How To Keep Your Heart Open In Hell - Ram Dass

one of the things that has changed in me is that i have begun to fall in love with the universe and it's hard to talk about that let me uh read to you two poems this first one is by a buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh very beautiful monk i won't read the whole thing i am a frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond i am also the grass snake who approaching in silence feeds itself on the frog i am the child in uganda all skin and bones my legs as thin as

bamboo sticks i am also the merchant of arms selling deadly weapons to uganda i am the 12 year old girl refugee in a small boat who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate i am also the pirate my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving my joy is like spring so warm it makes flowers bloom in all walks of life my pain is like a river of tears so full it fills up all the four oceans please call me by my correct names so that i can hear at the

same time all my cries and my laughs so that i could see that my joy and pain are but one please call me by my correct names so that i could become awake so the door of my heart be left open the door of compassion all my names the quality of love has no boundaries there's no other in love there is us at one level and at the deeper level there is only i we are merged in love call me by my true names the other quote is uh still in dualism but it's on the

edge it's a quote from the poet kabir since the day when i met with my lord there has been no end to the sport of our love i see with eyes open and smile and behold his beauty everywhere i utter his name and whatever i see it reminds me of him whatever i do it becomes his worship wherever i go i remove round him all i achieve is his service when i lie down i lie prostrate at his feet whether i rise or sit down i can never forget him for the rhythm of his music

beats in my ears now in the states of awareness where you see there is one there are no boundaries there are no separateness and then as that one starts to come into form as separate you look at these separate forms it has taken with a quality of awe and wonder when you're looking from there when you're looking from the point between what's called the form and the formless right at the edge and you look down at form or out at form or upward form i don't there's no direction you look at form you see the

absolute ah awful beauty of form and you see as plato talks about it the law the law that you appreciate as what you call god oftentimes is just all form in law it's all lawfully related it's called the dao in chinese the way of things it's the way in which all forms are related to all other forms and you look and you see it's perfect you can look in physics or chemistry or astronomy or astrology or psychology or music or wherever you look you begin to see that forms are related all to all other forms

all in lawful ways it gets interesting when you get down to quarks and things like that but everything above that it looks pretty wrong and there is an interesting term when you look at the way in which those things are all lawfully related you say it's perfect my guru in india used to say to me ram das don't you see it's all perfect i'd say perfect perfect what about bangladesh what about africa what about tyranny what about violence what about greed don't you see it's all perfect can't you step back for a moment from your

humanity to see the way of things can't you see the way it's all lawfully unfolding the question is have you the courage to see what you're seeing or does it seem to take away your humanity because when you look and you say it's all perfect the problem is it's so impersonal somebody falls down in front of you and you say karma see there's no warmth to it but if you come down into your human heart the pain is unbearable because there is so much suffering everywhere and you look and that there's rape and there's child

molestation and there's ecological insensitivity and there's tyranny and there's terrorism and there's which one is at first starving the homeless that who is it where's where does your heart go first and what most people do is they close their heart down and they armor it to protect it from the immense amount of suffering they armor it with their mind with thoughts with a web or a net or a veil of thought that armors the heart so that they don't get hurt and overwhelmed by the immensity of the suffering because you know how when your child

hurts you give anything and the quality of the heart is the heart has no boundaries my heart goes out to you is the expression the heart will give the heart doesn't know boundaries the mind knows the boundaries the heart says here take my automobile take my apartment take anything the mind saying now wait a minute be reasonable and there is an interesting dialogue that goes on within us and so this armoring protects not only our hearts from the amount of suffering outside but it protects our separateness from our heart which would give away our separateness

it would give away everything give away everything and so the interesting question is how do you keep your heart open in health and what does it mean to be in love with the world and what does it mean in action what do you do the answer lies again in the statement at least the answer that i have found thus far that there's nowhere to stand that if you stand only in your humanity it's unbearable if you stand in the area of perfection it's impersonal if you get them both going at once it is the root

of what i understand true compassion to be a lie about it is something where unlike job which questions god at some point you do what you do because your human heart hurts and you want to do what you can to relieve the suffering of the people you love and at the same moment there's not a flicker in you as to it is all as it must be i work with aids patients now i do a lot of work with aids patients and a fellow calls me and he just found he has aids and he was

a law student and all of his plans have now gone awry and his whole life has changed and he's frightened and my heart my human heart cries with him and so he hears there's a fellow human heart that's empathizing with him at the same moment there's another part of me that's just looking at the universe as it is and saying yes and this too and this too he has a new curriculum now this is heavy work for his soul he's going to do new work in terms of awakening because when you look at individuals from

the level of soul or awareness or spiritual entities you see the entire earth plane and all the personality and all the physical things and the death and sickness and illness and all of it you see it all as the curriculum of the soul when you look at it from the personality point of view it's horrible and that seems so unfair and suffering seems so cruel and for you to hear the term suffering is grace not that you would ask for it but that when it comes your way you work with it you work with it

as part of your spiritual journey of awakening because the only reason anybody suffers is because of the clinging of their mind starvation is just a certain set of pangs the fact that you suffer when you starve is because of the mind's identification with the separateness when ramana maharshi the great saint in india was dying and his devotees were crying bhagwan bhagwan don't leave us don't leave us he said don't be silly where could i go i'm just dropping my body it's no big deal you have that level of awareness then the whole meaning of suffering

changes and all suffering is showing you is where your mind is still clinging to pull your awareness back from your the time-binding nature of mind allows you to be fully here to be fully here am i happy yes i'm happy i'm happy because it's spring i'm happy because people are having babies that are bringing joy into their lives i'm happy because flowers are blooming i'm happy for a myriad reason am i sad yes i am sad because every 45 seconds a child is dying needlessly from hunger i'm sad because there is so much inhumanity among

humans to each other and to other species i'm sad because there's so much fear in this moment i am both happy and sad as long as you try to stay in the world of polarities happy sad dark light positive negative good evil you cannot experience the richness of the moment the richness of the moment is the one that lies just behind the two you