In this talk from 1980, Ram Dass invites us to bring all aspects of our lives into harmony by integrating the different planes of our awareness.
Show Notes
Integrating Our Awareness (Opening) – Ram Dass talks about the need to bring harmony to, and integrate, the different planes of our awareness.
“You and I have all, one way or another, transcended our separateness, albeit momentarily, and experienced the fact that we are all one being. But, how many of your acts reflect that you know this? We have to integrate all of these levels of awareness.”
The Paradox of Perfection (19:00) – How can there be anything perfect about suffering? With Ram Dass, we explore the paradox of suffering and perfection and what it means to find harmony between polarities.
“It is like the balance of the head and the heart. With your head, you are awed by the exquisiteness of the laws of the universe. With your heart, you are bleeding from the horror of the suffering that you are seeing. You end up doing what you can to relieve the suffering and at the same moment never forgetting the perfection. Meaning, never getting caught in the drama of polarities – of good and evil, of suffering and happiness, of dark and light – and yet you play in that field perfectly.”
Harmony of the Moment (30:55) – Ram Dass discusses the difficult proposition of living in the moment by doing the optimum thing and letting things happen without offering any resistance.
Separation of the One (39:50) –We explore a question from the audience around the symbolism of original sin. Ram Dass looks at the lesson in separation and salvation that the story has to teach us.
“Separateness from God is the beginning of the attachment to the intellect. It is the beginning of the attachment to the thinking mind which knows an object. The thinking mind is only a little sub-system of the total universe. God doesn’t think rationally, that is a projection on our part.”
