- Ram Dass

Happy Hanuman Jayanti! It’s the birthday of Hanuman. 🐒⚡️❤️

“Hanuman is a figure from the epic allegory, the Rāmayana. He embodies selfless service and devotion to God…

My guru, Neem Karoli Baba, or as we called him, Maharaj-ji, gave me a taste of unconditional love. Maharaj-ji gave me the name Ram Dass, ‘servant of Rām’, which is also Hanuman…I try to be like Hanuman and become those qualities of love and service.”

-Ram Dass ...

…There are certain very deep patterns, whether they’re psychologically learned or karmic, that are like a lock waiting for a key to open it, but the key must fit into that lock. It must be a certain pattern or concatenation of factors. 
 
All of your psychological conditioning prepares you to be attracted to certain methods, or certain paths, or to certain people. For many people, the energies they’re working with at the time they are seeking this love so strongly are second chakra energies; energies of desire, of sexual desire, of desire for union that is relational and the energy gets into that pattern. And you associate making love as a vehicle to coming into love. 
 
So you’re going along the path as a little lock waiting for a key, and along comes a shadow of love, goes by, and like a little duckling you turn and you start to walk after it. It just happened to be the particular pattern that turned you on, that opened you up. And you say, “I think I’m in love” with him, or with her. See, that’s the key, right there – not, “I think I’m in love,” “I think I’m in love with her” or with him. And if you’re lucky, your key unlocks her or his lock, and his key unlocks your lock, or her key unlocks your lock. So you get into “You love me, I love you, here we are,” and it’s incredible because through this dynamic you have opened to a place that’s like a triangle; the two people together are feeding something that they don’t even know. If they’re feeding the unitive space behind the dualism, they’re feeding the quality of love, and when they’re together, they touch it. 
 
When you say, “I’m in love with you,” what you’re really saying is that you are the key stimulus that is opening me to the place in myself where I am love, which I can’t get to except through you. Can you hear that one? 
 
– Ram Dass ...

We can come back to the control we feel with our thinking minds. The problem is we are reinforcing our own sense of separateness, and in that world of separateness, you’re constantly locking doors, to protect something, and feeling drier and drier in the process. You’re turning off the life juice, the flow of the universe, just in order to protect something… Once you recognize who you thought you were, you say ‘yeah’, there’s my thinking mind and it defines all this, but behind it all here I am, just am. - Ram Dass ...