What does it really mean to live in our truth?

Knowing you’re God and being God are two different things. I mean intellectually, we all know we’re God – most of us understand that. But the direct experience of merging into it is another matter.

What seems to happen as you evolve spiritually is that the impurities or the things that veil you from being in your deepest truth become more unbearable.

I’m not talking about the judging mind coming up and saying, “I’m bad for it” or, “It’s bad for me.” It’s like if you have a lover, but you’re always separated by some veil from that lover – it becomes unbearable after a while. You just keep wanting to rip the veil apart. I’m so aware in myself, for example, how when I don’t clear my mind, when I don’t extricate myself from identification with my thought forms, my whole life gets thick. I can feel the thickness of it and it’s a sort of dense quality. I end up like I used to be, “It’s all fine, and I can get through life, and it’s all going fine, everybody likes me, and I like everybody, and I’m making money, and I’m doing my life, and I’m getting up and going to bed, and doing good,” but somehow it’s not living truth.

It’s that absence – that distance from that living truth, from that lightness, from that playfulness, clarity, sweetness, from seeing the beauty of the Beloved everywhere I look without saying, “Ah, there’s the beloved!”

When you have to impose a game with your mind on it, somehow you lose it. So the process of, “I can’t stand that,” pulls you back into practice. Once you have tasted it, you are hooked, and you will try very hard to forget it, as I’ve said many times, but you can’t forget it.

For somebody who is not awakened, at first they say, “Well that’s lovely. I was awakened, and I’ll do it on Sunday mornings.” As time goes on, everything that takes you away from it becomes too painful, and the horror happens when the things that you held dear in romantic, dramatic, and psychological senses start to turn into nothing, because they’re keeping you from God, and you can’t bear them.

That’s a stage, because once you finally get rooted in the spirit, then you come back, and you can be in love with all of that again, but when it seems like an obstacle, and that obstacle isn’t the thing itself, it’s not the child, it’s not the job, and it’s not that, it’s where your mind is in relation to it, then you’re driven to meditate, because you can’t stand the way in which your mind is creating division and separateness.

 

– Ram Dass

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