 Dear Friends,
A new book by the spiritual teacher Ram Dass has just been published by Piatkus. It’s called One Liners and it’s a collection of quotes taken from Ram Dass’s talks. He chose these particular sayings because he felt that, at those moments when he said them, he was aligned with a higher level of consciousness.
Aligning ourselves with a higher level of consciousness is, it could be said, the core goal of all twenty-first century spirituality. (Thomas Moore talks a great deal about this in his new book, The Soul’s Religion.) Today, our spiritual concepts are being stripped of all the old, ego-based guilt, ‘thou shalt nots’, judgement and fear with which they almost always used to come packaged, and we are learning to measure our beliefs against the standard of unconditional love, rather than the standards of religious dogma. And our understanding of what it means to align with a higher consciousness is becoming simpler, clearer, too, as more and more people gain their own practical experience of this higher state. You can see this, for instance in The Four Agreements and The Mastery of Love. Don Miguel Ruiz’s teachings are so simple, yet so powerful and liberating.
Or take, for instance, the following extract from Ram Dass’s introduction to One Liners. In the past, people have written great tomes of bewildering language on the subject of the relationship between Spirit, soul and body. But Ram Dass makes it all so simple and, more importantly, so free of judgement..... ,
‘I’d like to share with you a little something of the particular metaphysical context from which I operate. I have been working on a paradigm that proposes that we, as awarenesses, inhabit three planes of consciousness. You might say that we each have three “I’s” Number One “I” is on the physical and psychological plane; we’ll call that the “Ego”. The Ego is the administrator for the physical plane, and the experiencer of the incarnation. The second “I”, Number Two, is on an astral plane, where we function as individual spiritual beings. We’ll call it the “Soul”. And then the third “I” is on the plane where we are realized beings; we’ll just call that “Number Three”. As Number Three, we are the loving, creative wisdom that is God. Now it isn’t a question of our being on one of these three planes and not on the others; we exist on all three planes, all the time. However, we usually identify with only one of them, and ignore the others. Then out of that identification comes our perception, the window through which we perceive the whole cosmos. And the view from each of the three planes gives us very different perspectives: the perspective from incarnation, the perspective from karma, and the perspective from Nothingness. The perspective from incarnation – the perspective of Ego – we know all too well. The perspective of Soul is the perspective from which we see everything as perfectly unfolding karmic law, as a pattern of cause and effect. And the perspective from Nothingness, from Number Three, is the experience of being pure Awareness, pure Being-ness.
Out of its creative lila, through its play, Number Three creates Number Two; it creates the Soul out of itself. The Soul is never entirely separate from Number Three, but it’s somehow distinguished by a sort of net of karma, which prevents it from experiencing its identity with Number Three any more. So then the soul chooses a sequence of incarnations, of Number Ones, that will help it work out its karma, and eventually release it back into Number Three. That is, the Soul enters into a concatenation of experiences that will allow it to acquire wisdom, through suffering and through love. And over time, as it runs through the various story lines that gradually “neutralize” its karma, the Soul is freed to merge again with Number Three. That’s the basic paradigm I’ve been developing – what I call my “Three-Plane Awareness” model.’
So, if we continue using Ram Dass’s terminology, the ideal situation – the state we all yearn for – is when Number Three, Number Two and Number One are all talking to each other, and are all in the right pecking order, i.e. Number Three guiding Number Two, and Number Two guiding Number One. Our unruly thoughts, however, often make such a noise that no higher voice can be heard above all that din.
That’s why spiritual teachers such as Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov tell us that taming our thoughts is the most important task for human beings at this time. How do we do this? Well, we all know the obvious answers: meditate, pray, and live a daily life that reflects our high aspirations. But have you ever thought about the humble act of reading? We often notice how reading an uplifting book, or even a special sentence, can have the same effect on our minds and hearts as combing our hair or taking a shower has on our bodies. Our whole system can become somehow ordered, cleaned, if the ideas expressed in the book have a high enough quality. That’s why we hope you’ll like not only One Liners, but also the book below it, The Source of All our Strength, a collection of inspiring quotes from White Eagle. Both these books are small enough to keep on your desk or in your bag (or even in the bathroom), so you can have a quick look at them whenever you get a spare moment, and use them to ‘bring your mind back home’.
With much love from all of us.
Geoff, Ann, Martyn, Jackie, Jacqueline, Eileen, Sarah, Lynette, Regina, Irina, Penny, Belinda, Catherine, Richard, Brian, Will, Phil, Alison, Mary, Derek, Eddie, Louisa, Jon, Sam & Pat
Text & photographs © Cygnus Books 20-Jun-2006
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