You can alway look at situations as, “Did the person make the moment?” Or, “Did the moment make the person?”
In this way I can feel, for example, that my journey towards enlightenment is my journey towards enlightenment, and that’s all it is. Whether or not it’s to be manifest in a social-public role is a function of the cultural needs at the moment. I might end up as a shoemaker or a grocery clerk; I’d still be a Buddha when I finish, and as a Buddha I’d still be enlightening people, but there wouldn’t have been any need for that social role.
As it is, I can already see my role evolving.
I’ll give public lectures for awhile, then that’s going to dissipate and the moving around will disappear. Then I’ll sit in one place and people will come. Then after awhile I’ll talk less and less and after a while longer I’ll be like a living murti, I’ll just be sitting there, a vibrational statement of the thing itself. People will learn from just coming and being there.
Now that’s far out, because it is your own death, there is a powerful image for this: many years ago I heard about these termites called White Ants in Africa. What I heard concerned the way their termitaries are constructed. There are these huge termitaries many feet high and many feet wide including thousands and thousands of these huge termites or white ants. Out of their numbers one is elected as queen and put into a room and from then on one row of ants comes bringing food and another row comes and takes the royal jelly made by this queen ant. The queen ant becomes merely the producer of the royal jelly. As time goes on the queen ant keeps growing in size, until it fills the room, and then they break down the walls and it keeps growing and growing until it has lost all of it’s ‘ant’ qualities. The queen ant has become merely a machine that produces royal jelly. Although it started out as another of the ants, by the end it isn’t an ant at all; it is merely an instrument for the production of royal jelly, it has ‘died’ into its function.
This is the most vivid image in my head for what this process is about. You end up sitting at your own funeral pyre. You watch yourself die. That is the process of becoming enlightened.
Having such frequent bits from Ram Dass even now eases the loss. I wish you would include the dates of each post, though; while much of his writing is timeless, I find it interesting to put some of these comments in the context of where he was on his journey (age, health, activities). Thanks.