Can You Trust Love Itself? Ram Dass and Loving Awareness

Episode 333 of Jack Kornfield's Heart Wisdom podcast asks a question that sounds simple and turns out to be one of the hardest in contemplative life: what can we trust in a world that will not hold still? Kornfield's answer is love itself, though not love as a passing feeling that arrives and leaves. He treats love as a capacity that can be grown through deliberate practice, and he builds the case from three living examples: his friend Ram Dass, whose final decades were reshaped by a stroke; Sharon Salzberg, whose metta practice felt dead on the cushion before it cracked her open; and the simple act of seeing another person with the eyes of love. Recorded from a live stream for a course on relationships, the conversation moves from a Maui beach to a bowl of spilled rice in Burma, and it lands on a claim worth taking seriously: loving awareness is not something we earn. It is what we already are, underneath the noise.

What did it look like when Ram Dass became love?

Picture a tent on a Maui beach, a few hundred people seated in the sand, and Krishna Das singing kirtan every evening of the retreat. Kornfield and his longtime collaborator Trudy Goodman had taught there for roughly fifteen years, and the week always ended with a ritual at a large altar. Ram Dass, paralyzed on half his body since his stroke, sat in his wheelchair in front of it. People filed past him one at a time. He looked each person in the eye and placed a small mala, a string of prayer beads, into their hands, with a thread from the blanket of his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, known as Maharaj-ji, tied into it. Many of them wept (Kornfield, Heart Wisdom ep. 333, around 5:00).

Kornfield is careful about what he saw. Some of those tears, he acknowledges, were projection, the natural response to a beloved teacher meeting a student's longing. But he does not stop there. "Some of it wasn't just projection," he says. "He was exuding love" (ep. 333, around 5:30). It is a distinction worth holding onto. Projection explains why we might feel a teacher is loving. It does not fully explain why a room of strangers would fall quiet when that teacher looked at them.

The deeper story comes from Krishna Das, who spoke at Ram Dass's memorial, and whose account Kornfield relays. In the early days after their return from India, Ram Dass would stand on stage with his beard, white robes, and beads, playing the guru. That worked on stage. Off stage, as Krishna Das put it through Kornfield's retelling, Ram Dass was sometimes still a mess in all kinds of ways. The change Kornfield describes came after the stroke, which he says came about twenty years before Ram Dass died. Krishna Das's observation was that Ram Dass became the person people had imagined him to be when he first came back.

"Ram Dass became love. He wasn't just a teacher anymore. Whoever you were and whatever was brought to him, he would sit in a field of love and see you with the eyes of love." (Jack Kornfield, Heart Wisdom ep. 333, around 8:00)

What makes this more than a eulogy is the implied method. Kornfield is not saying Ram Dass was born loving and simply showed it at the end. He is describing a man who, in his early years, was trying, and whose heart was gradually reshaped by sustained practice and by the humbling force of his illness. The field of love was not a mood he happened to be in. It was a state he had grown into, and that is precisely the point Kornfield wants his listeners to take home.

Can love be cultivated, or does it simply happen to us?

Most of us inherit a split picture. Love is either something that happens to us, as when we fall for someone, or something we feel toward people who are easy to love, like a sweet and charming child. Kornfield points out the problem with the first model: "anything you fall into can be problematic." Anyone who has been in a painful romance knows what he means. Falling is involuntary, and so is falling out.

He offers a different image. Love is "like gravity." It pulls us together, it simply is, and in a sense it predates us. Kornfield links this to a feeling of being together before the Big Bang, in a singularity we have never fully left. "In some deep way," he says, "we are love" (ep. 333, around 8:35). This is the metaphysical claim at the center of the episode, and it is what makes the practical claim possible. If love is our nature, then it can be uncovered and strengthened, not manufactured from scratch.

That is where the practices come in. Kornfield emphasizes that love can be developed through loving-kindness and compassion, forgiveness, and the other facets of love that the course explores in guided meditations. The key word is cultivation, which implies time, repetition, and patience, the way a garden responds to tending rather than wishing. Ram Dass, Kornfield notes, was "trying to be" that loving presence in his early years before it became his natural expression. Effort did not contradict authenticity. It was how the authenticity surfaced.

The opening of the episode puts the consequence plainly. Kornfield says, "The good news is you don't run out of love. When you share it and offer it, love doesn't dissipate. Actually, it grows" (ep. 333, opening segment). Most of us operate on a scarcity model of the heart, as if affection is a finite account that drains with every gift. Kornfield's claim reverses that. Giving is the mechanism by which the capacity expands.

What happens when metta practice feels dry?

The most useful story in the episode may be Kornfield's account of Sharon Salzberg, one of the figures most associated with loving-kindness practice in the West. He describes a hard stretch in her life, including a painful breakup, when she traveled to Burma to study with the meditation master U Pandita Sayadaw and committed to a couple of months of pure metta. The practice was constant recitation, directed at herself and at others: may I be safe and protected, may I be filled with love and kindness.

Her report, as Kornfield recounts it, was blunt. "Nothing happened." The phrases felt dry and mechanical, unloving and unwarm. She had flown halfway around the world to a teacher she admired, and his instruction was simply to keep going. "Just keep doing it," he said.

Then came the moment that changed the practice. Carrying her tray from the dining room back to her small room at the temple, she tripped, and the food, dal, rice, and curry, went across the floor. Her first inner sentence, Kornfield says, was harsh: "Sharon, you are such a klutz." The next sentence that followed was different. "But I love you." She was, Kornfield says, surprised by it. Whatever the metta had been doing underneath the dryness had surfaced in a moment of self-judgment, and it was the tenderness, not the scolding, that showed up on its own.

For readers who have tried a loving-kindness practice and given up because it felt fake, this is the crucial lesson. The practice did not feel warm when she was doing it. It worked anyway, below the level of sensation, until the heart was ready to answer the critical voice with something gentler. Kornfield's emphasis is on the instruction to keep going, not on the feeling that comes or doesn't come along with it.

Why does impermanence make love feel dangerous?

The episode opens with a question from Ganesh Dass, Kornfield's assistant and a student of Ram Dass, who frames the stakes of the whole conversation. With the constant barrage of news, social media, and political unrest, he says, there is a part of each of us asking, "What can I trust in this world?" Even the Buddhist teaching on impermanence seems to raise the question. If the nature of every passing moment is impermanence, what is there to trust? Kornfield's answer, as Ganesh summarizes it, is to trust love itself, using Ram Dass as the prime example. Ram Dass was forced to let go into the abyss through his stroke, and in that letting go he discovered that who we are is loving awareness, or consciousness, itself.

Kornfield does not dodge the difficulty. He observes that love can turn into attachment or fear of loss, and he reminds listeners that all things are impermanent (ep. 333, around 18:30). This is where many spiritual conversations go soft, substituting reassurance for honesty. Kornfield stays with the discomfort. The things we love will change or end. What he proposes is that the remedy for fear is not to love less but to love from a deeper ground, one that does not depend on the other person remaining the same.

The episode also describes how love can transform into compassion, joy, and equanimity, and the preciousness of what we love becomes clearer when we are not clutching it. The practice is to hold people and experiences with loving awareness, so that when they pass, the love does not vanish with them.

How do we move beyond judgment and treat the body with kindness?

One of the episode's quieter threads concerns judgment. The kindness that Salzberg discovered toward her own clumsiness is the same movement the episode asks for everywhere: moving out of the reflex to judge and into a loving awareness that can hold what is happening. Kornfield's description of the course's guided practices includes embracing the body, heart, and mind with kindness, and listening for what is asking for love. The implication is that we tend to skip past the body and the feelings and go straight to the story about them. Loving awareness begins with noticing what is actually here.

The episode closes with a guided meditation rather than a conclusion, which is itself instructive. Listeners are invited to let the shoulders soften, to appreciate what is present, to be curious rather than critical, and to rest. Several of these instructions recur in the transcript as short cues, and they reflect a consistent method: invite, rather than force. The love Kornfield describes is not produced by strain. It is revealed when the body and mind stop bracing.

Ganesh Dass closes the episode with a blessing that names the stakes plainly: may you see others and yourself with the eyes of love, and may you remember your birthright as mindful, loving awareness. Read alongside the Ram Dass story, it is less a wish than a description of a practice. The practice is to keep returning to that birthright until it stops being an idea and starts being the way you look at the person in front of you.

Where to go from here

Episode 333 is short on theory and long on invitation, so the most useful next step is practice. Start small. Choose one phrase of loving-kindness, such as may I be safe, may I be filled with love and kindness, and repeat it for a few minutes a day, even if it feels mechanical. When it does, remember Salzberg in Burma, who was told to keep going and who found, in a spilled tray of dinner, that the heart had been changing all along. Extend the same phrases to a stranger, to someone difficult, and to yourself, noticing where judgment appears and whether a gentler sentence can follow it.

For a deeper structure, Kornfield points listeners to his course with Trudy Goodman, How to Thrive in Love: Buddhist Secrets to Transform Your Relationships, which this episode was drawn from, and to his site, JackKornfield.com, where his weekly teachings and online offerings are collected. The Heart Wisdom podcast is part of the Be Here Now Network, and the episodes are worth returning to slowly, one at a time. The question Ganesh opened with is not one a single talk can settle. It is one you answer by practicing, again and again, until you find that love has been holding you the whole time.