Ram Dass "Promises and Pitfalls of the Spiritual Path"

Continuing to address the problem of relationship. spirtuality, and ecopsychology, that I have written about in previous blogs, Mark A. Schroll comments on "Reawakening Empathy With Our Earth/Body," which includes comments by Ram Dass.

I agree as Warwick Fox suggests, that personally based identification--"my-self first, my family and friends next, my cultural or ethnic grouping next, my species next"--can be said to result in the psychological orientation toward "possessiveness, greed, exploitation, war, and ecological destruction" (Fox: 4-5, 1993).

It is this kind of self-righteous, ideological, narcissistic identification that represents the worst of enculturation, whose shifting nuances of awareness were referred to by Sigmund Freud as the "psychopathology of everyday life." We need to acknowledge and hold in our awareness these psychopathologies of personally based identification so that we can work through them. Ram Dass pointed out in his presentation, "Promises and Pitfalls of the Spiritual Path" (1988):

". . . we can never become fully cured from our neurosis of psychopathology of the ego, but we can learn to manage them. They become like little schmoos' that surface from time to time from the unconsciousness. When they appear, I always say: 'Oh, I have not seen you in awhile, as they peek out [from the shadows of our personality]" (Ram Dass, 1988).

I take Ram Dass' comment to mean that once we have learned how to manage our neuroses and various psychopathologies--when they do show themselves (similar to particles in a cloud chamber) that they will only stay for the moment before disappearing back into the unconscious. A similar but slightly different metaphor is that our unconscious neurotic and psychopathological tendencies are like clouds passing across the sky. The sky is likewise another metaphor of our self-awareness and its relatively stable structure. Cloud formations represent a metaphor of our neurosis which we can associate with our temporary moods and emotions. If we have not worked through and learned how to manage our neuroses, upon re-emergence the conscious mind will cling to them, making an issue of whatever particular psychopathology that happens to be manifesting itself. We need to learn how to let-go of these moods and emotions like the sky allows an endless variety of cloud formations to pass across it. Psychologists have referred to this process of managing neurosis as disidentification, which represents a method of learning how to manage the psychopathologies associated with personally based identification.

Discussing the issue of identification and disidentification with Ralph Metzner, he noted his hesitation about accepting the concept of identification as Warwick Fox has formulated it (Metzner, 1993). On the one hand, I agree with Metzner's criticism that the shadow elements of our personality do (as I pointed out earlier) need to be treated like clouds passing across the sky. Nevertheless, regarding the relationship of humans to the natural world, most of us already treat the nonhuman world (our Earth-Body) as totally separate. Moreover, the EuroAmerican scientific orientation toward our Earth-Body has been to regard it nothing more than a resource to be exploited. In other words, the nonhuman world is there for humankind to transform it into human oriented products that we later casually discard as trash when their use-value is consumed.

References
Warwick Fox. (1993). "Transpersonal Ecology." Unpublished Manuscript, privately distributed.

Ralph Metzner. (1993, August 25). Personal conversation at the 25th Anniversary Convocation of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology Conference, August 25-29, Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, California.

Ram Dass. (1988, October 10). "Promises and Pitfalls of the Spiritual Path." Keynote presentation at the 9th International Transpersonal Association Conference, held at the El Rancho Tropicanna Hotel, Santa Rosa, California.