A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
How can we reconcile our spirituality and our religion?
Posted
There was a great moment when I asked Trungpa Rinpoche for some meditation instruction.
He was sitting there with this saki bottle and he said, “What you should be doing now is this form of yoga called Ati yoga.” And he says, “You just will expand out, let’s do it.” So we sat there looking at each other and started to meditate.
Then after about 20 seconds he says, “Ram Dass?” I said, “Yes?” He said, “Are you trying?” I said, “Yes I’m trying!” He said, “No Ram Dass, don’t try, just do it.” I realized that in my zeal towards enlightenment, I’d turned it into another Jewish middle-class achievement task.
So this spiritual group started seeking disciplines and paths and practices and got very enamored of Eastern Wisdom, and this was earlier before the full response of the Western Religions in which they finally recognized that they had to make the esoteric more available, that they had to give up some power, because within the Eastern traditions the esoteric was available.
When people started to have these esoteric experiences, they were so thick, so fast, and so different, that it was ineffable – very hard to explain. There was no way I could even start to conceive of explaining it. I mean, it’s like, take this moment, how would you describe it? If you all gave a description, it would still fall short of the totality of what it was.
I think that my child rearing through the Jewish Conservative Reform track, if that had had enough spiritual sustenance in it, I might have turned to things like Kabbalah or Hasidic literature, and to Nachman, or to Baal Shem Tov or someone like that. But I still had such a reaction to the kind of social-political attachments to Judaism.
I was just
looking for something that was touching a deeper place in me, than had
never been touched by Judaism. Not that it couldn’t be, but that it had
never happened.
So to me, the maps that were available clearly pointed toward the East, but as the years went by and I got to around 1967, I realized that nobody in the West knew how to read the maps. I mean, there were some that did, but I just didn’t know them, of course.
So basically, I went to the East looking for a map reader, and I found in my guru such a being. The best thing I can say about the quality of him was that over the few times I knew him, when he was in his body between ’67 and ’73, there were very few times I could ever find him.
What I recognized with him was that what I had been able to touch with acid, he could have without it.
We gave it to him. Nothing happened, because if you’re in Detroit, you don’t have to take a bus to Detroit. There was nowhere for him to go, he stayed in that space. We were looking to go somewhere, to change something, because we were holding somewhere. He wasn’t holding anywhere.
We
must reclaim the concept of awakening from an exclusively
individualistic therapeutic model and focus on how individual liberation
also requires social transformation.
Wisdom
isn’t something you can “do” or “make happen”—it’s there in all of us.
By becoming more familiar with that space within ourselves and trusting
our own instincts more fully, we can learn to apply this quality of discriminating wisdom in everyday life.
The quality of the heart is that it loves without discrimination, it
just loves, it has no boundaries. The mind is continually setting
boundaries. 'This is me, this is not me, this is good, this is bad.'
The mind is constantly judging, the heart is not judging, the heart is
just opening. The heart is without boundaries, so the mind is actually
afraid of the heart. That's what the interesting thing is, the battle
that goes on in us - you're afraid of your own heart because your heart
will give away the store.
The heart says, ‘You need my car, you need my house, you need my life,
take it.’ And the mind is saying, ‘Now wait a minute. You've got your
health insurance to pay, keep cool, don't blow the whole scene.’
So the interesting question is when and under what conditions can you
meet people in such a way that you can keep your heart open without
giving up your discriminative wisdom about how to be with another
person.
- Ram Dass
From our new free 4-week online course 'The Yoga of Relationships:
Exploring Connection and Sexuality Through the Lens of the Soul" -
beginning September 24th.
Nonviolent Communication... is a method for resolving conflict by expressing needs without blame or criticism, then listening and responding empathically.
Peace and kindness have their best shot at establishing themselves when we accept our own inadequacy, when limitation and error become aspects of ourselves we can embrace rather than strive to mask.
"It’s amazing how the nature of your relationships change when it’s coming out of love instead of trying to get love."
- Ram Dass
From our new free 4-week online course 'The Yoga of Relationships:
Exploring Connection and Sexuality Through the Lens of the Soul" -
beginning September 24th.
We can choose to take refuge in the brilliant sanity of enlightenment, the Buddha; trust the process of the path, the Dharma; and rely on the experience of those who guide us along the path, the Sangha.
The
act of giving purifies intention, the quality of mind with which any
action is undertaken. For a brief moment, the giver’s self-absorption is
lifted, attachment to the gift is relinquished, and kindness towards
the recipient is developed.
How
do we develop this appreciation of things just as they are, especially
if we are sick and in pain? We must treat our pain gently, respectfully,
not resisting it but living with it.
As
progress is made on the path, the positive qualities required for
further advancement will become part of you, and you will gradually
learn how to assimilate and become these positive qualities, rather than
regarding them as something to be attained and possessed.
“If there is one thing that a person needs from another human being,
it’s to be appreciated, to be listened to, to be heard. Just as you are,
not as I would make you."
- Ram Dass
From our new free 4-week online course 'The Yoga of Relationships:
Exploring Connection and Sexuality Through the Lens of the Soul" -
beginning September 24th.
We
can get dragged back into the past, which can lead to depression, or we
can become anxious about the future, which can lead to fear. Conscious
breathing returns us to the here and the now, where we really belong.
When
we trust our creative energy, we encounter a supreme kind of
enjoyment—an amazement at the natural unfolding of life beyond our
ordinary way of looking at things.
All
the transitions in life—dream, meditation, death, and rebirth, all the
unending transitions in what we call existence and nonexistence—are each
and every one a path of enlightenment.
