Ram Dass Now

There may be no place to go, just the OM home of the here and now, but I’ve been traveling for the last two weeks and, let me tell you, I’ve been a lot of places both inside and out.

First I went to Albuquerque for my goddaughter’s bat mitzvah. There was the mishpuka (a probably misspelled Yiddish word that means all the crazy relatives) and all the chaos involved in helping to put on and photograph a series of events (rehearsals, meals with out-of-towners, the main service, the big party). There also was my goddaughter’s absolutely exquisite singing of her Torah portions and the blessings and prayers. For her, it was truly a spiritual initiation, a rising into the next level of both adulthood (or teenager-hood) and commitment to her path (at least her path at this moment of her life), and a real sense of community. But being Jewish never cut it for me. Being Jewish meant bagels and lox and The New York Times. I loved her singing, but somehow Sanskrit resonates more with me than Hebrew.

Then I went to Santa Fe, where I spent days with my ex-father-in-law, the 90-year-old patriarch of a large family of Maharajji devotees. He’s starting the process of turning inward. He’s not into storytelling, doesn’t seem to have real highs or lows, just a steady march on shaky legs into a hopefully dignified ending. He is living the lessons of changing and letting go that are so necessary at any stage of life, but especially the one he’s now facing. And the same is true for his wife of the last 30 years, as her life changes along with his.

I saw old friends. Some are going through extremely difficult times of suffering—loved ones dying, children with serious problems, career frustrations, economic difficulties—heartbreak in all its manifestations. All the sorrows of the world. While others are rising above, getting through the hard times and coming out stronger and more alive and more creative.

The wheel of karma. The law of life. It’s in the midst of all this living that we learn to let go. It’s loving fiercely and letting go. Parenting and letting go. Watching parents go. Living more here, in the moment, in the now of life, whatever it may hold, whatever it may ask us to hold.

And then I went to Taos, the home of America’s Hanuman, the one temple in the West that bears Maharajji’s name. And oh, what a tempest in a teapot that’s been over the decades! The factions, the fights, the wounds that have been inflicted and never let go of. Along with the rich silent heart space where the beautiful murti of Hanuman and Maharajji’s tucket share equal billing.

Ram Dass created the temple inadvertently. I don’t know where his desire stemmed from, but he was the one who had a 600-pound marble murti sculpted in India (in his flying pose, as he was going to have to cross another ocean) and brought to America. We had a small bandhara on some land in northern New Mexico, where the crate was opened. And suddenly there was the question: What are we going to do with him? Where will he live?

He wound up living in Taos, and it’s there that I felt the pull of polarity the strongest. The temple/ashram is a large container for the area seekers and devotees, the hungry or just crazy. I always thought of it as a big pot of soup, a caldron, really, and Maharajji picks up his ladle and stirs the soup, and all us little veggies collide into each other, and in the process, melt a bit more. My old (and getting older) friends spend less or no time at the temple, some with nostalgia for the good old days, while some actively oppose its existence.

In the end, we all define our own path. There’s no need to worry about “finding” ourselves. Here we are. Doing what we do. Suffering/loving/suffering/loving in a million different ways. It gets so clear: love it all. Love what’s happening now, right in front of you. When you keep loving, keep the heart open, and try to be kind, even the suffering is love.

Today I fly home. As if I ever left.

Taos Hanuman

As I open “From Bindu to Ojas,” I am arrested by the picture opposite the dedication to Maharaj-ji—Hanuman tearing open his heart. The juxtaposition says to me that even the necessity of painfully ripping open our hearts is a blessing from the guru.

There was a time in my life when this picture of Hanuman was my sole/soul guiding force. I had run into a major stumbling block on the evolutionary road to higher consciousness: I believed, like a good little yogini, that I shouldn’t harbor (or even acknowledge) any of the emotional hell realms such as jealousy or anger. It took six months of sitting in my meditation “cave” (then located in a closet) and communing with this picture before I could come to grips with a completely human reaction to very discomfiting circumstances. I was, in a sense, learning how to live in the cave of my heart.

Hanuman tore open his heart because someone had questioned his devotion; now Rama, Sita, and Lakshman clearly could be seen to reside within his hridayam.

The hridayam. Our true home. The only real security—to be one’s Self. Maharaj-ji told us that God, Guru, and Self are One. It was easy to believe while in his presence, swimming in the ocean of his total and unconditional love. Everything got much harder when he left his body and we still had to carry on somehow with our lives. But having had the experience, the knowing, of such extraordinary love made it all possible. It’s what pulled Ram Dass through the “fierce grace” of a massive stroke into the place where he could write Be Love Now.

How to describe such love? English is a language of doing, full of verbs and action. We have only one word for love. We love our children and we love sunny days and we love our lattés. In Sanskrit, a language of being, there’s a word to describe every possible permutation of love: love of wife or husband, love of lover, of child, of home, of friend . . . and on and on. Maharaj-ji’s love encompassed it all.

Some days, sitting in front of Maharaj-ji, it felt like the vast impersonal love of the high Himalayas, massive grandeur, humbling. At other times, it was the melting warm love of an infant in its mother’s arms, tender and intimate. Love has many faces. I went through every possible relationship with Maharaj-ji. At various times he would be my grandfather, father, mother, lover, or child. He was the king, who I would serve (ideally) as Hanuman served King Rama—in such service to love that the only momentary separation from Oneness is in order to enjoy the longing for union and the bliss of devotion.

Love=consciousness.

When I finally get to page one, the words “Cosmic Consciousness” pop out. It’s hard to imagine nowadays, when yoga studios are as common as Starbucks and the sound of kirtan is everywhere, but back in the pre-Internet, pre-New Age bookstores Sixties, there were only a few books of Eastern wisdom that I had come across—Autobiography of a Yogi, the wondrous tale of Paramahamsa Yogananda; the Bhagavad Gita; and the Zen teachings of Alan Watts. At a particularly needy moment, I stumbled into a tiny library in Miami Beach and discovered High Priest by Timothy Leary. What a book! I had never seen marginalia before (which I thought was brilliant), and I had never heard the words “cosmic consciousness.” I was thrilled. I remember the moment of knowing that’s what I want!

I still do. But more than forty years later, I know that the “cosmic” part has to be embodied in everyday life . . . in love, in service to love. Meanwhile, to quote a friend from Peru, a priestess of an ancient Incan lineage, we’re here “to iron out the wrinkles of consciousness.”