THE JOURNEY FROM DUALISM TO NON-DUALISM

Interviewer (David L. Smith): The word “initiative,” what does it mean to you?

Ram Dass: To take initiative means to find that place in you that is responsible for the universe. And that part isn’t ego. It’s something deeper than that. It’s not ego control. A lot of people think responsibility is, you ought to be responsible, meaning and I’m being responsible in an ego sense. But if you go inside or behind your own ego, your own mind, you come to a place where you experience being a co-creator in the universe, in which you see the way in which your mind creates the universe in which you dwell.

And then you start to accept—you knowledge that part of your identity. And that’s what I mean by acknowledging responsibility. And that’s where initiative comes from. All the rest of it is mechanical runoff. You have the choice of being the victim or the creator. That’s it. And most people think it’s too much hutzpah to think that they’re the creator, so they’re busy being the victim, because as long as you identify with the body or the personality or your own mind, that’s all stuff and that’s all law and that’s all lawfully running off. And if you identify with that, you feel like you’ve been had by the universe, because you feel like you’re at the whim of overwhelming forces all the time. And the minute you get into that part of you that’s not in time or space, you will experience at that moment what it means to be the creator of the universe. The creator is formless. You are formless as well as form.

Interviewer: Is that the relationship between initiative and initiation?

Ram Dass: Initiation is into that space. Yes. In fact, all yoga’s, all religions, all methods are designed to take you from dualism into non-dualism, from the two into the one. Not to stay in the one and reject the two, but to come back into dualism, into the two, into form, but be as Christ said, “in the world, but not of the world,” so that you acknowledge that formless part of yourself, through initiation, through moving into that space, that formless part, that is the creator. And you are both the creator and your creation. I mean, this is my creation, and I am the creator of this.