious Awareness

Selfhood: Spirit and Personality

by Ram Dass

There are many stages of the process of transformation.

There is a stage where you feel something in you that is behind your social facade and your social relationships to people. You feel a somebody-ness which we call a soul. You feel yourself as an entity. Then, as you get deeper into the transformative work, that thing starts to dissolve. Then there is no self, there is nobody, there is only one.
So then you ask:

How do you incorporate that understanding into existence?
How do you live with no continuity?

The continuity is the result of karma. It’s that who you were started an inertial process, that leads to you being this person. As your awareness is less attached to that person, you’re just aware of the processes going on. Just as I’m aware of my body aging and decaying, I’m aware of my awareness getting lighter and less attached to forms, and I’m aware of personality processes. I’m aware that when somebody awakens an impulse within me a reaction will also awaken, but I can see it almost in slow motion as just these processes going on. All I end up being is just these processes: there isn’t somebody there. All the form of me ends up being just these processes, and behind it all there is not somebody being aware, there is just the awareness; which is even subtler.

We keep projecting our own solidity into everybody else. So it’s very hard for me to convey to you the kind of nothingness that’s going on in here, and to say to you that you just keep delicately approaching and just playing with watching the way in which you need that reassurance of being somebody. Watch that need, and see that need as a phenomenon that exists in the universe, lawfully existing, then keep quieting the mind and deepening the connection to just that part of you that is just with it all, just this spacious kind of awareness.

Its called spacious awareness. It’s the sky, just the sky.

-Ram Dass