Ram Dass explores how his work with death and dying keeps him at his own leading edge of consciousness and talks about why compassion is truly the sword of discrimination.
“It’s taken me a long time to learn the way in which compassion is not fuzzy-wuzzy stuff, compassion is the sword of discrimination.” – Ram Dass
In this powerful talk from 1992, Ram Dass explores:
- Working with death and dying as a spiritual practice, and how it helps keep him at his own leading edge of consciousness
- How the process of learning to live simultaneously on more than one plane of consciousness is the path to dealing with death, dying, and suffering in a more spacious manner
- How two levels of love – conscious love and relational love – come into play when dealing with death, and why compassion is truly the sword of discrimination
- How we can honor diversity by sharing our pain together and grieving our way into unity
“So what I realized in working with dying is that I have to grieve my way into love. I have to open to all of the stuff of what that’s about. To open to suffering and pain is the art form of the game. And the ability to not go into denial and into reactivity, but to be with what is, requires the inner work to be rooted in the many planes of reality so that you can offset one plane with another. Because the plane of suffering is so intense and so massive and there’s so much of it, that if you just live on that plane you burn out almost immediately. And when you burn out, what you do is you close your heart.” – Ram Dass
