Via Rachael - Love Serve Remember Foundation \\ Ram Dass on Relationships as Portals 🌀

 

Ram Dass on Relationships as Portals From Transaction to True Connection   ““In our efficiency to get on with life, we tend to see other people slightly as objects who are instrumental to our getting what we need.” – Ram Dass Our relationships with each other can be vehicles for our growth. They can be vehicles for our entrapment. Our relationships with one another can be vehicles for bringing us more into the universe, into the moment, into the flow of things. Or they can be vehicles for isolating us more into our separateness. In my relationship with you, who I think I am affects who I see you to be. I'm driving down the street. I'm in a rush to get to an appointment that I'm a little late for. There's a car in front of me that is slowing down at a corner unnecessarily. I experience anger at the person who's driving. I swerve to go by the car with anger in my heart. I look and I see that it is an older, confused man who is lost, and I feel guilt. My attachment to getting to my appointment made me see that person as an obstacle and get impatient. I go into the bank with a check to cash or a deposit to make. I walk up, wait in line, and get to the teller. Who do I see? I see the casher of my check. I may go through a perfunctory smile. How are you today? I'm fine. Thank you. Have a good day. Nothing happened. I stayed in my isolation, the teller in his or hers. Now I'm the bank teller. Person by person comes before me: now a deposit, now a check cashing, now a certified check, now a money order. All day long, people giving me hello, smile. Yes, nod. Here's your receipt. Thank you. Have a good day. Yes. I feel lonely amidst a crowd of people. These are not exceptional examples. They're examples that are common to most of our lives, much of the time. That in our efficiency to get on with life, we tend to see other people slightly as objects who are instrumental to our getting what we need. You can see the extreme case in an autistic child who wants something from the refrigerator and takes your hand to the refrigerator door. It just knows that hand opens that door. It doesn't even relate to you. Just the hand opens the door. And often parents with new children feel their egos very scrunched as the baby only sees them as something to gratify the baby's needs. If I am hungry, if I'm very hungry, I can't help but look at you in terms of whether or not you are going to feed me. If I'm hungry enough, I'm going to look at you as to whether or not you’re food, as the Donner party did. If I have a strong need that I identify with, everybody around me is going to be seen in relationship to whether or not that need is going to be satisfied by that person. And if not, they are of no concern to me. In the world of lust, you can watch people relate to each other through lust, and you can see that as they walk down the street with lust, with sexual desire, sexual arousal, they look at other people and they see them either as a potential, a competitor, or irrelevant. And if you walk down one of those streets, you will experience yourself as being seen as one of those three categories. We each have these structures in our minds, these models of who we are, what we need, where we're going, what we think it's all about. And these models define what we see out in the world. Not only that, but they are what another person receives from us. - Ram Dass, from Intimacy With All Things