Sansaku: I Know the Feeling
5/4/24
I told a friend a couple of Ram Dass stories and now I’m started. He came to campus in the nineties and we got ourselves invited to hang with him at dinner. He was headed for Japan; he’d never been there and wanted some pointers. Chyako taught him to apologize.
I first met him twenty years earlier. He was speaking in Loveland and my roommate at the camp where I worked in Estes Park had traveled with Ram Dass through India. Again, got ourselves invited to the after party. Stoned and sitting in a circle, he put me in the spotlight and started making faces. This went on for an uncomfortably long time. My roommate felt sorry for me and was glad it wasn’t him.
My experience was strange. He let me see all parts of him, the foolish and the wise. He seemed to say: “We’re no different, you and I.” When I told him the story, this is what he said: “I thought you were weird.”
Before the talk we spent some time in the group room at the counseling center. He said he’d spent a hundred grand on therapy without a cure. But when he made friends with his neuroses, they didn’t bother him. I’ve been doing this with cancer. The coming blood draw is feedback on our relationship. Ram Dass is right, I’m weird.
One of my dream group students became a care-giver for Ram Dass after his stroke. He described the place in Hawaii and what it was like to live alongside a guru. It sounds like he’d become completely normal. That’s a rare achievement in the modern world for a human.
Whether or not this is true, doesn’t really matter. It’s the thought. And when he began his talk that night, he said he’d told these stories so many times he wasn’t sure they’d happened. I know the feeling.
bestslowly 