THERE ARE TIMES when each of us has to bear the unbearable. It may come as physical pain, illness, or emotional suffering of our own, of someone dear to us, or of other sentient beings.
Can you respond to suffering without closing down and still keep your heart open? It seems almost instinctive to use your mind to protect your heart, to rationalize the suffering to avoid the pain or discomfort. But then you cut yourself off from true compassion for yourself and others.
Most of us armor our hearts when dealing with the immensity of the suffering that exists in the world. We look at all the people who are starving when we have just finished a big breakfast, and we turn away. We feel like there is nothing we can do, and we can’t bear to see the suffering. Armoring the heart is the opposite of opening the heart. You know the feeling of loving another person; you know how that love feeds you. Love is how we feed each other, but when you experience overwhelming suffering, you close your heart defensively. Your heart may feel protected and less vulnerable, but it is also deadened in the process. Armoring the heart cuts off the living spiritual interchange of energy that exists in the universe and that nourishes the spirit in all of us.
We all fear suffering. People find the world scary because they become overwhelmed by the suffering around them, their own and everybody else’s. In any major city in the United States, there are homeless people sleeping in doorways. It’s one thing to experience this in India; in Calcutta it seems like half the population lives on the street. But in the affluent United States, it’s bizarre that some people live so well and some are so poor. It feels like we should be able to get it together enough to provide everybody with at least shelter, food, and clothing. Are we turning away because our minds are closing off our hearts to the suffering of others?
I deal with the immensity of the suffering all around me by cultivating more than one plane of consciousness, by witnessing, and by acknowledging the laws of the universe. When I can arrive at a perceptual vantage point where I look at a leaf or a drop of water or stars and planets and see the oneness of existence, I can begin to see the exquisite interrelationship of phenomena. I can find universal law in each field I examine—physics, astronomy, music, genetics, mathematics, chemistry. From that point of view of oneness, I can’t help being filled with awe at the magnificence of how it all works. I also realize that suffering is part of the way it all works.
After the Buddha’s enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, he expounded to his new disciples what came to be known as the Four Noble Truths. The first Noble Truth says that all existence is characterized by suffering. Birth has in it suffering, death has in it suffering, old age has in it suffering, and sickness has in it suffering. Not getting what you want has in it suffering; getting what you don’t want has in it suffering. Even getting what you do want or not getting what you don’t want involves suffering, because both are in time.
Anything in time is impermanent. Jesus said, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt.” As long as you are caught up in time, there is suffering. The second and third Noble Truths deal with the causes of suffering, which are the clinging of mind—to attractions and aversions—and to a false sense of self. The fourth Noble Truth lays out the Eightfold Path to get free of suffering.
I deeply honor the Buddha, and I have studied Buddhism a lot and practiced much Buddhist meditation. But my particular spiritual path is through my guru, Maharaj-ji. The guru reflects our deepest Self. Indeed, when fully known, the guru is our deepest Self, and that is who we see when we polish the mirror of our being.
My relationship with Maharaj-ji is one of faith. That faith allows me to see everything that comes my way as his grace. Just remembering that everything is his grace, is itself grace, but sometimes it doesn’t come easy.
On February 19, 1997, I suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke (a bleed rather than a blockage). I had been working on a book about aging, and I was lying in bed trying to imagine what it would be like to be old and sick and suffering, when I had a massive stroke.
The phone rang. I tried to get out of bed to answer it, and I fell onto the floor. I was paralyzed on one side. I managed to reach the phone and pick up the receiver, but I was unable to speak. My friend calling from New Mexico realized something was wrong, and asked me to tap on the phone if I needed help, which I did.
Within a few minutes, my secretaries, Marlene and JoAnne, appeared, soon followed by paramedics. I remember being wheeled into the hospital on a gurney. During those first few days, no one knew if I would survive. The news of my stroke traveled fast—even to India. Prayer circles around the country were sending me healing energy. The people surrounding me, the doctors and nurses, my friends and relatives—all wore long faces. They kept saying, “Oh, you poor guy, you’ve had a stroke!”
As I absorbed their mindsets, I started to think I was a poor guy, just another stroke victim. They were projecting the full view of a stroke as a medical disaster onto me. It was coming from almost everybody—except the cleaning woman. Whenever she came into my room, she was totally present with me. She knew.
Before my stroke, I felt like I led a life of grace because I was under the protective umbrella of my guru. The stroke shattered my faith in that protection. I felt I had fallen out of grace. I lost faith and I got very depressed for a while.
I would look at the picture of my guru on the hospital wall and say, “Where were you when I had this stroke? Were you out to lunch?” For the first two months, I was almost totally dependent and suffering—physically, psychologically, and spiritually. I sat in my hospital bed attempting to make sense of what had happened. On one hand, there was the stroke; on the other hand, there was Maharaj-ji’s grace. How did this stroke fit in with his grace?
Slowly things began to shift. I started thinking about the stroke in different ways. Could this stroke be grace in any way? Awful grace? It certainly wasn’t helping my ego, but could it possibly benefit my soul? The effects of the stroke included aphasia, paralysis, and dependence on others. Attempting to reperceive it, I tried to find out where the grace might be hidden. After all, this was still Maharaj-ji’s play, his līla. I was trying to figure out Maharaj-ji’s grace in the stroke, how this sickness was going to help get me to God.
Early on I was markedly aphasic, unable to speak at all. Learning to speak again was hard. Words came slowly. I had to learn to deal with silence—a great boon spiritually because it forced my mind to be quiet. I had to go beyond my intellect into the silence of my intuitive heart. As I became more absorbed in the heart, I found it to be a place where separation disappears and knowledge gives way to wisdom. About a year and a half after my stroke, I started speaking again publicly. It’s good motivation for your speech therapy to have five hundred people waiting for you to get your words out.
When I would lecture before the stroke, there would always be one or two people in the audience who had been dragged to hear me speak by a spouse or a friend. It was easy to pick them out of the crowd; they’d be sitting with their arms folded and their faces wearing a long-suffering look. I’d work hard to help them open their hearts. Now my wheelchair opened their hearts. And because of the wheelchair, I was always assured of having a seat wherever I went.
The stroke taught me about dependency. I went from being the driver of a sports car to a passenger. I was in a body that now needed help from others. As a passenger I could appreciate the passing trees and clouds in a way I couldn’t when I had to pay attention to traffic.
I had written a book called How Can I Help? (with Paul Gorman); now I needed to write one called, How Can You Help Me? Since the stroke, I have been deeply humbled by the compassion of other beings. I am blessed to have such wonderful people taking care of me. Now they take care of my body, and together we take care of each other’s souls.
As I see it, we have three vantage points, or planes of consciousness, from which we live. The first is the ego, the plane of personality. The second is our individual soul, part of which is the witness consciousness we talked about earlier. The third is the mystic part of us. Quakers call it the still, small voice within, or the inner light. Hindus call it the Atmān. We can also think of it as the One.
Each of us has all three of these channels. They are all here simultaneously, but how you experience reality depends on which one your awareness is tuned to. When you dwell deep in the intuitive self, you are on the soul plane. If you follow that awareness and go in and in, you will come to God awareness, to the Atmān. That same awareness is in you and in me. God consciousness is the same in all of us. While we think we are our incarnation, our soul witnesses it all, and ultimately connects us to the universal God consciousness that dwells within each of us.
These days I see myself as a soul who has taken incarnation in a body that suffered a stroke. So while my ego thought I was a person with a stroke, that suffering pushed me into my soul, which witnesses or watches the incarnation. It’s much less painful to watch the stroke than to have the stroke.
I have pains throughout my body. I list them for my doctors. But I don’t identify with them. I identify with being a witness of pain. Physical pain is in the body, and I am not my body. My body is out there, and I am in here. Pain is part of the body. Now if we’re talking about psychological pain, that is from the ego, which is also out there. I remember I am my consciousness, my awareness. I am inside, and I live with the pain—not as the pain, but with the pain.
That is another way the stroke proved beneficial: it pushed me into my soul. Instead of leaving me wallowing in the physical problems of my incarnation, it gave me a leg up and took me into my soulness.
Recall the story from the Rāmayana in which Ravana, the demon king, kidnaps Sita, the earth mother or the soul who is married to God, Rām. He carries her away to the demon capital on the island of Sri Lanka. As the army of monkeys and bears arrives at the ocean shore in India looking for Sita, Jambavan, the king of the bears, reminds Hanuman that he has divine powers. Then Hanuman takes his great leap of faith and flies over the ocean to find Sita.
As I struggled in my mind to accept this stroke, a message came from a dear friend in India. In the same way that Hanuman needed to be reminded of his power, my friend K.K. Sah in India felt I should be reminded of the power of my faith. K.K. wrote some simple words that Maharaj-ji had said to him about me: “I will do something for him.” Just that remembrance was enough to recall my faith. My soul was once again enveloped in Maharaj-ji’s blanket of love.
Siddhi Ma, the “Mother” in India who maintains Maharaj-ji’s ashrams, saw Mickey Lemle’s documentary film about me and the stroke, which was called Fierce Grace. In the film, I talked about trying to see the stroke as Maharaj-ji’s grace. She sent me a message that Maharaj-ji would never give me a stroke. I finally realized that the stroke was the natural result of my own karma. Maharaj-ji’s grace lay in helping me deal with the effects of the stroke. It is true that being able to deal with the suffering from the stroke changed my life.
I certainly wouldn’t wish a stroke on anyone, but mine has had its positive side. Although I lost my faith for a while, over time it has been tempered and deepened. Although for a time I was overwhelmed by the suffering, eventually I found a place in myself that has faith that this stroke is part of my awakening. That was the grace.
Living with both the perfection and the pain of the suffering allows me to stay with the pain without pushing it away, because I have that balance within myself. I’m part of the unfolding of it all, and that includes suffering.
When Phyllis, my stepmother, was dying, the pain she went through forced her to give up clinging to her body and led to her spiritual awakening during the few days before she died. I wouldn’t have given her that pain, but who am I to judge? As a human being with an emotional heart, I am faced with the paradox that I want to relieve suffering, while at the same moment there is another part of me that understands that sometimes there is grace in suffering. From a spiritual point of view, suffering is sometimes the sandpaper that awakens people. Once you start to awaken spiritually, you reperceive your own suffering and start to work with it as a vehicle for further awakening.
When you suffer, the suffering seems to envelop your world. Think of a framed picture of a cloud. If the picture is cropped too closely, you see only the gray of the cloud. If the picture is cropped to a wider angle, you see the blue sky all around it. That’s grace.
The whole game is based on faith. Faith comes through grace. In the Bible, the apostle Paul says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”
When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be. Without faith, the existential fears and uncertainties that we all have dominate. If you have faith, you have no fear. If you don’t have faith, you fear.
As I questioned my own faith after the stroke, I began to ask, “Faith in what?” I found that my faith is in the One—not faith in Maharaj-ji as a person, but faith in him as a doorway to the One, faith in the One in Maharaj-ji. Oneness is a state of being. Again, this is the state where, as the great South Indian saint Ramana Maharshi said, “God, guru, and Self are one.” Maharaj-ji simply held up one finger and said, “Sub ek”—it’s all One.
Faith is the reflection of that oneness in the mirror of your soul. Faith is the way you connect to that universal truth of oneness. Faith and love are intimately entwined. As it says in the Rāmayana, without devotion, there is no faith; without faith, there is no devotion.
Faith is not a belief. Beliefs are in the head. Faith is in the heart. Faith comes from within you. You cultivate it by opening your spiritual heart and quieting your mind until you feel your identity with your deeper Self. That opening to the deeper Self, when you have quieted your mind. comes through grace. The qualities of that Self are peace, joy, compassion, wisdom, and love.
Having been in the presence of Maharaj-ji, I have come to trust the way a being like that is in the universe. It’s like knowing somebody who lives a little farther up the mountain and can see farther than you can. The view from there is perfection—not perfection as something to be achieved, but perfection in what is. Maharaj-ji kept saying to me in various ways, “Ram Dass, don’t you see it’s all perfect?” And yet Maharaj-ji spent all his life being there for people, helping them with their lives, feeding them, and just loving them.
The art of life is to stay wide open and be vulnerable, yet at the same time to sit with the mystery and the awe and with the unbearable pain—to just be with it all. I’ve been growing into that wonderful catchphrase, “be here now,” for the last forty years. Here and now has within it a great richness that is just enough.
If somebody asks me, “Ram Dass, are you happy?” I stop and look inside. “Yes, I’m happy.” “Ram Dass, are you sad?” “Yes, I’m sad.” Answering those questions, I realize that all of those feelings are present. Imagine the richness of a moment in which everything is present: the pain of a broken heart, the joy of a new mother holding her baby, the exquisiteness of a rose in bloom, the grief of losing a loved one. This moment has all of that. It is just living truth.
The saving grace is being able to witness suffering from the perspective of the soul. Another way to say it is that the saving grace is having faith. Living in the fullness of the moment with joy and suffering, witnessing it in all its perfection, our hearts still go out to those who are suffering.
If we live in the moment, we are not in time. If you think, “I’m a retired person. I’ve retired from my role,” you are looking back at your life. It’s retrospective; it’s life in the rearview mirror. If you’re young, you might be thinking, “I have my whole life ahead of me. This is what I’ll do later.” That kind of thinking is called time binding. It causes us to focus on the past or the future and to worry about what comes next.
Getting caught up in memories of the past or worrying about the future is a form of self-imposed suffering. Either retirement or youth can be seen as moving on, a time for something different, something new. Start fresh. It’s a new moment. Aging is not a culmination. Youth isn’t preparation for later. This isn’t the end of the line or the beginning. Now isn’t a time to look back or plan ahead. It’s time to just be present. The present is timeless. Being in the moment, just being here with what is, is ageless, eternal.
It is extraordinary how near we are to our deeper being. It’s just a thought away. And the thoughts that take us away from it create so much suffering. The thought “I am this body” causes suffering. I might think, “Well, my body used to be able to do this. My hair didn’t used to be gray. I used to be stronger. I used to be thinner. I used to be …” Those thoughts cause suffering because the body is what it is. We do everything we can to stay safe and healthy, but illness, age, and accidents still affect us. Maharaj-ji said, “No one has the power even to keep their own body safe.” The Buddha is right: this body is in time. But we are just here, in this moment.
If you have had the grace to touch living spirit in your lifetime, you know it can be a challenge to translate it into action in the world. To put it another way, now that you know that home is where the heart is, how do you live your life in such a way as to deepen your spiritual connection? There are many paths—paths of prayer, of study, of redirecting bodily energies in hatha yoga, of devotional singing in kirtan.
Many of us are strongly drawn to a path of service—the kind of service designed to alleviate the suffering of our fellow beings, service in deep harmony with the way of things, the dharma. When it is guided by the heart, such service feels like making love with God. Think of Mother Teresa seeing her beloved Jesus in all his distressing disguises.
Giving and receiving, depending on how they’re done, can nourish people on both ends. Those who receive can help others feel graced and blessed to have the opportunity to serve. The art of receiving is a mindset that says, “I am a soul; you are a soul. We come together, and what roles we play is kind of irrelevant.” Likewise, in serving, what you truly offer another being is your own being. That is how true healing occurs—your open heart allows the other person’s heart to open. Then caregiving becomes a gift for everybody involved.
Getting old, for example, can be a cause for more suffering, or it can be a state of grace. People who have been fiercely independent say, “I hate being dependent.” On the other hand, I see people who are old and frail and need to be taken care of, but who are not at odds with themselves. They are so graceful and loving in their dependency that everybody who is taking care of them ends up feeling taken care of too.
I changed my father’s diapers, as he had once changed mine. People said, “Oh, how disgusting.” To him and me, it wasn’t disgusting at all. It was a beautiful completion of a cycle. His mind had turned inward, and he was radiantly happy, peaceful, and relaxed. This was a guy who in his life had found happiness only in outer things, and now was radiating inner joy. Something in him transformed, and he turned into this other being. I was bathing him, and it was like washing the Buddha—incredible, blissed out, all the time. He didn’t even recognize his former self. As he got older, my dad, who had been successful and active politically and socially, became very quiet. He just smiled a lot. I used to sit with him, hold his hand and watch the sunset. We had never done anything like that before. That is grace.
When you get to those edges where you say, “I can’t handle that” or “I’m not going to do that,” take a look at the mindset you are holding onto. There is the root of your suffering. That’s where your mind is in relation to what is.
My friend Wavy Gravy is a living example of how to transform suffering. Among other roles, Wavy is a professional clown who visits children in the hospital. In full clown costume, complete with a big, round, red nose, he hangs out with children who are critically ill or dying. He blows bubbles. Sometimes he plays games with them. Sometimes he delights them with face paint. Sometimes they just hang out, and he shares and lightens their burdens.
Wavy says, “I don’t know. Burnt skin or bald heads on little kids—what do you do? I guess you just face it. When the kids are really hurting so bad, so afraid and probably dying, and everybody’s heart is breaking, face it. Face it and see what happens after that. See what to do next. I got the idea of traveling with popcorn. When a kid is crying, I dab the tears with the popcorn and pop it into my mouth or into his or hers. We sit around together and eat the tears.”
When I was in India in 1971, there was tremendous devastation in Bangladesh. I wanted to help, and I went to Maharaj-ji to get his blessings. He said to me, “Can’t you see it’s all perfect?” I loved this man so deeply, but I remember feeling this was an obscenity. How could he say children starving to death was perfect? Yet this was a man of incredible compassion. He fed everybody, and he helped people all day all the time. He was saying I had lost my balance and had become so obsessed with the suffering that I couldn’t see the greater picture.
This is about where you stand in your awareness, in a place that allows you to be with suffering in the world without closing your heart. If you close or armor your heart in order to be in the world, you become a crippled instrument for the healing of the universe. So you do all you can to relieve suffering and work to keep your heart open.
Another Indian saint, Swami “Papa” Ramdas, lived his life in continuous devotion to Rām. One night when he was sleeping outside by a river, he was being bitten by mosquitoes so much he couldn’t sleep. His response was, “Oh Rām, thank you for bringing these mosquitoes and waking me so I could think about you all night.”
Most of us are not quite ready for that. However, the recognition that suffering is a fire that purifies is an important concept. For a person who has not awakened, the game is to optimize pleasure and minimize suffering. As you become more aware, you recognize the reality of the Buddha’s first Noble Truth: that existence on this plane involves suffering. The more conscious you become, the more you recognize that suffering is how the teaching you need in the moment is coming down. How you experience that suffering depends on your attachment, on how much you identify with what the Buddha describes as “the transient non-self,” what we call the ego—who we think we are.
Consider what it’s like to have a handicapped child—usually seen as a situation of sadness, suffering, and misfortune. But a different perception is that this soul has taken birth in this form with certain work to do. Part of that work is to recognize that he or she may not be fully understood or appreciated by the world around them. Your human heart as a parent wants to take away your child’s suffering. But if you cultivate your spiritual awareness and meet this being as a soul, you can help him or her make contact with that part of their being that has nothing to do with a disability. As long as you see the child as being disabled, you are reinforcing that particular reality in which he or she is going to suffer. Meet the soul behind the disability. In that way, your work on yourself is an offering to your child.
I had a young friend, Kelly, whose body was quadriplegic. He had a misdiagnosed head injury when he was about nine years old. He was fully awake and brilliant, and at thirty-three years old, he was absolutely a delight. You could hold his hand over an alphabet board, and he could spell out words to communicate. Once when I was speaking before a group of doctors and holistic health healers, I had Kelly introduce me. About five hundred people were in the audience and Kelly was wheeled out onto the stage. They were all agape. Kelly spelled out, “RD says we are not our bodies. Amen.”
We often feel helpless in the face of suffering, especially the suffering of those close to us, and we wonder how we can help. Simple acts of kindness are so meaningful, like the quiet moments between people taking loving care of one another, or the support and kindness of friends and family expressing concern, offering help, prayers, and food. Food can be so much more than physical nourishment. Or perhaps you offer a flower from your garden, or just listen to the fears and feelings of someone who is suffering, so they know they are not alone. Sometimes just being there with an open heart and a presence grounded in peace and serenity is enough. These are reminders of grace that happen when you least expect them—reminders that nourish the soul.
Bearing the unbearable is the deepest root of compassion in the world. When you bear what you think you cannot bear, who you think you are dies. You become compassion. You don’t have compassion—you are compassion. True compassion goes beyond empathy to being with the experience of another. You become an instrument of compassion.
Your own suffering—be it loss, failure, grief, or physical pain—hurts like hell. Your heart may be broken. And yet, here you are.
You may have had an experience of suffering that burned deep into you and created a different quality of your being. You see the way that suffering forced your awakening. It’s hard to imagine a spiritual curriculum in which Suffering 101 is not part of the course for becoming a full human being. It’s a fierce teaching.
Part of that teaching is beginning to see through, or give up, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, the pattern of desire and aversion that fastens you so intimately to māya, the illusion of separation. Something happens when you stop trying so hard to avoid suffering. When you wish it were different, you can’t see how it is. There’s a line in the Tao Te Ching that says, “Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.” As you clear the mist of desire from your mirror, you start to reflect things as they are.
As you dwell more in loving awareness and see things as they truly are, you begin to expand beyond the boundaries of your separateness. You start to experience the outer world in a new way, so that instead of being in relationship to someone else, you become them. At that moment, the suffering of the universe is inside of you, not outside. True compassion arises out of the plane of consciousness where I am you, where you and I are one.
This is a Buddhist loving-kindness blessing, part of the Metta Meditation:
May all beings be free from danger.
May all beings be free from mental suffering.
May all beings be free from physical suffering.
May all beings know peace.
OM