Passionate involvement without attachment is an interesting thing to aspire to. Unless you can develop it, unless enough of us develop it, I think we are in for some interesting times as things get darker and more complex. The reality of the way our social structures are changing, the economic disparity between rich and poor, the way we have used resources, all of it can start to be very frightening for those attached to how things were. It’s all just happening and the inertia becomes so great until it all starts slowly erupting into something else entirely.
So then, when you are attached to how things are, and they start to not be that way anymore, you get frightened because your identity is so wrapped up in it all.
You find yourself contracting with fear and trying to hold onto what you’ve got by isolating yourself from others. It starts to feel like a certain kind of paranoia, of “them”-ness, and it also feels like a kind of scapegoating, or blaming outside of yourself because of your own fear. This all often leads to violence and that’s the problem – it leads to violence, which creates a lot of suffering.
Under these conditions, what part would you like to play?
I would like to play the part of someone who has worked on my consciousness sufficiently so that if things get tough, in terms of environment, social structures, oppression, minority groups, whatever the thing is – I would like to be able to be in the scene without getting caught in my own reactivity to it, without getting so caught in my own fear that I become part of the problem instead of part of the solution.
-Ram Dass
