A little before the halfway point of Ram Dass’ Journey of Awakening: A Meditator's Guidebook, he makes an astonishing statement. As we continue to meditate we find that each...
...moment starts to have a richness or thickness of its own. Fewer moments are special as more of them become richer. This lessens the rushes, the highs and lows. As they disappear we sometimes feel a sadness and depression, a sense of having lost the richness and the romance of life. Indeed, an awakened being is not romantic, for nothing is special any more. Every moment is all of it. No romance. Just the coming and the going. Coming and going.
Most of us have a view of meditation where we strive for a core experience, we heighten our sense of joy, we feel less pain. We calm down. But Ram Dass, who passed away in late 2020, believes otherwise. For him, meditation enables us to see our thoughts as just thoughts, not an expression of any kind of reality, neither outside in the world or in our heads.
People, for the most part, do not live this way. The “romance of life” is what keeps us going, and we are willing to put up with the lows to gain (what we hope) is the coming highs. We don't want to chuck the whole deal down the chute because we know lows are coming. I think a part of Ram Dass lived this way. In his later years he lived in a house in Maui. If “nothing is special anymore” than why not pick the cheaper double wide trailer outside of Horseheads New York, for instance, and not pricey Hawaii? We do so, if we can, because we know it is better to live in Maui than Horseheads. There are more peak experiences in Maui than upstate New York.
Although Ram Dass’ message speaks strongly to me, and it is most useful – I struggle with what he sees as human aspiration. Most of us are romantics of some sort and can never eradicate that impulse, especially artists. Just coming and going is not inspirational. Being 'even' kills our creative impulses.
