I had returned to India for the second time in 1971 but was unable to find Maharajji. He moved about a great deal and was not always so easy to locate. When I had exhausted the obvious possibilities, I decided to enroll with some friends in some meditation courses in Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha had become enlightened under the bodhi tree. I thought that if it had worked for him, it might work for me.
After almost forty days of practice, I felt the need for a change and decided to accept an invitation to a celebration in honor of Shiva that would be held in Delhi. A number of other Westerners who had been at the course decided to join me, and, boarding a friend’s bus, we set out. The route to Delhi took us through Allahabad, a stately old city with wide, tree-lined thoroughfares and a fine university. Allahabad is best known for the Prayag: the confluence of two of India’s most sacred rivers, the Ganges and the Jamuna, with a third spiritual river, the Saraswati, rising from underground. For a Hindu, it is very auspicious to bathe where the rivers join, particularly at certain moments determined by the positions of the stars and planets. At these times, many millions of people come to Allahabad for the mela, a monthlong religious gathering during which people camp on the banks of the rivers and bathe at the appropriate moments.
When we arrived in Allahabad, one of these moments had just occurred. A member of our traveling group had been at the mela and suggested we make a small detour to where the rivers meet. It was already late in the afternoon on our first day out of meditation. We were all tired and still had some miles to go before arriving at our lodgings. I, as the elder in the group, opted that we not stop. But then I began to feel that that decision was not appropriate. After all, we were here on spiritual pilgrimage, and this spot was among the most sacred in India. A little fatigue should not deter us. I changed my mind and asked the driver to make the detour so that we could watch the sun set at the mela grounds.
When we arrived at the area, it was all but deserted: a vast, sandy campground with the river in the distance. The driver asked where he should park the bus. Dan, who had visited the mela and brought us small medallions of the deity Hanuman, suggested that we pull up near the Hanuman temple. Just as the bus was coming to a stop, Muffin, a two-year-old member of our party, shouted, “There’s Maharajji.”
Sure enough, Maharajji was walking with a companion just by the side of the bus. We all piled out and surrounded him, falling at his feet. Most of the group were seeing him for the first time. I was so overwhelmed by this “chance” meeting that I was holding on to his feet and crying uncontrollably.
After some time, Maharajji said something, and the man with him translated that Maharajji wanted us to follow him in our bus. Maharajji and the other man got into a bicycle rickshaw and started off down the street. I still could not catch my breath or stop crying and laughing. After having thought about Maharajji for the three years since I had first been with him, the unexpected shock of this meeting had left me ecstatic and confused.
The rickshaw led us through a number of small residential streets, and finally we stopped at a house, which Maharajji quickly entered. As we got down from the bus, the first thing I noticed was the smell of cooking. As we came up on the porch, the people greeted us as if we were expected. But how could this be? It turned out that early in the morning Maharajji had instructed the mothers of the house to prepare food for thirty-four people, who would be arriving in the late afternoon. How did he know? And wasn’t it lucky that I had changed my mind and decided we should make the detour? Or perhaps there had been no “luck” involved at all. What this story reveals is that I, as a decision maker, am very suspect. And that just behind the stage may be an entirely different scenario from the one I think I am acting in.
This disquieting and at the same time refreshing reflection has a strong effect upon me. I stop taking myself so seriously. More often a small part of me is busy making choices, while by far the larger part is watching to see how it all comes out. Realizing there is meaning and purpose to events in life that are beyond the ken of my thinking mind—in other words, that I just can’t understand what is happening—gives me equanimity. I’m less frightened about making the “wrong” choices.
The perspective about choice that this experience with Maharajji provided has led me to define my spiritual journey more as one of listening and tuning to what is than of choosing. The spiritual journey, as I now conceive of it, is a progression from truth to ever-deepening truth. I feel myself being drawn toward truth. I have taken guidance in this emphasis from Mahatma Gandhi, for whom “Truth is God.” He saw his life as a series of experiments with truth and made every effort to align his choices with the deeper truths of the universe. This alignment with truth gives Gandhi’s words an incredible moral force. So I listen at each choice point to hear the deepest possible truth from which to act, and I choose, realizing full well the paradox that I am both making the choice and not making the choice.
“Old as I am in age,” Gandhi said, “I have no feeling that I have ceased to grow inwardly or that my growth will stop at the dissolution of the flesh. What I am concerned with is my readiness to obey the call of Truth, my God, from moment to moment, no matter how inconsistent it may appear. My commitment is to Truth, not to consistency.”
I look back and see my own inconsistencies over time. I see how many things I have been wrong about in my life. I remember the arrogance with which I taught a course in human motivation at Harvard. How limited and even incorrect was the gospel according to behaviorism that I was propagating. I taught Freudian theory as if it were ultimate wisdom, while, in fact, it turned out to represent a rather impoverished view of the human condition. These and so many, many more.
How do I feel about all these errors? Embarrassed? A little! But that state of mind just flickers across the screen of consciousness. It is almost immediately replaced by a sense of humor at how poignant we human beings are. That, in turn, is replaced by a deep appreciation for the grace of having been able to move on, of not getting stuck in any particular take on reality, of seeing and being willing to admit my bad judgment. Truth isn’t necessarily popular or easy to espouse, but it certainly keeps things lively.
A woman once came to Gandhi with her young son. “Mahatma-ji, tell my son to stop eating sugar. It’s not good for him.” Gandhi told her to return with her son in a week’s time. When they returned, Gandhi said to the boy, “Stop eating sugar.” The woman was perplexed and asked Gandhi why he couldn’t have told the boy that a week earlier. Gandhi replied, “Because at that time I had not given up sugar.”
What I feel is that the truth, as well as I can express what I can understand of it, is a gift I can give to another person. By offering them my truth as I know it, I am also offering them the message that the situation is safe. I am not consciously hiding anything. It’s a little like a wolf baring its neck to another wolf. The other wolf then feels safe and stops fighting. We live in such a disturbing, paranoid world that a whiff of truth is like the most wonderful music. It may be difficult to hear, but it speaks directly to our hearts and invites them out to play.
Whether I speak the truth or withhold it depends, of course, on the situation. Some people don’t want the truth. I may be with a person who is obviously dying and simultaneously denying it. Unless the person asks me outright, “Am I going to die?” or words to that effect, I don’t try to force her or him to face it. What is important for the potentially heart-networking communication is that I not knowingly lie and am willing to share my truth if I sense that it is appropriate.
Many times I’ve played the truth game with another person. We sit looking into each other’s eyes and take turns saying, “If there is anything that you would rather not share with me because it is too difficult, embarrassing, inappropriate, trivial, whatever—share it.” When I am asked that question, you can be assured that the most embarrassing thing imaginable, which I may never have thought about before, comes into my mind. Then, uncensored if possible, I answer the question. Then both of us sit quietly together contemplating the answer, until we have digested it. To digest it is to get by one’s reactivity until one can see the response and all it implies as just another poignant part of the human condition.
With this method we either very quickly melt into the shared awareness that is true love or we meet a resistance in our collective psyche. We cannot tell what fear awakens the resistance in which of us, but here we stop. To do more would attempt violence, which would be fruitless. Stopping is not a failure. There was no necessary accomplishment. We did what we did and faced what we were ready to face. And that is this moment’s truth. And there is sweetness in sharing just that.
I sit on the edge of the bed and hold Jean’s hand. The oxygen tank that stands by the head of her bed is the jarring reminder in this otherwise soft and tasteful room that death is at hand. Jean’s skin is blue-white transparent. Her hand, with its skin and veins and bone, now devoid of the flesh that gives body, is the hand of my dying mother, the hand of all dying mothers.
Jean says, “Ram Dass, I’m so bored. I wish it would be over.” I have met Jean only once, briefly, several years before, but her request to see me and her deep Quaker roots and meditative practice encourage me to share my truth with her.
“You’re bored because you’re spending all your time dying. Any role, if you try to invest it with exclusive reality, is boring. Couldn’t you die, say, ten minutes an hour?”
She laughs. I am remembering a seminar with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in which a nurse with metastasized cancer and young children showed us how our reactivity to her condition—with our pity, anger, shock, and so on—trapped her in the role of being a “dying person.” She had said, “Everyone is so busy reacting to my situation, nobody is with me.”
Jean squeezes my hand and tells me of a recurring vision of a frightening being circling a tree in which a small child is sitting. I encourage her to get to know the frightening being and see what, if anything, is really so frightening. She does her work silently; I can feel her body tensing and relaxing.
“Ram Dass, I feel everything is too much. The light, the sound. It’s all overwhelming.”
“Jean, you are opening to new energies. You are like a one-quart container into which you are trying to pour two quarts of water. Perhaps you aren’t a one-quart container after all. Let’s try an experiment and expand together. Listen … do you hear the children playing outside? Instead of pushing against them as not-us, let’s expand outward to include them inside ourselves. And the light coming in under the drawn shade, let the light be part of our bodies. Let’s keep expanding to contain it all. Me and my voice—all within you, just as you are within me. But is there still a “you” and a “me”? As the boundaries soften, become permeable, and dissolve, feel how we merge … just one awareness.”
We sit there for many minutes in the deepest peace, fully present in the moment, our hearts knowing the truth of love. Then Jean sits up and reaches out to embrace me. We hold each other and kiss. It is the kiss of recognition and celebration.
I gently lay Jean back on the bed. She closes her eyes now, all trying, all intention at rest. After a few minutes I get up and say, “Jean, you know what I know. It’s only forms that change, not essence. Enjoy the changes. Goodbye.”
Her gentle, attentive husband, who replaces me at her bedside, told me that she died a few hours later … peacefully.
There was a period of several weeks in 1972 when Maharajji would summon me many times a day. Each time I would hasten to him, sit down in front of him, and wait. Then he would either say, “Ram Dass, always tell the truth” or “Ram Dass, love everyone!” I’d usually answer something lame, such as, “I’ll try,” and then he would send me away. Day after day this went on, and I was getting more and more agitated because, the truth was, I didn’t love everybody. Which should I do? Make believe I love everyone or tell the truth? I acknowledged that in the past I was more likely to make believe that I loved everybody than I was to tell the truth. So, for a change, why not tell the truth? For the next week I lived out the truth. And the truth was that I didn’t really like any of the people around me, for one righteous reason or another.
At that time, as an experiment, I was not carrying money. So when I went on the bus, one of my friends would serve as my “bagman” and pay for me. But once I was mad at everybody, there went my bagman. When everybody else got on the bus to go the eight miles to the temple to be with Maharajji, I walked. It took hours to get there by a mountain path. When I finally arrived, everyone was eating lunch, and they obviously had had much time with Maharajji. This made me all the more angry. When one of the people, whom I particularly despised, offered me a plate of food, I threw the food in his face.
The next thing I heard was Maharajji calling, “Ram Dass!” I realized that he had seen my act, and I went to him feeling really miserable. When I was settled before him, he asked, “Something troubling you?” It was all I needed. I broke into sobs. Maharajji patted me on the head and pulled my beard, and he was crying too. He sent for milk and fed it to me. When I was finally able to speak, I blurted out, “I hate all those people,” pointing at the Westerners across the yard, “and I hate myself, too.”
“I thought I told you to love everyone.”
“You told me to tell the truth. The truth is, I don’t love everyone.”
Then Maharajji drew close, nose to nose, looked very coolly at me, and said, “Love everyone and tell the truth.”
At that moment I saw before me a coffin in which lay the person I thought I was. I heard Maharajji as if he was telling me exactly who I would be when I finished being who I thought I was. Whether he was goading me, giving me a boon, or creating a new reality, whatever he was doing, it worked. Now, nearly twenty years later, I hardly recognize myself, because my truth is coming to be that I love everyone. Well, not quite everyone. But I am working on it.
There was a time when my aggravation with the system focused on Caspar Weinberger, secretary of defense. I’m sure he was no worse than many others, but there was something about his cold arrogance and apparent lack of wisdom that infuriated me. So I got a picture of Caspar and placed it on my puja (prayer) table with all my spiritual heroes. Then, each morning when I lit my incense and honored the beings represented on the puja table, I’d feel waves of love and appreciation toward my guru, Buddha, Christ, Anandamayi Ma, Ramana Maharshi, and Hanuman. I’d wish them each good morning with such tenderness. Then I’d come to Caspar’s picture, and I’d feel my heart constrict, and I’d hear the coldness in my voice as I said, “Good morning, Caspar.” Each morning I’d see what a long way I still had to go.
But wasn’t Caspar just another face of God? Couldn’t I oppose his actions and still keep my heart open to him? Wouldn’t it be harder for him to become free from the role he was obviously trapped in if I, with my mind, just kept reinforcing the traps by identifying him with his acts? I could see my guru rushing about in the wardrobe room at Central Casting, putting on one mask after another, shouting at me, “Bet you can’t find me behind this one! Bet this one will really fool you!” Not the Caspar mask, Maharajji, no! Oh, no!
The Indian poet Kabir said, and Maharajji often repeated, “Do what you do to another person, but never put them out of your heart.” It’s a tall order. But what else is there to do? Sometimes there is really nothing to do. We can only work on ourselves to keep another person in our heart: to be there, open, waiting, loving, spacious, nonjudging, appreciating,… and listening.
So much of loving has to do with hearing another person and appreciating her or his predicament. In 1968 a woman came to visit me in the cabin on my father’s estate to complain about her young daughter, who had forged her older sister’s signature on a check. Her story was a lengthy one, concerning her own life as a single mother and seamstress after her husband had deserted her and the children. It was presented with much anguish and twisting of a handkerchief. I listened attentively while silently “doing my beads.” When she finally finished I said, “I hear you!”
That statement didn’t seem to satisfy her. I’m sure her recitation of this story, undoubtedly oft told in the past, usually elicited cluckings of pity, instructions, and such. So she said, “No, you don’t understand,” and began the recitation afresh, this time accompanied by tears.
When she had finished the second recitation, to which I had listened with attention, and during which she had let her eyes stay with mine for longer and longer times, I said again, “I hear you.”
At my words this time, however, she smiled a rather roguish, little-girl smile and said, “You know, when I was a girl, I was kind of a hellion too.” At that moment she relaxed, and there was subsequently a change in her perceptions and ways of dealing with her daughter.
Recently, in India, I visited Yeshe Dhonden, former personal physician to the Dalai Lama, and asked him for a diagnosis of my health. As he held my wrists, listening to my pulses, I understood a story I had told hundreds of times about him. He was invited to grand rounds at Yale Medical School and was diagnosing a patient. He stood holding her wrists, listening to her pulses, as Dr. Richard Selzer, who wrote the story, said, like a giant bird holding her hand in the most intimate way. After many minutes of this silent touch, he released her hand, having spoken not a word. As he went to leave the room, he turned back toward the bed and the woman, who was now holding her own wrist with her other hand, called out, “Thank you, Doctor.” Dr. Selzer described how he personally felt envious watching this scene. “I was envious not of him, not of Yeshe Dhonden for his gift of beauty and holiness, but of her. I wanted to be held like that, touched so, received.” I too felt heard and received.
In the late seventies, I experienced being heard and attended to in a manner that was extraordinarily subtle and profound. The experience was palpably healing. I had been invited by John and Toni Lilly to swim with Joe and Rosie, the dolphins with whom they worked. I was eager, because, in the circles in which I traveled, everyone wanted to swim with dolphins.
The day on which we had scheduled the swim at Marine World in Redwood City, south of San Francisco, was gray and cold. And as I watched my friend Peter in the water with the dolphins, who now seemed very large to me, I was having second thoughts. I was cold, and I couldn’t quite remember why I had wanted to swim with the dolphins in the first place. But everyone stood at the edge of the tank watching, and it was too late to back down, so I climbed onto the platform in the tank and let myself into the chilly water. Both dolphins made flashing passes close by me. They were even bigger and more powerful than they looked from the tank’s edge, and I was feeling very vulnerable in their territory.
Rosie stopped and hovered within arm’s reach of me. I wanted to touch her, but that seemed a strange thing to do at that moment. My mental category system had her placed somewhere between shark and fish, neither of which would welcome my touch. I was desperately trying to remember what I was supposed to do. Everyone was watching. Finally, I reached out tentatively and ran a finger along her side. She didn’t move at my touch, and it felt wonderful. So I touched her again with my whole hand. Her skin was as soft as anything I’d ever touched, and although she was now definitely aware that I was touching her, she still didn’t move.
Suddenly I was infused with a feeling of her intimate, attentive, non judging presence. My own gross thoughts of panic and planning seemed like a prison, and I just let go—of fear, of intellectual analysis, of thought itself. My hand started to caress Rosie, and I laughed aloud. At that point Rosie flipped until she was vertical in front of me, her belly against mine. I hugged her and even kissed her. She pressed her body against mine.
All at once I began to get aroused. I panicked! Everyone was watching! Was it even legal, let alone normal, to be caressing a dolphin? But I felt so free I found I didn’t really care. Soon afterward Rosie moved in under my arm, and after some trial and error I discovered how to hold tight to her, and we went swimming wildly around the tank. Each time after an ecstatic forty seconds or so I’d think, It’s all well and good for you, Rosie, but I have to breathe. Just this thought, barely perceived by me, was enough to bring Rosie to the surface, where I could fill my lungs.
At one point we came up and people were taking pictures and I got to hamming it up—old Ram Dass and the dolphin—and I forgot to get a breath when she dove. But it wasn’t more than a few seconds before she rose again to the surface, understanding in some wonderfully intimate way that I had a problem.
We swam like this for some time, until I began shaking with cold and turning blue. Then Rosie shook me off, got Joe, and the two of them with their noses forced me to the platform and out of the tank. Rosie had heard me so well because I felt her to be inside me. It felt the same as it had with Maharajji. There was nowhere to go and no need to hide. It was that unconditioned and unconditional love again.
Such love passes from Rosie and Maharajji to me, and from my heart it passes to others. I hold a boy dying of AIDS. I am gentle. My face is buried in his hair. Our hearts are open. Right here … right here, inside our hearts, we are not dying boy and kindly man, we are two beings, recognizing each other through and behind the drama. We share the awe of the moment, the peace that lies at the center of the whirlwind of fear and confusion. In that timeless moment, it is enough for both of us. We are healed. We are in the domain of love. We are free.
Now, I am freed by being in love with people. There is no possessiveness in it. It isn’t really romantic. It’s as though we are sharing one space, we have merged in love. It’s the space that more and more I share with Maharajji, as the years go by. Even to be away from it in forgetfulness for a moment is very painful.
When I am searching for the ways to stay in love, I hear Maharajji saying, “Feed people, serve people, love everybody, tell the truth.” So I serve more … and I find myself more in love. What is wonderful is that the love lies not outside as a reward, like a gold star for being a good helper, but within the act itself. For when you offer yourself in service, it opens your own heart so that you may once again taste the sweetness of your own heart’s innate compassion.
Rabindranath Tagore, the great Indian poet, said, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty [dharma]. I acted, and behold, duty was joy!”
And Gandhi said, “When you surrender completely to God, as the only Truth worth having, you find yourself in the service of all that exists. It becomes your joy and recreation. You never tire of serving others.”
We are all part of a huge family. Within the family our acts of caring, insignificant as they may seem, are nevertheless an integral part of a vast network of compassionate acts that are occurring throughout the universe at each moment. Just as billions of tiny acts of ignorance, greed, violence, and exploitation have created most of the suffering and breakdown that now exist, so the billions of tiny actions of compassion—which includes wisdom and skillful means and joy—preserve and heal the situation.
While in Madras in South India, I was asked by one of my guru’s devotees to join him and his family in celebrating his birthday. We were to meet outside my hotel entrance the next morning at seven thirty. It seemed a strange time to celebrate a birthday. He arrived in his car, which already contained his wife, son and daughter-in-law, and daughter and son-in-law. As is the case with all Indian transportation, there was room for one more. We drove through the city in the early morning toward the birthday celebration. I was mystified about what kind it would be.
On the far side of Madras, we entered the gates of what appeared to be a very poor ashram. In fact it turned out to be the poorest ashram in the city. It was a home for the destitute aged and the mentally disturbed. My host drove the car into the middle of the courtyard. There were several hundred inmates standing there, each holding a tin plate. When the trunk of the car was opened, there were huge covered pots of steaming rice and vegetables and wonderful Indian sweets. Each of us was given a pail and a ladle. We filled the pails again and again from the pots, serving the contents to all the people now sitting cross-legged on the ground in rows. When all had had their fill, the sweets were distributed, and the ashram served tea.
The pots empty and the utensils back in the trunk, we drove out of the ashram gates. In the car we were all silent, each alone with his or her own reflections and images gathered from such an intense experience. There were tears in all of our eyes. My host broke the silence with the words “Now, that was a birthday party.”