Helping Others to Spiritually Awaken

Question: Given that we are to do anything, how can I best help others awaken spiritually? I’m thinking of my grandchildren primarily.

Ram Dass: There is an intense desire, once you have tasted something as sweet as spiritual awakening, to want to share it with people you love. Sometimes it’s so strong that you get into a proselytizing stance that awakens in them a paranoid defense, because you’re saying to them, "Who you are, just as you are, isn’t enough; if you only knew what I know, or had what I had, you could be happier than you are, and I want that for you."

All you do is create a lot of ‘stuff’, and it takes awhile because it’s really hard to keep your hands off the people you love: “I love you, I want you to enjoy what I enjoy,” and after awhile you learn all of the karmic stuff that you create when you start to judge somebody else as doing something that is less than what they could be doing, because you don’t know why they are the way they are.

I mean, if the kid needs Nintendo, you know, you think, "Why are you spending time with that shit, man, when you could be, you know, doing this? Come on, let’s sing holy songs. When are you gonna do this?"

“What? Are you out of your mind? Leave me alone, I want a new Nintendo game. I’ll meditate if you buy me a new Nintendo game.”

And after a while, you come to appreciate that what you can offer another human being is to work on yourself to be a statement of what it is you have found in the way you live your life, and one of the things you have found or will find is the ability to appreciate what is, as it is, in equanimity and compassion and love that isn’t conditional; that is, you don’t love a person more because they are happier the way you think they should be.

What you cultivate in yourself is the garden in which they can grow, and you offer your consciousness and the spaciousness to hear it.

I remember after my mother died in 1966, and then I went to India and came back, and we had a big farm in New Hampshire; and after some weeks, it turned out that people found out I was in a cabin back there, and I was really ‘way out there’ because I’d been silent for six months, and I had a lot of shakti, and people started to come to the house at the farm. At first it was a few each day, and then a few more, and then they’d bring their parents, and they’d bring their ministers, and it went on until we had like 300 a weekend coming by, just to sit under the trees and talk. Now my father, I mean, this was his place, and he was great, I mean, he’d count the cars, and he’d say things like, "You know if you charged a dollar apiece, you’d be a rich man," you know, and he just saw this as the potential for business.

At the time he was mourning my mother's death very deeply; and I was out on the lawn talking about those exact issues about grief and illusion and soul and what happens at death, and he’d walk by to go in and watch the ball game, and I would look at him and realize that if he just stopped and listened, the very thing that he was suffering from would be alleviated, and it had been brought right to his front door, and there was nothing I could do about it; nothing, I couldn’t make him hear it, and what I’ve learned over the years is to appreciate that people have different agendas at different stages of their lives, because of their different backgrounds.

I have become an environment that is available, I am living my life in such a way that some people come up to me at an airport, and they say, "You know I’ve been watching you, and there’s some quality about you; could we have a cup of tea?" or something like that, and then I’d know it’s really "out there"; it’s really working; and what I find is that if I just am what I am, when people are ready they will ask, and now I really wait for people to ask. I don’t come on to people, I don’t like to teach where I’m not invited to teach - Allen Ginsberg and I used to have big dialogues, because he always went in, and he’d Om in the middle of the Chicago riots, you know, and the police would be beating him on the head, and he’d be going Om, Om, Om, and I’d say, “I only want to go with people who want to hear what I have to say."

I’m learning how to play that as close to the edge as I can now, but in general, I’m saying you don’t come on to other people about spiritual issues, you keep your own council, but you’re available, and when they ask, you share and you create environments where they could, if they wanted, hear it by having the books around, the tapes, the music, the opportunity.

I mean, when a family meditates genuinely, when parents meditate, the kids will say, "I don’t want to do that," but they’ll come up to the door, and they’ll look in, and then they’ll walk away, and then they’ll come in, and sometimes they’ll sort of hang out for a little while, and then years later, that "stuff" starts to pay off incredibly.

I think you can force people to mimic stuff, but I don’t think you can force their hearts, I don’t think you can force the human heart. "The human heart," as Meher Baba says, “What we’re selling is catchy, it goes from one heart to another.”  When I watch Jai singing the Chalisa, you can feel that he’s not doing it for you; it’s between him and God, and then you feel it, you just trust what his purity is, and then it allows you to sort of tune in yourself to what that’s about.

- Ram Dass, from Listening Heart Summer Retreats, 1989