The transformation for the initial part is to move the plane, the perspective from where you're sitting. So a discipline, but not too violent, don't get ahead of yourself. And if you feel it's too rigid, stop for a while and try other forms. Keep allowing the eclecticism to go until you feel pulled genuinely into a deeper process.
- Ram Dass Audience Member: How do I discipline myself to practice with compassion and with no judgment? Ram Dass: There is a matter of timing in sadhana [spiritual practice] that's important to keep in mind, I mentioned it a little bit last night that we tend to overthink. So we often choose a sadhana, a spiritual practice, a little before its time or before it chooses us, before the marriage works, and we find ourselves in this ought and should predicament where you start out with great love and within a little while it's, "Oh my God, I got to do my practice." And it's like another thing like washing the dishes. And certainly there is value in doing a practice regularly every day, even when you don't want to do it, especially in meditation practice, because in meditation practice, the not wanting to do it is as much grist for the mill of meditation as wanting to do it, it's all stuff you can work with, with your mind. That's very beautiful. But the delicate balance that has to go on inside oneself, recognizing that if you build up too much negative tone to your practice, too much resistance, you're going to have a reaction to it that's going to take you away from it for a while before you can come back later on. A lot of people were so gung ho in their spiritual practices early on, I remember in the early seventies that you find them five years later at the local bars, drinking beer and watching television and talking about how they used to do spiritual practices and how they fell off the path. Now it isn't really falling off the path, it's just another part of the path. But part of that violent reaction was because of the impurities with which they did it in the first place. So my usual guidance is to go slow, is to not get too gung ho. Don't figure you're gonna get enlightened yesterday. Relax. Just start to tune. Now, the other thing is when you say, "I found my practice," you can't assume that the practice you found is the practice that's going to last you for the rest of your life.
Because who found that practice is in the course of the practice going to change into somebody else. And so the practice that was appropriate for the person initially may not be appropriate a little way down the line. So you've got to keep staying open. So you hear all these delicate balances that are going on in you. One is the value of deepening a practice.
Like Swami Satchidananda was criticizing me for being such an eclectic dilettante. And he said, "Well, you can't just go around digging shallow wells everywhere. You've got to dig a deep well so that you get fresh water," which is just a metaphor, that I could counter with, you know, another metaphor that would be equally as sweet for the other argument. |
But when I watch people over time, what I see is that they start out quite eclectically, and then they get drawn into one practice quite deeply, and then when they come out the other end, like Ramakrishna, then they can do all practices, and they're all the same practice, alright? So it's like a funnel. It goes in, and then it goes out again. So my answer is that you go gently. Gurdjieff said an interesting thing, he was a Russian philosopher, and he said that an alarm clock that'll wake you up one moment, you can sleep right through later on. And he said you need to keep finding new alarm clocks to awaken you because you can have something that awakens you out of your sleepwalking, of normal waking consciousness, and it works one moment like something you read, and a moment later, you're reading it and you're busy planning your shopping list while you're reading it. I mean, you've gone completely to sleep in the process of doing it. So all of these are merely variables that you have to keep in mind as you're proceeding with your practice. And in terms of the question of discipline, you've got to work very gently with pressing against it, making right effort without turning it into a neurotic achievement game, which we in the West are masters of... >> Keep it going... Listen to the full lecture on YouTube right here. | 
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