Past, present, and future are all here – you just have the illusion of going through time and going through incarnation, but when you are fully awakened out of that, you realize that it was here all the time, all of it was here, and the fact that you think you’re on a time trail is just within your mind.

It’s a very deep level, but it’s within the mind, which works in time and space; awakening is built into the system. I mean, I’ve watched and I’ve learned how to pump people up into experiencing a moment of awakening, but sometimes it’s like having a tire with a big leak in it, and you pump it all up, and they say ‘Ooohhh yeah,’ and then you turn around a moment later, and they’re all ‘grrrrrrr,’ and greed, and desire, and lust, and fear, and you think ‘What happened?!’ Somebody else, you touch them and they open up, and everything changes in their life, and they never go back.

After a while, I learned to listen more carefully to who people are, and where they are in the evolutionary scale, and to then be less manipulative – less trying to get them to be something other than what they are. Instead, it becomes about honoring who they are and where they are at that moment, and understanding the appropriateness of where they are, and that it’s unfolding fine, and appreciating it.

I mean, one of the greatest things that happened to me in my relationships with my father was when I finally allowed him to be who he was, instead of trying to make him into who I thought he should be. When he stopped trying to make me into who he thought I should be, we could become friends. So my sense is that you deal with this funny statement of, ‘There’s nothing to do, so do it.’ At the higher level, there’s nothing to do, because it’s all unfolding, but at that level of ego you want to do something. The person who is ‘doing it’ never gets enlightened anyway.

You also understand that the ego who says, ‘Oooohh, I can awaken,’ is gonna die in the process. What is enlightened is not who you think you are, but who you are. So, even the trying will finally have to be given up. Like Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche once said when I sat with him in meditation, “Ram Dass, let’s just do this specific meditation of expanding outward.” So we started to expand outward, looking at each other’s eyes. Then he said, “Ram Dass, are you trying?” I said “Oh, yeah,” he says “No Ram Dass, don’t try. Just expand.” It’s that interesting thing of ‘what do you do when you don’t try?’

See, people come and they say, “I oughta meditate,” and I say “Don’t.” Then other people come and say, “Oh, thank God, I can meditate,” and it’s just a timing process. We often live in our minds ahead of our intuitive readiness for something, because we think our way into things, and we tend to overkill with our minds, so we know where we think we’re going before we’re ready to go there… The result is we’re always in our thoughts, which are a little ahead of ourselves. We won’t slow down enough to be in it fully with our beings.

-Ram Dass