Fierce Grace
The following article was written by Elizabeth Lesser, co-founder of the Omega Institute and author of ‘Broken Open’. It was published recently at Integral Institute. It really expresses a great truth about our souls and who we really are.
In the 1960s a young psychology professor named Richard Alpert left his teaching position at Harvard in a blaze of infamy. The son of a wealthy Boston Railroad magnate, and a brilliant scholar and teacher, he was the first professor to be fired from Harvard. His radical research with Timothy Leary into the use of LSD for psychological healing and the expansion of consciousness did not endear him to the staid academic community at the university.
Alpert went on in life to become Ram Dass, named by a guru in India who saw in him someone who could live up the meaning of his name, “servant of God”. And he did. He has been a guide for a generation of spiritual seekers. In 1971, his groundbreaking work,
Be Here Now, was the best-selling book in the English language, outselling even Dr. Spock.s Baby and Child Care. More than anyone.more than the Beatles, more than the Dalai Lama.Ram Dass deserves the credit for translating into the vernacular of the West, the ancient spiritual wisdom
I have known Ram Dass for many years: first as his student when he returned from India in the early 1970s; then as a colleague when he led retreats at Omega Institute, and sat on our board of directors; and later as a friend who helped me weather the storms of my divorce. Most recently, Ram Dass has needed help. This is a new position for him to be in.to be helpless, to be the one who needs help rather than the one who gives it. He is the middle of a Phoenix Process, and he is the first to admit it. He is learning to be helpless.
Many people only know the Ram Dass they read about or see from a distance at a conference or retreat. They know him as a wise, compassionate, and utterly brilliant man. I know that man, and I also know a different man: I know the man who hated to depend on
The other Ram Dass infuriated me. I fought with that Ram Dass at board meetings and threw my hands up in exasperation during retreats when he resisted my attempts at organization.He accused me of being controlling. I told him he had issues with powerful women; that he liked to play the wild boy and assign me the role of his overbearing mother. For years we danced between appreciating each other and keeping our distance. As I once heard him say to a thousand people at a conference, .Human interactions reflect a dance between love and fear.. That certainly described our relationship.
Then something happened that changed Ram Dass, and changed my relationship with him. It began one evening in 1997, when he was in bed at his home in California, thinking about how to end a book he was writing on the subject of aging. “Lying there in the dark,” he writes in his book
Still Here
By the time help arrived, Ram Dass was still on the floor. “There I was,” he writes, “flat on my back, still caught in my ‘dream’ of the very old man, who had now fallen down because his leg wouldn’t work .. My next recollection is of a group of firemen, straight out of central casting, staring into the old man’s face while I observed the whole thing as if from a doorway to
It was later, when he began to feel the pain of his condition, that Ram Dass understood the gravity of the situation. Only ten percent of people who suffered his type of stroke survive. Being who he was.someone practiced in the art of prayer and mindfulness, someone who had lectured for years on accepting suffering as ‘grist for the mill’ - he did not take his survival for granted. There was a reason he was still alive, and he set about to discover what it was.
“Three hospitals and hundreds of hours of rehabilitation later,” Ram Dass writes, “I gradually eased into my new post-stroke life as someone in a wheelchair, partially paralyzed, requiring round-the-clock care, and a degree of personal attention that made me uncomfortable.
All my life I had been a ‘helper’; I had even collaborated on a book called
How Can I Help?
This is me, that was ‘him’”
I had not seen, or even talked to the old ‘him’ for several years. My last communication with Ram Dass had been in a letter sent after a board meeting. I wrote to complain about something he had said in the meeting; something that had hurt my feelings. He never wrote back.
The next time he came to teach at Omega, I was out of town. Then he left Omega’s board of directors and I had even less reason to see him. And then he had the stroke.
During his recovery, friends kept me updated on his set-backs and his progress. At first he was on a respirator; he couldn’t talk; he couldn’t eat. His right side was completely paralyzed.The doctors did not know if he would ever walk or speak again. Friends rallied to his side. But I didn’t because I was occupied with something else. The week before Ram Dass’ stroke, my father - who, at 85 was in better shape than I will ever be - went skiing, as he often did, came home, ate dinner, went to sleep next to my mother, and never woke up. Out of the clear blue sky, my father died. He was one of the ninety percent that did not survive a massive stroke.
For months, there was little room in my heart for anything but the enormous grief I felt from the sudden loss of my father. I couldn.t bear to even think about Ram Dass confined to a w
A year after his stroke, I went to California to meet the ‘new’ Ram Dass. Crossing over the Golden Gate Bridge, I was brought back in time to when I first met Ram Dass, when I was living in San Francisco. I mulled over the experiences that made me who I am today, and realized that Ram Dass had been a part of almost all of them. In many ways, he reminded me of my father - the guy out in front on the hiking trail, clearing the brush and setting the pace, never looking back, assuming that the other wayfarers could make it on their own
, should make it on their own. When I was four years old my father took me to the top of a ski trail, pointed my skis downhill, and said, “Follow me!” And when I was 19, and I read Be Here Now,
Now my father was dead, Ram Dass was in a wheelchair, and I was dancing on my own. I walked up the path to his cottage in Marin County, the bright California sunshine shimmering through the oak trees, and saw Ram Dass sitting on the porch. He was slumped over in the wheelchair, his trembling right arm tied to chair.s railing, his white hair in Einsteinian disarray. He looked up at me and waved with his good hand. “Elizabeth!” he called with delight. I caught my breath and tears came to my eyes. My heart broke open. I felt as if I had come home, after a long exile.
“I’m home, dear!” I joked.
“Yes, you’re home,” Ram Dass said sincerely. “Welcome home.”
What ensued will go down in the record of my heart as one of those rare times in life when you finally rest - when you put down the burden of striving, and a sense of wellbeing spreads like honey into every corner of your consciousness. There was nowhere else to go, nothing to do, no one to be - just now, just this precious day, these shared breaths with a friend. I learned something that afternoon that will serve me for the rest of my life. All along in my relationship with Ram Dass I had been aware of two sides of the man.the brilliant teacher Ram Dass and the frustrating friend Ram Dass. But now I was with a third Ram Dass, one who seemed to be both simpler and grander than the other two combined. This was not yet another side of the man.this was his soul, his core, his true self. The other Ram Dasses stepped aside in deference, as if they were merely surface level apparitions; as if the ‘good’ Ram Dass was a
temporary ghost, formed of genetic gifts and karmic awards, and the ‘bad’ Ram Dass was made of learned defenses, coping mechanisms, and old wounds. This new Ram Dass, this soul version, contained the other two and transformed them into a whole and luminous being. Of course, the Ram Dass I was now greeting had been there all the time. It was not just something in him that had changed to allow the soul to shine through. Something had shifted in me too, so that my soul was greeting his, and we both had come home.
“I understand,” I said. “What did you lose? What did fierce grace take away?”
“Ego,” Ram Dass said, making the motion of a blade slashing his throat, Ego, gone. Nothing more to lose. Ego breaks open - then you see who you
really
Perhaps I was finishing his thoughts now, and not just his words, but I looked into Ram Dass’ eyes and I understood what he was trying to tell me. He was saying, “This is the real me. Please always know that behind all of my human behaviors - behind the best of me and the worst of me, behind the ego struggling to survive - is my soul, longing to mingle with yours.. And he was telling me that behind everyone’s learned behaviors and odd eccentricities, lurks a soul, ready to make contact if only coaxed out through a crack in the ego. Would that it take something less than fierce grace to break us open.
Later on, I read in Ram Dass. book a less jumbled description of fierce grace:
For me to see the stroke as grace required a perceptual shift. It was a shift from taking the point of view of the Ego to taking the point of the Soul. I used to be afraid of things like strokes, but I.ve discovered that the fear of the stroke was worse than the stroke itself . . .. I’ve now been given a fully rounded understanding of grace. What was changed through the stroke was my attachment to the Ego. The stroke was unbearable to the Ego, and so it pushed me into the Soul level, because when you bear the unbearable, something within you dies . . .. My identity flipped over and I said,”So that’s who I am. I’m a soul!” I ended up looking at the world from the Soul level in my ordinary, everyday state. And that’s grace. That’s almost the definition of grace. And so that’s why, although from the Ego’s perspective the stroke is not much fun, from the Soul’s perspective it’s been a great learning opportunity. When you are secure in the soul, what’s to fear? Since the stroke I can say to you with an assurance I couldnt have felt before, that faith and love are stronger than any changes, stronger than aging, and, I am very sure, stronger than death.
We laughed at that. And then we sat silently together in the slanting light until it was time for me to leave.
“So now what?” I asked Ram Dass, thinking about our friendship, about his life. “What’s next?”
“Enough is enough.” Ram Dass said. “That’s what next. This is enough.. He squeezed my hand again. Tears rolled down his cheeks.tears that said more than he could ever have said before the stroke. Tears that spoke of forgiveness and love and wonder. There was nothing more to say. I got up. I kissed his cheek, hugged him, and patted the wheelchair. “Good wheelchair,” I said.
As I walked down the path, Ram Dass called to me. I turned around. “Goodbye, Elizabeth,” he called, waving like a fool. “Come home soon!”