The Reward of Desire
Grist for the mill
By
Ram Dass
If you watch the patterns of
your desire systems and mind, the end of your day goes something
like: "I think I'll take a
nap. Gee, I'd like a cup of tea. How about a cigarette with that? I'm gonna listen to that music. What are we going to have for dinner? What do you want for dessert, ice cream? I'm gonna have some coffee. What's on television? No, let’s go bowling. Bicycle?
Great. Ice cream soda? Let's go home. Okay.
Want to go to bed? Okay. Ah great.
Got a cigarette? On and on and in
the middle of your main course, you're already thinking about what you'll have
for dessert.
The way you deal with this
game is by constantly keeping the things going by fast, like a sleight-of-hand trick. Knowing that none of them will last, you
figure that enough of them with small enough spaces in between will keep the
rush going. Rush after rush after
rush. But it's like building a house on
sand--you can't stop because it gets a little frustrating if you stop. If those spaces in between get too big, there
is depression, confusion, disorientation, anger, loneliness, self-pity,
unworthiness. Such stuff! Yech! So keep it coming Ma. More and more and
more.
But it turns out that Christ was right when he
said, "Lay not up your treasures where moth and rust doth corrupt and
thieves break in." Buddha was right
when he said, "The cause of suffering is craving, craving after things that are not permanent,
and nothing is permanent.” So if you
cling to anything which is in form you're going to suffer. That was Buddha's point.
What is blue chip, that you
can invest in, that you can stop feeling frightened about? Your body? Your body is decaying at this very
minute. Even the youngest person here is
decaying. Fifty or sixty years from now,
you know where your body will be, what it will look like? And your intellect? All that knowledge you collected? Did you ever see a skull and consider what's
been eaten away and who ate it? And do
you know what that emptiness is? That's
everything you think you know. No wonder
you are frightened. If you’re thinking
you're your thinking mind or that you're your body it's panic.
From 12:00 to 6:00 is the
increasing hope that you can get it all together, get it all together, get it
to feel just right. But there's a
scariness because you are trying to do it in a dimension that exists in time
where everything changes, you're going to lose everything. At the very least you’re going to die. As a philosophical materialist--not a
materialist in a gold Cadillac, but one who is attached to the senses and
intellect, and what you can think about--you are afraid because when you are
dead, you're dead. As you get closer to
dying, you start to get very frightened and you start to push pretty hard. You say, "Doctor, you've got new pills,
use them, do anything, save me, freeze-dry me, do anything, I don't want to
die," and grab and hold the bedsheets and pay more and more and get more
and more hysterical and get into intensive care units and keep alive even if
they have to transplant everything. But
no matter how hard you try, suddenly you're dead.
And then a voice says to you,
"Hello." If you're a philosophical materialist, this leads you to
say, "I guess I didn't die."
To which the voice replies, "Oh yes, you did." Just an example,
at one point buddha with his clear vision looked back and saw his last
ninety-nine thousand incarnations. And
that was only a trivial amount of them.
Birth-death-rebirth-redeath-, on and on.
Now, in the early period, say
between 12:00 and 3:00 every time you die you're so caught in your own
attachments to your senses and your mind, you're so deep in the illusion, that
when somebody says you're dead, you deny it and stay in total confusion until
you get sent into the next round. which
is all you will see, perfectly designed.
Later as you get on with this round of births and deaths, you realize
your predicament. You are under the veil
of illusion of your birth--you don't want to die, then you're dead and you say,
"Far out, there goes another one."
At this point you look around and you see your old mothers and fathers
and friends. "Oh, my God you were
my wife this time, last time you were my brother.
When you're more conscious you
share in the understanding of where you are situated on the clock, in the round
of birth and death. You begin to see
exactly what the next birth has to do from a karmic point of view, what is has
to work out. And when you design the
next birth, you say, "Well, I think I should be born into a lower-class in
New York City, and then around ten I think I should get raped, that would be
useful for that particular samskara, that deeply imbedded mental impression,
that I've been working out from four thousand births back. Let's see. I'll have my first child when I'm
eighteen," etc., etc. You design it
all the way through -- up until how you'll die.
You've run it all through the computer, the right parents come together,
the right combinations have come up, comes the moment of birth. And there you go. You dive back down in.
Some being enter this trip at
the moment of conception, others at the moment of birth--the baby comes into
the world and has that kind of stoned out look, like what the hell am I doing
here? Like and old lama who has been
born, say, in the Bronx, and he would like to bless everybody but he can't get
it to work. The ones that entered in at
the moment of conception are busy being babies already. "Waaaaaa, give me." Those that come
in stoned, because the veil hasn't shut down yet, are most of the time around
parents who are busy inside the veil saying, "You're a baby, you're a baby. Goo-goo, look at the little baby." Pretty soon you buy it. and there you are again. On and on and on and on.
Until something interesting
happens at 6:00 o'clock, or one minute past six. Up until then, in every birth you've gone
back into the illusion that you are this body, you are this thinking mind, you
are these senses. Everything you think
you could get is what you can sense and think about, what you're grabbing,
looking out and down. Grabbing and
grabbing and then suddenly at one birth there is a moment when the veil parts
albeit for just a second and you stick your nose through and you say,
"Wow, it isn't how I thought it was at all." Maybe the veil parted for a millisecond, but
that was all it took if you were ready.
The veil is parting all the time for everybody, but most of the time you
Karma is so heavy, and you're so used to the view, that you're not ready, so
that the minute you do see through you immediately deny it or push it away as
hard as you can.
Recently I read in New York
Times magazine an article on "Mysticism in America" which said that
two-fifths of the population of the United States has had a genuine mystic
transcendent experience, which means they saw through the veil. In sampling that two-fifths of the
population, eighty-five percent said, "It was the greatest experience of
my life but never want to have it again."
Of course not, because look at how it screws up the apple cart. If you've built a whole universe around being
somebody and suddenly you see that that isn't who you are at all, what then?
But what is the condition
necessary so that the moment comes when you see through the veil in a way that
changes everything from then on so that from 6:01 to 12:00 your whole journey
changes its meaning? The condition
necessary for that to happen is that despair, the realization that everything
you think you can do to create perfection isn't going to be enough. That who you are and who you think you are is
where the problem lies. It leads to a
deep despair that is absolutely the necessary condition for you to look up at
that moment. Once you have seen and know
you have seen, you can never go totally back to sleep again. Even through many, many more birth from 6:01
to 12:00--you can never fully forget.
You are starting to be drawn back to twelve o'clock.
I'm talking about a clock of
births and deaths which is all in time, which is all an illusion or relatively
real, but we're just working with this illusion for a moment. The nature of the beings in tune with these
words are by definition after six o'clock.
Otherwise there'd be no reason for you to have read this far. Maybe you're a 4:13, but why would you put up
with this long rap then when you could be out getting more which is
better. But you know something and
you're trapped in what you know and look at what it's led you to. And it gets worse; that's what's so far out about
it:
Once you start at one minute
past six the return journey to 12:00, you're trying to grab at experiences that
are going to get you back. You're going
to collect new experiences that are called "getting high" You come down from something and you treat
that down as the time between the last time you got high and the next time when
once again you'll get on with your journey to God or back to 12:00 or whatever
you want to call it. As the experimental
clock ticks on you keep developing in your understanding of how it's all
working, and you begin to recognize a peculiar phenomenon that, as C. S. Lewis
points out, "You don't see the center of the universe because it's all
center." That you, in fact, are the
center of a universe which has been designed perfectly in order to awaken you
out of the illusion and that every experience you have is equally valid grist
for the mill of awakening. Your whole
incarnation is the teaching.
Next you begin to realize
that although they are all equal in teaching quality, some of your experiences
seem to shake you more than others, that the model which you are stuck in,
sometimes so subtly you don't even know it, is shaken by pain and suffering and
the negative qualities. At that point
you recognize the bizarre phenomenon that suffering is grace. Now that's heavy. Because up until that time you've been trying
to optimize pleasure and minimize pain.
When you realize that in its fullest dimension, you may still live to
optimize pleasure and minimize pain but whatever comes down the pike is all
right. "Boy am I depressed. Far out.
Now, there's depression."
Until finally "There's pleasure." "There's pain."
"I just make a thousand dollars.
Wow." Or, "Oh, I just got robbed." And the "Wow" and the
"Oh" and the "Ah" and the "Uhh," all of these
alternative are just more stuff, beautiful, delightful stuff. This incarnation is the absolutely optimal
one which you must be in now in order to do what needs to be done, or have done
through you what need to done, in order to bring you home, bring you Aum, or
out or in. It's happening weather you
know it or not. But as you know it, it
changes it, that's part of it, that's all karma too.
Along around 10:00 or 11:00
you're going into other planes of reality in your meditation or however, and
they are equally as real as the plane that you started this incarnation
in. You don't quite understand where
you're at, sometimes you get confused, it's very uneven and complicated
work. But if you're really aiming at
perfected truth, you move at a rate at which you can keep it all perfectly
together. You work for the perfect
balance of the different planes.
At one minute past six you
started to look up and got so fascinated with what you started see you couldn't
take your eyes off it, and forgot to look down and you fell on your face. You started to study the "absolute truth
of raw God," and you got so fascinated with the impersonal perfections of
the universe beyond all polarities, you were so involved in the icy cold
impersonality of it all that you kept stepping on things and you looked and
said, "Well so what, it's all perfect." But you learned the simple rule of the game
is that as long as you push away one plane to grab another, you're still off
balance. Ultimately, you understand that
honoring of this incarnation. That's
when you start to develop the capacity to look up and to look down at the same
moment. To look in and to look out.
When you look at pure truth
you can see the grace that suffering is.
From your point of view, when you're suffering, "Fine, I'm
suffering, that's interesting." at the same moment if you are looking down
and honoring your incarnation, you're working to alleviate suffering. Let me give you an example. Somebody says, "I want to study yoga
with you. I want to fast." And you
say, "All right, fast for nine days."
At the end of the seventh day they say, "I've fasted for seven
days." And you say, "Wonderful, wonderful. You've got two more days
to go." Then you walk outside the
building and somebody comes up to you and says, "Hey man, you got a
quarter, I haven't eaten in seven days."
You don't say, "Wonderful, wonderful, you have two more days to
go." It's not an appropriate response, because for that being, suffering
isn't grace, suffering is a drag.
When that discipline is
developed to allow you to look up and look down simultaneously, you have the
absolute clarity of the pure white snow on the Himalayn peaks, the exquisite
clarity, raw truth, the impersonal perfection which includes everything -- Vietnam,
Cambodia, Bangladesh, Biafra, persecution in our cities, inequality, violence,
as well as all the bliss and love and compassion and kindness--the entire
mosaic. In the icy city of the Himalayas
you see the perfection of it all in the evolutionary journey of beings. And at the same moment the caring part of you
is like the bleeding heart of Jesus and you look down and see the blood on the
snow. You keep both of those in mind at
every moment, so you can help beings that are suffering in the way they need to
be helped.
If you are really going to
help them get out of the illusion, you yourself must not get lost in the
illusion, you must continue to keep your eye fixed on absolutely clear
truth. You love without clinging, you
help with being identified as the helper, you protest with getting lost in the
protest, you care for your child remembering that, behind it all, here we
are. The truth, the caring. You honor your body, you honor your society,
you honor your whole game, you change it in the way it needs to be
changed. You listen to hear what your
particular karmic predicament is in this round and you find your dharma, the
way to live this life in perfect harmony with the forces inside and outside of
you in order to bring you home...
from ‘Grist for the Mill’ by
Ram Dass
pp 38-44
Copyright 1976 by Ram Dass & Stephen Levine
Unity Press, California
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