I passed someone the other day who was hitchhiking. Lost in thought, I didn’t feel like stopping, picking him up, making conversation. It’s a well-travelled road, I told myself. Someone else will stop. Forget it.
But I couldn’t. It didn’t take more than ten seconds for a flood of memories to jostle me out of my reverie: images from years ago of me standing on the road, waiting for a ride; and a less appealing image altogether, of me too busy or preoccupied to do a kindness for another. I braked to a stop, turned around, and picked him up.
Is caring for others natural, a reflex of the heart, once we snap out of our self-absorption? Indeed, sometimes it seems as simple as that. But what happens when it’s not simple — when it’s unclear what we’re being asked to do, or our own best intentions get in the way of helping, or caring for someone else turns into a burden?
How Can I Help? Stories and Reflections on Service is an insightful look at the many faces of compassion. “Seeking to care for others,” write Ram Dass and Paul Gorman, “each of us inevitably faces fundamental challenges. These are what draw us to explore the very heart of helping.”
The book is enlivened by many personal accounts from professional helpers as well as ordinary people just trying to meet each other’s needs. We’re thankful to the authors for permission to reprint these passages.
Ram Dass is the former Harvard professor Richard Alpert who was involved with Timothy Leary in the 1960s exploring the potential of psychedelic drugs. He was given the name Ram Dass, which means servant of God, by his guru, Neem Karoli Baba. He is the author of Be Here Now and other books on the spiritual path.
Paul Gorman has been a program producer and talk show host with WBAI-FM, Pacifica Radio, in New York City since 1969.
— Ed.
At times, helping happens simply in the way of things. It’s not something we really think about, merely the instinctive response of an open heart. Caring is a reflex. Someone slips, your arm goes out. A car is in a ditch, you join the others and push. A colleague at work has the blues, you let her know you care. It all seems natural and appropriate. You live, you help.
When we join together in this spirit, action comes more effortlessly, and everybody ends up nourished. Girding against the flood . . . setting up a community meeting . . . preparing a funeral . . . people seem to know their part. We sense what’s called for, or if we don’t, and feel momentarily awkward, someone comes quickly with an idea, and it’s just right, and we’re grateful. We babysit the kids while their parents move possessions to homes farther from the rising river . . . we bring a comfortable chair for an older person who might attend the meeting . . . we call the rabbi with a favorite psalm of the one who has just died. Needs are anticipated, and glances of appreciation among us are enough to confirm that it’s all going well.
We take pleasure not only in what we did but in the way we did it. On the one hand, the effort was so natural it might seem pointless or self-conscious to make something of it. It was what it was. Yet if we stop to consider why it all felt so good, we sense that some deeper process was at work. Expressing our innate generosity, we experienced our “kin”-ship, our “kind”-ness. It was “us.” In service, we taste unity.
Sometimes I help and sometimes I don’t.
I hold the door open for one behind me, or I rush through preoccupied in thought. I vote, but not always. When solicitations come through the mail, some catch my eye or heart and I send at least something. Others I basket as junk mail. A friend is having a hard time. I think I should phone to see how she is, but I just don’t feel like doing it tonight.
I’d do anything to help the family. But how much is enough? When to stretch a little further? Whose needs come first?
Those close to me get an immediate hearing. The suffering of people more remote gets sporadic attention. I’m only vaguely aware of it. It’s out there somewhere.
Whom should I help anyway? Senior citizens, battered children, human-rights victims, whales? Well, if we don’t defuse the nuclear threat, there’ll be no tomorrow. But if we don’t support education and the arts, what kind of tomorrow will it be?
If I stop to think about it, I help out for all kinds of reasons. Maybe it’s because I should; it’s a matter of responsibility. But there’s usually a maze of other motives: a need for self-esteem, approval, status, power; the desire to feel useful, find intimacy, pay back some debt.
Sometimes I’ll help through organizations. But the purpose of helping and the people who really need it often seem to fall through the cracks. Maybe I’d rather do it one-to-one, keep my options open, help out here and there.
I expect my government to relieve suffering. Sometimes it does. But it also pays farmers not to produce wheat while somewhere, every forty-five seconds, a small child starves to death. And a public official, no better or worse a person than I, finds reason to justify this policy — but would probably do everything he could, faced with one starving child.
There are times when service is effortless. Other days, burnout. With one person, I’m totally open and present. With the next, I might as well be on Mars. Sometimes the chance to care for another human being feels like such grace. But later on, I’ll hear myself thinking, “Hey, what about me?”
Over Gandhi’s tomb are inscribed words that say: think of the poorest person you have ever seen and ask if your next act will be of any use to him. That’ll flash through my mind as I prepare to throw a Frisbee. And when I spend fifteen bucks dining out and going to a movie to ward off boredom, I might recall that a fifteen-dollar operation could restore someone’s sight in a third-world country. I’m moved by the power of Gandhi’s invitation, “Live simply that others might simply live.” But I’m not at all clear about how to heed that, day in and day out, here in the affluent West. Sometimes I feel a little guilty.
Over Gandhi’s tomb are words that say: think of the poorest person you have ever seen and ask if your next act will be of any use to him. That’ll flash through my mind as I prepare to throw a Frisbee.
I’m fortunate, for the moment, to have good health and loving friends, to be housed and fed, with work to do and some time to play. When I myself need help, there’s usually someone to call. I’m able to spend some time away from places where suffering is really visible and just can’t be screened out.
Yet there are few days when I’m not feeling human pain, my own or another’s. If it’s not there in front of me, I see a steady stream of images of misery on the evening news of a suffering planet: homeless one huddled by a doorway or tree; old one looking vacant in a nursing home; slain revolutionary or national guardsman, both teenagers; drunk driver just realizing he’s killed his whole family; starving child’s bloated belly and haunted eyes; victims of natural disasters; helpless leaders, helpless helpers.
Some images I ponder; what’s that one saying? Others make me uneasy; I tune them out. Some make me angry; I want to get up and do something. Others make me sigh; horror and compassion. And finally I might have to turn away, close off, and escape into some philosophical sanctuary. It’s all just too much.
How can I keep my heart open and not go under? I’ve got my own life to live, after all. Still, I’d like to do more for others. What do I have to offer, and what would help most? Complicated business, all this.
Look, you do the best you can. . . .
In the early stages of my father’s cancer, I found it very difficult to know how best to help. I lived a thousand miles away and would come for visits. It was hard seeing him going downhill, harder still feeling so clumsy, not sure what to do, not sure what to say.
Toward the end, I was called to come suddenly. He’d been slipping. I went straight from the airport to the hospital, then directly to the room he was listed in.
When I entered, I saw that I’d made a mistake. There was a very, very old man there, pale and hairless, thin, and breathing with great gasps, fast asleep, seemingly near death. So I turned to find my dad’s room. Then I froze. I suddenly realized, “My God, that’s him!” I hadn’t recognized my own father! It was the single most shocking moment of my life.
Thank God he was asleep. All I could do was sit next to him and try to get past this image before he woke up and saw my shock. I had to look through him and find something beside this astonishing appearance of a father I could barely recognize physically.
By the time he awoke, I’d gotten part of the way. But we were still quite uncomfortable with one another. There was still this sense of distance. We both could feel it. It was very painful. We both were self-conscious . . . infrequent eye contact.
Several days later, I came into his room and found him asleep again. Again such a hard sight. So I sat and looked some more. Suddenly this thought came to me, words of Mother Teresa, describing lepers she cared for as “Christ in all his distressing disguises.”
I never had any real relation to Christ at all, and I can’t say that I did at that moment. But what came through to me was a feeling for my father’s identity as . . . like a child of God. That was who he really was, behind the “distressing disguise.” And it was my real identity too, I felt. I felt a great bond with him which wasn’t anything like I’d felt as father and daughter.
At that point he woke up and looked at me and said, “Hi.” And I looked at him and said, “Hi.”
For the remaining months of his life we were totally at peace and comfortable together. No more self-consciousness. No unfinished business. I usually seemed to know just what was needed. I could feed him, shave him, bathe him, hold him up to fix the pillows — all these very intimate things that had been so hard for me earlier.
In a way, this was my father’s final gift to me: the chance to see him as something more than my father; the chance to see the common identity of spirit we both shared; the chance to see just how much that makes possible in the way of love and comfort. And I feel I can call on it now with anyone else.
The most familiar models of who we are — father and daughter, doctor and patient, “helper” and “helped” — often turn out to be major obstacles to the expression of our caring instincts; they limit the full measure of what we have to offer one another. But when we break through and meet in spirit behind our separateness, we experience profound moments of companionship. These, in turn, give us access to deeper and deeper levels of generosity and loving kindness. True compassion arises out of unity.
All the more painful, then, are the moments in which we feel cut off from one another, when we reach out to help or be helped and don’t quite meet. Despite the yearning of the heart, so often when we seek to care for one another we feel far apart. Albert Einstein speaks to this question and the challenge it poses to service:
A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Frequently, in our efforts to remain secure and protect the integrity of the separate self, we give greater weight to one aspect of our identity over another. Though we may acknowledge, in the abstract, that we are simultaneously physical, emotional, moral, political, and spiritual beings, we seem to cling to one dimension of our identity at the expense of the others. We specialize. As a consequence, however, we often end up shortchanging what we have to offer one another.
“I’m just a surgeon. Your really ought to discuss your reactions to this experience with someone else.” Why? What of the wellspring of compassion from having seen so many people go through similar experiences as patients? Thinking of oneself as a surgeon may cut off access to our empathy, potentially a source of great comfort and counsel.
Or perhaps we think of ourself primarily as a “seeker.” “Oh well, I’m basically a religious person. I don’t have much to do with politics.” Yet by simply opening to acknowledge a fuller sense of identity, we might see that the very inner tranquillity we may have cultivated in spiritual practice is precisely what is needed in social action.
So often we deny ourselves and others the full resources of our being simply because we’re in the habit of defining ourselves narrowly and defensively to begin with. Less flexible, less versatile, we inevitably end up being less helpful.
While some self-images are more likely to facilitate the expression of our compassion than others, it is also true that any model of the self, positive or negative, will limit our capacity to help. Each form we identify with, each role we attach to, is ultimately incomplete and transient. It can dissolve in a moment. A social worker gets fired — budget cuts, nothing open in the field: “Now I can’t even read the want ads.” A therapist starts losing patients, and fewer new ones come in: “What’s happening? Is it me?” A model mother can’t let go as her youngest child turns adolescent: “I’m so depressed. My kids don’t need me anymore.”
If any of these roles are who we think we are — social worker, therapist, mother — what’s left when they fall away. “Where’s the rest of me?”
Even if we may momentarily be secure in our chosen roles, they can still impede the quality of our service at the deepest level.
Implicit in any model of who we think we are is a message to everyone about who they are. It’s not as if there are any real secrets. If we’re only seeing one part of the picture about ourselves, positive or negative, that’s all we’ll be able to make real to anybody else. Caught in the models of the separate self, then, we end up diminishing one another. The more you think of yourself as a “therapist,” the more pressure there is on someone to be a “patient.” The more you identify as a “philanthropist,” the more compelled someone feels to be a “supplicant.” The more you see yourself as a “helper,” the more need for people to play the passive “helped.” You’re buying into, even juicing up, precisely what people who are suffering want to be rid of: limitation, dependency, helplessness, separateness. And that’s happening largely as a result of self-image.
What’s to be done? When there’s too much “somebody,” it’s trouble. But we can’t make believe we’re nobody, either.
To identify with the separate self, however functional it may often be, is to make this model of reality more real for everyone else. How much is this helping, and how much is it hindering?
Perhaps we recognize the predicament; we see the problem of always having to be “somebody.” So we decide to let it all go, become the model of humility and aspire to the ideal of selflessness.
One day a rabbi, in a frenzy of religious passion, rushed in before the ark, fell to his knees, and started beating his breast, crying, “I’m nobody! I’m nobody!”
The cantor of the synagogue, impressed by this example of spiritual humility, joined the rabbi on his knees. “I’m nobody! I’m nobody!”
The “shamus” (custodian), watching from the corner, couldn’t restrain himself, either. He joined the other two on his knees, calling out, “I’m nobody! I’m nobody!”
At which point the rabbi, nudging the cantor with his elbow, pointed at the custodian and said, “Look who thinks he’s nobody!”
What’s to be done? When there’s too much “somebody,” it’s trouble. But we can’t make believe we’re nobody, either. It’s enough to make you throw up your hands and quit!
Time for humor and perspective. The least we can do is acknowledge or remind ourselves that this is part of the predicament of being human. We all must deal with conditioning. The sense of ourselves as separate is what we are contending with virtually all of the time. It’s our curriculum, and everybody’s enrolled.
So how do we get on with our course of study?
As an intern, part of my work was to travel around in teams, examining patients. I would notice their look as we entered. Intimidated, apprehensive, feeling like case studies of various illnesses. I hated that. But I was an intern.
I remember one guy distinctly, however, who was altogether different. I think this guy changed my life. He was a black man in his sixties — very cute, very mischievous and very sick.
What brought us repeatedly to him was the utter complexity of his illness, condition on top of condition, and the mystery of why he was still alive. It was so strange. We were visiting not to find out what was wrong with him, but why he was still here at all.
I had the feeling he could see right through us. He’d say, “Hey, boys!” when we’d come in — the way you might when a gang of ten-year-olds come barging into a house for a snack in the middle of an intense game outside. He was so pleased, and so amused. It made some people nervous. I was intrigued. But for some weeks, I never had a chance to be alone with him.
Now and then he’d get into very serious trouble, and he’d be moved into intensive care. Then he’d rally, to everyone’s amazement, and we’d move him back. And we’d visit him again, and he’d say, “You boys here again?” — pretending to be surprised that we were still around.
One night there was an emergency, and I took the initiative and went to see him alone. He looked pretty bad. But he came alert a few seconds after I entered. He gave me a grin and said, “Well . . . ,” sort of like he’d expected me. Like he’d known how much I’d come to love him. That happens in hospitals.
I imagine I looked a little surprised at the “Well . . . ,” but we just laughed a minute, and I stood there just so taken by who he was. And then he hit me with a single remark, half a question and half a . . . something else.
“Who you?” he said, sort of smiling. Just that. “Who you?”
I started to say, “Well, I’m Doctor. . . .” And then I just stopped cold. It’s hard to describe. I just sort of went out. What happened was that all kinds of answers to his question started to go through my head. They all seemed true, but they all seemed less than true. “Yeah, I’m this or I’m that . . . and also . . . but not just . . . and that’s not the whole picture, the whole picture is. . . .” The thought process went something like that. Nothing remotely like that had ever happened to me. But I remember feeling very elated.
It must have shown, because he gave me this big grin and said, “Nice to meet you.” His timing killed me.
We talked for five minutes about this and that — nothing in particular; children, I think. At the end, I ventured to say, “Is there anything I can do for you?” He said, “No, I’m just fine. Thanks very much . . . Doctor . . . ?” And he paused for the name, and I gave it to him this time, and he grinned at me again, really he did. And that was it.
He died a few days later. And I carry him around today. I think of him now and again in the midst of my rounds. A particular moment or particular patient brings him back. “Who you?” For years, I’d trained to be a physician, and I almost got lost in it. This man took away my degree, and then gave it back to me with “And also? . . . and also? . . . and also?” scribbled across. I’ll never forget that.
All of us can recognize some truth to the plea of conditioning — first by our parents, then by our teachers. From earliest childhood many of us are told, “Be good and help.” Helpfulness gets encouraged, often rewarded, because it makes the household function more efficiently. “Help out” becomes a euphemism for obedience or compliance.
Once we come to associate it with rewards, we start to use helping in the service of a wide range of personal motives other than the expression of natural compassion. We might empty the trash in order to get the use of the family car, or go to the store to fetch ingredients so that Mother will make our favorite cookies. We might be seeking to compensate for a lack of self-esteem, for feelings of unworthiness or incompleteness. Need praise? Help out. Or perhaps we’re looking for a form of atonement: there’s guilt to assuage. For many, the ability to aid others can provide a needed sense of power or respectability. Maybe some of us help out as a way of compensating for a deeper sense of helplessness; we don’t have to face our own quite so much when we’re busy treating someone else’s. Or maybe we’re just plain lonely. Intimacy is what we’re looking for, and it’s often there to be found in a helping relationship.
Rare indeed is the individual for whom the helping act does not arise in part out of some personal motive. To the extent that it does, however, what we are looking for is a role that meets a need . . . our need. We’re looking to be helpers, not simply to be helpful. A personal agenda leads us to invest in the position, not simply the function. And we invest in others’ reactions to it as well.
Often getting a few perks from our acts seems fine. But most of us can recognize moments when we get a little lost in such personal needs. In any relationship — marriage, friendship, work — there’s that place in us which enjoys being the wise and compassionate one. We understand someone a little too quickly, or volunteer advice just too soon. Sometimes we have to be shown that all of us are better off when we’re free of attachment to being helpers.
I happened to have been on a mountaintop in a state of great bliss when a stranger suddenly appeared next to me, sat down, and immediately started to describe this problem he was going through. By the time I’d pulled myself out of the Higher Realms, he’d already detailed the whole drama, the cast of characters, and the decisions he was facing. I hadn’t gotten a bit of it. Nothing. Nobody. Moreover, it was much too late to ask him to run it all down once more. He would have felt very uncomfortable, justifiably.
So there I was, intimate confidant to a deep problem, without the slightest idea of who was who and who had done what to whom. My first reaction was to laugh hysterically. It was one of those great Human Condition moments. But this guy was obviously in distress and looking for a kindly pair of ears, so I picked up as best I could.
To my continued amazement, none of the details became any clearer as we walked down the mountain. I kept hoping I’d find out who “she” really was, and what “he” had actually done. No such luck. And I wasn’t about to ask a question that would reveal my total ignorance, make him feel terrible, or lead me to hysterical laughter.
So we just quietly walked on down. And from time to time I would punctuate the conversation with what seemed like appropriate remarks: “That must have been hard.” “What did you feel then?” “Oh, yes, I’ve been through that one before.” “Boy, things sure do get confused in life.” Great insights like that. And he would nod appreciatively, continue, and l’d contain my sense of this wonderful human absurdity. Meanwhile, I was growing increasingly fond of this guy. And feeling great empathy for his problem — whatever it was.
When we reached the bottom of the hill, he stopped for a moment and then suddenly embraced me. “I just want you to know how incredibly helpful you’ve been,” he said. “You’re one of the most understanding, compassionate people I’ve ever met. Do you think we could have another conversation like this again?” I was dumbfounded. It was one of the great moments in my life. “Sure,” I said. “I’d love to.” And he walked off to join some other people — a number of whom kept coming to me during the day saying, “What did you tell Eddie? He’s just so grateful to you. He says you’re wonderful.”
How good it can feel to regain perspective. Our feeling of confinement as narrow, limited, isolated entities begins to dissolve as we take a few steps back and recognize that who we are is “this . . . and also . . . and also . . . and also.” Moving in and out of these various identities, each is “real” only at the moment we are invested in it. A moment later it may not be relevant at all. We see, in other words, the relative reality of these various identities, “real” only in relation to the situation which calls them forth.
But if all of our identities are only relatively real, coming and going as circumstance warrants, is there any part of us that remains steady and stable behind all our roles? If we observe our own minds at work, we see that behind all these identities is a state of awareness that incorporates them all and yet is still able to rest behind them. As we loosen the hold of each identity so that we don’t get completely lost in it, we are able to remain light and loose — able to play among these various aspects of being without identifying exclusively with any. We don’t have to be anybody in particular. We don’t have to be “this” or “that.” We are free simply to be.
To taste this freedom increases our flexibility immensely, and enables us to be fuller instruments of service to others. For example, as a skillful nurse, we’ll sense those moments with certain patients in which all the nurturing we’ve learned as a mother is needed. Or perhaps a situation arises, say with an imperious physician, when who we are is simply a strong woman — one who’s gained that resolve through the consciousness-raising and insights of feminism. Or in the presence of one who is dying, we feel that part of ourself which is merely God’s child; humility, prayer, and faith are what we have to share now.
We often move among these various identities with much fluidity and skill. When we discover how exhilarating this is, what we’re getting is just a taste of real freedom, the liberation that comes from loosening our identification with self-image altogether. We experience the versatility of our being and the independence of our awareness. We’re opening up the windows of our little homes and letting in a little cross-ventilation.
Humor also serves to support this awakening perspective. What else, in the end, do we laugh at but our own vanity and puffy attachment to who we think we are? The Marx Brothers have no respect — no respect, that is, for anyone who’s busy taking himself seriously as “somebody.” Everybody’s fair game. Groucho’s cracks and Harpo’s horn shake us all up. We sit there watching, laughing, loving it, grateful. How often we recognize ourselves in portrayals of human foolishness. How much freer we feel when a friend kids us about some quality of self-importance, and we’re able to gulp, take it, and finally join in the general laughter. We come off self-image. We’re even able to direct this same irreverence toward our own behavior and attachments.
I felt so humbled. I swear I had the impulse to go down on my knees. Here I was, going around giving speech therapy, little lessons, little tips. And what was I receiving back in return? Humanity. Basic humanity. The deepest qualities of a person, deeper than you’d see most anywhere.
I’ll give you a day in the life.
I work in this program with juvenile offenders, ex-drug addicts mostly. And I’m with this very tough, smart kid who tells me, “I got no time for programs, man. I seen programs.” And I feel like saying, “Me neither. I’m not so crazy about programs myself.” But here they are and there we were.
“Whadda you know?” he says. “You’re just a social worker. Social workers are nowhere. Social workers don’t understand shit.” And he’s saying that a little angry and provocative. But it’s a little wry, too. He was playing. And I was liking him at that moment, liking his style.
So I go, “Yeah, all right. But that’s all you think I am, a social worker? You don’t see anybody here but a social worker?” I was up for playing too.
“Well, you got a degree, right? They teach you about other people’s troubles, right? That’s how you got this job. You the Fixer, right?”
“Sure I got a diploma. I got a wife too. And I got a TV. And I’m into the Boston Celtics. If I’m just a social worker, maybe you’re just an ex-junkie. Is that all that’s happening here?”
Well, he sort of paused, and he heard it. And there was this moment where I felt something was about to get off the ground, like we were going to get past all this. It sort of hung there, one of those moments when you can feel possibility; maybe we can make it after all. And then . . . it was like we just missed. You could feel it get close and then pass by. And I swear he sensed that too.
He said, “You got no idea where I am, man.” And I said, “Well, you got no idea where I am.” He was being straight. I was being straight. Maybe we’d make it another time. Maybe we needed that honesty. But it was frustrating, because it got so close. I really liked this kid. Like, if we could have talked basketball. . . .
So . . . bad day, or at least a frustrating one. Anyhow, I come home, lay back, and my wife comes in and tells me she’s thinking about quitting her job at the hospital. I sort of half groan and half laugh. I’d been hoping she’d be the one who’d have it together that evening. We take turns being the one who has it together.
“Okay, what’s the matter?”
“It’s like prison in there. You’ve either got an ID badge and a stethoscope or you’re flat on your back helpless. It’s Us and Them, the sick and the healthy. The patients get bugged, we get bugged, everybody gets bugged. I can’t stand the roles and the distances. It’s not a hospital — it’s a prison!” And she’s laughing a little, but it’s a strong feeling. And then she gives me this classic, exasperated line, again laughing, “I don’t want to be a nurse, I just want to help!”
So I say, “Poor kid . . . ,” and give her a hug, because it’s obviously been one of those days. And I say something like, “Well, I don’t want to be a social worker either. Social workers don’t understand shit. But what are we going to do? Who’s going to feed the cat? How do we get out of jail?”
And we laughed, and had chicken, and talked, and made love. And afterwards she said, “I’m still a little bit at the hospital.” And I said, “I know, I’m still a little bit with that kid.”
The philosopher Gurdjieff pointed out that if we wish to escape from prison, the first thing we must acknowledge is that we are in prison. Without that acknowledgment, no escape is possible. That is, as long as we feel that these roles are inevitable, functional, or the best we can do, it’s unlikely that we’ll be alert to alternatives.
Fortunately, many of us do recognize the entrapment of these roles. When we are able to step outside our situations for a moment and recognize the constrictions, we may even be prepared to acknowledge that somehow we ourselves are contributing to this sense of imprisonment.
There’s great potential in that recognition alone. It’s the beginning of our escape. Just to be alert to the entrapment can prevent it from taking complete hold without our conscious awareness. We’re more on the lookout for ways to penetrate the walls: a loose brick here, a vent duct there. We find an opportunity and grasp it and suddenly begin to come out from behind the roles.
With that alertness we are ready to seize opportunities. A doctor comes in to ask how you are feeling, and you notice he’s looking you in the eye; he’s really asking. Now you can tell him how you are feeling . . . not just what your body is up to. An uncle who’s been deeply depressed drops his guard and tells you just how much he misses his dead wife. The old family constraints fall away. He doesn’t have to be strong, you don’t have to be deferential. You can meet as friends, both of whom have known pain.
What’s interesting when this happens is that we realize that the opportunity to meet behind the roles was present all along. It’s a breakthrough to a state that was there waiting. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief because we feel that we are home again. It’s not so much that we’ve solved a problem through technique, experience, or know-how. We’ve simply remembered who we all really are behind the roles. Of course, there’s more going on than a one-dimensional transaction. After all, we’re human beings here.
So we don’t need devices or gimmicks to break through the walls of Helping Prison. Nor do we have to deny that we can help or we need help and that there are appropriate forms to give and receive it. What we can do, however, is allow ourselves to open to the fullness of our humanity. We can make room for it all. As we do this, the richness and reciprocity of the helping act itself works to dissolve the barriers created by roles.
It’s clear, for example, that as helpers we don’t simply go about dispensing service with nothing in return. We all know how much we get back from caring for others. Nor is it simply material reward, praise, or the feeling of having been useful. Something far more essential can be tapped.
You walk the halls of this place, and what do you see from room to room? Most people peer in and see this retarded child or that one. They focus on this particular mannerism or that deformity. I do it too. It’s very compelling, that picture.
But one kid flipped me around on that. We were doing language exercises. And for some godforsaken reason I’d chosen the exchange “How are you?” . . . “I’m doing fine.” We’d go back and forth. Well, he was having quite a hard time of it, slurring out, “Iy dluee fie” or some such. “Let’s try again, really slowly,” I said. “How . . . are . . . you?” And he slurred, “Iy dluee fie.” Then he suddenly burst into this wonderful crazy slurry laugh. It was the nuttiest sound we’d ever heard, either of us. He wasn’t doing fine at all. Neither was I. We were doing terribly. It was absurd. We just began to howl.
In the midst of that he suddenly gave me this very clear look — the eyes behind the expression. And I had a sudden thought: “My God, he knows more than I’ll ever know about all this. He sees the whole situation.” At which point he just scrunched up his face like a clown and gave me this wonderful wink.
I was just stunned. All I could see was this incredible sense of the humor of things. It was so deep in him. He just had it all in perspective. And he gave that perspective to me.
When I left him, my head was spinning. I walked down the hall and looked into the other rooms, at kids I’d known, or so I’d thought, for months. It was totally new. I don’t quite know how to describe it. In this room I saw courage. In that room I saw joy. Across the hall, patience. In yet another room, such sweetness: a little boy who was so continuously filled with love, people would just — “die,” I was going to say. “Live,” really.
I felt so humbled. I swear I had the impulse to go down on my knees. Here I was, going around giving speech therapy, little lessons, little tips. And what was I receiving back in return? Humanity. Basic humanity. The deepest qualities of a person, deeper than you’d see most anywhere.
What a gift! How much it helped me in my work! In fact it really changed my life. How often can you say that?
We had just finished a six-week study tour of Kenya’s major game parks, but our American college group had in many ways passed over what was most important to us: the people. So a friend and I set out on our own, feeling our way along the less-traveled roads for the pulse-points — the individual lives and feelings of the Kenyan people. Our trek took us to the small town of Kitale, and while resting our packs near the local market, a man simply walked up to us and introduced himself as Pastor Joseph.
Pastor Joseph, we discovered, was a Christian minister working in an area two hundred miles north of Kitale, where a drought had incarcerated the land and its people for three years. Pastor Joseph had collected some five hundred children who were entirely dependent upon him for their sustenance and shelter. We traveled with Joseph up into the drought area, to help him and to learn more about his work. Although we spent five days with him, a few moments tell the story.
We first approached Joseph’s church around noon, after a two-day journey. Except for the children who scurried barefoot beside us on the scorching sand, the feeling surrounding us was of helpless isolation. It was a forgotten place — a vast, almost soundless plain. Thin, brown-skinned inhabitants moved like mirages on the baked white earth of this desert.
My friend and I were exhausted, but Pastor Joseph beamed as though a two-hundred-mile trek in a crowded, overheated lorry was routine. (It was, I found out later.) He stopped in front of a peeling, green cement-block structure. Squirming, we saw a small wooden cross peeking up above one edge of the warped tin roof. “This is my church!” exclaimed Joseph with irrepressible reverence. His sincerity made us feel ashamed not to see this homely clay form — a structure he found when first coming here — in quite the same way he did.
We work on ourselves, then, in order to help others. And we help others as a vehicle for working on ourselves.
However, the “churchness” of that small, ingenuous structure became more apparent during our stay with Joseph, as did the enormity of his single-handed labor to look after the orphans of a starved, destitute tribe. We watched the sandy, famished faces of the children who stood outside the “church’s” kitchen to receive their daily cups of maize. The same children stood inside it early Sunday morning, singing. Nothing I had ever seen looked less but felt more like a church. Two hundred Turkana tribespeople were packed, naked or half-clothed, on pews made of tattered scraps of wood set on desert stones. Pastor Joseph stood among them, leading the clapping and singing of strong, rhythmical hymns.
My friend and I, two strangers from across the sea, were welcomed into the church by all. As I reached down to touch the children’s outstretched hands, I found that each child took a finger, then passed it along for a friend to hold. There was no fighting for my two hands, but, rather, a tacit understanding that ten fingers would, in time, be shared by all. We saw this same principle expressed by the children in many ways. For example, as the children were waiting for their cups of maize after the service, the cook brought out a crust of bread for one of the smallest, neediest children. He immediately looked for his friends, then began to break it in fragments to share with them. Seeing these children — experiencing them — I asked Joseph what he wanted most of all to do for them. A great smile lit up his face as he replied, “To give and to give and to give, and to know that is my riches.” He strode out in the desert, explaining his work to me. “I came here three years ago when the drought began.” Pausing, he pulled from his pocket several folded notebook pages of children’s names. “I have collected these children from all parts of Turkanaland. Their parents have died or are too weak to care for them. I walk out in the desert each day to search for children; ten, twenty, or thirty miles in a day. When I find a child who needs my help, I carry him over there.” He motioned to a circular fence made of thorny acacia branches. “The children sleep within the fence when I bring them from the desert. I have wanted to build the children a shelter for a long while. But I find enough money only for food.”
I listened to Joseph while drawing the last of my water from a half-gallon pouch. When I offered him a swallow, he smiled but refused. We had been walking under the desert sun for only an hour but already I was feeling weak. He glanced at my friend and me, sensing our condition, then led us to a shade tree as he continued describing his work. “When I go into the desert, I take nothing with me. I know that God is with me. I am going out to find His children, and I know that He comes with me.”
With a simplicity, yet a spiritual toughness which has known and endured great suffering, Joseph told of several long searches in the desert when he existed for days on edible desert plants and water sucked from their roots. Bowing his head, he added, “These are God’s children I am seeking!”
The next day, we sat with Joseph in a corner of his church to do something we all knew was needed: pray. In the background, children sniffled, laughed, and cried — like punctuation marks between our prayers. We rarely spoke. When we lifted our heads and looked into one another’s eyes, it was to affirm a strength growing in us all: the realization that, indeed, our prayers were being heard, and that it was natural for them to be heard. We found ourselves in that incredible condition of trusting god, of sensing that there is a higher law to appeal to — and that it was available to all of us.
That afternoon it began to rain. For half an hour, rains poured down on the hard, white earth. The children huddled inside the door of the church and sat silent, watching it. I expected shouts of joy. But, instead, I heard an utter silence — the sound of reverence. Both Joseph and the children were perfectly quiet until the rain stopped. He bowed his head and told me, “This is the hardest rain they have seen in three years. They have seen their parents die because of the drought. What else can they do now but be still and watch?”
On our last night in Turkanaland we were served a supper by Joseph’s friends, and told that he would return much later. We had spent the day with children at the church, and watched Joseph disappear at noon, carrying a coughing child across the desert.
One small candle flame flickered across Joseph’s face as he walked into the church late that night, carrying the same child, now asleep in his arms. He gently laid the little one inside the door and came to sit beside us. Closing his eyes, he sat quietly for several moments until his breathing became easier. He looked utterly exhausted. He whispered, “There is no tomorrow here. There is only today and what God asks me to do today.” We listened quietly as his voice grew. “Today I found a child who needed to be taken for special care to a place seven miles away. So I took the child there. But when I arrived, I found that two of the children I had carried there a few days before had died.” His voice maintained its level. “So I will dig their graves tomorrow. And I am grateful to God that I can do that for these people.”
Joseph’s words hung in silence for a long while. They so overwhelmed me. I couldn’t utter a word. I remember just bowing my head.
To the question. “How can I help?” we now see the possibility of a deeper answer than we might once have expected. We can, of course, help through all that we do. But at the deepest level we help through who we are. We help, that is, by appreciating the connection between service and our own progress on the journey of awakening into a fuller sense of unity.
We work on ourselves, then, in order to help others. And we help others as a vehicle for working on ourselves.
In this recognition, we find new freedom and opportunity. External obstacles and old habits — our past experience of service — can now be dealt with in the broader context of our own growth. And each step we take out of the illusion of separateness, we now can see, will inevitably be a blessing to ourselves and all we are with.
In our initial impulse to help out, had we really anticipated so rich a path?
As we take to this path, however, we find it neither straight nor smooth. At moments we may become profoundly aware of our oneness with all things. Our sense of possibility expands. Could it be like this more often . . . more often than not?
But then some incident or situation arises and we are thrown back into the pain of separateness once again. At first this must shock us; we thought we were farther along. Yet, after a moment’s pause at the side of the road, a break for a little self-pity and self-recrimination, we have nothing to do but take up the journey once again. Though the road is circuitous, the transformation proceeds inevitably. Gradually we come to sense profound changes in who we are. Our hearts can open and our awareness expand only so far and so often before we must conclude that we are somehow more than we once believed.
How much more? This is for each of us to discover, walking the path at our own pace. The general direction, however, seems clear. Gradually, as our practice continues, the fact of our unity becomes more real and powerful to us than the belief in our separateness.
We may discover this in the course of ordinary daily work. In a demanding situation we may quietly affirm the fact of unity and suddenly see a breakthrough or insight follow as a result. Or we may come to recognize how our relationship with others has altered; how much more aware we are now of what we have in common than what once seemed to have set us apart.
Or we may experience moments of enlightenment or revelation which defy description. These may be more difficult for us to understand. They may happen instantaneously, and then become less vivid, and fade away. But their impact is such that they are never forgotten, and everything thereafter looks different. In referring to these transcendent moments, some speak of having lost a sense of the individual self altogether, or of having come to see, with undeniable certainty, that who we are is Spirit, beyond form. From such a vantage point, however it is described, separateness is seen to be a creation of mind. All really is One. Such is the testimony, in any case, of what has been “seen.”
It is out of these transformative experiences that we find ourselves able to accept a number of seeming paradoxes. We are in the world but not of the world. We are a part of what is formless but we are in form. We exist beyond the polarities of positive and negative, dark and light, good and evil, pleasure and pain, yin and yang; but we function under their cloak as well. Even our perspective on separateness has changed. For while it may indeed be a “delusion of consciousness,” even this delusion seems part of a greater order. It seems to be in the way of things that we develop our initial identification with a separate self and go on to get lost in it. It seems also to be in the way of things that we ultimately come to appreciate this predicament and go on to resolve it. We do so, however, not by returning to an innocence which existed before we felt ourselves to be separate. Rather we grow toward integration, a balance in which we can work within our separateness while resting in the greater unity which lies beyond it.
Separateness is there . . . to be awakened out of. Service is a perfect vehicle for this awakening.
We look at our present condition now with great compassion for ourselves and for the work we have taken on. We see the beauty of our humanity in the light of our divinity. From this vision comes a fullness of heart and a profound willingness and eagerness to come to one another’s support.
From How Can I Help? Stories and Reflections on Service. © Copyright 1985 by Ram Dass and Paul Gorman. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
