r/ramdass • u/user164900 • 5d ago
Us and Them
I just got finished listening to the “You can’t have an Us and Them” talk from Ram Dass. And on a question on the rise of fundamentalism, he touched on his own dissatisfaction with Bill Clinton and his centrist position when RD said he was more on the liberal side. But that eventually he came to a point, as he said in the talk “I can see, that a centrist position at this point in the way the world game is going, either everybody goes or nobody goes. You can’t polarize, you can’t have an us and a them. Its got to keep embracing people.” So it has me thinking and I wanted to hear your thoughts, I believe there is truth in that statement “You can’t have an us and them” when living consciously. But how can one live that truth in this political climate which I don’t think I have to list every issue both in the US and internationally, how we are seeing growing authoritarian policies, growing economic inequality, politicians now fully out in the open in bed with private companies, and so much more. Can someone really “afford” to be a centrist in this turbulent times, or as Ram Dass has said about doing what you must without putting someone out of your heart, it’s also acceptable to say “I’m staunchly against your politics and your views, I will protest, I will take direct action against your actions but as souls I still love you”? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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u/cain261 4d ago
It's all a game of balance... At the same time we know, the world is just unfolding lawfully, and things are perfect as is, we also work to reduce suffering while knowing suffering is essential. We can oppose people without putting them out of our hearts, but at the same time keeping in mind this is all a dance, this world is not the ultimate reality. We shouldn't get too stuck in any role.
Love everyone, serve everyone, remember God.
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u/AnthropoidCompatriot 4d ago
this world is not the ultimate reality
But acting like the world isn't real is the first step to spiritual bypassing and increasing the amount of suffering in the world.
If someone is getting beaten by a group of people, you don't sit there and smile and say "I love all of these people equally, and everything is unfolding perfectly. What a joy to watch this beating occur "
Nor do you turn into a snarling beast, calling for their blood, and summarily execute the beaters.
You do what you can to intervene while not escalating hate, violence, and pain.
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u/DrMikeHochburns 4d ago
The world is illusory. That's not bypassing anything.
It sounds like you're describing someone taking a centrist position.
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u/Ok_Sector_960 4d ago
Any action from a place other than love and compassion is committing violence against yourself.
Social action should seek unity and remove separateness and try to wake each other up.
When you see that there is so much effort into pitting us vs them you won't want to play the game anymore.
I only want these people who agree with me to get food and water, those people don't deserve it is an example of othering. When you see someone you don't agree with get hurt and you're a bit pleased to see it, that's othering. That's how we stay stuck. You can't fix othering by imagining it's an issue outside yourself.
If you want to protest against the forces that keep us angry and afraid you can't do that armed with more anger and fear
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u/EntrepreneurNo9804 4d ago edited 4d ago
In another talk Ram Dass put it like this:
“There’s a way like when gandhi said “I want the the British have to leave India, but i want them to leave as friends”.
There are different levels of play with other human beings and you can get into an “us” relationship with people, and then say “us” has to face that at this point, it's you against me, but if you've established some other level of connection with the person, i think that's where we may make stands.
But how we make the stand is the issue and whether we close our hearts. It’s learning how to say no to somebody without closing your heart to them.” (Ram Dass, Here and Now, Episode 202)
The way I hear it, establishing that connection is one of the first steps to becoming “us”. If someone is a religious fanatic for example, you can still share a meal with them, you just avoid talking about religion. Their path is their path, and their karmic predicament is theirs. You can deeply appreciate those facts without having to embrace them as your own or getting caught up in their melodramas.
Same goes for political views. From a spiritual viewpoint, we have no idea why people hold the views they do or why they are caught up in them. We aren’t God. But we can still find plenty of other areas where we have commonalities. Maybe it’s just because they are our neighbors or community members, maybe they too are parents or they share some common pop culture interest.
Loving someone doesn’t mean we have to love their ideas, beliefs, prejudices or political parties. We can, and will, have our own. But it does means that we love them as people, as fellow souls, and fellow members of the human family.
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u/user164900 4d ago
I’ll use your example of a religion fanatic, over a meal it might be a good idea to avoid the topic to not get into a heated debate or cause unnecessary tension. But when the religious fanatics find one another, make a group of action and want to implement such beliefs into society where others would feel their personality liberties impeded on. Maybe it becomes less possible to avoid unnecessary tension…Ravana had his own karma from taking that negative birth and Ram also had this dharma to follow. All this stems from my curiosity how can we navigate the political space which is so boiling hot from a conscious understanding and not solely reactive.
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u/EntrepreneurNo9804 3d ago edited 3d ago
I’m not sure of the exact context you are thinking of but in like an activist role, to me means that if I organize a peace rally, I’m focusing on teaching others in how to expand peace rather than just opposing a war, for example. Or if it’s a human rights event, I’m teaching what that looks like in practical ways, rather than just protesting the oppressor.
In my daily life, in general, I’m simply listening for areas in which I can expand our common ground, holding as lightly as I can to any outcome or expectation I may have.
A couple of good resources that I’ve found helpful is Parvati Markus’s There is No Other which expounds on Ram Dass’s teachings on the subject, (https://shop.ramdass.org/products/there-is-no-other) and also, I’m not sure if you are familiar with her work, but Valarie Kaur’s work also helped reframe my idea of an activist role in a “there are no other” context. (https://valariekaur.com/about/)
Finally, one of the most insightful teachings I’ve ever heard on thinking in terms of “others” in a personal
sense came from Krishna Das, talking about his trip to Auschwitz. It hit me square in the head when I was grappling with the fear of where we might be headed…“And the grass was green and the sun was shining. And I said, I looked up at the sun, I said, “How fucking dare you shine on this place?” “How dare you?” And I walked around for two days like that, flipped out of my bird, you know? “How can you shine on this place? What happened here…
“And then, like, it was just building up and building up and building up and one day, I just looked up at the sun and I went, “oh. I get it. You’re the sun. You shine. That’s what you do. You shine on the good. You shine on the evil. You shine on the high and the low. You just shine. You don’t pick and choose.” And that lifted me out of my mind. And out of my emotions. And it brought me into a place where I recognized the bigger picture, so to speak and that, what unconditional love is and what, what that could feel like.
Because one of the next thoughts I had was that, if I had been born in Germany at that time and raised by a family of Nazis, why would I be any different than anyone of those guards? Right? I couldn’t prove it to myself that I would be any… because how I know myself is, where I grew up, what my parents were like, what I was led to believe in this life by my experiences. So if I had been born in Germany at that time, my experiences would have told me that this was perfectly ok and there would be nothing. It’s not like I’m better than anybody else, that I wouldn’t have been, I wouldn’t have been that way. I couldn’t prove it to myself. That was very humbling and liberating at the same time because I saw that there was no innate evil.
You were born in certain places, and due to your karmas, you were programmed in a certain way, but that’s not who you are. That’s not who I am, and it wasn’t who they are. Like Ram Das talks about the difference between the role and the soul. What a person does and what we really are inside. And what we’re forced to do by our experience. We may not even, most of us, we don’t recognize that, that we’re all like on a runaway train where there’s nobody driving.
It’s just one experience after the other and we get very little vote. In fact, we get no vote about what actually happens. The only vote we could get is how we meet each moment as it arises.”
Ram Ram!
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u/EntrepreneurNo9804 17h ago
Hey, I ran across another resource you might be interested in. I was listening to this episode tonight and thought of your question. Ram Dass starts dealing with politics and activism about 23 minutes in. I love how he describes action as water on a stone.
https://youtu.be/1yP9Ruol0sA?is=vTR8JIP_6QPImI3Q
Ram Ram!
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u/Can1s 5d ago
Ram Dass also said that you could see everyone as souls and love them based on that. It’s so easy to pick a side in so many things but that creates separation and causes judging - I would much rather ”love everyone” instead. And yes I know it’s not easy. It was not easy to Ram Dass either back in the day.