We are pleased to bring you this excerpt from the Ram Dass title "Beyond Success: Finding Balance in Business". I
nternationally acclaimed spiritual teacher Ram Dass reflects on the basic questions of how to do business in a conscious, more mindful and balanced way. He explores the idea that commercial and conventional success can be self-limiting.
Where did you learn who you think you are? You learned it from your parents, you learned it from the school and you built a structure or a model, which is called an egostructure, in your mind, of who you think you are. And then it comes like a mind net around you, so you go down the street and you enter into conspiracies with each other saying “I will make believe you are who you think you are, if you will make believe I am who I think I am”. Then we enter into these games to keep reinforcing our models of who we think we are.
We dress that way, we look that way, we project it, of who we think we are all the time. And we get trapped in it. And it turns out to be too finite. You are short-changing yourself because you are much more than any model you can have of who you think you are. And finally, when you are ready for that next push, you start to go deeper and you start to become interested in those methods that allow you to escape from the structure your mind has created so that the structure is available as your servant but not as your master. In the spiritual traditions they say an intellectual who is proud of his intellect is like a prisoner who is proud of his cell.