Tag Archives: Ram Dass

“Its Going Away.” Oh, Well Yes, But…

Since the pandemic first unleashed its fury on us in February, Trump has been down playing its impact, often insisting, “It’s going away.” He did this even yesterday as our nation was witnessing the largest single day increase in infections. Oh, he is right as it will “go away”….eventually! (And so will he!)! A bromide I often use in my day to day life is, “This too shall pass.” But as we wait for it “to go away,” or pass it continues to ravage our nation, body and soul, requiring the maturity to focus on the present moment and pay attention to how we can mitigate its ravages. Failure to do so will result bring unnecessary tragedy. People will suffer and die if we do not.

This brings to mind the Ram Dass quote, “Be here now.” Dass was telling us to, “Pay attention” as opposed to our usual state of mind which fails to exercise a prophetic function that lies dormant in our heart. That “prophetic function” is to stand aloof…a bit, at least…from the zeitgeist of the historical moment. It entails an ability to handle the emotional/spiritual duress that this “aloofness” presents to one, a duress that can be described as loneliness, anxiety, and fear. It requires the ability to have seen, and experienced, that we only have a viewpoint to offer, not the demon of objectivity and the seduction of its impenetrable smugness.

Momma Nature Offers Her Wisdom Daily!

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I just discovered a new poet on the website of Commonweal, Samuel Menashe. With short, even cryptic poems, he captures some essential dimension of life which I think Ram Dass had in mind decades ago when he coined the expression, “Be here now.” Here is a sample of his work, entitled “Rue”:

For what I did

And did not do

And do without

In my old age

Rue, not rage

Against that night

We go into,

Sets me straight

On what to do

Before I die—

Sit in the shade,

Look at the sky

Sitting in the shade and looking at the sky is really good advice, though I would suggest a dollop of the lovely sunshine here and there! Momma nature is so gracious and loving, though culture teaches us to live in the past and/or future and avoiding the loveliness of, “being here now.”

Belonging, Identity, and Toko-pa Turner

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I was a joiner in my youth and early adulthood. I was not a good one, able only to offer a half-hearted commitment to any opportunity I found to convince myself…and half-heartedly again, that I belonged, that I fit in. This intense, and often desperate attempt never sufficed. I now realize that the more one must “try” to fit in the more likely it is that the efforts themselves will be off-putting to others. If you feel that you do fit in, it is likely that you will do so, and that you will be so comfortable in this “chez nous” of yours that you will rarely, if ever, worry about “fitting in.”

But I’ve almost totally given up in this futile quest of fitting in and am finding peace as a result. To borrow a term from Anna Burns’ Booker-Prize winning novel from last year, “The Milkman,” I am from beyond the pale and thus, in her terms, a “beyond the paler.” And I’m happy that this full awareness did not dawn on me until the 7^th decade of my life as now I have the maturity to not be intoxicated with the intrinsic alienation of this lot in life. I know whole-heartedly and appreciatively that those “within the pale” are the backbone of this “reality” we live within. Arrogance is a readily available to all of us, certainly those that lie beyond this pale and harbor some deep-seated wish that we didn’t. Arrogance just belies a failure to appreciate that the only thing that any of us have, beyond or within the pale, is “being here.”; this is relevant to the imperative of Ram Dass decades ago, “Be here now.” We are present in this mysterious maelstrom that we know as reality and it is important that we realize that this is true for all of us. We have only “being here now” so briefly, and that is the commonality that we all share. Regardless of how much we vehemently disagree or even loathe anyone in our life, they share with us this humble quality of being simply an entity that is nothing more than a “being” like the rest of us. It is in this simple, but Infinite Presence that we can find the unity which can point us in the direction of living together in harmony. Here in this Sacred Space we stand naked together, unadorned by all of the pretenses, dogmas, adornments, accomplishments, and chicaneries that have given us the illusion of our separateness.

Here I share a quote from a writer I discovered last year, Toko-Pa Turner which sums up these thoughts so beautifully:

Our longing for community and purpose is so powerful that it can drive us to join groups, relationships, or systems of belief that, to our diminished or divided self, give the false impression of belonging. But places of false belonging grant us conditional membership, requiring us to cut parts of ourselves off in order to fit in. While false belonging can be useful and instructive for a time, the soul becomes restless when it reaches a glass ceiling, a restriction that prevents us from advancing. We may shrink back from this limitation for a time, but as we grow into our truth, the invisible boundary closes in on us and our devotion to the group mind weakens. Your rebellion is a sign of health. It is the way of nature to shatter and reconstitute. Anything or anyone who denies your impulse to grow must either be revolutionized or relinquished.
― Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

The Deadly Elixir of Group Think’s Certainty

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I just got a “like” from a blogger, one of which I am particular proud. For this man is one of the “godless heathen” that my Christian tradition eschews….a Muslim. I am pleased that a lot of the “hits” I get on this blog are from people of different spiritual traditions who see, who “grok” something in my blatherings that they find of value. For spirituality has the pitfall of evolving into a death-trap in which only those of “like mind”…and therefore, “like biases.” are accepted.

I had that comfort as a child; a “comfort” which was mitigated by the realization that, “Oh, there is something not right about this.” Somehow I knew from early on that the Grace of God, aka “the Grace” of the Universe, is inclusive and not ex-clusive. This intuitive understanding was present from the early days of my life and instilled into my heart a deep experience of alienation, that I did not belong. And I didn’t “belong” for “belonging” involved accepting unquestioned premises in which my young and innocent heart could not imbibe. This was the onset of alienation, from which can emerge complete madness as the pain of alienation initially elicits terror. It is this terror that elicits a demand for certainty, a “certainty” which group-think always offers.

I am learning the value of just “being here.” The ultimate purpose of life is not to find a place in a chaotic world that is often mad…and certainly is now in my country, at least; this ultimate purpose is to just be here. Ram Dass called it “being here now” and Eckhart Tolle more recently described it as, “The Power of Now.” “Being here” is, to borrow from T.S. Eliot, a “condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.” Or as Janis Joplin put it so eloquently in the 1960’s, “Freedom’s just another name for nothing left to lose.”

Be Here Now!

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This admonishment used to make no sense to me and even used to perturb me for I knew it came from “one of them there damn hippies” though at that point in my life it was probably “dang” rather than “damn.” And, of course it is so meaningful to me now because it is not about “sense” (or reason run amok) but is about “presence” which is a more fundamental dimension of existence than reason. Most of my life has been spent in absence, in not “being here now”, but being immersed in my own little cognitive grasp of the world, a self-imposed prison like the one most people spend their whole lives in.

At present moment I think I “be here now.” I have just awakened and have taken my perch for “bird theater” with my cup of coffee, awaiting my three puppies to join me—two dachshunds and my wife. The darkness will lift shortly and I will again watch the birds engage in their ritual frenzy at the feeders and will be taken with the beauty of the moment. I will “be here now.” I often think of the words of Jesus at this moment, and apply a bit of literary license to his description of “the birds of the air,” noting that they do not fret and stew but merely go about each day of their life “birding” the world. And I also often recall a beautiful poem by Wendell Berry who described finding “peace in wild things” when beset by despair, wild things who do not “tax their lives with forethought of grief.”

Be here now.

Conservative faith and fear of difference

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