Open Heart

So what is required here besides the desire to open, to know, to find out, to become, besides the recognition of that seed which has been planted, what is also required for this journey is an open heart.

– Ram Dass
Ram Dass

The Emergence of Compassion

by Ram Dass


When we see that service is not a one-way street, we find that those we are helping give us a continuous stream of clues to help us escape the prison of our self-image. More than simply letting us know what might be working or not, they help us when they question our very models of ourselves. They snap us to; they may even see right through us. And if we can take it, it’s a blessing. We may feel a little foolish, but ultimately we’re grateful.

The struggles of those we are helping confront us with life at its purest. Their suffering strips away guile and leaves what is real and essential. The deepest human qualities come forth: openness, yearning, patience, courage, forbearance, faith, humor . . . living truth . . . living spirit. Moved and touched by these qualities, we’ve no choice but to acknowledge and reaffirm our humanity. Others notice when this happens. We feel them feel it. It’s at these moments that we remember what service is truly all about.

Throughout my childhood and well into my adolescence, there were other experiences that undoubtedly fed, if not at the time then later, into my emerging ground of compassion. For example, I was bedridden for a part of each summer with skin troubles — poison ivy, oak, and such. I’m sure those frustrating months and other situations like them affected my feelings toward people who are confined because of physical illness. At the time, the suffering seemed grossly unfair and all but unbearable. In retrospect, I am no longer sure whether those summers in my room, when I heard everyone else outside playing, were a curse or a grace. Undoubtedly, they were both. They were a curse to that young boy but grace to the man who was to be.

Another episode stands out and undoubtedly deepened my ability to empathize with such kinds of suffering. When I was sixteen years old at boarding school, I was caught in a nude wrestling episode with another boy. There were clear sexual overtones, and the upperclassmen who had spied on us through a hole in the closet wall lost no time in spreading the story throughout the school. Immediately I found the two of us ostracized. . . . The faculty didn’t seem to be able to handle the incident any better than the students. So I just went inside myself. It was only when a few popular boys risked social ostracism by befriending me that my ordeal of isolation ended. There was no time during that period or in the fifteen years immediately following that I ever congratulated myself on my good fortune at having had such an experience. But, in the last thirty years, I have come to see quite clearly how it affected me. It made me much more empathetic toward people outside the system. And the turning-inward, coerced though it was, proved a catalyst to help me find a place in myself where I could stand even in the absence of social support.

- Ram Dass

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

I Practice Turning them Into Trees

On Judging Yourself Less Harshly

by Ram Dass

I think that part of [less self judgment] is observing oneself more impersonally. I often use this image:

When you go into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees… and some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens and some of them are – whatever. And you look at the tree, and you just – allow it. You appreciate it. You see why it is the way it is, you sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way, and you don’t get all emotional about it, you just allow it. You appreciate the tree.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that, and you’re constantly saying, “You’re too this,” or “I’m too this,” or – that judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees, which means appreciating them just the way they are.

There was a period of time where I used to have a picture of myself on my puja table, and people would come in and say, “My God, what an ego this guy’s got; he’s got his own picture on his puja table.” But really, what it was, was a chance for me to practice opening my heart to myself, and to appreciate the predicament I’m in. And it’s finding a place in yourself from which you see the unfolding of it all. That Mother did this, and Dad did this, drugs did this, Maharajji did this – all of it is just an unfolding of a storyline, a drama. The Ram Dass story. There he is. How will it come out? How did it come out? You’re just sort of watching the stories unfold.

But at the same time, it’s nothing to do with me, because I’m not that. That’s just a set of phenomena happening. And when you look at yourself as a set of phenomena, what is there to judge? Is that flower less than that? It’s just being different than that. You begin to appreciate your uniqueness without it being better or worse, because it’s just different. Cultivating an appreciation of uniqueness rather than preference is a very good one.

It’s just when you get inside identification with your personality that you get into the judging mode, because then you are a part of that lawful unfolding. You’re not stepping outside of it all. The witness, or the spacious awareness, is outside of it. It’s another contextual framework.

-Ram Dass

Energy Systems in the Body

Ram Dass

Black Beans

I am simmering pre-soaked black beans in my electric pressure cooker. It's 5AM. I love to know I have a healthy meal awaiting me at supper when I am often tired cranky and impatient. Last night I was so tired from the week I went to sleep at 6:30 PM.

I love to know something is cooking while I am doing my work. Washing my clothes, making coffee cooking rice all of these things can be happening while I am reading and writing. I think more offices should be equipped with washing machines, pressure cookers and dogs, essentially HOME.

Fake Fight with Fear

Sarah Silverman called out President [X]'s fearmongering attempts to motivate his base ahead of next week’s midterm elections.

“[X] knows the only way that they can energize their base is through fear,” Silverman said...

She said [X] “riles” his supporters by starting “a fake fight with a made-up enemy,” such as the migrant caravan currently around 1,000 miles from the U.S. border in Mexico.

“He starts fake fights that he doesn’t have to finish, because he knows in one way or another someone will finish them for him,” she added. “And that is his starring role in our current epidemic of domestic terrorism.”

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Dream

I turned on the TV and Sarah Silverman was talking and to my surprise and shock my sister was with her. The doorbell rang and I ran down to answer it carrying a quart carton of milk. It was my pal Anthony. He came in and wanted to take my photo for his web site. I was wearing flannel penguin patterned pajamas. "Not while I'm wearing this," I said. "Let me put on my favorite purple shirt." Then I dreamed I was gnawing on my washing machine, like the man who ate an airplane. My friend Daniel arrived and was shaped like Humpty Dumpty. Maybe Anthony and Daniel were the same person. I kept rolling over, waking up trying to remember the dream so I could write it down in the morning.

Lately

I feel like I am drowning in toxic waste. I try to avoid looking at the newspapers but after a few hours I feel compelled to peek, as if I could stave off the next disaster. I run with my dog, write in my notebook and swim like my life depends on it because it does.

Caffeine

For a more focused Swim Practice

Jennifer Rubin

Washington post Opinion

The Afterlife

by Billy Collins


While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They're moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
The place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals--eagles and leopards--and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

-Billy Collins

Billy Collins

The Trouble with Poetry

By Billy Collins

The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night --
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky --

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,

and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.

But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti --
to be perfectly honest for a moment --

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

Max Boot

Vote for Democrats on Tuesday.

Vote against all Republicans. Every single one. That’s the only message they will understand.

Dr. Richard A. Friedman

Richard A. Friedman is a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at the Weill Cornell Medical College, and a contributing opinion writer.

The Neuroscience of Hate Speech

Humans are social creatures who are easily influenced by the anger and rage that are everywhere these days.
Richard A. Friedman

By Richard A. Friedman

Dr. Friedman is a psychiatrist.

We know that repeated exposure to hate speech can increase prejudice, as a series of Polish studies confirmed last year. It can also desensitize individuals to verbal aggression, in part because it normalizes what is usually socially condemned behavior.

Julie Fast

Mood-swing detective

Umberto Eco: My Working Method

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.... Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.

UMBERTO ECO

Umberto Eco

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“To survive, you must tell stories.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.”
― Umberto Eco

“When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”
― Umberto Eco

“The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.”
― Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality

“Then why do you want to know?"

"Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

“Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.”
― Umberto Eco

“What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.”
― Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose

The Best Way to Start the Day

“We're all just walking each other home.”
― Ram Dass

“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.”
― Ram Dass

“We're fascinated by the words--but where we meet is in the silence behind them.”
― Ram Dass

“It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.”
― Ram Dass

“The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.”
― Ram Dass

“I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion--and where it isn't, that's where my work lies.”
― Ram Dass

“The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.”
― Ram Dass

“In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.”
― Ram Dass

“Be here now.”
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

“Your problem is you are too busy holding on to your unworthiness.”
― Ram Dass

“As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.”
― Ram Dass

“Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.”
― Ram Dass

“The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving: it's in the being. When I need love from others, or need to give love to others, I'm caught in an unstable situation. Being in love, rather than giving or taking love, is the only thing that provides stability. Being in love means seeing the Beloved all around me.”
― Ram Dass

“Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.”
― Ram Dass

“What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.”
― Ram Dass

“The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.”
― Ram Dass

“Let's trade in all our judging for appreciating. Let's lay down our righteousness and just be together.”
― Ram Dass

“Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying.”
― Ram Dass

“Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.”
― Ram Dass

“The next message you need is always right where you are.”
― Ram Dass

“We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.”
― Ram Dass

“A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there's work to be done.”
― Ram Dass

“I would say that the thrust of my life has been initially about getting free, and then realizing that my freedom is not independent of everybody else. Then I am arriving at that circle where one works on oneself as a gift to other people so that one doesn't create more suffering. I help people as a work on myself and I work on myself to help people.”
― Ram Dass

“I'm not interested in being a "lover." I'm interested in only being love.”
― Ram Dass

“Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.”
― Ram Dass

“The game is not about becoming somebody, it's about becoming nobody.”
― Ram Dass

“Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama.”
― Ram Dass

“If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.”
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

“We're here to awaken from the illusion of separateness”
― Ram Dass, How Can I Help? Stories and Reflection on Service

“It's only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.”
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

Loving your Body

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