eThoughts : Baba Ram Dass and Fierce Grace

Obviously, relationships, of whatever kind, don’t always work out the way we envision them. Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions and envisioning realities more in the realm of imaginary fiction than dealing in realities congruent with our actual being.

I recently watched a DVD about Richard Alpert, a.k.a. Baba Ram Dass. Along with Timothy Leary in the 60s and 70s, he was involved with LSD and the “tune in, turn on, and drop out” movement. After he and Leary were fired as professors from Harvard (they both had earned Ph.D.s in psychology), Ram Dass continued with seeking alternate and expanded consciousness and wound up going to India for a few years. There he discovered a man named Maharaji and started with meditation as a means to polish awareness.

In any case, he had a stroke a couple of years ago (I don’t remember exactly), which was partially the subject of the DVD. Actually it is a story about awareness and gifts, despite “disabilities” and, as Ram Dass called it, “being stroked.” Ram Dass remarked in one segment, that in a perfect world, everyone would be “stroked” as it was a part of grace. He called it fierce grace, which is the title of the DVD.

I have been considering this terminology and it seems to me to be appropriate. Whether being “stroked” or having one’s heart broken, or realizing that one’s reality and one’s ideal are two different universes, whether finding oneself in the midst of stupidity on the road, in a meeting, living in a community, or looking in a mirror, all these states of existence are grace, fierce perhaps, but grace nonetheless.

Awareness seems to be what the journey is about and experience the supporting entity, the medium through which awareness deepens and broadens. When we know this, we have learned to emphasize awareness more than experience (which is an interpretation)–our watcher sees the quality of our awareness rather than the quality of our experience. This shifts everything and then nothing can be that isn’t a gift.

When this happens, deadly judgments and serious positioning take their place with the old ego and become artifacts we can view in the museums of ourselves. And the new judgment and the new positioning are used to dance and play, and for the really creative, to create new worlds where the rule is awareness and not authority.

What hurts do we drag around, attributing our wounds to a lack of grace? There is no such place as a lack of grace, even if there are places where people hurt each other tremendously. Yes, there are those who would inflict terrible pain to prove the existence of a place without grace. And there are those who would endure such terrible pain to prove themselves worthy of ascending to grace.

The pain is real in this incarnation, the lack of grace an illusion. We will have pain, yet why do we give pain, why do we give scars, such a special position in our lives? Why not drop the illusion? Without the illusion, pain and scars are just that, and not something that signals our grace or lack thereof.