Witness... and Love

The Soul Loves Everything: Even Its Own "Dark" Thoughts

Eighteen months before he died, spiritual teacher and psychedelics pioneer Ram Dass (1931–2019) welcomed ambient musician East Forest (Trevor Oswalt) into his home in Maui, where they collaborated on an album that was released a year later. It would be the final recording of Ram Dass’s teachings. The album, simply titled Ram Dass, features over an hour of shimmering hypnotic music enhanced by deceptively simple teachings by the spiritual elder, his voice gravelly with age yet resonant with profound, straightforward wisdom.

Here are some of Ram Dass’s words from the song “Dark Thoughts”:

When you witness a, a dark thought
A dark thought that isn’t going to get you anywhere
You witness it
And love it
You love your dark thoughts
Remember the witness is part of the soul
And the soul loves everything
Every thing…
And that love coalesces the universe
The oneness of the universe is love.

The first time I heard this song, I was driving, and I was so moved that I felt like pulling over to the side of the road so I could marvel at what I had just heard. I didn’t, but when I got home, I played the song several times so I could be present with the words, almost like practicing lectio divina with a spoken audio recording.

In contemplative work, we can often harbor a subtle kind of veiled hostility or aggression toward our thoughts — whether we interpret them as “dark” or not. We want our thoughts out of the way, so we can get down to the “important matter” of attending to the silence that we know is beneath and between all our mental activities.

And that tendency gets exacerbated when we judge our thoughts. If we deem a thought to be violent, or narcissistic, or lustful, or any of numerous objectionable qualities, then we assume it’s a thought that “isn’t going to get you anywhere,” and the temptation to reject it as bad or sinful can be strong indeed.

Centering Prayer practice offers a formula for cultivating something other than that posture of judgment and subtle hostility: “Resist no thought, retain no thought, react to no thought, and return to the sacred word.” By learning a radical non-attachment to our thoughts, anchored in the practice of praying with a single “sacred” word, we make ourselves more available to the luminous silence at the heart of our being.

Ram Dass’s wisdom offers a different response to our difficult thoughts, but one that I believe complements the practice of Centering Prayer beautifully. If you are going to have an emotional charge to a so-called dark thought, then choose to love the thought! Love, after all, is perhaps the best possible antidote to both judgment and aggression. When we love our thoughts, even the afflictive ones, we allow “the oneness of the universe” to flow through us.

This is not the same thing as Centering Prayer, but it is a practice that can be woven into every waking moment of the day. When feeling a tug toward judgment, choose love instead. It is the nature of our souls to love — which makes sense, for God is Love. When we love, we are one.

Quotation Source: “Dark Thoughts” from Ram Dass by East Forest x Ram Dass (Audio Recording), 2019.