Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Ram Dass on being loved...
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
I came across this beautiful short video and I felt I had to share. It’s just one of those things, it confronts you really directly with the source of suspicion and anger and how hard it is to let yourself really be loved. Wonderful, deeply moving.
It reminded me of what a friend said about Chenrezig practice, that it was a way of dealing with all harshness that one carries towards onesself. This video certainly made me realise that I carry a few things in this area... perhaps I should investigate. Food for thought. But the video released a whole range of stuff for me.
2
Comments
Sorry, can't relate to this -- as much as I like Ram Dass.
There’s a range of his material on youtube these days, mostly lectures of his with some kind of backing visuals. Feel free to indulge, I’d say.
I’ve done some searching for Chenrezig practice, to find out what this entails, but different places seem to offer somewhat different things. It seems to often involve a mix of “meditation, visualization, mantra practice and lojong (mind training).” I’m a bit puzzled because none of these things seems to work directly on the blockages we may have formed inside our minds to letting ourselves be loved. I hope that the opportunity arises to learn a bit more about Chenrezig, will keep an eye on the local Tibetan temple.
Here is my page on yidam practice
https://cundi.weebly.com/yidam.html
Om mani peme hum
or ... OM MANI PADME HUNG HRIH
or ... All praise the JC in the Lotus
Jesus does not exist? Shhh ... don't tell Santa ...
"Jesus does not exist?"
Brings Matthew 25 to mind for me. "Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, that you do unto Me." In the Xian religion Christ is the True Self of all.
Destructive religious activity is not helpful to anyone and it hinders the "vandal" more than anyone else.
More to the OP video's topic, seems strange to me, because I don't remember ever having such feelings. The wealth of love inside leaves you too full to feel empty or worthless. For me, Jesus Is very real and abides in me.
Throw away all dogma and that stuff:
Hafiz says:
We should make all spiritual talk
Simple today:
God is trying to sell you something,
But you don't want to buy.
That is what your suffering is:
Your fantastic haggling,
Your manic screaming over the price!
And Again Hafiz:
Beautiful Empty Pages
What kind of work
Can I do in this world?
Who would be kind enough
To give an old holy Bum,
One with a great reputation
For loving the charms
Of the lawless
And the wild artists and the lewd?
Maybe I could become a poet.
Maybe the Beloved
Will make my love so Pure.
That He will come to sit upon
All my Beautiful empty pages.
And when you come to look at them,
He might kick you
With His Beautiful Divine Foot.
Hafiz Boasts of You:
The Jeweler
If a naïve and desperate man
Brings a precious stone
To the only jeweler in town,
Wanting to sell it,
The jeweler's eyes
Will begin to play a game,
Like most eyes in the world when they look at you.
The jeweler's face will stay calm.
He will not want to reveal the stone's true value,
But to hold the man captive to fear and greed
While he calculates
The value of the transaction.
But one moment with me, my dear,
Will show you
That there is nothing,
Nothing
Hafiz wants from you.
When you sit before a Master like me,
Even if you are a drooling mess,
My eyes sing with Excitement —
They see your Divine Worth.
Feel free to take the thread, over, @Nirvana ...
It just goes to show, we can have very different experiences. The video spoke to me because my upbringing and young adult years left me feeling somehow unworthy, on various levels. Unworthy of parental love, unworthy of the love of a partner.
I don’t have such a wealth of love inside. I’ve often had to take care of myself where people around me had gone off to do their own thing, and there not being the right kind of people to connect to. It shaped me by showing me the world in such a way to learn from, it was lonely and isolated at times.
It was like I was a cramped fist, feeling a mix of fear and unworthiness, which only very slowly learnt to unclench and find out what abundance was. Videos like this one touch a nerve with me, showing me that inside there is still some unclenching left to be done.
I’ve been reading more of Ram Dass’ articles from his website, it is a pity that he has died, I see a special something in his teachings. You can read them here...
https://www.ramdass.org/teachings/#articles
One of my favorite CDs is Ram Dass's Chord of Love. Interspersed with lots of chants Ram Dass reads snippets from Kabir —and they are fantastic.
To hear the CD, Please see this link on SoundCloud:
https://soundcloud.com/ramdass/sets/the-chord-of-love
Ram Dust is not something I know much about ...
No doubt another spiritual luvie/act Tor ...
No doubt highly adored ... Daz zling as the lite bringer always iz ...
Rest In Peace 💗🙏🏽💀
His book Be Here Now is also worth a look, it’s here online...
http://beherenow.synergize.co/?i=1
It’s funny, many would consider Ram Dass just another spiritual guru type, but he was also a seeker, as the story of his journey to India (with a bottle of LSD to try on the yogi’s!) shows. He never loses that humility, and he always straddles that line of fellow seeker and teacher himself.
He apologised in the end for not having provided for himself late in old age... he had a stroke about ten years ago, and ended up living in Hawaii with a small community of disciples around him taking care of him.