The Word of God

In Grist for the Mill, there is a section where Ram Dass is going to meet with some men in India or somewhere and have dinner and just be himself. As the night unfolds, the talks of the business world and politics unfurl, and because Ram Dass has read the entirety of the most recent Newsweek magazine on the plane ride over, it is his duty to let his hosts know of his expertise.

These men are so impressed by his wisdom that they invite him to speak at a dinner before their associates. He tells them that he first must ask his guru, so a couple of the men follow him into the place where Maharjji is staying. He asks his guru. In short, what Maharajji tells them is that Ram Dass would be happy to come and also that Ram Dass only speaks about God.

This presents a problem. The men wanted to hear his ideas, to have him share with those they know the perspective of a Westerner. They decide that perhaps somebody more equipped to talk about business and politics will better serve their agenda. I don't remember if Ram Dass had a great realization, but I did.

We think in terms of division and then go about wondering how we can bring people together, how we can get some of these people to realize the destruction they are putting this world and it's inhabitants through. We think in terms of solving problems and creating change and piling on more and more sand as if once we get enough, this sand will stop sliding down the sides.

People get uncomfortable when you approach them with the idea that we are not mind or body, that we are mere vessels that hold and pour out God. It is hard to be violent, to be right, to be afraid, and to need when this is the condition we live in. The mind wants to categorize, wants to have a reason why, wants to connect with other people not in order to share the God in their vessel with the God in our vessel, but to regurgitate the ideas that he has to make him feel safer. So we run with those that believe and do the same things and all of it is false.

No wonder there is a problem with separation, with fighting about who is right. No wonder so many succumb to whiskey or women or dozens of Snickers bars when the only thing that feels like home is a far away place we spend our entire lives running toward. What if I were to tell you that you are home right now? What if this is what I am telling myself? What if I fully realized that these words are not mine, just like the books of Ram Dass are not his, just like the land where I live is just as much mine as it is the frogs I did not even know were here until yesterday?

I am a steward whose answers come in silence. The answers then transfer through me and back out of me and into me through the awareness of a day that has started in silence. There is nothing to be fixed. There is only the notion that we are spirits and the unravelling of all that is not, the stripping away of the very ideas we have allowed to separate us from each other.

Each new butterfly I see is my reason to continue planting seeds. Each person that walks up and wants to ask me questions about growing is an opportunity to share what I have learned, what I have found, the mistakes I have made. Even saying that is a disservice to God and this world. We have been conditioned to think in terms of success and failure when what nature might tell us, what exists within the vessel is the notion that every action is an opportunity, for growth, for the world to work better as a whole.