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Anandamayi Ma,
Neem Karoli Baba,
and Babaji Ram Dass
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HOW CAN WE FIND BALANCE ON THE PATH OF LOVE?
This is the path of love. The path of the heart. Like all paths, it is fraught with pitfalls and traps, and most of our emotions are either in the service of our minds or our frightening things that overwhelm us and make us afraid so we protect ourselves from them.
So we come through life a little bit like hungry ghosts. We are beings that have huge needs for love, but seemingly it’s like we have some kind of amoeba that doesn’t allow us to digest our food. So, though we get love, it goes through us and then we need love all over again. This conception is so deep within all of us that we’ve built an entire reality around it, and we think that’s the way it is; that everybody needs love and that if you don’t get it you are deprived, and that the more of it the better, and you need it every day from everything. In that sense it’s like an achievement; you see people that are achievers. The minute they achieve something it becomes irrelevant, and their awareness turns to the next achievement because they are addicted to the practice, not to the goal.
The predicament with loving is the power of the addiction of the practice of loving somebody; of getting so caught in the relationship that you can’t ever arrive at the essence of dwelling in love.
If you imagine it in this sequence that you are cut off in your heart from love so you feel hungry, what that hunger is is the hunger to come home. It’s the hunger to be at peace; to be feeling at one in the universe; where lover and Beloved merge. It’s the place to feel fulfilled in the moment, to be able to live fully in the moment.
Closed off, you are like a bee looking for a flower. You’re flying around buzzing and looking. There are certain very deep patterns, whether they’re psychologically learned or karmic, that are like a lock waiting for a key to open it, but the key must fit into that lock. It must be a certain pattern or concatenation of factors.
All of your psychological conditioning prepares you to be attracted to certain methods, or certain paths, or to certain people. For many people, the energies they’re working with at the time they are seeking this love so strongly are second chakra energies; energies of desire, of sexual desire, of desire for union that is relational and the energy gets into that pattern. And you associate making love as a vehicle to coming into love.
So you’re going along the path as a little lock waiting for a key, and along comes a shadow of love, goes by, and like a little duckling you turn and you start to walk after it. It just happened to be the particular pattern that turned you on, that opened you up. And you say, “I think I’m in love” with him, or with her. See, that’s the key, right there – not, “I think I’m in love,” “I think I’m in love with her” or with him. And if you’re lucky, your key unlocks her or his lock, and his key unlocks your lock, or her key unlocks your lock. So you get into “You love me, I love you, here we are,” and it’s incredible because through this dynamic you have opened to a place that’s like a triangle; the two people together are feeding something that they don’t even know. If they’re feeding the unitive space behind the dualism, they’re feeding the quality of love, and when they’re together, they touch it.
When you say, “I’m in love with you,” what you’re really saying is that you are the key stimulus that is opening me to the place in myself where I am love, which I can’t get to except through you. Can you hear that one?
– Ram Dass, Omega Retreat, July, 1992
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TRANSMUTATION OF ENERGY
If I am at one point, when something happens in my field, my environmental field, that’s negative, what I say is, “That brings me down,” meaning it caught me in its model of how it all is. When I am able to transmute energy, I can take that energy that was connected with that act itself and I can move it up my chakras and get high from it. Right? Not only can I get high from it, but I can give back a place which frees the other person from it as well. That is, if you come up to me and go “R-r-r-r-r” I can be busy going “R-r-r-r-r,” see, or I can see you going “R-r-r-r-r” and say, “Yes, and that too is life and here we are and that’s the way it is.” And then I can look at you and be with you in a certain way where I took all that energy you fed in and it just pulled it up my spine and here we are in this new higher place together which then frees you from the place you were stuck in before as well.
Now, for example. every night for three weeks, I gave darshan in New York City in a sculpture studio for about two hundred people and more people kept coming and they kept coming back and more kept coming every night and it was just like a curve, a geometric curve, and just more and more we were getting higher and higher together. But the place was next door to a fire house and usually you could count on the fact that at least once or twice a night the fire engines would be called out. And we might be in the middle of chanting a love song to God, you know, in this very intimate sound and suddenly “R-r-r-r-r-r” and you’d look out into the audience and everyone was going through that pained “Oh, they’ve loused it up and we’ve lost our moment.” And I looked at that and I thought, “Wow, isn’t that far out?” Here all these high beings are being brought down by a fire engine.
What I do is, I see the fire engine is merely free energy the city of New York is giving us if we know how to use it, and I’m getting stoned out of my head, getting way up into these higher chakras off the fire engine. And I’m saying, instead of seeing life as full of impediments to doing what your pre-run tape says you’re supposed to do, see all of it as part of the here and now moment. There’s the fire engine and that’s the way it is. You’re only bugged with it if you’re still living a moment ago where you were busy not having the fire engine. At the moment, here’s the fire engine. If you can live in the here and now, you should say, “Wow, here’s the fire engine.” Then you’re in a new state. That’s transmuting that energy. In other words, it’s getting high off of it.
– Ram Dass, excerpt from The Only Dance There Is
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WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TRUTH IN RELATIONSHIPS?
I want to talk to you about this word truth.
If you are with another human being and you want to awaken and get free, you can do it by dealing with the people around you without expecting that they will also want to get free. But if you’re lucky, you’ll get to be around people who also want to get free. In Buddhism it’s called Sangha, and in Hinduism it’s called Satsang. Every religion has the fellowship, the spiritual community of people who are seeking together, and it’s very reinforcing to those qualities in you that want to awaken to be around other people who similarly want to awaken. These truth relationships help remind you of it.
We look for people that are simpatico to those values. The highest one of those is where two people have consciously and intentionally said, “Yes, let’s get free and let’s use our relationship with one another as one of the vehicles for doing that. In order to do that, since we know that in freedom there is truth, let’s be truthful with one another.” That is a very high and very special relationship. It is very rare.
We are all relatively truthful people, but we have a lot of edges where we use the white lie, or the social truth, or we color it a bit because we don’t want to hurt the other person, because we want to trade off kindness for truth, and that kindness leaves you isolated.
I hate to say that, I mean it’s bizarre to say that, because isn’t it important to be kind? The truth is you’ve got to listen to hear what the license is between you and another human being. If it’s the license for truth, then you are free to speak the truth. If there is not a license, you are not really free to speak the truth.
You can be silent, but most relationships are a conspiracy saying, “I won’t upset your ego, if you don’t upset mine.”And most families survive by doing that. But if you speak the truth, and you keep doing it, and if it’s done with love, you end up just in a liquid space of appreciation together. It’s all just stuff. What difference does it make? Behind it all, here we are, but very few people want to play that game or necessarily should play. It’s not a failure to not play the game at all. I couldn’t play it with my mother or father, and I’ve played it with very few people – actually, that’s not true. I’ve played with a lot of people, but they are people who come to me to play that game, and that’s very different.
A family is a group of people, all of whom want to go to God together or want to get liberated together and say, “Let’s help each other do that, and let’s use truth to do it, and let’s use every technique we can, and let’s use silence at times in the home, so that we can meet in the place behind our minds. Let’s meditate together. Let’s come to retreats together. Let’s reach out to try to do something to bring ourselves into a higher state of consciousness together, so that we can get out from under the illusion of our own separateness that is keeping us isolated… even in the midst of our love for each other.”
-Ram Dass
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