There’s something to be said for a little leisurely outdoor writing on a fabulous spring day that’s been hotter than some of our English summers. Sunshine is definitely the juice that gets me going – probably a result of having been brought up in a warm climate – and there’s nothing like an unexpectedly balmy day to make me feel joyful and carefree. It’s a wonderful contrast to my wintry wheeze of spending way too much time on the computer downloading all manner of weird and wonderful podcasts. I’m like a kid in a kooky candystore, amazed at how much stuff is out there, and not only that, it’s all free!
Currently I’m challenging my language skills to stretch themselves by listening to www.learnitalian pod.com, a ten-minute-a-day class run by two heavily-accented Italians based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It’s highly entertaining listening to the dynamics between them as they demonstrate set pieces of dialogue – Jane clearly wears the trousers and Massimo often lets a little passive-aggressive tension come through his voice when responding to her enquiry in every instalment of ‘Are you ready, Massimo?’.
Then there’s the Quigong Meditation Podcast, where I pick up some rather helpful guided meditations for general wellbeing. The voiceover is a little monotone and sometimes the directions for focusing on certain acupuncture points are a little too technical for the uninitiated, but on the whole there are some real treasures to be found here, particularly the 13 Ghost Point meditation for releasing stress.
But my favourite find of the moment is Zencast, the home of all manner of fascinating lectures, as well as some simple meditations. It has a heavily Buddhist slant, obviously, but you’ll find a wide range of material on inner peace in general and some excellent teachers, including the Buddhist monkThich Nhat Hanh and the irrepressible spiritual teacher, Ram Dass.
For those of you who may be a little newer to the whole realm of spiritual seeking, Ram Dass is the granddaddy of them all. From a wealthy Jewish background, as Richard Alpert he went on to become a lecturer at Harvard in the 60s – along with his great playmate, the psychedelic experimentalist, Dr Timothy Leary – breaking the mould there with his own radical spiritual concepts, before moving onto India to study with Maharaj-ji and re-emerge as Baba Ram Dass. On his return, he published the seminal hippie text-book, Be Here Now, which sold in its millions, became the bible of the counter-culture and is still in print today. Now in his sixties and known simply as Ram Dass, he continues to push the boundaries of consciousness by exploring the question of facing the ageing process with grace in his latest book, Still Here. Having suffered a stroke a few years ago, Ram Dass writes not from some pristine and remote spiritual vantage point, but from the trenches of human experience with a humour and grit that is sorely lacking in a lot of spiritual material.
He’s a reporter from the outer reaches of experience, telling us what he’s found on the crazy journey through life that he’s taken, encompassing a deep immersion in Eastern traditions as well as Western culture. As he sees it, we are in an age obsessed with information, but lacking in wisdom. In Still Here, he writes “Unless we see ourselves as part of life’s continuity, whether we’re currently young or old, we will continue to view ageing as something apart from the mainstream of culture, and the old as somehow other. In a non-traditional culture such as ours, dominated by technology, we value information more than we do wisdom. But there is a difference between the two. Information involves the acquisition, organisation and dissemination of facts; a storing up of physical data. But wisdom involves another equally crucial function: the emptying and the quieting of the mind, the application of the heart, and the alchemy of reason and feeling. In the wisdom mode, we’re not processing information, analytically or sequentially. We’re standing back and viewing the whole, discerning what matters and what does not, weighing the meaning and the depth of things. This quality of wisdom is rare in our culture. More often, we have knowledgeable people who pretend to be wise, but who, unfortunately, have not cultivated the quality of mind from which wisdom truly arises.”
Currently I’m challenging my language skills to stretch themselves by listening to www.learnitalian pod.com, a ten-minute-a-day class run by two heavily-accented Italians based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It’s highly entertaining listening to the dynamics between them as they demonstrate set pieces of dialogue – Jane clearly wears the trousers and Massimo often lets a little passive-aggressive tension come through his voice when responding to her enquiry in every instalment of ‘Are you ready, Massimo?’.
Then there’s the Quigong Meditation Podcast, where I pick up some rather helpful guided meditations for general wellbeing. The voiceover is a little monotone and sometimes the directions for focusing on certain acupuncture points are a little too technical for the uninitiated, but on the whole there are some real treasures to be found here, particularly the 13 Ghost Point meditation for releasing stress.
But my favourite find of the moment is Zencast, the home of all manner of fascinating lectures, as well as some simple meditations. It has a heavily Buddhist slant, obviously, but you’ll find a wide range of material on inner peace in general and some excellent teachers, including the Buddhist monkThich Nhat Hanh and the irrepressible spiritual teacher, Ram Dass.
For those of you who may be a little newer to the whole realm of spiritual seeking, Ram Dass is the granddaddy of them all. From a wealthy Jewish background, as Richard Alpert he went on to become a lecturer at Harvard in the 60s – along with his great playmate, the psychedelic experimentalist, Dr Timothy Leary – breaking the mould there with his own radical spiritual concepts, before moving onto India to study with Maharaj-ji and re-emerge as Baba Ram Dass. On his return, he published the seminal hippie text-book, Be Here Now, which sold in its millions, became the bible of the counter-culture and is still in print today. Now in his sixties and known simply as Ram Dass, he continues to push the boundaries of consciousness by exploring the question of facing the ageing process with grace in his latest book, Still Here. Having suffered a stroke a few years ago, Ram Dass writes not from some pristine and remote spiritual vantage point, but from the trenches of human experience with a humour and grit that is sorely lacking in a lot of spiritual material.
He’s a reporter from the outer reaches of experience, telling us what he’s found on the crazy journey through life that he’s taken, encompassing a deep immersion in Eastern traditions as well as Western culture. As he sees it, we are in an age obsessed with information, but lacking in wisdom. In Still Here, he writes “Unless we see ourselves as part of life’s continuity, whether we’re currently young or old, we will continue to view ageing as something apart from the mainstream of culture, and the old as somehow other. In a non-traditional culture such as ours, dominated by technology, we value information more than we do wisdom. But there is a difference between the two. Information involves the acquisition, organisation and dissemination of facts; a storing up of physical data. But wisdom involves another equally crucial function: the emptying and the quieting of the mind, the application of the heart, and the alchemy of reason and feeling. In the wisdom mode, we’re not processing information, analytically or sequentially. We’re standing back and viewing the whole, discerning what matters and what does not, weighing the meaning and the depth of things. This quality of wisdom is rare in our culture. More often, we have knowledgeable people who pretend to be wise, but who, unfortunately, have not cultivated the quality of mind from which wisdom truly arises.”
When we have that clearer quality of mind that allows space for reflection, we can begin to open our own doors of perception – to borrow a phrase from Aldous Huxley, another of Ram Dass’ Harvard set – to realise how much our own attitudes affect how we perceive reality. If we choose to alter the way we think, then what we define as reality for ourselves will also, by necessity, change. When we loosen our grip on how we think things are, then a new wave of possibility can enter. In typical hippie-speak on a Zencast entitled Serving The Beloved, Ram Dass recalls opening to this new vision of reality in his experiments with Dr Leary, saying “I think if Tim Leary taught me one thing, it’s that I could play with life rather than being played upon by life. It wasn’t a function of the events that occurred in my life, it was a function of where my head was in relation to those events.”
Talking about his own personal spiritual quest, he adds, “As a result of whatever experiences I have had in the last 35 years, I would say that the primary game is to become conscious, is to become aware, is to have our hearts open and our minds quiet enough to hear what is; to get free of our own reactivity to be able to hear freshly; to be wisely innocent … Our predicament, of course, is that you and I have been acculturated, we have been socialised, we have bought into a way of looking at the universe which we all conspire to define as reality. When I talk about being free, I mean freeing your awareness from entrapment in your cultural heritage - not denying it, not pushing it away, not believing it’s less valuable, but not being trapped within it.”
Ram Dass defines freedom as “not standing anywhere”, learning to appreciate all the roles we encounter in life without over-identifying with any of them, understanding that at heart we are all individual reflections of a single consciousness. As he so gloriously puts it, “All we are is God in drag … We meet, soul to soul, in all these unique and different forms … it’s as if you’ve rented a body and a personality and an astrology – it’s all your coat of many colours”.
Yet when we’re in that individual experience it’s hard to hold the wider perspective of who we are, so we forget the bigger picture and begin to identify with the smaller storylines of how life appears to us. The philosopher Gurdjieff calls this the prison of the mind, saying that the first thing you must realise is that you’re in prison. If you think you’re free, no escape is possible. Most of us spend our lives rearranging the prison furniture in the cell, rather than looking for ways to break down the walls.
For Ram Dass, no role is interesting enough to be in all the time. As he says, “Every storyline gets boring. No matter how great your storyline is, it’s just another trip. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t precious and that you don’t honour it and love it. It means that you’re not trapped in it.”
As a wonderfully extreme example of this wider perspective, he tells the story of a bizarre encounter with his brother – who he describes as having a “messy identity” – and a psychiatrist in a mental institution, just after he’d returned from India. Still heavily bearded, wearing robes and beads and with bare feet, he met with his brother, an asylum inmate, who was formally dressed in a blue serge suit and tie, to give the psychiatrist an opportunity to observe the family dynamics. Ram Dass and his brother got into a deep spiritual discussion about whether or not the psychiatrist would ever know he was God. Exasperated at his own situation, the brother said “I don’t understand it. In a few minutes they’re going to let you out. Look at us!” Ram Dass responded, “The way I look at it, you are Christ.” His brother nodded, “Yes”. Ram Dass continued, “Well, I’m Christ too”, to which his brother said, “You don’t understand”. “That”, said Ram Dass, “is why they’re locking you up.”
Old hippies may not be your cup of tea – and I do admit they leave a lot to be desired in the style stakes – but there’s some essential life wisdom being dispensed here with humour and humility. This is a man who’s been through the classic 60s journey of drugs, Indian gurus and Zen monasteries and has come out the other side, to report that the path of renunciation did not necessarily bring freedom. In his experience of fleeing from Western life, Ram Dass discovered the truth of “What Buddha said, if you still have aversion to anything, you’re not free. What I had aversion to was the world that was going to awaken me to all the things that were going to trap me in my separateness. So I realised I had to eat it alive, I had to eat that for lunch. I had to enter into life fully in order to be free, because freedom didn’t mean pushing away incarnation, it didn’t mean pushing away life, it didn’t mean pushing away the passions. It meant going towards them, but how scary, because how powerful they are.”
That’s what makes his work as relevant and influential today as it was in the counter-culture era. We’re in a time where spirituality is not just for those who can hide away in caves – it’s a drive and a desire in all of us. We now need to find ways to integrate a spiritual perspective into our day-to-day lives, rather than needing to run away from what challenges us in the world.
Ram Dass’ philosophy for our times is “my karma is my dharma”, which simply means that the growth we need to experience can be found in whatever we are facing in our daily lives. It’s a perspective that teaches us to move away from our entrenched positions in life, to a wider sense of spiritual purpose, which then frees us to observe what is occurring, rather than become emotionally enmeshed in it. The more entrenched we are in our own viewpoints, the more it seems that our reality is the only perspective and we become locked in Gurdjieff’s prison of the mind. When we’re willing to loosen our grip and see things differently, the prison walls dissolve and we are free to experience ourselves and our lives much more fully, deeply and joyfully.
According to Ram Dass, “Once that shift is made to seeing your karma as your dharma, to seeing your life experiences as the vehicle through which you can get your mind more liquid and fluid in planes of consciousness, the more you do it, the more the whole process energises you.”
So how do we ground this mad little romp through the 60s hippie trail into our thoroughly modern 21st century lives? Start to free your mind from its prison by questioning whether or not it’s really true every time you catch yourself saying “I have to …” this week. Is that really the case or is it just your perception of what you think someone else wants? Have you ever even asked if that’s what’s really required? Notice what you’re saying about yourself (out loud or inside your head), particularly any phrase that begins with “I am ...”. Exactly how true is any of that? Pay particular attention to the stories and themes that reoccur in your life. Where are you playing victim? Where do you think you don’t have a choice? What if it’s not really that way at all?
So how do we ground this mad little romp through the 60s hippie trail into our thoroughly modern 21st century lives? Start to free your mind from its prison by questioning whether or not it’s really true every time you catch yourself saying “I have to …” this week. Is that really the case or is it just your perception of what you think someone else wants? Have you ever even asked if that’s what’s really required? Notice what you’re saying about yourself (out loud or inside your head), particularly any phrase that begins with “I am ...”. Exactly how true is any of that? Pay particular attention to the stories and themes that reoccur in your life. Where are you playing victim? Where do you think you don’t have a choice? What if it’s not really that way at all?
Loosen up your mind, focus on the bigger picture and you won’t end up sweating all the small stuff. Kaftans are optional, by the way. On the new spiritual path there’s no need for worry beads or bad hair – modern hippies have style as well as perspective!
Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column by using the link in the Favourite Sites section on the right or by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com. For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. To contact me, email coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk. All material © 2007 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 26 Mar 07)
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