by Ram Dass: Here is a quote from the great saint, Anandamayi Ma, “It is true that this body has no relationship with any of you except the kinship of the Atma,” meaning…
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the source, truth, love, “Which this body enjoys equally, not only with each of you, but even with all the trees and foliage around, as well as with rocks, mountains, and everything else.”
I really want you to hear this one, because it’s the one that changes romantic love into expanding conscious love, and what I have experienced over the years is this transformation. There have been frightening aspects to this because our cultural models of romantic love have to do with specialness.
“I love you specially.” What I experience is that I don’t love people specially. I have special work to do with one person or another, but I love beings, and I’m getting to love the universe, and I’m getting to love the manifestation. It’s interesting though, because people keep wanting you to love them specially and I just don’t feel that anymore. It’s a strange experience because it’s strange from a cultural point of view.
Here’s a story from when I was guiding people through acid trips back in the sixties: I would take acid with them and we’d both go into the place of merging, or just beyond separate where we were in love. Then the session would be over, Saturday night would be over and there’d be Sunday, and then we’d be parting ways in the beautiful morning mist, listening to the Messiah, and they had never had a thing like this before, and they would say, “When can I see you again?”
Can you imagine it? You’ve just been with someone in total love, and then you’re about to part, and here’s where the fear comes in, the lack of faith and the doubt, “When will I see you again?” So I’d say, “Well, why don’t we have dinner Wednesday night?” Then that became every Wednesday night. Because that’s what you do with a beloved, you know it’s, “Let’s hang out.”
Pretty soon I guided another session and the next day the person asked, “When will I see you again?” I said, “Well, how about Thursday night?” See what’s happening? After I had run six sessions I went to my teacher, Tim Leary, and I said, “Tim, I don’t think I can guide any more sessions. I don’t have any more evenings free.”
At that point I realized I was going to have to up-level the thing. I was going to have to take it up to another level of loving. Where if we have a moment of truth love, that’s what we’ve got. The clinging of the mind comes out of the fear that says, “I have to possess it because I may run out of love later.”
When you make the leap out of that possessive love and go into the next space, you realize that every time you turn around there is another form of the beloved and another opportunity.
Love is abundant because you are love. As you become love, you get to the point where you walk down the street and someone comes, and it is the most beautiful thing that you have ever seen. You look and look and appreciate and love, your eyes meet, you both recognize the love, and you don’t have to do anything about it.
It’s nothing special to be in love, it’s very ordinary. How alien that is in this culture, to think that being in love with the Universe is ordinary.
