Ram Dass Now

At one time, the brightest minds believed that the planets were attached to crystal spheres, and that every once in a while, angels or gods would give these spheres a little spin. This is what explained the movement of the planets in our solar system. With scientific advancement, we now know that this is not the case.

This is what we seem to do. If we cannot understand something, we say it must be the work of God, or the angels, or demons. Then we figure it out, and God goes on to some other phenomenon not yet figured out.

How far can this go? Does it even matter?

What I believe at the moment:

Everything happens for a reason (in favor of this one)

There is no reason for anything

The point is, I have no idea what is going on. I mean, REALLY? This whole being alive here on planet Earth strikes me as absurd. I look around every day and I am just blown away. Will the fact that I (along with my wonderful hubby) made my children ever cease to amaze me? I just have a hard time believing it. Just a couple days ago, my husband looked at our son (now 2), then at me, and said “can you believe he came out of you?” No, I cannot. My babies grew inside of me for 42 weeks, without any work (besides remembering to eat) on my part.

One of the first midwives (before she became a midwife) remembers lying in the hospital bed ready to give birth, wondering where the heck her baby was going to come out. She figured it would come out of her mouth, as it was the largest opening in her body. She just had faith it would come out somewhere.

Where am I going with this?

We don’t know all the answers. We hardly know anything. I know I was born, and I know I will die. That’s about it. At least that is what I know intellectually. That is what I can state in words.

God, the Guru, that is all soul. That, I cannot explain. The word that seems to suffice is faith. But that word still seems flimsy. Faith is just belief without evidence, which is what this soul stuff appears to be on the surface. But it is more solid than that. It is a deep knowing on an unexplainable level.

I know on this level that we are all One, and that one day, we are all going to return to that place. Maybe science will prove me wrong in the future. And honestly, I don’t even care if it does. I am just enjoying the view from where I am at now.

I talk about my kids in pretty much every post. It is hard not to. Anyone who is or has been a mom to young children will understand why. This is what I do all hours of the day. Be with my childen. Oh, and nights too. Neither of them sleeps through the night yet. So to say they are on my mind a lot is the understatement of the year.

“ If only I didn’t have these kids around my neck” (page 33)

Oh, how often this thought pulses through my veins. If only…I could go on a meditation retreat and REALLY figure myself out…I could start doing yoga again…I could chant more often…the list goes on.

The thing is, my children are my mediation retreats, they are my yoga teachers, they are my chanting companions. It is just my head that I am stuck in. If I stop and change the way I look at it, I can see that having kids is just what I need. They take every little bit of me that I do not like and bring it out in the open. I don’t need to go sit in a cave to figure out how to be more patient. That lesson lies in my son trying to make our kitchen floor into a swimming pool using a cup and our kitchen sink. Yoga poses are endless when trying to hold my children as I do the dishes or cook dinner. And chanting, well, kids LOVE to sing the SAME songs OVER and OVER again. Is chanting the names of God not the perfect thing to do?

I once asked Ram Dass how to go about handling the sticky times with my children. He told me to just see them as souls. We are all just souls. Do not get caught in the roles. “I am you MOTHER and you LISTEN to your MOTHER!” No, none of that.

“The Spirit is the Spirit” (page 30)

And here we are. Now. Just where we are supposed to be. No, I am not missing out on wonderful retreats by having kids. I am missing out on having kids by thinking I need to be at a meditation retreat.

Thoughts, thoughts, and more thoughts. I live in a sea of thoughts, ebbing and flowing like the tides. Some are profound (so I like to think), some mundane. The thing is, they are all the same, and they all mean nothing.  They mean nothing in the context of this BIG question, a question so simple, yet so intricate, that Ram Dass poses to all of us on page 15…

WHO AM I?

Well, I am not my thoughts. I am not all the labels that I have identified with. In thinking about this, I am reminded of Ram Dass talking about a particular LSD experience he had, in which all of the labels he had assumed made up who he was went flying out the door, and all that remained was this essence that many may call Soul, or Atman.

I am not a mother, or a wife, or a daughter, or a sister. I identify so closely with these roles most of the time that to say I am not them is both scary and freeing. Scary in the sense of “well then what can I hold on to?”, and freeing in the sense that I no longer have to live up to the expectations that I have set up to fill these roles. If this were a play, I would be one hard ass director.

Most of my life, I have been playing the role of being who others want me to be, or at least who I think they want me to be. Thank goodness I can let that one fly out the window because that one really sucks!

So who am I then? Well, I am the seer, the one who sees. When I visualize who I am, I see this mini-me sitting on top of my heart, just watching this whole melodrama of my life unfold in a pretty silly way. From this seat, life is beautiful, and extremely humorous. The task at hand is to be able to maintain this position in the heat of a sticky moment. When life is going smoothly, no problem. But when something happens that gives me that icky feeling inside, I usually find myself so absorbed in the issue that I completely forget I am the seer. I become the issue, which is just, well, yuck! Only when the issue resolves do I remember to take that seat back on top of my heart. When I am in this place, the possibilities are truly endless. From here, I can completely open my heart, and see so much more. I can fell this brilliant energy rushing through my body.

It is still hard to believe that I am not my thoughts. But when I read about it in Be Here Now, and in many other spiritual books, I know it to be true. I need no proof. I can just feel it. Why is that so hard to believe? Life in general is hard to believe. It is crazy that we are even here, on this planet, in the middle of space, spinning around, yet not flying off. Why do we always need proof of all this? Parvati mentions Ram Dass saying to her while in India “we are here to bear witness”. With them as witnesses, I have complete faith that what they say is true, and what so many realized beings have said to be true. They simply can’t all be nuts. And if they are all nuts, well, I will strive every day of my life to become as nuts as they are.