"I am loving awareness."
The Mature Teaching
If Be Here Now was the young teacher's instruction, loving awareness was the old man's distillation — the whole path folded down into four words he could offer as a practice and a home. "I am loving awareness." Say it, and then notice what it asks of you. It asks you to drop your attention out of the noisy attic of the head and let it settle in the heart, in the chest, where a quieter kind of knowing lives. From there you watch. You watch the thoughts, the moods, the sensations pass — the same witness consciousness that runs through all his teaching — but now the witness isn't cold or detached. It is soaked in love. Awareness, when it rests in the heart, turns out to be made of love. It doesn't judge what passes; it simply loves it, and stays.
Being Love, Not Doing It
The turn Ram Dass kept insisting on is subtle and total. Loving awareness is not a thing you do — not a chore of being nice, not effortful compassion pumped out toward others. It is a thing you are, once you stop obscuring it. Consciousness recognizing itself, and finding that its own nature is love. This lines up exactly with the Vedantic ground beneath the whole collection: if the deepest self is not personal but universal, then to rest as awareness is to rest as the one Self, and that Self is love. You don't manufacture the love. You uncover it by getting quiet enough to notice it was there under the chatter all along. This is where Meditation leads when it stops being escape and becomes recognition — presence and love turning out to be the same thing.
Fierce Grace
In 1997 a massive stroke nearly killed him and left him aphasic, half-paralyzed, dependent on others for the rest of his life. He could have called it the end of the teaching. Instead he called it fierce grace — grace that arrives not as comfort but as a hard hand that breaks you open. The stroke stripped away the fluent, quick, performing self, and what was left had to teach from silence and struggle, groping for words, sitting in a wheelchair by the ocean. And the teaching didn't shrink. It deepened. The man who had told everyone to be here now was handed a now he could not escape, a body he could not fix, and he met it with the very awareness he'd been pointing at all along. He often said the stroke taught him more about loving awareness than the decades before it — that suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation, doing its slow work of smoothing us out. The wound became the classroom.
Related
- Ram Dass — The teacher, the collection
- Be Here Now — The earlier instruction this matured from
- Meditation — Resting attention in the heart
- Neem Karoli Baba — The love this teaching came from
- Walking Each Other Home — Where it turned toward death
- Vedanta — Consciousness recognizing itself
- Healing — The wound as teacher
- Consciousness — Awareness knowing itself
- Spirituality — The broader practice
"The quieter you become, the more you can hear."