I took a clowning class once. A few of my fellow students were a part of a program where they’d perform at a local children’s hospital. It seemed ridiculous. At best, I thought these sick kids wouldn’t have any interest in clowns, and at worst, I thought it might be upsetting for them. After all, what kid isn’t at least a little afraid of clowns?
I also assumed, because of the often egoic nature of the performing arts, that these clowns had bad intentions; maybe they were doing it because of its novelty, because it’s a funny story, because they couldn’t figure out a real way to help.
When I finally joined them, my own intentions rooted in curiosity more than anything else, I was surprised to see how genuine and sweet the clowns were with the children. They were able to meet the kids where they were at: sometimes our performances were a big, goofy spectacle, sometimes they just sat down and told soft stories to the kids while we all just listened.
When I heard this lecture, I immediately thought of them. At the children’s hospital, you could see all these steps through service: the intense desire to heal the kids through laughter, followed by the realization that these kids are really the ones healing us. But the best performers were the ones that were completely empty of ego or desire. It was like their clown personas were these big empty vessels for what was needed each moment, and they were possessed by this truly joyful, loving spirit.
— Aidan Gould, Content Creator, Love Serve Remember Foundation // RamDass.org
A process occurs where you hear your predicament. It’s called awakening. And I really don’t feel that you would be in this room were you not aware of this predicament. I think you are aware of the predicament that you are probably more than you think you are, but often you don’t know what to do about it, but you are aware of that predicament. And that beginning of that process leads one to want to extricate oneself from the exclusive identification with one’s separateness, because it is quite painful to be separate all the time. It’s like going to your first party, your first dance, and how self-conscious you are, and you’re all, you know, goosebumps and standing awkwardly, that self-consciousness.
Now, where does serving work at this point? Because up until now you have been helping because I need to help in order to gratify my needs. I need to feel good. I need to feel responsible. I need to feel righteous. I need to feel free of guilt. I need to alleviate the pain I’m seeing. I need to do something. I need to do it. And I feel better when I do it. It’s just like eating, in a way. It relieves our psychological needs.
Once you see your predicament that you are apart inside a prison of your own making, the prison of your own mind’s making, then your job is to extricate yourself, and you look at serving and you see serving. How can the way I serve be a vehicle for my getting free of my own entrapment in my own separateness?
And that begins to be what is called in Hinduism karma yoga, or yoga meaning union, or coming to oneness through karma, through the stuff of life which you use in order to come back to the one.
Now you see the difference between the way in which you do an act when you are busy being separate, and the way you do an act when you are separate but attempting to return to the one. How the act affects you changes depending on the way in which you do the act.
And a lot of the the kinds of images of Mother Teresa, of Krishna telling Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, many, many images are really concerned with this form of getting closer to the one, or to the Spirit, or to God, or to unity, or to pure awareness, getting closer to a place of equanimity in your being, a place of Aikido equanimity from which you have the right perfect action.
All of that is being done through the act of service. Now you see, if you can hear this, you are now doing service for a very different reason. It’s still an ego thing. It’s still you as somebody doing something. You are starting as a separate entity and you’re doing it in order to come back to a unity experience.
Now, you meet in committees and you know that you come into committees, each with your separate opinions, attitudes and quite vested interests in those opinions and attitudes. But in the process, at moments, you start to see yourself as separate from your opinions and attitudes, and the unity experience of the group starts to be felt, and it starts to vie with the power to which you are holding to your attitudes and opinions. And very often there’s a little flip of balance where it’s less important that you be right than that you’ll be part of the collective consciousness. And you begin to understand the possibility that our collective wisdom is greater than any one individual’s wisdom.
That’s a big shot for most people. Most of us would prefer to think we would know best. And when we look around at this motley crew, the thought that we would put our lives or our money or anything in trust this way is a risky business. We can do it in a small way, in a token way.
I said to the steering committee, Listen, if you really want to play this game, take all your money and put it in the pot and demand consensus for how you give it away and you only have one part of the vote.
And nobody, I think, really wanted to play. I’m not sure I do either. I’m just pointing it out. I mean you want a game of high risk that’s exciting, that awakens you, that one would awaken you because there is a risk element in it.
Trauma and risk are vehicles for transcending separateness. It forces you together.
Now there are two more steps in the dance, and I’ll come back to one of them in a little bit. But you’re doing an action now. I am working to stop nuclear proliferation, or I am working to relieve the suffering of somebody with AIDS, or I am working to help the dolphins, or I am working for whatever purpose.
I am working to help, and at the same moment I am working as a way to work on myself, realizing that until I am free of my identifications to my own attitudes, opinions and separateness, my act of necessity will be perpetuating some degree of divisiveness in the world. Even as I’m doing good, I will be also creating suffering.
And in knowing that, I’ve got to work on myself and I can’t stop until I’m enlightened because the dance goes on and you can’t stop acting, because you’re in an incarnation and the acting just keeps happening.
So then the only conclusion is: I will use my actions to work on myself as an offering back into the system.
I work on myself as an offering to you. I serve you as a way of working on myself. And that double whammy or that double investment or that double process means that the more you serve, the emptier of identification you get when you’re doing karma yoga properly. And the freer of identification with your own separateness you get, the more you’re being fed. The more you’re being fed, the more you can do, and the more you want to do, and the more joy you’re having from it.
Tagore, the Hindu poet, said, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and behold, life was service or Dharma duty. I acted and behold, service was joy.”
What the term joy means is that the act itself is bringing you back into the harmony, the Tao, the way of things, the flow, the unity of process.
The next stages are where you have so surrendered, as Gandhi said, “When you have completely surrendered to God or to the one or to the unity, you find yourself in the service of all that exists, it becomes your joy and recreation.” Meaning that the quieter you get and the more empty you get, and the more empty you get of being busy being somebody, the more you are listening to hear how the universe is. And the more your suffering is my suffering, the more I am part of the whole thing, and out of that equanimity and quietness comes an act, which is the act that will relieve suffering of mine and yours.
This is the next stage where you have, in Aurobindo’s sense, become an instrument of God. Or an instrument of the one.
And there is a final stage, which is that which you see in great saints and realized beings and gurus. You see the stage where they have lost self-consciousness and they just are service. There is nobody doing anything anymore. There is just service, there is just that which heals. They are healing. They are no longer healers. They are the healing act. They just exist that way. That’s what they are.
Published by the Love Serve Remember Foundation, the nonprofit caretaker of Ram Dass’s teachings since 2010. Learn more at RamDass.org or join our virtual community and archive at Inneracademy.ramdass.org
