I’ve been reading a lot of Ram Dass over the past year. There’s just something about his story and way with words that has an effect on me like no other. Perhaps Michael Singer is one of the only authors that has come close.
Dass’ most famous work is Be Here Now, with sequels such as Still Here, and Be Love Now. I always thought these were an example of where authors just try to squeeze as much out of their success by dragging the same message out across other titles.
As I was about to find out, my premature judgements were quite wrong. Given the amount of value I took from Be Here Now, especially after revisiting it a few times, the least I owed it to myself was to give some of his other works a try.
Grist For The Mill was game-changing. Dass explores the idea of how pretty much everything that happens to us in life is an opportunity to leverage it to help us attain spiritual freedom. He says that all our life’s events are grist for the mill of awakening.
Familiarising myself with this idea helped me to change my perspective and realise that things are just happening, but I’ve spent most of my life believing they were happening to me. It’s taught me to reframe things by examining my reaction to certain events rather than the events themselves.
A Mind-Reading Guru?
A few personal experiences over Christmas taught me that I needed to put more active work into cultivating more compassion for others, regardless of whether I’d decided I ‘like’ them or not. It was at this point that I started doing an additional meditation every evening, just focussing on metta, otherwise known as loving-kindness. This is about actively cultivating positive feelings towards others, even ones you may have had differences with, in which case the practice is even more powerful.
Having done this every day for the past couple of months, I certainly feel like I’ve become more compassionate and understanding towards others. I also noticed a deep sense of peace within myself after doing this practice, and even though I had finished the practice, I’d often sit there in the feelings of love and peace that enveloped me for another five or ten minutes. Sometimes I struggle to pull myself away as these feelings are so blissful.
These experiences made it like a good time to start working my way through Be Love Now. Ram Dass uses this book to explore devotion to his guru, an Indian saint called Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaj-ji). He met Maharaji-ji in the foothills of the Himalayas in the late sixties and showed him what unconditional love truly looked like. Certain conversations with his guru convinced Ram Dass that he was having his mind read, and that was all he could focus on as he tried to think of a plausible explanation for it, which never happened.
When Thinking Doesn’t Work
My meditation teacher told me that real meditation happens through the heart, and my rational mind found this difficult to process. I’d always been so focused on the breathing and the mind, that it just didn’t sit right. I had to learn that there’s more to meditation than the method where you focus your attention on the breath and continue to redirect it when it wanders. It’s simply the act by which we learn to settle our minds, which can still take years for us to become truly proficient with.
Although it has profound benefits, the end goal is not to just become a master at Anapanasati (ana — inhalation, pana — exhalation, sati — mindfulness). It does, however, create the conditions to settle our minds so we can tune into our deeper levels of consciousness—this is where the real meat and bones of meditation are.
This brings with it a deeper understanding of ourselves and therefore those around us, as we develop deeper social and emotional intelligence, our deeper intuition. This is an understanding that comes without thinking, and it is what many spiritual teachers are referring to when they describe using your heart. Ram Dass was so focused on thinking he’d met someone who could read his mind, but what he’d truly found was another being that understood and accepted him on such a deep level that it shook him to his core.
offers some great perspectives on intuition through his posts such as this one:
Putting in The Groundwork
The early days of meditation are heavily focused on Anapanasati, but this is just the precursor to becoming more tuned in to the workings of our minds and bodies. It’s like cutting the grass before you can play ball. It’s not always the most fun task, but it’s necessary. I’ve more recently started getting to the point in meditation where I can finish my Anapanasati practice, and towards the end of the session, I can just sit there enjoying the present moment, without feeling like I need to actively do anything.
I can only liken it to a sense of peace and appreciation for life, as you start to feel more calm, centred, aware, and open. You start to feel less of a separate entity and more like a calm, accepting, loving awareness that accepts whatever life brings your way. It becomes even more powerful when deliberately cultivating feelings of understanding, love, and compassion for others.
In one of my next posts, I’m going to tell a little story about what happened when an abstract image from Be Love Now appeared in my mind during this practice.
Thanks for the kind inclusion : ) Great article
I absolutely love your visuals, I have to say