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joanbaez

@pivic@kolektiva.social

14d

#RamDass #humanism #JoanBaez #book #reading #quote @bookstodon @bookstodon@fedigroups.social

Ram Dass was no stranger to “us” versus “them.” In Be Here Now, he defined that polarization as “Hippies create police; police create hippies. If you’re in polarity, you’re creating polar opposites.” Ram Dass didn’t run from the contrasting forces of good and evil, yes and no, pleasure and pain, loss and gain. He didn’t complain on social media. He didn’t lecture against anything or anyone. He didn’t ask his followers to vote for a certain party or stick to a particular spiritual path. Instead, he dove into his guru’s instructions to love everyone. He put a framed picture of the person who most represented the polar opposite of his personal beliefs on his altar, right next to the images of his guru and other beings who point the way to oneness. And he would try to open his heart to love the “other” as a soul, not as the role they played in society.

If I develop my identity as a teacher, I need you as an audience or students in order to legitimize my definition of myself. So I’m constantly looking to you. I’m manipulating you to get you to give me back something I need to reassure me that I am who I think I am. The identification with my own separateness starts to make me use everybody around me to get that. You can feel that in your own lives again and again and again. If you feel yourself to be a competent mother, you need your children to be a certain way to legitimize your role as a mother. The minute you need somebody else to fulfill a model you have of yourself, you start to manipulate the other person. Don’t think the other person doesn’t feel manipulated. They do. And then you’re dealing with an interesting situation in which you are creating paranoia in other people who feel that they are being used and exploited.

Joan Baez found her commitment to nonviolence pushed to the limits in the ruins of Sarajevo. Everywhere she went, her strong silver voice was accompanied by the staccato sounds of shelling from the hills around the bloodied city. She went, she said, not with any answers but as a nonviolent response to what was happening there. She wanted to share her life and her music and be a witness to people who were undergoing such tremendous suffering. She told me, “The best thing I could have done was just to be there because they are, for the most part, no longer afraid of dying. They are afraid of being forgotten.” As Baez trudged through the muddy landing strip on her way out of Sarajevo, a young woman who attended the concert came up to her and said, “Thank you for coming. You have brought us life.” That’s all Joan needed to know. It had been the right thing to do. How do you bring life to somebody? How does that infusion take place between people? The ability for two people to fulfill their roles inherent in their relationship without being trapped by them so they meet behind their roles, they meet in being together. That is an infusion. What a play, what a dance! As the poet Rabindranath Tagore said, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.” You are ready to be an instrument of the relief of suffering.

When people are only in their minds, they’re very dry, brittle, cynical, frightened, tight people. When you first realize how caught you are in your own mind, very often you try to push it violently away, which is the renunciation path. It’s like this is all a crock and I’m going to the Himalayas. I’m going to go into a cave and stay away from the cities. But that is the newness of realizing there are other realities; you push against one to get to another one. After a while you realize that if you are pushing against anything, you may be getting high but you’re not getting free. Being free means you’re not standing anywhere or you are standing everywhere, meaning you are both the One and the many.

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