Ram Dass Now

If nothing is going on, nothing is happening, nothing has ever happened, and nothing ever will happen, then there is nothing for me to know. I have no clue. No idea what’s going on. So why am I writing on this blog? So many others who are so much riper than me. This is my karma, I suppose.

I experience my experiences, but engage in my own illusions, indulge myself in it, project my own ideas onto the void, and call it “Jon.” How’s that? What projector? What illusion creator? Bzzzt. That’s the short circuit.

I am a walking paradox. I carry with me a great deal of burden because I still need to learn or ripen. I am so grateful that I do feel deep compassion, that it keeps me sane (most of the time).  We found feral kittens recently, and I knew that we’d need to catch them and help adopt them out so they could live healthy, happy lives with loving people–and one night I caught one, and as I took it to a waiting carrying case, it slipped from my grasp and ran back to it’s mother. I was already feeling terrible for taking a kitten from its mother before I had my hands on him. Apparently, I cannot knowingly separate a child from its mother, in spite of knowing that a growing feral community is not healthy for the kittens, or future kittens. But it’s not my place to decide kitty karma. My compassion overtook my intellectual mind and helped my unconscious knowing to come through. At the same time, I am glad that there was another person that was able to catch all 4 kittens, get them to a clinic, and get their shots and find a home for them. But I could not do it. I’ll kill a mosquito, and feel remorse as I wash the blood from my hands, but I won’t take a kitten from it’s mother to help find it a loving people home. I have no clue what’s going on with that, but I know it’s not a weakness of any sort. I don’t know whether to feel guilty or great, or nothing at all. This is all very confusing–fortunately, I see confusion as a reminder to slow down and pay attention. Continue reading

I am having a very hard time finding the words I want to put on this page today.

I’d been feeling dragged down by the gravity of the events in this week’s news and disheartened by the tug of war  in words and deeds going on. I was letting myself carry that weight rather than making another decision….rather than changing my head. The minute I shined a light on the way I was letting my thoughts roll I began to …yet again…let it be instead of wanting/desiring it to be different.

I went back to pages 29-35 and was astounded at how relevant and helpful they suddenly were to me. The seemingly absurd,irrational statements and actions of some people eliciting some equally outrageous responses and polarization is duality doing its thing.

The yin and the yang. “The world most everybody is living in most of the time”

Page 30 says, “The only way out of that is to take the poles of every set of opposites and see the way in which THEY ARE ONE.

And if you can get into that place where you see the interrelatedness of EVERYTHING

and: you see the oneness in it all

then: no longer are you attached to your polarized position.”

Yesterday morning in my searching for wisdom to make sense of the madness in the world I came upon a quote by Albert Einstein that I think says so beautifully and simply what is true and echoes those word on page 30.

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

So I feel we have this opportunity as people on this planet during these extremely volatile and polarized times to make a different decision about how to BE here. Yes…we live in a world of desires and I do believe the desires are what keep the whole thing spinning and are a necessary note in the music of the dance. But I also believe there is a way to recognize the desires when they arise and to be at ease …accept that the desire  is there and move with it…let it come and go….the dance…rather than attaching to it and being thrashed about in the waves.

The yin and the yang, the light and the dark, it is all happening.

Today. September 11th is a day so much about just that.

There is sadness and hurt and there is huge compassion and goodness flowing.

There are acts of violence and statements of hatred and there are peaceful gatherings and beautiful tributes.

September 11th is also the date that Maharaj-ji left his body in 1973 and although I imagine the day might feel sad to those who were close to him, I know that it is also a beautiful day when many of those same people and many others gather together to remember him and share in his light and love.

And so while angry protestors at ground zero try to drown out the voices of the families mourning and reading the names of the loved ones they lost on September 11,2001 , I take heart in the fact that there are also thousands of people gathered in the desert of California at Bhakti Fest to sing love out into the air and that message of  love and light is being sung over the planet everyday in many ways.

I truly believe that all is well.

I am sitting on the couch with my 4-week-old baby, Canyon, asleep in my arms. As I close my eyes in this moment, I can just feel the Love of God, the Love of the Universe, pouring through me. “I am the bliss of the Universe, Everything am I”. I am here, now, and isn’t life just beautiful…

My 2 year old, Clavey, wakes up, crying for mommy. All of a sudden it feels like I had been floating on a cloud of bliss in the sky and then catapulted at an amazing speed back into “reality”.

I go in to get my son out of bed, and he is not in a state of harmony. I try to help him regroup, but he pushes me away. He is 2. He can do everything by himself. How did I forget this? Meanwhile, my 4 week old is crying to nurse. I try to nurse him, but my 2 year old throws a fit because he wants me to play with HIM. I feel lost. Where did God go? Why am I not floating in the clouds anymore? All I can think about is how to make it through the rest of the day, and then I remember page one…

SURRENDER

I realize that is why I feel no God-presence in moments like these. Instead of opening up, letting the energy come in, I go in lock-down mode. But once I throw up my arms and rip open my heart, ahhhh. The fussing continues, but ahhhh. I can handle this now.  I ask Clavey if he wants to have “mommy milk” with Canyon. Problem solved. Once again I find myself on the couch, one child in each arm, nursing both of them back into harmony…and finding my own harmony at the same time.

This is how it is with my children. One moment is up, then the next down. I know that it is not this way simply to test my patience. It is this way because they live so intensely in the moment. For them, this moment is all there is. As I see both of them so absorbed in the Now, I can’t help but go back to page one…

“Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of Heaven”

It comes so naturally for them. Me, I have to really work on it. But as I sit with them, becoming as they are, seeing the Universe through their eyes, my whole being feels full of light. My heart is open, and God comes in. Residing in my heart cave, my hridayam, the next tantrum doesn’t make me want to run. Instead of the feeling of frustration running through my veins, I am able to look at Clavey and Canyon with…

UNBEARABLE COMPASSION

…and say “this is hard sometimes, isn’t it?” This whole life thing is tricky at times. But the great thing is, we are all here together, just figuring it out.  Sometimes, this whole surrendering business is easy. Other times, my ego takes over and the idea of surrender is off in some far away land. But the more I work on it, the more natural in becomes. And with these two beautiful boys, I get PLENTY of time to work on it. My children. My little guru’s.

So it’s all the same thing. It’s all made of the same energy. God is everything. . . including me, and you, and that table. I like the comment that we are all fingers on God’s hand.  I like it because it really seems to fit—we may be God’s pinky, but until the pinky ‘remembers’ that it’s a pinky, it’s just a pinky dressed in the projections of an ego; but when it remembers that it’s God, that pinky becomes God—it strips itself of the ego; rather, the ego is, well, absorbed into God, into everything-ness. Is-ness.

Unbearable compassion. Hridayam, heart cave. Sameness. For a long time, I tried to meditate and ‘pretend’ that I was directly connected to the things around me; this used my brain and did a wonderful job of entertaining my ego.  Then came Be Here Now and that heart cave. The whole idea of going into your heart to really experience same-ness shook me up a bit—I had been so proud of my intellectual understanding that I had forgotten that experiential knowing comes from the heart. . . and REALLY knowing that you are the same as everything MUST involve total, unbearable compassion because it not only involves direct knowing of beauty in ways that go way out there, but also the same one-ness with deep pain, sorrow, confusion; what a beautiful arrangement, that even knowing pain is a direct expression of the highest form of Love: Compassion. Compassion is beauty; it is one of the greatest transformations to witness.

So, while meditation has changed in its form, I am grateful for having gone through the more ego-based ‘thinking’ that was masquerading as meditation . . . for that was a part of my path; without it, I would not have realized the difference, or that it’s all part of the same thing. It’s still all the same thing, even if we ‘get it wrong,’ we still get it right. Compassion for yourself folks. If you are starting a path of meditation, and things seem to get noisy at first, it’s ok; have compassion for yourself because you’re just going through exactly what you’re supposed to go through.

I’ll wrap up my first post by sharing that I’ve been at the beach for the past several days, with beautiful people. I’ve learned so much from the beach, from watching children catch minnows, then set them free because they are God’s children, too. Children get total, unbearable compassion.

Namaste’
Jonathan F. Anderson

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