A Quote by Ram Dass

Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it. — © Ram Dass
Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.
Problems arise when you identify with your thoughts and emotions. Try to be a witness to the thoughts instead of being totally identified with them.
Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.
Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.
As a director, I have to do everything. As an actor, I'm just worried about one role, that's it. As a director, everything is important. Everything is something you have to be very detailed and specific about in telling a story. So for me, the job is far greater than just being the actor, there's a lot more responsibility creatively, technically.
It's like one of the best things that can ever happen to you as an actor: to have your story reach people, even if they don't look like you and even though they may not be able to identify with a black male; they can still identify with what's happening to you.
Once you're playing someone, you shouldn't be judging them in any way. That's what being an actor is - it's having empathy for people that are different from yourself. Once you've committed to that person, your responsibility is to tell that story.
And here in Los Angeles, once again, I'm going to go down and be a witness. There's a guilty plea. I don't mind being on the witness stand, but I think they mind it a lot.
When you get old, everything changes - your body changes, your family changes. You can't do what you've always done, anymore. And, either you can complain about things changing - or you can be content. Instead of complaining, you can say: "Oh, yesss! Look at all this change!" You can welcome it.
Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation.
I have often thought of doing a story with someone either as a human being or as a robot who, by a series of stages, changes into the other end of the spectrum. By the story's end, he'd be either totally robotic or totally human, the opposite of what he once was. And possibly... bring him back again.
Be a witness of sex too. Don't be the controller of it. Don't try to forcibly bring it under control, remain a witness of it too. Just as you are a witness of everything else, remain a witness of sex too.
Change your story, change your life. Divorce the story of limitation, and marry the story of the truth and everything changes.
But I've always felt that the less you know about an actor's personal life, the more you can get involved in the story in which he's playing a character. And I don't like to see movies where you know about everything that happens behind the scenes. I can't engage in the story if I know what's going on in the actor's head.
One way of paying tribute to my parents was 'bearing witness' as the Quakers do - writing down everything that was happening instead of turning my back on it and pretending that it was all great.
I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped by two things -- stories told and the memories they leave behind.
Film 'This Changes Everything' is not a sad story. It's not a slit-your-wrists climate film. It's a story about people who are making change happen.
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