You Don't Have to Learn To Let Go

Ram Dass said,

“The matter of consciousness is how quickly you give up a past model, so that you can be here and now.”

Try something with me.

Make a fist.

Right now, whichever hand is free.

Close it tightly and hold it.

Feel how much work this takes.

The fingers. The palm. The forearm!

Now stop.

Don’t open your hand.

Just stop closing it.

Now watch. It opens by itself.

Nobody ever had to teach a hand how to open.

Opening is not another task.

It is what happens when you stop doing the closing!

Opening up does not begin with doing something.

It begins with something we give something up.

Not master.

Not overcome.

Stop closing ourselves.

Because that’s what we do when the ground shakes.

We grip.

Old models held more tightly.

We tell ourselves how things are supposed to work.

Whose fault this is!

What is coming nex!

We grip our personal models hard too.

We tell ourselves we’re the informed one.

The strong one.

The one who can handle anything.

The mind believes the grip is keeping us safe.

Loosen this, it whispers, and who would you even be?

But feel what the gripping costs.

In the body first.

The jaw.

The shoulders.

The chest that never quite loosens up.

Love needs room.

The tighter we hold ourselves together, the less able we are to hold each other.

So now return to the strange word in Ram Dass’s sentence.

Quickly.

He did not measure consciousness by how much you know.

He measured it by how quickly you can put an old model down!

Because the models are maps.

The ground moved.

The map has to change.

And notice what he says appears when the old model drops:

Here and now.

The only place love has ever lived.

The only place joy has ever happened.

Not inside the model of how things should be.

Here. Now.

So what does a loosened person look like in an unsteady world?

Ram Dass gave us a beautiful picture:

“When you get on the bus now and then, there’s a bus driver who’s so high and beautiful that everybody that gets on his bus feels better when they get off the bus than when they get on the bus. He’s just driving the bus. He just happens to be Buddha driving a bus.”

Just driving the bus.

Not fixing the world.

Not winning the argument.

Not gripping anything.

Just unclenched, in public, doing an ordinary thing.

And every passenger breathes a little easier.

If someone came to mind while you read this, send it to them.