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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- 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.”

To continue the conversation, please also visit

www.nowstayopen.com

and

www.facebook.com/StayOpen.

It’s already been decided, so can I just let it be? I’m so sleepy. And then I wonder, is my post too sparse? Have I put enough of myself in it? But the message this week is simple and profound and deep in itself. It’s all determined. Including me punching these keys and these marks showing up on the screen. That’s what we’re discussing. The inevitability of everything that’s happening now.

I wrote the following on my column last winter:

I believe that everything is as is, as I recently heard Deepak Chopra say. That is-ness is infinite and now. Everything that has ever happened, everything that ever will happen, everything that’s happening now: it’s all this instant. I have a gesture I make when I’m describing this. My words seem lacking.

I snap the fingers of my right hand, while moving my arm in a dropping motion, with the snap landing as the hand drops into this moment. There is nothing else.

And there is no other way this moment could be. Is that fate? I think it might be. Sometimes I call it karma. I may be contrasting other definitions of the word. I say it as in meant to be. And tell me, how can anything not be?

And so, I’ll stumble right into dropping off my post for this week, twirling the Grateful Dead experience into the folds of these brown pages. Ladies and gentlemen, pages 8 – 14:

*****

I’m getting a whole new layer of the Grateful Dead, and it’s absolutely related to this experience. The layers of the onion – the sweet, sweet onion – are falling away. Unfolding. Lotus petals opening.

It was my time with the Dead that instrumentally and initially shifted my conscious and turned me on to other ways of knowing.

I suspect my dad feels his once dutiful daughter broke up with him for Ram Dass and Jerry Garcia and has been errant ever since, but I couldn’t help it. This life calls from the heart.

It’s as if you’re propelled into it

Like the moth into the flame.

Ram Dass, Be Here Now, page 11

It couldn’t be any other way. Nothing could be. And I’m grateful because there’s no other life that I can imagine but that of waking up, relaxing and resting in the Beloved’s arms.

It’s inevitable,

It’s just happening,

It’s GOT to happen that way.

page 12

These are some of the most relaxing words I know:

YOU ARE A TOTALLY DETERMINED BEING

page 14

On the inside of my car’s windshield are the words “It’s already been decided” written in dry erase marker, baked on now from this Texas heat. When my eyes fall on them, I  settle. My friend said to me, “Isn’t it great to know that we can’t fuck up?” We are loved no matter what. It dissolves worry.

These words snap me awake – radical to the mind, reflecting the soul – as do these words on page four of Be Here Now:

There is writing happening . . .

I am writing, but “I” am not writing.

These fingers touch these keys, but who’s typing? Who is hearing this music? Who is reading this page? As a writer I trip out on this all the time, especially with pen in hand, watching the letters unfold on the page like a dance they’ve always known.

We forget and think we have to drive and drive hard. Beyond that, beyond beyond beyond, is the memory that has us on this journey, smiling from the inside.

Believe it if you need it

if you don’t, just pass it on.

Sun and shower

wind and rain

in and out your window

like a moth before a flame.

~ Robert Hunter, Box of Rain

Thank you for journeying with us. We welcome your reflections.

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

“It is only when you rest quietly in your own Hridayam . . .”

(Ram Dass, Be Here Now, page 5)

My Hridayam: what you get to peek at when Hanuman tears open his chest. I love how it’s dripping with blood. It’s not a clean, simple cut. It’s ragged. And as I’m typing this I hear Deepak Chopra say, “I will see myself as the Seer in the ever-changing field.”

The Seer watches from Hridayam.

When I took up the book to read last night, I was deep in a fog of mind and emotion. No clarity. Peace unfamiliar. And I just felt complicated by the early part of the brown pages. There was some faint specter of that trusting open surrendered being, but it was just out of my grasp, like a memory you can’t quite put together and you’re not entirely sure you actually experienced.

The next few pages are filled with ink: swirling dense pictures, repeated images and almost hidden language, and my mind said, “You don’t understand this.” Basically saying, “You suck.” I was nowhere near feeling UNBEARABLE COMPASSION though I desperately longed for it. Reading the word Hridayam – the root of my first mantra (that I picked up from Ram Dass in Journey of Awakening, and that I saw printed on a license plate in the parking garage of Whole Foods the other day) – was a tiny puff of space in my thought-laden mind.

But as I turned the pages, that mind-noise was trying really hard to figure out what all of this writing was about. Thinking, and working really hard, pushing itself, as if that would help make sense of the language and the concepts. And then,

page 7.

And then my whole system went, “Oh yeah,” exhaled, and relaxed. Space pours from this page, and ahhhh.

We’re heady people, man. I love how Zach said he loves to panic about what’s going to happen the next morning. I – or my mind – loves to try to logic my way out of my muck. In such moments, when the gentle peace of being right now is slopped over with wet mud and rejection, I am so convinced that this moment is a problem. I try to figure it out.

I scrap and grab for this teaching or the other, some training, something some great baba said, something to make the shift.

On some level, and at some point, I suppose I realize that thinking my way into an open heart just ain’t gonna happen and I eventually can see again. And there’s always that sweet joy of relief.  Remembering: I know, and I know that I know.

The butterfly – its own creation –

Here’s more from the Ram Tirtha quote at the bottom of page 7 along with my great thanks.

I have no scruple of change, nor fear of death,
Nor was I ever born,
Nor had I parents.
I am Existence Absolute, Knowledge Absolute, Bliss Absolute,
I am That, I am That,

I cause no misery, nor am I miserable;
I have no enemy, nor am I enemy.
I am Existence Absolute, Knowledge Absolute, Bliss Absolute,
I am That, I am That,

I am without form, without limit,
Beyond space, beyond time,
I am in everything, everything is in me.
I am the bliss of the universe,
Everywhere am I.
I am Existence Absolute, Knowledge Absolute, Bliss Absolute,
I am That, I am That,

I am without body or change of the body,
I am neither senses, nor object of the senses,
I am Existence Absolute, Knowledge Absolute, Bliss Absolute,
I am That, I am That,

I am neither sin, nor virtue,
Nor temple, nor worship
Nor pilgrimage, nor books.
I am Existence Absolute, Knowledge Absolute, Bliss Absolute,
I am That, I am That.

See you next week, my friends. We’ll be here every day.

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

Ram Ram

Ram Ram

Ram Ram

I’m grateful to be with you. We are here having the only conversation there is. We could be singing Ram’s name or talking about chocolate cake and pudding and we would be having the same conversation. We are here to express gratitude to our teachers, and we are the teachers. Can we empty our slates so that the great teacher may write upon them messages of love?

I’m a licensed therapist and musician whose primary gig is her spiritual trip and who has somehow loved writing since birth. I’m thrilled to be participating in this project. Be Here Now and I are simultaneously celebrating our 40^th birthdays, and not long ago I launched my column, Stay Open: Spiritual and Self-Care Space. It’s a Dear Abby-style spiritual counseling column that naturally combines my love of writing and my desire to share truth so that we all may experience relief, space, joy and real peace.

Stay Open: Spiritual and Self-Care Space would not exist without Be Here Now.

We seek to share the good news, like yet another great Jewish teacher who lived a few thousand years ago. We are so fortunate to live in a time when awakening is celebrated on a pervasive scale. Yoga, meditation, chanting: we are infused in this country with devotional celebration of spirit; and Be Here Now opened the door.

The honor that it is to write on this project is equal to stillness within that is holding up a mirror so I can see myself. So that I can see you.

There is only one conversation.

I’m so grateful to be with you and expect that we are at the trailhead of a deep journey, one that has started with so many people coming across this oddly square-shaped book and subsequently seeing their own mirror.

Thank you so much.

(Composed to Wade Imre Morrisette’s beautiful song, Prayer. Check him out.)

June 24, 2010

Austin, TX

Carin Channing (Carina ShantiOm)

www.nowstayopen.com

Taken by Steve Silberman at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, Phish show, 8/6/10