There’s no rush. Go on being right just as long as you can. You’ll see that being right is actually a tight little box that is very constraining and not much fun to live in. Righteousness cuts you off from the flow of things. When I’m locked in a situation in a relationship with someone, it isn’t that they have done something to me. They’re just doing what they’re doing. If I get caught up in judging, the responsibility lies with me, not with them. It becomes my work on myself. I often say, “I really apologize for whatever suffering I’ve caused you in this situation.” We start to work from there. And after a while they will come forward and will examine themselves and say, “Well, maybe I was . . .” Our predicament is that our ego wants to be right in a world of people who don’t understand how right we are.

There is a way of representing what is right, the dharma of the moment. But if you get emotionally attached to a model of how the world ought to be that excludes how human beings are, there’s something wrong with where you’re standing. You should be standing somewhere else. Getting lost in your emotional reactivity isn’t where you want to be. Just allowing your humanity and that of others to be as it is, is the beginning of compassion. We are in a human incarnation. We can’t walk away. To walk in the dharma is also to hear other human beings.

- Excerpt from Ram Dass’ book Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from your Spiritual Heart.