Ram Dass: The Paradigm of Soul and Awareness
An informal talk
Bay Area Conference Center, Tiburon, 1996*
e find ourselves trapped in what we might call the conceptual prison of the Ego. Yet, with the emergence of the witness—that observing presence within us—we begin to bring consciousness into our lives, particularly into the process of aging. If the way out of Ego is into Soul and Awareness, we need to look more closely at what those planes truly are. We’ve considered the curriculum of the Ego; now it’s time to step back and reflect on the curriculum of the Soul. It offers a broader, more expansive perspective for our journey.
In the three-plane model I’ve shared, Awareness is undifferentiated. In the West, this is what we often call “God.” In Hebrew, it’s written as G-d, a reminder that the Divine is unspeakable. The letters point to the formless—they are fingers pointing at the moon. The word “God” merely refers to a concept, while what it represents lies far beyond the conceptual mind. This is the spiritual dilemma: how do we use words to speak about what is beyond language? Perhaps the best we can do is to admit the limitations, then proceed anyway, but cautiously.
There is God. There is the formless. The unmanifest. The immanent. And then, through some unimaginable process, the unmanifest becomes form. It becomes many. This is often called the beginning of the descent.
“Descent” can carry negative connotations, like “descent into hell,” but here it simply means the creative gesture: the formless into form. It’s the moment of “in the beginning,” the moment time itself begins. “In the beginning was God,” and then God created separation. Through that act, multiplicity emerged. But this event exists beyond time; Awareness has no past, present, or future. Time and timelessness are one and the same, a polarity that appears as soon as form appears. Light and dark. Yin and yang. Good and evil. These polarities are how manifestation happens.
The question we often ask is: Why did it happen? Who made this happen? Some teachings offer poetic responses. Emmanuel, a being of light who speaks through Pat Rodegast, once said: “You are, and your is-ness is creativity. You are the creative spark.” Or take another view: Awareness, the One, cannot know itself—it just is. But when it creates the many, and then merges back into itself, it becomes capable of self-awareness. It sees itself mirrored in the multiplicity.
Other teachings say there is no answer to that question—not one that can be known with the rational mind. You can be the answer, but never know the answer. The Buddha said, essentially, it’s none of your business. He didn’t mean that dismissively; rather, your rational mind is too small a subsystem to grasp the larger meta-system. It can’t comprehend the mystery, because the mystery includes more than the mind can hold.
From the point of view of the One, nothing ever happened. The One becomes the many, the many forget, the many remember, the One dances as many—and all of that is happening always, simultaneously. From that perspective, the question “Why did it happen?” dissolves. Nothing did. The mystical answer is: it always was, and it always wasn’t.
Yet, however or why-ever it happened, the Big Bang occurred. The One became the many. Awareness fragmented into a multiplicity of forms—of Souls. Each Soul is unique, like a snowflake, defined by its own characteristics. This uniqueness is the delight of God coming to know itself through diversity. Souls are different because of their psychic DNA, their karma. Karma is what the Soul clings to, which keeps it seemingly separate from Awareness. Karma creates the membrane of separateness; working it out is how the Soul journeys back to God.
The Soul manifests on many planes, including the physical-social plane we call incarnation. Each Soul uses the conditions of its incarnation—its genetics, its environment, its storyline—to work through its karma. It’s all lawful. There are no coincidences. This body, this life, this set of conditions? All part of the curriculum.
The Ego experiences incarnation as real. The Soul sees it as relatively real. The game of life has internal consistency, like a novel or a play, but you can also step outside the story and see it as only one of many stories. Aging, from the Ego’s perspective, is a decline. But from the Soul’s view, it is a phase in the unfolding of karma.
So how do we engage life fully, without being caught in it? The answer is not to deny the Ego, but to hold it within a larger awareness. You are an incarnation, but you are also a Soul. And both exist within Awareness.
There is no free will in the Ego plane; everything is unfolding lawfully according to karma. Even the Soul is subject to karmic law. Only Awareness is free. As you identify more with Soul and Awareness, your life becomes less reactive and more expressive of creativity. You become both the creator and the created.
There’s old karma—what brought you into this life—and new karma, which you create when you cling. A desire arises. You cling to it. That clinging sets a new cycle in motion. If you witness the desire without attachment, it dissolves. But if you identify with it, you’re back in the loop.
Our desires shape our perceptions. Motivation determines what we see. If you’re hungry, you’ll notice restaurants. If you’re lonely, you’ll notice companionship. Desire filters the infinite stimuli around you into manageable meaning. It’s the Soul’s karma playing itself out.
The Ego reacts to suffering by resisting or identifying with it. The Soul witnesses it. Suffering, from the spiritual perspective, is grace. It awakens. It burns away the clinging. Yet, to tell someone in the midst of suffering that it is grace is unkind. You must meet them where they are.
Compassion arises from your relationship with suffering. If you’re fully in Ego, you try to fix suffering and burn out. If you’re rooted in Soul, you offer a space of love and presence that allows others to remember who they truly are. Compassion is not personal; it’s grace flowing through form.
The Soul’s journey eventually brings it to the edge of Awareness, where even the separateness of the Soul dissolves. This is the poetry of Rumi and Kabir, the Lover yearning for the Beloved. But at the final merging, there is no more Lover and Beloved. No more Soul. Only Awareness.
The paradox is this: nobody gets enlightened. Nobody crosses into Awareness. The “you” dissolves at the threshold. Awareness remains. You were always there; you just forgot.
Having returned to Awareness, you re-enter the world differently. You live as Ego, Soul, and Awareness simultaneously. Nothing is denied. You are fully human, fully divine, and free. You dance in form without being caught by it.
This is the curriculum. You use your separateness to transcend separateness. You become a Soul. You become Awareness. And you come back to be all three at once. You meet others as people, as Souls, and as the One. And you laugh, because there’s only One of us, in drag.
*This talk was recorded before Ram Dass’s stroke, at a time when he was collecting material for a book he planned to write on aging.