Tolle and Ram Dass: Mastery of Life

"The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men
Gang aft agley,
An'lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!"

-- Robert Burns --
("To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with a Plough")

"Mastery of life is not a question of control," observes spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, "but of finding a balance between human and Being."

Our humanity would have us incessantly casting our inner eye backwards and forwards in order to control and tame life, so that our fears and worries are averted and all remorse and bitterness over the past is overcome. Yet, in continual recurrence to this netherworld of past and future ( "I backward cast my e'e. On prospects drear! An' forward, tho' I canna see, I guess an' fear!") we rob ourselves and others of the larger dimension of our Being. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Robert Burns seems wistful, even envious, of the mouse whose nest he has overturned with the plough. The mouse who lives in the Eternal Present knows a dimension of Being unknown to the ploughman who is merely stuck, held prisoner in his unconscious humanity, somewhere between his past and future.

"To do whatever is required of you in any situation without it becoming a role that you identify with is an essential lesson in the art of living that each of us is here to learn," Tolle points out. "You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity."

[Tolle, "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose," pp. 104, 106-107.] 

As Ram Dass observed in his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita: "Whatever karma it is that brought you to this point, it's now your dharma to work with it." To be present to that dharma is to move beyond time-limited humanity and towards eternal Being. It is to be as present as the mouse and not to be enslaved, like the ploughman, to the woeful past and and a fearful future.

[Ram Dass, "Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita," p. 52.]

Doing One's Dharma and Finding One's Path

There are innumerable paths to enlightenment - or, perhaps more accurately, the number of paths to enlightenment is precisely equal to those beings who consciously seek that goal - for each of us approaches the goal of liberation from where we are, by working out our karma, by following our own personal dharma, by walking lightly on the Earth and leaving small footprints.

Unlike traditional Indian society with its castes and classes, and with its four stages of life (the student, the householder, the spiritual aspirant, and the renunciate), modern society - East and West - no longer holds tightly to such rigid distinctions, and everyone must come to understand and work out their particular avenue through life and towards personal liberation.

"In his study of the Bhagavad Gita ("Paths to God"), iconic spiritual teacher Ram Dass notes that "(t)here are very few clear, cultural prescriptions that are deeply ingrained in our society to tell us what to do. So we're faced with having to figure out for ourselves what our dharma might be."

"We have to rely on ourselves," he points out, "we have to listen and hear how our individual differences will determine our appropriate duty moment by moment. All of our circumstances feed into that: If you have a certain type of intellect, of if you have certain economic circumstances, it defines certain paths. If you have a husband or a wife, that defines certain possibilities, and it also defines certain limiting conditions."

"Some people," he observes, "might say, "I can only do a job that is absolutely dharmic, and I would rather starve to death than earn money impurely." Others say, "Look - I'll do the best I can, given my circumstances." There's no judgment in either case; each of us has to hear what each of us has do to."

"If you are a sadhu, if you are single and a renunciate, then maybe you can afford to be more of a purist," he points out, "(as) no one is dependent on you. On the other hand," he points out, "if you are a householder and have a family, then you have certain responsibilities, and you've got to do the best you can. If you are a householder, but you are being such a purist that you don't get enough money to feed your baby, in the long run you will have done more adharma than dharma. If you're in that situation and you find that you have to take a job that doesn't feel entirely dharmic to you, do the best you can to bring as much consciousness as possible into the scene. That's all you can do. You work with what you are given."

"You do that with respect to each aspect of your life," Dass notes. "Whatever your part is," he says," you just play it, but you play it as consciously as you can. That's the most basic form of the concept of doing your dharma: to find your little square on the grid, and then to live it out perfectly."

Ram Dass on Suffering and Grace

The ego - our thinking patterns that create the 'reality' of separateness and individuality, what Einstein called an "optical delusion of consciousness" - will not die without a struggle. The question then becomes a matter of whether we choose to suffer through the pangs of dying to the self or ego voluntarily before dying, or whether we wait, avoiding and fending off the inevitable as best we can

While in both cases there is unavoidable suffering that must be either endured or overcome, with the former - i.e., in dying before dying - there is a powerful teaching that can provide us with wisdom to be used and shared by us in this life. And, we have all had intimations of the greater peace that lies beyond suffering, if only in the sometimes bliss of the dream state.

"He who learns must suffer," writes the Greek poet, Aeschylus. "And in our sleep, pain which we cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

In a powerful video, attached below, spiritual teacher Ram Dass utilizes this wisdom from Aeschylus on suffering to take the viewer through the insights he and his step-mother received when he attended her on her death bed. But in doing so he omits the first sentence of the above passage and stresses the last clause of the well-known quote; that is, "the awful grace of God" that emerges as a respite from egoic suffering.

Ram Dass notes that after his step-mother had endured the pain, and come out the other side from her physical and existential suffering, her ego lifted and a new force of pure being emerged.

"I watched that ego finally surrender and this spirit come forth," he says. "And the being that I was then with was like being in the presence of just pure grace. And her death was absolutely just like ink going into water. It just dissolved. . . just a breathing out. And I saw this being who I never expected to see in our lives together emerge, and  I had to admit that it was the pain and suffering that beat that ego down for this other thing to come through. And I knew that I never could have done that to her. And it was the awful grace, the awful grace. . . ."

Out of this experience, Dass says, he has learned to see death as "the unfolding perfection of the universe," knowing that the person who dies to self, or dies to the ego, is entering upon what he calls "a new curriculum" offered up by the universe. And it is a "new curriculum" which is available, presumably, for the spiritual seeker who is brave enough to endure the suffering of his or her own volition and, in so doing, die to self. For wisdom teachings from all ages and continents have spoken of the dark night of the soul, and the suffering that must be endured in order for a new being free of the ego to emerge.