Ram Dass explores awakening from the illusion of separateness and opening up to love.
The question is, how do you awaken out of the illusion that you are only separate?
The doorway out of that is through the heart, and we say, “My heart goes out to you.” The heart keeps a doorway into the unitive nature of the universe, and it’s the love that flows through it. Love doesn’t know boundaries. The mind creates the boundary of separation between me and you. The heart just keeps embracing and opening out, so that things that open your heart open you out into the universe and allow you to experience preciousness, the grace, the sweetness, and the thick interconnectedness of it all.
It’s even more than interconnected. It’s all one thing, and it just keeps changing its flow and patterns, and you’re just a part of it.
The opening of the heart is the doorway into that. So that when you love your cat, you love your child, or you love your beloved, or you love nature, that is the doorway. You start with that kind of love, which is relational, romantic love, and then that’s a doorway that moves you into the kind of merging quality where we are together in love, which is in the oneness of it all, in the existence of it all, which is God. That’s the way in which you experience God. You experience being a part of the divine manifestation into form, and you’re one with it.
So you start with this very relational love.
that is between you and something else, and it opens the heart; and then you. In a way, you go out through the heart and keep feeling connection – you know when you’re in love, suddenly other things look beautiful other than the beloved.
I would say that most of us stay locked in our separateness
And we are very frightened of coming out of it. We feel very vulnerable. In truth, you are not vulnerable at all… You just think you are vulnerable. Who you think you are is vulnerable; who you are is not. This is the truth of it. That’s what Christ was saying over and over again, but nobody seemed to want to hear him. It’s very hard to open your heart when you are not vulnerable, but your experience says that you are.
When you are in the presence of unconditional love.
That’s the optimum environment for your heart to open, because you feel safe. You realize nobody wants anything from you. The minute that heart opens, you are once again letting in the flow, and that flow is where you experience God.
-Ram Dass
