Ram Dass explores the benefits of practices in meditation, how different practices work for different individuals, and the individuals' role in spiritual growth. This recording is apart of Ram Dass' 1989 'Listening Heart' lecture series.
Audience Member: Are there benefits in creating a regular practice or discipline in a daily meditation?
Ram Dass: Well, I have two answers, obviously. I mean, the uplevel answer is it doesn't matter. The answer most of us want to hear and we need is yes; it's absolutely wonderful to have a daily practice because most of us are very deeply in the world, and we get lost very easily into the stuff of life. And to have a daily practice that keeps reminding you and pulling you back and awakening you again and giving you a chance to look at what happened and how you got lost the day before and keep putting what's happening with you in the world back into perspective is very useful.
I mean, every time I read a little spiritual passage in the morning when I get up, I have them next to my bed and I'll just pick one up and I'll just open and start the day reading maybe a little shloka or a little quote or something like that. And it'll just start me remembering what the game is about.
And it reminds me. Now that's a regular spiritual practice. It happens every morning when I get up. Sitting practice is extremely useful in clearing away and letting you see how your mind keeps creating your universe. Now, most traditions require a regular practice to get ahead, to move ahead. There are certainly traditions in which no regular practice is required, and people do fine, so I can't say it is necessary, but I certainly find it useful and I certainly would encourage other people to do it.
I think it's delicate that you do it from the place of really remembering why you're doing it and doing it with some kind of joy and appreciation. If you get into, "Oh, I got to do my practice." I mean, it's fine and the practice will probably clean that out in you, but I'm not really feeling... I mean, that's what happened to most people when they went to church every Sunday and they ended up hating religion.
I would rather push people away from spiritual practices until they're so hungry for them that they really want to do the practice rather than having them, giving you a sense of feeling you ought to do the practice ... because you will end up hating this whole business.
And in the long run, I don't think it will be good for you. So I would say to you, a spiritual practice is wonderful if you want to do it. And if you don't, don't.
Audience Member: How do I discipline myself to practice with compassion and with no judgment?
There is a matter of timing in sadhana [spiritual practice] that's important to keep in mind, I mentioned it a little bit last night that we tend to overthink. So we often choose a sadhana, a spiritual practice, a little before its time or before it chooses us, before the marriage works, and we find ourselves in this ought and should predicament where you start out with great love and within a little while it's, "Oh my God, I got to do my practice." And it's like another thing like washing the dishes.
And certainly there is value in doing a practice regularly every day, even when you don't want to do it, especially in meditation practice, because in meditation practice, the not wanting to do it is as much grist for the mill of meditation as wanting to do it, it's all stuff you can work with, with your mind. That's very beautiful.
But the delicate balance that has to go on inside oneself, recognizing that if you build up too much negative tone to your practice, too much resistance, you're going to have a reaction to it that's going to take you away from it for awhile before you can come back later on.
A lot of people were so gung ho in their spiritual practices early on, I remember in the early seventies that you find them five years later at the local bars, drinking beer and watching television and talking about how they used to do spiritual practices and how they fell off the path.
Now it isn't really falling off the path, it's just another part of the path. But part of that violent reaction was because of the impurities with which they did it in the first place.
So my usual guidance is to go slow, is to not get too gung ho. Don't figure you're gonna get enlightened yesterday. Relax. Just start to tune. Now, the other thing is when you say when I found my practice, you can't assume that the practice you found is the practice that's going to last you for the rest of your life.
Because who found that practice is in the course of the practice going to change into somebody else. And so the practice that was appropriate for the person initially may not be appropriate a little way down the line. So you've got to keep staying open. So you hear all these delicate balances that are going on in you. One is the value of deepening a practice.
Like Swami Satchidananda was criticizing me for being such an eclectic dilettante. And he said, "Well, you can't just go around digging shallow wells everywhere. You've got to dig a deep well so that you get fresh water," which is just a metaphor, that I could counter with, you know, another metaphor that would be equally as sweet for the other argument.
But when I watch people over time, what I see is that they start out quite eclectically, and then they get drawn into one practice quite deeply, and then when they come out the other end, like Ramakrishna, then they can do all practices, and they're all the same practice, alright? So it's like a funnel. It goes in, and then it goes out again.
So my answer is that you go gently. Gurdjieff said an interesting thing, he was a Russian philosopher, and he said that an alarm clock that'll wake you up one moment, you can sleep right through later on. And he said you need to keep finding new alarm clocks to awaken you because you can have something that awakens you out of your sleepwalking, of normal waking consciousness, and it works one moment like something you read, and a moment later, you're reading it and you're busy planning your shopping list while you're reading it. I mean, you've gone completely to sleep in the process of doing it.
So all of these are merely variables that you have to keep in mind as you're proceeding with your practice. And in terms of the question of discipline, you've got to work very gently with pressing against it, making right effort without turning it into a neurotic achievement game, which we in the West are masters of.
We could take something that should be joyful, like, "I'm going to drive to New Mexico," and within a little while it's, "Oh my God, we didn't make enough time today. We've got to go faster," you know.
And you take the whole thing that's beautiful and turn it into a hell realm. Now maybe none of you have done that. To me, that's a very familiar thing of doing that kind of thing, of taking something that is quite delightful, and when you stop and reflect about it, you can take most things in life and turn them back the other way.
You can turn them back into, "Wow, I'm driving in traffic," instead of, "Oh God, the traffic," you can just keep flipping your consciousness. You learn how to play with it.
Well, say with spiritual practice, you can keep reinvesting it, and my suggestion is that you have a regular time each day for your practice and that you say, in effect, I am spending so much time brushing my teeth, I'm spending so much time going to the toilet, I'm spending so much time feeding my body. I am spending so much time feeding my spirit, awakening into my soul. This is what I'm doing.
And this is a time that is sacred. And it's not a time when the telephone can ring and it's not a time when people can call you. It's a time where you respect your practice enough to say to the people around you, "This is my practice time."
Now, when you have young children, you can't do that because they can't understand that. So you may have to do that before they get up, which is quite early sometimes. So maybe it's 4:00 and then you take a nap later in the day when they can interrupt your nap, that kind of thing.
Because if you water down your practice too much, if your practice is a practice like meditation or study or chanting or mantra or something like that, if you allow too many distractions, the world just closes in all the time. It's always closing in. When I sit down to do my practices in the morning, I unplug my telephone, and I mean it's all right. Everybody doesn't have to dial your mind every time they get a whim to do it. It's all right if you're not there. And if they need an emergency, there's the police or the fire department. You know, I mean, it's I'm not critical to anybody's life that way. And I find that otherwise, you end up justifying, "I couldn't do it because of this and because of that."
And it's very hard, because the world presses in so much, to give that appropriate time. So a regular time, not so much time that you end up feeling put upon by your practice. Right. And it should be a time when you're reasonably fresh and clear. That would be good. If you have two times for meditation, it's even better.
But if you have one time each day when you can slow down and allow yourself to process what's been going on in your life from a spiritual perspective and just kind of run it through, digest it spiritually, digest it into your consciousness, see how you got trapped during the past day, how you lost it. They're like little beads on a thread and like, say six in the morning every day, it's a little bead on the thread and there's a bead six and a bead six and a bead six.
And so pretty soon there is continuity across those beads that puts the rest of your life into perspective from that vantage point rather than you being in the world going out into the spirit, the game is to flip it so that you're really in the spiritual consciousness playing in the world.
That's really what the process is. The transformation for the initial part is to move the plane, the perspective from where you're sitting. So a discipline, but not too violent, don't get ahead of yourself. And if you feel it's too rigid, stop for a while and try other forms. Keep allowing the eclecticism to go until you feel pulled genuinely into a deeper process.
