Dissolving the Fear, Finding Your Own Beauty - Ram Dass

It takes us a long time, many of us more longer than others, to come up out of the the darkness of our feelings of unworthiness, of unlovable-ness, of allowing that liquidity to happen, of feeling safe to be in the presence of love. When I first experienced my Guru loving me, my mind kept flickering with the thoughts of if he only knew, and then I realized that he did know, and he was still loving me, and it took me through the da-da-da-da, and whatever you are, however you are at this moment, when you can accept that you are lovable, then the fear starts to dissolve. It's allowing your own beauty, it's allowing the beauty of your soul, which is behind your personality, it's behind all that stuff, just another radiant bit of light, another soul. And I think at this moment, it's nothing violent to do, you just observe the kind of sadness, the feeling of loneliness, the feeling of separateness, the feeling of pain, you just watch it, and allow it, and don't get too fierce about it, don't feel too deprived about it, and don't milk the self-pity of it, you know, just notice that it's just no passing show, it's just another place your mind is grabbing. It's all mind, you realize that. The only thing you're stuck in is not even history, it's just mind. It's a model you have of who you think you are, and who you think everybody else is. That's all it is, that's exactly what's causing your suffering at this moment, is your own thought forms, and you're clinging to them, and saying this is real. It's like somebody who sees a rope, and they think it's a snake, and they get frightened, and then somebody says it's just a rope, and then suddenly they're not frightened anymore. And it's as simple as that, it really is the mind. And that's finally why you're driven to work on your mind, to quiet your mind, because you see the way your personality is really just a series of thoughts that you keep investing. Like the first moment you felt the sadness, or the loneliness, or the emptiness, or the pain, that started a whole track of, oh this is like I've always felt in the past, and you started to build the whole storyline all over again. And it's at that moment, it's just ah, sadness, oh yes, comes and goes. Because I would say that most people in this room, if you scratch the surface, you will find some residual unworthiness, from just having grown up on earth. I mean, it's interesting, because you don't understand that the personality itself is rooted in fear, and vulnerability. That's where the root is of it. Because you go from being, can you imagine being the baby that is everything in the universe, to starting to be this little vulnerable tiny thing. And the first time you realize there are big forces, and you're not them. How incredibly inadequate one must feel, if you could give words to it. And every one of us has been through that, that moment. And for most of us it's buried so deeply, we can never get hold of it.