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Informationen zum Autor Ram Dass, edited by Daniel Goleman with Dwarkanath Bonner and Dale Borglum, illustrated by Vincent Piazza Klappentext Find the practice that's right for you with this exploration of the many paths of meditation-from mantra, prayer, singing, visualizations, and "just sitting" to movement meditations such as tai chi "Everyone has experienced a moment of pure awareness. A moment without thinking 'I am aware' or 'that is a tree.' Such moments bring a sense of rightness, of clarity, of being at one. Such moments are the essence of meditation."-Ram Dass Ram Dass is an American psychologist and spiritual teacher who has studied and practiced meditation for many years. Here he shares his understanding and suggests how you can find methods suitable for you. He illuminates the stages and benefits of meditative practice, and provides wise and often humorous advice on overcoming difficulties along the way.1 GETTING YOUR BEARINGS The Flow There have been moments in your life when you were pure awareness. No concepts, no thoughts like “I am aware” or “That is a tree” or “Now I am meditating.” Just pure awareness. Openness. A spacious quality in your existence. Perhaps it happened as you sat on a river bank and the sound of the river flowed through you. Or as you walked on the beach when the sound of the ocean washed away your thinking mind until all that remained was the walking, the feeling of your feet on the sand, the sound of the surf, the warmth of the sun on your head and shoulders, the breeze on your cheek, the sound of the seagull in the distance. For that moment your image of yourself was lost in the gestalt, in the totality of the moment. You were not clinging to anything. You were not holding on to the experience. It was flowing—through you, around you, by you, in you. At that moment you were the experience. You were the flow. There was no demarcation between you-sun-ocean-sand. You had transcended the separation that thought creates. You were the moment in all its fullness. Everyone has had such experiences. These moments are ones in which we have “lost ourselves,” or been “taken out of ourselves,” or “forgotten ourselves.” They are moments in flow. It is in these moments of your life that there is no longer separation. There is peace, harmony, tranquillity, the joy of being part of the process. In these moments the universe appears fresh; it is seen through innocent eyes. It all begins anew. The past has flown away. The coming month and year do not exist; Ours only is the present’s tiny point. —Shabistari The Secret Rose Garden of Sa’d Ud Din Mahmud Shabistari We try so hard to overcome the separateness. More intimacy. More rubbing of bodies. More exchanging of ideas. But always it’s as if you are yelling out of your room and I am yelling out of mine. Even trying to get out of the room invests the room with a reality. Who am I? The room that the mind built. We spend so much effort to get out of something that didn’t exist until we created it. Something that is gone in a moment. We’ve all had moments when there was no room. But we freaked. Or explained it away, ignored it, or let it pass by. A moment. The moment of orgasm. The moment by the ocean when there is just the wave. The moment of being in love. The moment of crisis when we forget ourselves and do just what is needed. We each come out again and again. We turn and look and realize we’re out—and panic. We run back in the room, close the door, panting heavily. Now I know where I am. I’m back home. Safe. No matter how squalid the room is, no matter how unmade the bed, no matter how many bugs are crawling around the kitchen. Safe. These moments appear again and again in our lives. For many people it first comes as a glimpse into other states of consciousness bro...
