Ep. 281 – Across the Decades: Ram Dass on Love and the Path of the Heart

Speaking across the decades from the 1960s to the 2010s, Ram Dass shares his thoughts on the feeling of love and the path of the heart.

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This episode of Here and Now is a compilation of Ram Dass speaking about love and the path of the heart across the decades:

• We begin in 1969, with Ram Dass talking about Maher Baba, whom he calls the personification of pure love. He describes a particularly powerful LSD trip where he gained insight into the true nature of love. He says, “I now conceive of the fact that falling in love means like falling into a bathtub of love.”
• We move on to 1979, with Ram Dass addressing the Christian Community of San Francisco. He describes the different stages of falling in love and talks about the devotional nature of the path of the heart. “And that’s one of your predicaments,” he says, “that when you really fall in love, it just opens and opens and opens, and you just don’t know where to hold on anymore.” 
• The next stop is 1986, with Ram Dass touching on conditional love and the deprivation model we’ve been working with all our lives. He digs deeper into the different stages of love and talks about the need to give up the deprivation model. He says, “You change from the deprivation model to the model where there’s an abundance of [love].” 
• We fast forward to the 1990s, with Ram Dass reading from the I Ching about the path of love and the path of the heart. He talks about how we are hungry ghosts who get addicted to the method of love, but all methods are traps. “And yet,” he says, “the bizarre thing about methods is they don’t work unless you get trapped.”
• Finally, we end in 2017, with Ram Dass telling a delicious story about loving everything, including a rug with spots on it. He talks about how judgment is in the mind, but love is in the heart. “I don’t judge,” he says. “But if I do judge, I love it.”

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“Now, if you look at in the sense that, in the usual way of, ‘I fell in love with this person, there’s another way of seeing that, which is this person is a stimulus, is something in the world that was just right in a key sense to release us into the place in ourselves where we are love. And we say, as a result, ‘I am in love with you.’ Another way of saying it is, ‘You turn me on to the place in myself where I am love, where I can’t get to without you.’ Now we’re talking about you being my connection to that place in myself where I am love, where I can’t get without you. And then I want to hold on to my connection, just as any good junkie would like to do.” – Ram Dass

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