Ram Dass Now

There is a perfection to the web of life that we can’t always see. The forest for the trees? Yes, I think it’s something like that.

Last spring I was asking for a natural way to share my column. My boyfriend was here on his first visit from New Zealand and I had been away from email for a while. One day I sat down to go through some of them and I saw a message from my sweet sister-friend Deneise Newman, a forwarded call for writers from Stephanie Reiter at Love Serve Remember Foundation.

Stephanie’s invitation to talk further came just as Andrew was getting ready to leave, and I told Stephanie so when I replied. The warmth in her response back to me made me realize, “I have a shot at this.” Connection.

I loved answering the questions she asked, name dropping Vrindaban, acknowledging the Dead shows as being as influential as any blue, oddly square-shaped book.

This blog brought me back home again in an unexpected way. That is, I wasn’t focused on Ram Dass or even NKB satsang. Ah, see, there are not limitations to the guru, to the love RD is writing about in Be Love Now. Now I’m smiling as Durga Das comes on my Pandora. I had recently been at a kirtan with him and Mira recently. Yes, we are everywhere.

Nevertheless, finding myself expanded as a writer — and nothing could have been a more perfect launching pad — simply by doing nothing: by staying home and getting to know my beau after 18 years beyond those beaches in sunny Greece . . . it’s quite amazing how we grew into each other over these years and seas, but that’s another story.

See? We don’t see the whole web. It seems as if there are other stories. But it’s all one.

I got my natural way to share my column. That’s one major boon.

I got to read every page of Be Here Now, those mysterious pages, looking through the images to see Sita moving aside. Surfing with Shiva while I read Jed McKenna’s books and my whole world fell apart. Writing with these pages gave me a generous place to sink into, process and create about the changes: Hail the vampire!

Hail the Now.

Hare Hare Mahadeva Shambo chants through my Pandora soundtrack. Kashi Vishwanata Gange.

See, I sat on the banks of the Ganges and Continue reading

I don’t know how long these changes will last. If they are something you come back from. It doesn’t feel like it now. Can’t go back to human once vampire. No more caterpillar, eh moth? Further. That’s the course of this transformation.

Who can say when it started? If you want to bake a yogini from scratch, first you have to create the Universe.

Parts are dying away. Some parts are not going quietly. Others are already gone, gently dispersed. The peace that buzzes within keeps me from going completely crazy. From being admitted to the mental hospital with the rest of the boys who’ve seen the light. I’m more likely to freak out and melt-down at life circumstances, not the fact that I’m shifting into unfamiliar territory. It is, in fact, the life circumstances that provide the grist for this proverbial mill of awakening.

MAGIC THEATRE

FOR MADMEN ONLY

PRICE OF ADMISSION

YOUR

MIND

(see p. 102)

Take it. I know I have no choice. It’s a sweet way to live, not having to make choices. I mean, instead the information is obvious to me when it needs to be. The only choice I have to make is to wake up, moment to moment. But am I even choosing that?

All grace. All grace.

It’s a trippy life. But this is how it is for me. I wouldn’t change it, even though people are dropping away because I really only want that satsang, and even then, only on the fringe. And really only those who are going where I’m going, and no one really can go where another must go (“That path is for your steps alone.” Right Blake? Right Zach? Right Jerry?)

I’m in an interesting position where I’ve just had a massive love-infusion ~ that continues in my heart and via Skype ~ all occurring during this massive tuck-in I’ve been doing over the last several months. I feel loved and supported greatly from the Universe and feel very little need or desire for human interaction. Well, maybe little desire is the best way to explain that. I do feel craving for it at times, but I just can’t bear the small talk. And I’m not speaking the same language as most people I know right now. As most people, across the board, I’d say.

It’s one of the things I love about my mate. He doesn’t stir my mind up with head-spinny chatter, dramatic or otherwise. We just get to be. I can carry on with my shape-shifting, he can carry on with his zombies, and we’ll meet on the couch at ten for the next disc of The Wire. He gives me love and support all the while contributing to a grounded stillness in my being. And I don’t really have to talk to anyone else.

I’m grateful for the cocoon.

Remember the days of travel before cell phones, internet, email, Facebook? One could head out on a journey, a pilgrimage, and not be in touch all that much. Liberation! I realize even as I type this that the sense of not being liberated to go out-of-touch is as much a false construct as anything else.

Does it require a gentle apology? Friends? Family? I don’t know what to say because I feel that I don’t know how to put it in language — verbal or otherwise.  I’m just doing something different right now. The hero’s journey is always a solo one. I don’t use that language to dramatize, only to draw the metaphor. We all have our version of it. And once the seed has been planted . . . you don’t have any choice! (p. 101)

You gotta die to be born. (p. 98)

Parts fall away. Into the nothingness out of which they arise. The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

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I just Googled “multiples of 7″ to figure out what pages we’re on. In case you’re wondering, it’s 91 – 97. But who’s counting? It seems like we’re so deeply into this project that everything is relevant. But let me read a little bit here, and I’ll get back to you.

Again,

p. 91 going back, back, back . . . until you are the idea that lies behind the universe you are literally it you’re not making believe you’re it YOU ARE IT.

But yet the mind, the tool we’ve been/I’ve been most trained with in this life so far, can’t push beyond the skull, is trapped inside the limits of the ego.

It’s okay.

See, that’s the thing. The slice of me that’s turning these brown pages, looking loosely at words: duality . . . realized . . . ocean . . .

the part that tries to understand and tries to knock out through some barrier or another . . .

it’s all one and infinite and

the knowing is way beyond anything thoughts or the mind can understand or words can understand or really even point to. See, and that’s okay. I am/you are/we are it already and infinite and unknowable. It’s relieving.

Like Zach, in this moment I don’t feel like putting words to it.

Let me read some more.

p. 93 you go from form into formless

see,

I don’t even have to understand. In fact, I can’t understand.

Hilarious, the knocking from the inside.

p. 94 what has submitted to fate becomes part of the always so

Stop fighting. Just stop fighting. Just drop it and be here on the couch, back softly sunk into the hand-me-down leather, tongue in my mouth, poking between my teeth, chill fan breeze on the backs of my hands. No thoughts.

No thoughts.

The always so is completely silent and infinite – beyond thought. Submitting is ultimate liberation. These things are paradoxical. And we’re trained to fight and complain and push push push. Somewhere in A Course in Miracles it says that something in us thinks that by pitching a fit (pouring out heavy emotions) we can change the always so

the already so.

And I have seen a Bodhisattva Continue reading

All roads point within.

*****

I’ve been in a smackdown with my thoughts and emotions, attempting to plan and to understand a picture beyond what my pea brain can actually understand.

I write “morning pages” as a way to pour out the cobwebs of fear and judgment with which I awake in the morning. This morning I was, indeed, pouring with them. Perfect for Halloween: fear, fear, fear [I'm writing this on Halloween, preparing for the week ahead]. Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist’s Way, recommends that one does not re-read morning pages – at least for two months.

So this morning, after writing, and calming down in the process, praise Jah, I looked back two months in my notebook, hoping to see something brighter, if I’m being honest. And yet, there it was, almost the same chant: fear, fear, fear. And also, two months back, anger.

While I was writing this morning I saw (remembered, woke up to the fact) that inside is the only way to go. Quieting the mind, for me, is it.

I’ve been reading Be Love Now (***Released TODAY, Tuesday Nov. 2!!!). Ram Dass is speaking right to me when he says: “I couldn’t get to my spiritual heart through my rational mind.”

About six weeks ago, I wrote about the arrival of my beau coming from another country. I was panicked, as I was driven by my (ir)rational mind. Now, weeks later, I find myself panicking again, fearful of his departure back to his home country, which – to my limited mind – seems like another planet, inaccessible.

This process is not about thinking things out, I come to see.

My judgments, my ego-tripping, my attempts to plan and to know what the future holds or to try to drive the future in any way — all futile and hung up on a desperate mind, clinging to an image of importance that simply cannot stand against an open heart, against the field of a quiet mind.

See, when I’m not engaged in intimate relationships, I have a sweet quiet mind and a heart, languid in its openness. But get a mirror of “another” close to me, and all hell breaks loose. In my mind.

It takes it all so dang seriously.

Earlier this week as I’d been begging for a paradigm shift because I couldn’t stand the suffering I was putting myself through, I found freedom even in the words “I hate my life.”

Point being that when all hell breaks loose, when I’m hating my life, when I’m forgetting my practices and become focused on what seems to be outward (such as another person and the context our relationship seems to be situated in), eventually, out of grace or just being fed up with the aching mind, I remember:

GO  .  IN  .  IN .  IN .  IN

(BHN, p. 85)

Nothing is about the other person, nor is it personal. My personal grasping for love and affection are reminiscent of the little girl whose mother was outta there when the girl was just small, and as the circumstances prepare to shift (i.e., my man prepares to return to New Zealand for now), I freak. I feel like I’m dying. I’m terrified of something that hasn’t happened.

There’s the part of me, then, that says, “Go for it! Die!” Not literally, not physically, of course, but more in the sense of, “Bust on through!”

Meanwhile, the early pages of Be Love Now resonate so much with me. Ram Dass: “The more I gave up my desire for personal love, the less distance there was between his being and mine, and I felt much closer to him.”

We know it. We forget it. We write it so we can remind ourselves and each other. And ultimately, all roads lead within. And then we get to sit there, lightly smiling, relieved, exhaling. Breathing easy.

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The last time I did a Vipassana course, I nearly lost my mind.

The standard Vipassana meditation course is 10 days of silence and lots of meditation. And that’s about it. The days are broken up with walking to and from the meditation hall between hour-long sits to go to the bathroom and get some water, meals in the dining hall with other hungry people alone with their minds, a quick nap here or there, some stretching alone in your room, etc., but never is there a time when you’re going outside of yourself.

One of the most profound aspects of the course is that you have no one to talk to about your troubles or the stories running in your head that are dressed up as problems and woes. There’s no one to get on board with how bad or troublesome any of it is. And you’re just left to chew it over, to plot and scheme and fantasize and attempt to solve, . . . all when there’s NOTHING you can DO about it.

No phones, no notebooks to write in, no computers, no iPod. Just the campus, the cushion, your body and your breath.

So the first time I went through the 10-day course, I knew it was the hardest thing I’d ever chosen to do, but I managed. I was impressed and proud of myself and found, for the next year, that my overall sense of peace had increased.

I stopped in about six months later for a 3-day course for old students, and as I wrote about in another blog, I only freaked out once.

Then, a year after my first 10-day course, I went back for another.

I was hesitant this time, and within the first 24 hours, I was losing it.

I cried the entire course, and twice I ended up in the teacher’s quarters talking with her (I will always be grateful for her care).  Besides recommending that I go ahead and take fruit and milk for dinner, ease up on the really deep practice at one point and also get a little extra sleep, she asked me the perfect question: Continue reading

You are the void.

Doesn’t everyone want to wake up? That’s what’s so strange to me.

- the model was what they searched for

it was their own thought process which kept them from seeing

I say all I want to do is write and now I sit to write and I prefer to sit quietly. Not add more sounds to my mind in the forms of words, thoughts arising, making noise.

Yes, as usual, the fan is blowing overhead. Tonight it’s on a higher setting and I can hear the rough brown pages of Be Here Now rubbing together, page 75 scratching at page 76 (it was their own thought process which kept them from seeing . . . ).

And so could I possibly be falling into innocence? In so many ways my attitude is almost jaded, scowling, shaking my head. Does the ego swell before exiting? Before thinning?Ah! Assuming that jaded, scowling and head-shaking is ego! Could it not be awake?

I have the urge to try to make it all happen, whatever it is. I got up from writing to lock the door behind Andrew as he heads out to a metal show (always perfect timing on the nights I’m staying home to write), and as I came back over toward the couch, my mind went to a punch list of everything else I think I should be doing after I finish writing this (write a newsletter, work on new subscription project for my column, should, should, should). And then on the heels of that is:  “How am I supposed to do everything I want to do and also exercise and eat well and rest and quiet my mind and and and???”

So I just sit back down, breathe, type.

I straddle these worlds: mind (thought processes) and . . . what do you call the other one? Is it enlightenment?

I don’t use that word (sorry) lightly.

I don’t think it means what I thought it meant. Ha! I imagined I was hearing critters rustling in the leaves outside my front door and felt my heart rate and breath quicken and then realized, it’s more pages of BHN chirping, like a cricket rubbing its legs together.

YOU ARE ENLIGHTENED

What’s there to be done is done whether I have a thought about it or not. I’m sound asleep to think I’m – that is, little Carin – the source of any of this. It’s a funky dance.

There is no I unless it’s the great I. The great Eye. I am. But “I” am not. Carin is a costume character convinced that her story is the real deal. Like an actor in a play, not knowing he’s in a play. My skin looks good. My belly changes shape. I had a headache last night. Breathing goes through this body, out my nostrils, in my nostrils.

I think about these other characters writing here. My new buddies. My friend Blake out there, so young to love Jerry, finding feathers like the rubber snakes I found on tour. I think of you all and hear a SMASH! like a plate of glass breaking, like when Superman re-routes that nuclear missile into space and inadvertently releases Zod and his pals from the Phantom Zone.

I’m digging the metaphor. Smash ourselves out of the sleeping ego. Release from the Phantom Zone. Ahhhh . . . fly in space. Freedom. Awake. Awake. Awake.

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- He’s sitting up there (in here) all the time.

What is this eye? Is it the chicken/the guru that watches all the time, sees, knows everything, just checks it out? Smiles gently like the Buddha? Cracks up wildly like we used to way back when we first smoked pot?

Is it my eye?

Singing these words:

I know that I’m not driving this train. I am consciousness being played through a character.

At the moment it sounds like “Bernie’s Chalisa” off of Flow of Grace. Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram

Sita Ram Sita Ram Sita Ram Sita Ram

And the words don’t mean anything,

and it doesn’t matter! Isn’t that good news?

It just happens that I dig this kind of music, but it is not access to the guru. How can I have access to that which I am?

So.

of late I don’t talk with as many of my friends as -

- as when? as what?

this personality appears to be changing and I don’t feel like explaining it. It almost has me put on a veneer of indifference, nay, almost defense. Football pads? When you’re pulling the clothes out of the drawer of who you think you are, the wardrobe inevitably changes. I’m not driving this train.

This blog gives me a nice place to spill it.

I’d rather write than talk with most people these days. I’d rather create than talk about the weather.

The trips that we’re into are the trips that we’re into. Always a writer. Always a traveler. There are things about us that we can’t help.

Including the seething resentment, brother Zach. Including the puking, sister Melissa. Including absolutely everything about this moment you’re I am experiencing right now. Eyes closed, can I still type? And feel the fan blowing in a low swirl above my head? Smiling as I realize I’ve made an error and backspace to correct, eyes still closed.

What is that eye?

- I just have what I have going with my own karma.

- You hang out with yourself because there’s nobody home there at all.

- He is a perfect mirror since there’s nobody here.

- Not: “I really love Ram Dass.”

- “Well, everywhere I go, the chicken sees.”

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By the time you read this I won’t be here now. Was I ever here? Or are these words just appearing on the screen in front of you? Did anyone really write them or are they all simply arising in your consciousness in front of you right now?

Right now it seems as if my fingers are hitting warm, plastic keys, sometimes my finger tips, other times my finger nails. My boyfriend’s sitting next to me and I’m seeing the movie “Knocked Up” for the second time today.

I played it early this afternoon and fell asleep on the couch. I needed it.

Last night I had a bad dream. And it ran well into the morning. I had about seven hours of what appeared to be food poisoning and the experience was just how I’d heard it described. You feel like you’re dying – or like you want to die.

I lay in a stupor wherever I could, spending a lot of time on the rugs on the bathroom floor, pulling them together so my body wasn’t burned by the cold tile. I could barely stand and could barely stay in one place, just uncomfortable everywhere and at the same time totally exhausted and needing to sleep. And just praying that the next shit or puke would be the one that would relieve the monster in my stomach.

It was weird.

And eventually I did have that moment when the relentless feverish scraping- my-belly-from-within relented. Annica. Changing, changing, changing.

But, man, when I was in the middle of it, I only reached for the word “equanimous” [sic] once, and it flew away so quickly, I didn’t bother again. I was just tripping out and needing relief.

I heard Eckhart Tolle say today, “Why make another problem and say that you should let go of desire?” Yo.

My fear was not that I would die, but that the brutal tummy ache would go on and on. Death is surely more chill than food poisoning.

So, now, did that happen now? It’s not happening now. (Though the girl in the movie just threw up in the trashcan – pregnancy, not food poisoning.) Oy.

Why am I talking about puke?

This is just what’s up for me right now. I don’t feel the need to dig deep into a spiritual conversation because they are not separate from the experience of typing these letters (am I actually typing letters?) or throwing up or begging God for relief or masturbating or snoring.

I’m not sorry for the vomiting. It didn’t surprise me at all. Lying on the bathroom floor I thought about last week’s vampires and the “sickly and painful process” of transformation they go through. And then, after all that purging, we are clearer.

It’s been quite the day, week, month. (Did any of that actually happen? Did I write these words, or are they arising right now in your consciousness?)

Too tired to say much. Just lovin you and chillin out this evening. May the moments you read this . . . well, how are they?

For more writing from Carin (aka Carina ShantiOm), please visit www.nowstayopen.com

I go through more and more times when I’m a recluse.

I like it that way. I quiet down. Buzz with the trees. Quiet my mind.

I used to be very social and this kind of shift confuses the community. The parents. The girlfriends. People worry. People expect, because they’re used to something different.

Come, take this badge off a’ me.

There isn’t a should about this or a right or wrong to any of it. “You do what you do because that’s what the harmony of the universe requires,” (BHN, p. 54).

I do what I do because that’s what I do. I could call it living on guidance. That’s not exactly right. It’s not like an outside voice leads the way. It’s more like an internal compass that directs me in the direction the universe requires. Because it couldn’t possibly be any other way.

Even my struggles are divinely designed.

That’s not quite right either. Divinely dreamed?

Just dreamed.

To get into these places that are beyond words and description is challenging to a talker and a writer like I am.  I don’t feel like explaining what I can’t explain. We do love our metaphors.

Today I was driving and I saw in front of me on a fancy black sports car – my boyfriend would have been able to tell you the make – a license plate that read: VMPYR. Yes, just the analogy I’d been thinking of.

Did you read those Anne Rice books? I read them in high school. Was so into them that when I yawned and my eyes teared up, I thought there would be blood on my fingers when I wiped my cheeks.

Anyway,

when the humans were bit by the vampires and then drank vampire blood, they underwent a metamorphosis. It was a sickly and painful process, always explained to the fledglings by the elders that the human body was dying. The being would fall exhaustedly asleep, and after some time, the new vampire would wake up, and everything was clear and sharply focused.

I’m in that in-between stage. Sort of the purgatory between taking (as Jed McKenna calls and capitalizes it) the First Step and completely waking up. I dig it.  It’s fun and I’m focused. And at the same time bitchy and verging on insane.

Then again, those who know what I mean are the sanest people I can come across.

Sane is in the eye of the beholder.

For more writing from Carin (aka Carina ShantiOm), please visit www.nowstayopen.com

It’s a cool night in Austin tonight, a marked difference from the scorch of summer, half a blink away. I have my windows open and face a room swept clean today. I swept all the rooms in the house and did some straightening. There’s space in here tonight.

Tomorrow the Guest arrives.

When Andrew left the last time, I lay on my couch and heard a Rumi poem, and I saw that he was like Shams to me. The Beloved of lore. It’s several months later now, and he’s en-route; his next flight is from Auckland to San Francisco. I envy him the travel. I envy touching down at SFO.

Today I bought some sausage that he likes and Reese’s Cups and new editions of some heavy metal magazines.  I felt happy to do it, and I have no idea what I’m doing. This is different from last time.

I’m not riding the oxcytocin wave of romance that brought us together last time, beautiful and righteous as it was. I’m simply here, curious.

I have no prediction of the next moment. I’m fascinated by this experience. I remember driving to the airport the last time he came to town, which was also the first time. (And the first time we’d seen each other in eighteen years.)

I felt nervous on the ride and knew that I just did not know what to expect. That kind of clarity can riddle a person with anxiety, or it can wake you up.

We really never do know what to expect. Yet somehow we’re mostly just dozingly cruising through our world. Leaving the house and driving to work. Eating. Showering. We act like each moment isn’t completely new.

We have no idea, ever, what’s going to happen. We’re sleepwalking through the movie.

My only job is to wake up.

My friend Erik recently married a woman from another country so I’d asked him for some suggestions on the process. This is what he wrote:

And as far as marriage goes, I’ll share with you the biggest lesson I’ve learned which is that: the ONLY purpose for it that works is to use it as a classroom for my own spiritual maturation… not the other person’s, mind you, but solely my own!  (It’s VERY tempting to spot the ego in the other and try to get THEM to mature spiritually, but just trust me… it NEVER works!)  Lol…

A good warning for me. I know that if I feel uncomfortable, I’m likely to seek fault in my mate, projected from my own sleepy, delusional mind.

In Be Here Now this week, Ram Dass writes:

I CAN DO NOTHING FOR YOU BUT WORK ON MYSELF . . .

Neither this man who’s flying across the world tonight nor I know what we’re in for. But we are open to the river of faith, and this is simply where we are. He was lovingly (and with impressive efficiency and focus) compelled to come here, and I am here to receive him. Life is like this for me: unpredictable, fast-changing, wondrous. When I watch the movie, I’m just curious, smiling in fascination.

It’s all very dreamy.

For more writing from Carin (aka Carina ShantiOm), please visit

www.nowstayopen.com

and

www.whatamidoingup.tumblr.com.