Ram Dass Here And Now – Details, episodes & analysis

In this half-hour guided meditation, Ram Dass uses concentration and mindfulness techniques to help us sit on the river bank of the mind and watch the thoughts, sensations, and feelings flow by.

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Take a seat on the river bank of your mind with this guided meditation Ram Dass conducted during a retreat in Vancouver, Canada, in February 1992.

• Ram Dass begins the guided meditation with a Samadhi, or concentration, practice. “Every time the mind wanders to any sensation or thought,” he says, “the minute you notice that it has wandered away from the breath, just very gently, non-judgmentally, draw the awareness back to the next breath.”
• The meditation shifts to a mindfulness practice. “Now just open up into mindfulness,” says Ram Dass, “just being aware of what is. Let the mind be drawn to whatever primary object it is drawn to. If it’s drawn to a feeling in your back or in your legs, notice that. If it’s drawn to a memory or a plan or an emotion, a listening, tasting, whatever sensation or thought, let it flicker to that, let it sit with it, don’t hold onto the thought or sensation, and then watch it be replaced by another one.”
• For the last part of the meditation, Ram Dass tells us to focus on the thought of “I.” He says, “Look and see if you can find out where that is. Where is the thought of I? Who is this I? In the ocean of awareness, where is I?”

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“It’s as if you were sitting on a river bank watching the mind’s stuff go by. Here comes a floating sensation from the knee. Here comes a thought about the whole process. Here comes the listening to a sound. They just come, and they go.” – Ram Dass

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How can we learn to live by changing our relationship to death? Ram Dass addresses the staff at a hospital and shares his vast perspectives on death, not getting caught in the drama of dying, and dealing with burnout.

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Today’s episode is from a lecture Ram Dass gave to the staff of Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, New York, on November 26, 1986.

• Ram Dass begins by exploring different perspectives on death. He talks about how the Western perspective on dying can often frame death as the enemy, then shares how the Eastern perspective contains a lot more lightness about death.
• Ram Dass touches on the hospice movement and then discusses his work with the Living Dying Center. He talks about how death is often the biggest drama in town, but the process of dying can be used to awaken rather than keep people identified with their separateness. 
• Finally, Ram Dass addresses the issue of burnout in the medical community. How can one function in the role of being a healer without emotionally being attached to whether or not the patient lives or dies? But we can approach pain and suffering in a way where we don’t get lost in it.

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“I must just encourage you to explore the possibility that you use the adventure of service as a vehicle for opening up the exploration of who you are in relation to what you’re doing. Because I think if you were less a nurse and less a doctor, and more an awareness who was being a nurse and doctor, your payoff would be improved considerably, and death would become an interesting part of nature rather than an error or a failure. And you could still do your work, in fact, perhaps even more impeccably.” – Ram Dass

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Speaking to issues of ecology, politics, and social action, Ram Dass shares stories of compassionate action and explores patterns of interdependency we can recognize in the world.

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This episode of Here and Now is from a 1992 talk in Edgartown, MA.

• Ram Dass discusses our looming ecological crisis, politics, and living in the age of the Kali Yuga. There is change happening all around us. For Ram Dass, what’s interesting is where one stands in relation to change.
• How do we respond in an appropriate way to all the suffering in the world around us? Ram Dass shares classic stories of compassionate action and talks about the constant dialogue between the mind and the heart.
• Ram Dass explores how moving through different planes of reality can help us recognize the incredible patterns of interdependency in this world. By acknowledging that these other planes exist, we can find a way to be fully in the world and simultaneously not be trapped by it. In this way, we’re able to keep our hearts open in hell.

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“When you experience the plane of reality where everything is interdependent, it includes you, you’re part of it all. If you flip the dial and go to another plane of reality, you see that behind all of the forms, which are like cloud patterns, there’s only one of it. There’s one stuff. There’s one stuff that keeps going into these incredible patterns.” – Ram Dass

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In this talk from 1989, Ram Dass leads an exploration into what it takes to be present with our hearts, present with the moment, and to have compassion for the suffering in the world.

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In this riveting Q&A session from a 1989 retreat, Ram Dass answers questions around making the transition from somebody to nobody, right effort, doubt versus faith, and much more.

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In this talk from 1976, Ram Dass reflects on how we can get to God by embracing our Dharmic path in life.

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In this interview from 1980, Ram Dass shares a mind-bending conversation with physicist Amit Goswami about the intersection of science and spirituality.

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In this dharma talk from 1993, Ram Dass looks at how each of us can get stuck in our transition between the fear-driven social institutions that we were born into and the love-driven paths of the heart that we are re-discovering for ourselves.

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In this dharma talk from 1978, Ram Dass looks to the example set by The Shakertown Pledge as a model for committing ourselves to inner and outer social action.

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In this dharma talk from 1982, Ram Dass illuminates how happiness, boredom, suffering, past and future, life and death, it’s all right here in every moment we experience.

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