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Written by Ram Dass
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Monday, 25 February 2008
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Page 2 of 4
If, for example, we have been on a high diet of achievement gratification—whether it's been raising children, or holding a job, or whatever ways our egos have used to keep negating their sense of inadequacy—when that feeding of "proof of accomplishment" is no longer available, there is a rising sense of failure that stems from our lurking inadequacy for which we don't have an immediate fix. Suffering. But from a soul-view—achievement, non-achievement, no difference; adequacy, inadequacy, all the same.
When our bodies start to decay, when they start to fail us, it can often send us into despair or depression, into ever thicker ego states, unless we remain mindful. Let me give you an extreme example of that.
Before my stroke, I used to work a lot with dying people. It's part of what I've always loved to do, because it seems to me the richest broth of spirit I can consume on this plane. Someone who's dying has very little to lose, so you have opportunities for moments of real truth with another human being, and that's very, very rare.
I was visiting once with a fellow who was in the last stages of ALS—Lou Gehrig's disease, the illness causes the muscles to seize up and stop working one by one. When I visited him he had just two functioning muscles left: he could pucker his lips for a dot, in Morse Code, and raise his eyebrows for a dash. Those were the only movements left in his body.
When I walked into that room, the first thing I felt was the most extraordinary claustrophobia in myself; the idea of being trapped inside a body where those were the only movements left to me was terrifying. But I realized that if I stayed in that place, all I would be offering him was reinforcement for the pain he already had at being in that situation.
So I reached in my pocket for my mala—the prayer beads I always carry—and I started chanting my mantra: "Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram." And because I have worked with that mantra for a long time, and invested it, it quieted me down, it helped me center. Slowly, my reactivity settled down, and I realized that I'd forgotten once again—that once again I'd gotten sucked in by the incredible intensity of a human story line. And I came back to being a soul, who is in a birth, in which I am sitting next to somebody who's also a soul in a birth, a birth in which he now has ALS.
Then he and I talked back and forth—I mean, I talked, and he did his Morse Code—about what the incarnation was like. We were looking into each other's eyes, and after a while the space got quieter and quieter, until pretty soon we were just sitting there appreciating it all together—the total tapestry of a human life, with all its beauty and all its suffering. The whole room started to take on this purple glow, and he was radiant. He spelled out to me, "Much light, much light."
For me, it was as if we had met in a space behind the dance, the dance of being "someone dying of ALS" and of being "someone there to help somebody dying of ALS." We met as fellow souls. "You in there? I'm in here. Wow, what a trip you're on!" Think about meeting another human being that way. It's so rare for us, we call it "soul mates" when it happens. But ultimately the game is to be there for everybody as a soul, if they're ready to come out and play. And if they want to stay egos, that's fine too—I can still be a soul, no matter who they want to be.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 30 May 2008 )
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