Via Ram Dass

The only way you can keep you heart open is by living simultaneously on more than one plane of consciousness. When I was in India, there was a time in Bangladesh when things were just falling apart, and I wanted to take my VW and use it as an ambulance. My guru didn’t tell me to or not to, but he saw how agitated I was, and he said, “Ram Dass, don’t you see it’s all perfect?” and I said “Perfect?!” – I was outraged because people were dying and suffering.

My self-righteousness was outraged. How could it be perfect if people were being violated, and there is injustice?

Yet he would cry over the suffering, and he would do things to alleviate suffering, so I began to try to embrace the paradox of the planes of consciousness, in which there are inconsistencies. It involves the evolution of the individual soul through all kinds of learning experiences that involve suffering and death, but if you are looking at it through the eyes of your separateness, through your individual rational mind, it becomes a trap where you cannot see that it is all simultaneously perfect and it stinks.