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 also love the final image of the sacred 108 pages. The bridge serves us when we need to cross what seems to be a flowing obstacle; it helps us remember when we pause on it to look at our reflection; it helps us to love when we use it to cross over to the people who wait for us on the other side. It’s the perfect image for the final page of BHN’s From Bindu to Ojas~Ram Dass saw the bridge, paused on the bridge, and crossed over it. He does it again from Be Here Now to Be Love Now.

And with a reflection, you’re looking down at the illusion of yourself, and identify with it; but it’s not you, it’s just a reflection. Right? Depends on how you look at it: what you see IS you (the reflections, the water itself, etc)  vs it’s your brain separating you from the water that has your reflection in it. The simpler way is usually pretty good. So, both. I go with both.

I’ve had only one picture in mind during these 108 days, and I knew I was going to show it on the final blogging day because it’s my version of the bridge on 108. I took this picture in the Fall of 2008 in Austin, Tx.  This old fisherman sat patiently floating in the middle of the reflection simply waiting for fish. Then he came to rest in the eye of what the reflection completed as a fish that reminded me of the Christian Ichthys. I was stunned. He WAS both the reflection, and himself at the same time; reflected and reflection.  I was immediately taken back to this final page of BHN when I saw the image.

Ram Dass has given us a bridge; just as Maharajji gave to him; Just as Hanuman bridged the ocean with a great leap to serve God and the beloved. I am grateful to have participated in this blogging experience, and am more assured that while I am still on my bridge, that I can enjoy my reflections as I move to the other side in each moment as it presents itself.

Namaste’
Jon

Icthys Eye - Fisherman rests in the eye of the Icthys

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I’m so happy to be back here with you, my brothers and sisters. Last week, I was contemplating the silent freeways while my head was in the clouds in Maui. Tough life I know. For whatever reason getting to a computer to write just didn’t seem to work out. Funny how that is – I was near the source with Mr. Be Love Now himself yet I felt like I had very little to say. Somehow just being with Ram Dass in the gorgeous manifestation of mother earth left me with few words, I was just floating from one moment to the next.

I always experience this very powerful visual metaphor when I’m Hawaii. I’m on the beach in Maui and I can see, very clearly, a birds eye view of my body sitting on that beach. I can see from deep outer space my little body on the edge of a tiny island that is the most remote land mass on planet Earth. There I am, just sitting on a spec of rock in the middle of the ocean. Because of the physical circumstance that this vision puts me in I can go deeper and really understand my connection to the rest of the universe. I am no different than the sand, the ocean, the fish in the ocean or than the earth itself.

The trip about being human is that we’re aware that we’re aware. We may be the only species that is aware that we’re aware. So I see that I’m just this sentient life form in the middle of nowhere – I can vibrate into oneness with the one, the formlessness. Touching the sand and feeling the warm water I can blend into matter. Slowly though, balance kicks in. I become aware of sight, sound, touch, ego, responsibility, perceptions. The role that I am a man with relationships, jobs, money and speech weighs on me and suddenly I’m back to participating in this incarnation. Oh no. Is there illusion here?

Page 93 cracks it open “A fully realized being – you must delight in the exquisiteness at every single level. you must take joy in your maleness or femaleness.”

It’s that expression of love found within my role that I don’t subscribe to the notion that it’s all just a meaningless illusion. Sure, we made up the idea of working 9 to 5. But the energy that I put forth in all my actions contributes to the energy that I find when I’m just being in oneness at the beach. It all has to work together.

In fact, if I had to summarize one lesson from “Be Here Now” it would be that this path encourages me to be present in every moment – mundane or not. You still have to “chop wood and carry water” (pg 96). The dance here is really finding the balance that makes it all work together. If I go too far one way I bliss out and don’t do much of anything. If I go too far the other way I perform meaningless actions that are unconscious and robotic.

It’s fun to live on the edge. I have a friend who once said that he lives on the edge because “that’s where all the action is.” Damn straight. When I sit on the beach in Maui I seriously contemplate selling everything I own just so I can continue sitting on that beach. But then I fall in love with my role and some of my desires. I learn to embrace them as sometimes flawed but always perfect. I relish in the deliciousness of kissing my mate, or eating ice cream, or the miracle of sound that comes through my iPod. Ram Dass has told me over and over again that I must “love the chair because it’s a perfect manifestation of the one.” If “flow in harmony with the universe. i can still do my thing” (pg 96).

That edge where consciousness, love, God and being human all play together is what’s really giving me a lot to think about these days. It’s so far out to think that I’m eternal and “can be anything this time around.”

Om Maui Om

I am watching the waves from a window.

My mother’s 80^th birthday was this week and I brought her here to Maine to see the ocean. She brought my children and I here for a week every summer after summer of their childhood years, but for the past two years her health wouldn’t allow the long trip from her Pennsylvania home. She wanted to see the ocean again and although summer is long gone and this seaside town is quiet and shuttered, the ocean never notices.

I got us a room, with a full ocean view and as my mother sleeps peacefully I am sitting beside the window watching the steady roll of wave after wave break into white foam rising from the still, expansive steel blue/gray waters. Perpetual, peaceful motion.

The line between the sky and sea is barely perceptible because of the early November clouds and I wonder…is there really a line anyway? I find my breathing slowing to match the cadence of the flow and the steady roar of the waves I hear muffled through the glass of the window. In all of my visits to the beach, I have never stayed in a place with an ocean view. There’s something so different about watching the show from here. It takes me out of the scene a bit to a witnessing place.

It all just is. The ocean, the sky, the sounds, my mother sleeping, me sitting here typing….all one connected happening in the now.

Eternal moments…  I am “calmly watching this drama unfold” BHN pg.88

This past week I attended a memorial service for my uncle who passed away recently. It was held at the sweet, little country church where he and my aunt took me  on Sundays when I visited them as a child. I loved coming to stay at their house in the mountains where I could spend hours in the heavy, scented woods beside a trickling stream and come back to  the house to find the best chocolate milkshake on the planet in a frosty glass mug made just for me. My uncle was so gracious and taught me much about the ways of  kindness.

The memorial service was a traditional, Catholic mass and all of the words, gestures and emotions of the prayers of my youth flowed easily from inside me without the least bit of thought. It all came from a deeper place. The entire mass was sung with much call and response and I smiled at the recognition of this being perhaps the birthplace of my love of kirtan. The devotional rituals of the mass still  take me into the rich mystery and magic of the divinity within my own heart…a place of loving awareness as Ram Dass says.

At the end of the service, family members were invited to light a candle to commemorate the soul’s passing. I walked to the altar and my hand shook as I held the long, slender white candle to light it from the center candle’s flame. It took a long time for the flame to catch , but once it did I placed it upright in the circle of sand by then filled with many other glowing candles. I said a silent prayer to my uncle and cried softly.

I stepped back from the altar and felt my heart warmed by the sight of all of those small candles burning together as one bright light in testament to a life. I was brought again to a place outside the drama of my life and to the peaceful center of the moment.

The circle of life, the round tripi-ness of it all, the wave after eternal wave emanating from the still center….beautiful.

The ‘Hail the Goer’ mantra has particular significance for me. Right beside it is all of pg 88. The comfort of this almost chaotic looking page is that it’s presentation may make you look particularly carefully to make sure that you’re reading the words that are actually written. . . if you’re like me, you have to ‘work at it’ to see it, literally. But the message is so comforting that the work leading up to it is completely worth it.

That the water just goes on down stream, just like your senses just do what they do (and on this page, you get great exercise in the visual ‘doing’ something) . . . that you can overcome attachment through a simple exercise (karma yoga, candle focus) truly practiced, is relieving; this makes a lot of sense to me.  And what’s in sharp focus? Waiting for you to be drawn towards it (maybe as soon as you look at the page)? The clear Om Mani Padme Hum mantra. I mean, it’s literally the clearest thing on the page, visually. Where his heart rests, watching the unfolding happen. That’s just a warm sounding place, no matter what’s going on– it’s comforting to know that somebody’s there, in that warm place, and knowing it, and giving you a mantra to focus yourself so that you can find it too.

And not just that . . . also that there’s no claim to need to attain a permenant state of non-thinking just yet; and that the thoughts that you DO have can be appreciated for what they are (” . . . few people who know me don’t appreciate the fact that I think and have keen discrimination and have not lost my mind and I am a sophisticated aware being”).

So you work pretty hard to actually read the page, and to get the tone and rhythm of it (though I guess many may not work at it at all and read it easily, but I think y’all will know what I’m referring to), only to find that, like water,  you do what you do, but you neither have to be attached to it, nor absent from living life. Take heart that there’s somebody guiding you home either way. Om Mani Padme Hum.

When I got Be Love Now, I opened to a random page to see what was revealed to me. Page 116 talks of what the guru does. I think he’s the one that’s sitting in that warm heart place calling you home, waiting for your awareness to merge into one with with the mantra. Far out as that sounds to me, the idea resonates with something in me; I’m not entirely clear on what yet, but it’s comforting in the same way as pg. 88 of BHN.

I haven’t finished Be Love Now yet, but I can say that it is truly as beautiful in it’s essence and presentation as Be Here Now–and it goes beyond that too. When you read it, notice the voice that it sounds like it’s in–I like to imagine Ram Dass speaking the words out loud, in conversational style with me. For me, it’s a laid back, deeply heart-felt tone speaking to comfort, not just inform. I could go on . . . but suffice it to say that I’d suggest getting a copy. Please stop by www.BeLoveNowBook.com and take a look around, watch the video, and get a copy of the book. Really. Watch the video. “. . . You. . .Love everybody.”

Namaste’
Jon
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I’ve been reading Be Love Now and I love the way Ram Dass is revisiting his early experiences with Maharajji, looking back at the beginning, filling in the blanks in between the layers of the stories we’ve heard before. When I think about those first awful weeks after his massive stroke, when we didn’t know how much brain function he would recover and the prognosis looked grim, and then read the way his memories pour out in the new book, I’m so grateful for the round trip Ram Dass been able to make.

He talks about the six months he spent at Kainchi after first meeting Maharajji and how they seemed like “one timeless moment.” I understand. I also keep revisiting the time I spent in Maharajji’s presence. And revisiting is the wrong word for a timeless experience that lies at the core of who I am and who I’ve been for the last four decades—a devotee of Spirit who tries to live with no “scruple of change” as the drama plays itself out. Rereading Be Here Now, and first reading Be Love Now, is like having a round trip ticket to ride once again the waves of love and surrender, joy and despair, of that timeless moment.

Like Ram Dass writing his new book, I’ve been immersed in the past. I’ve started archiving the stories of those of us Westerners who were with Maharajji during those few brief years in the early 70s before he left his body. Looking back four decades, what is amazing for all of us is how vividly that time stands out. We may not remember everything he said, or the exact progression of whether it happened in Kainchi or Brindavan or Allahabad, but the feeling, the space, the connection is always there—timeless.

What can erase from memory the greatest love story of your life?

One of the things that those of us who kept journals during our time with Maharajji did was to write down quotes that were relevant to us. I don’t have a lot of words today. Instead, here’s a quote I’d written in my journal back then.

“When love beckons to you, follow him, though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you, yield to him, though the sword hidden amongst his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him, though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, so shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.”
–Gibran, The Prophet

A page from Maharajji's "journal"--all RAMs

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.

To continue the conversation, please also visit

www.nowstayopen.com

and

www.facebook.com/StayOpen –

where by becoming a fan you’re automatically entered in a drawing to win a copy of Ram Dass’s new book, Be Love Now

Short and sweet is what my computer is telling me today. It keeps turning off this morning . . . ? I spent time trying to fix it, and it kept doing it, so I’ll keep this short. I suppose Maharajji works through computers, too! And I think he sees fewer words than I hear running around my  head.

(p 87) The Stillness – The Calmness – The fulfillment. That’s the rooted place. Ram Dass talks of the roots being where ‘it’ is at. We speak of their stillness. There are no beautiful leaves or color in the roots; Just the driving force of life. That still place that literally soaks up what is around them.

We ARE roots. This does not seem magical to me. This just seems to be a truth. We absorb what is around us–always. Jesus is a root. Maharajji is a root. I am a root. Papa is a root. We’re all roots, absorbing what is around us. And even if ‘we’ are not being still (ie if we are running around as hyper egos), our roots are still quite still; the steady calmness of the roots is always with us. We just have to turn in in in in in through love love love love love to be our roots.

My screen is beginning to flash, so I’m going to hit ‘publish’ now, but I may return to update this post. Please check back, and please add your thoughts on stillness and roots, your experiences of being rooted.

Namaste’
Jon
Further thoughts now on different computer: We have to care for our roots. While they may rest deep inside of us, they are still there and need to be nurtured, loved and cared for.

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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

When I was a young child I used to hide in my room for hours and hours playing video games. I would find so much pleasure in disconnecting from the rest of the world just so I could hide in that beautiful digital fantasy. Completing one level after another only to complete the game and then start another.

In and of itself video games are fun and actually quite healthy. But as I grew older I realized that the way in which I played video games was really a symptom of not being comfortable in the moment. I would play games to avoid doing my homework and to be alone. I had so much fun even while I let my responsibilities crumble around me. Anything to get me out of the here and now. There’s the old saying “wherever you go, there you are.” That’s true unless you keep your world is made fantasy where you’re a wizard or a little Italian guy with a big mustache.

As I grew up I continued to have problems in the here and now, in just being. All sorts of manifestations of that came up, some of which I’ve touched on in previous posts. The tough part about trying to escape from yourself is that you never can, you just keep running and running. Right? Why? Because “wherever you go…”. The only thing you can do is to stop and bear witness and surrender to the now. Nothing is anybody’s fault, there’s no one to blame and nowhere to run, everything that’s ever happened has led us to now. And it’s perfect.

For the last 40 years Ram Dass has given us simple yet profound instruction on finding bliss in each moment, by simply being “here now” we have the potential to make each moment into an experience of enlightenment. Each moment is a gorgeous gift of Gods and can be perfect no matter the circumstances. Even as faith lingers, Gods love does not. Now it seems that Ram Dass has taken it even a step further, the little rascal. “Be Love Now!” It’s no wonder that Hanuman is the patron saint of this practice, Ram Dass (and by all accounts Maharaji-ji) is such a little prankster monkey. So sweet, kind, full of devotion yet always challenging us with little pranks that are fun to toy with.

“Be Love Now”. Really? All the time? Try saying that in the middle of L.A. traffic! It’s a prank – just being here here here, right now – loving now now now. Just love, all the time.

I have yet to read the new book but I can tell that it’s Ram Dass at his best. RD and Ramesshwar Das have embarked on a journey that will no doubt share wisdom and love that will inspire us all.

We’re almost finished with our 108 pages of Be Here Now. Almost. “Nobody is going anywhere” (pg 81). That’s the best part. “We’re always going to be here” doing our dance. Living our Rasa Lila. Which reminds me – I’d love someone to write about living their Rasa Lila in the Kali Yuga, how much fun is that?

Anyway, as I continue to dance my divine dance I have a new goal this week. It’s to see everyone as a divine dance partner. Even when I’m furiously impatient in line at Starbucks or at those opposing Proposition 19, I want to dance with them. And I’ve started to realize that I can even have fun with it! I can make life into a love filled video game. Wonderful. “Going back into the world” (pg 82) is a good step indeed.

But maybe I should play a few games of “Angry Birds” on the iPad too.

The Rasa Lila - the Divine Dance of Life