Ram Dass presents various scenarios about the state of the world. What’s your favorite scenario about our future? Is it optimistic, pessimistic, or somewhere in between? What would you LIKE it to be? Share and let’s discuss!
My thoughts are in between… looking at the capitalist world where everyone is running behind something, having ego in them to achieve things (materialistically) it is not bad to have aspirations to have something but I feel we are trapped in some kind of loop. There are countries suffering, fighting over something which is harming people makes me worry about how future world will look like however looking at the other part as a human race we have come so far but I am really confused and worried…
We hit what we look at? Did RD say that? A bit more context please.
Incredibly optimistic! Y’know Terence McKenna used to do a touch of applied Buddhism in giving various lectures about a paradigm he invented, which he called “the image at the end of time”. He would construe the determinism of an individuated life, whether it be human or otherwise, as clearly of a nature that upon it’s completion, one finds themselves utterly “communed” with the “image at the end of time”, which to him was a metaphor for an ideal being/God. Time is a potency of spirit in most religious systems, a tool by which individuated consciousness can either grow eternal or awaken to the aspects of it which are by passing through it. The idea that it can do anything other than tick towards a singular, blissful, destination is nonsense, and also to is the notion that life is qualitatively, as a whole, anything short of victorious/robustly good. While we must live gracefully in the midst of suffering, the dynamics of life are as such that suffering is to be overcome and naturally is overcome as beings accumulate life experience…one hand washes the other in this world…we practice, often, just to reintegrate the conviction that it is as such.
I must say, when RD spoke of nuclear devastation as if it was a very real possibility, it just seemed silly. It doesn’t seem all that possible, especially in the vicinity of mystical insight/conceptual analysis of concepts akin to the “transcendental soul” or “the determinism of phenomena”. In fact, the anxiety quietly seems to affirm ultimately a need to transcend entirely secular framings when dealing with…spirituality…ultimately spirit needs to maybe enter as a group of paradigms/area of focus?
I have vacillated between the two extremes. Before taking this course, I would’ve said Armageddon. After listening to Ram Dass, I’d say that’s no longer the question.
I think it was on Monday’s lessons that Ram Dass said something like (brutal paraphrasing) he realized 15 years earlier that it didn’t matter which extreme won out: he wanted to enter into either one of those scenarios with an open heart, calm mind, and the desire to help the suffering.
For me, that is a roadmap to get through the illusion of us and them. I can let go of my anger toward the Armageddon side, keep working to calm my mind, open my heart and help others. That’s strong medicine right there.
Teri ~ 