Ram Dass and Social Change

-Ram Dass, Lama Foundation, 1983

“We protect our hearts because of fear that they will break. Yes, they will break. But out of the pieces will be forged a new heart, a strong and fearless heart, a compassionate heart, a heart that is invulnerable. That is what is required. Nothing less!”

So to be effective agents for social change we have to start with ourselves. First, we have to work on ourselves until we can be in the world without being automatically reactive. As the stuff of the world around us comes pouring in on us, instead of reacting with fear and aversion or greed and grasping, the art is to introduce a moment of clear quiet awareness between the input (or perception) and the output (or response). By adding this moment of awareness, we break the chain of reactivity that keeps us all so unconsciously bound. Look around and see how reactive people are to each other and how little space there is in the system. Just bringing a bit of awareness to each moment can help. Gandhi says, “What you contribute may seem very insignificant, but it’s still very important that you do it.”

With a bit of quiet awareness, you have a different perspective in situations. And sometimes with that perspective, you can see alternatives in a difficult situation, which shifts the entire dynamic and brings space and possibility anew.

The political arena does not usually attract very conscious and spacious players, and as such, it may not be the optimum vehicle for social change. However, even there, true statesmen and stateswomen, beings with a quiet inner context, can potentially bring about profound changes.

Besides quieting the mind, we have to learn to keep our hearts open. Social movements attract people to a lot of different motives. And we meet many people in social actions whose motives are not the same as ours. Although this confusion of motives makes our work together more difficult, we can still do a caring and effective job. What I’ve learned, however, is that my first job is to not get caught in either my judgments of them or in their projections about me.

If you are in the forest and seeing many different trees—oaks, fir, pine, aspen, etc.—you aren’t inclined to be continually judging: “That pine should be an oak.” But the minute we get near humans we start judging. It’s very funny. We are constantly saying, “If only everybody were working for the motive that Gandhi was working for.” And open-hearted appreciation of individual differences in humanity rather than just judgment is very important.

Kabir, the Sufi mystic, said, “Do what you do with another person, but never put them out of your heart.” As I’ve studied being involved in more and more social action, I’ve begun to see that learning how to say “no” without closing my heart is also very important, disagreeing with somebody without seeing the person as an opponent, staying in the place just behind that so that even the “no” heals as opposed to being divisive. Most of us, especially those who have children, face having to say “no” often. A child asks for something, and you’re going to say “no” out of the best motives in the world. Yet you know that the child is going to be frustrated by not getting what it wants. There’s a part of you that empathizes with that child. Furthermore, because the child is frustrated, the youngster is going to look for an object of aggression, and it might well be you. And it hurts for someone you love to be angry with you. So you get a double whammy of negative feeling when you say “no.”

In a situation like this, you tend to close your heart down just a little bit so as to be able to handle these feelings. So what message we really send the child is not only a “no” message. We push them away emotionally, as well.

Social actions are fraught with disagreements and the saying of “no” to others. It’s a great opportunity to watch your heart close down and open and close and open.

… Since we’re not starting other than from our humanity, all we can do is use the situations in which we close down as exercises to work on ourselves, to watch how we lose it again and again. We must be very compassionate with ourselves, and each time just center again, quiet again and begin again.