Ram Dass quotes:

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  • Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It's not 'I love you' for this or that reason, not 'I love you if you love me.' It's love for no reason, love without an object.

  • When I used to perform weddings, the image I always had was the image of a triangle, in which there are two partners and then there is this third force, this third being, that emerges out of the interaction of these two. The third one is the one that is the shared awareness that lies behind the two of them.

  • I sit with people who are dying. I'm one of those unusual types that enjoys being with someone when they're dying because I know I am going to be in the presence of Truth.

  • A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there's work to be done.

  • You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing. You don't have to do anything to earn it. Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical perfection, or social and economic success - none of that matters. No one can take this love away from you, and it will always be here.

  • Working with the dying is like being a midwife for this great rite of passage of death. Just as a midwife helps a being take their first breath, you help a being take their last breath.

  • In our Western culture, although death has come out of the closet, it is still not openly experienced or discussed. Allowing dying to be so intensely present enriches both the preciousness of each moment and our detachment from it.

  • I remember my first visit with my guru. He had shown that he read my mind. So I looked at the grass and I thought, 'My god, he's going to know all the things I don't want people to know.' I was really embarrassed. Then I looked up and he was looking directly at me with unconditional love.

  • It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.

  • When I look at relationships, my own and others, I see a wide range of reasons for people to be together and ways in which they are together. I see ways in which a relationship - which means something that exists between two or more people - for the most part reinforces people's separateness as individual entities.

  • If I go into the place in myself that is love, and you go into the place in yourself that is love, we are together in love. Then you and I are truly in love, the state of being love. That's the entrance to Oneness. That's the space I entered when I met my guru.

  • My guru said that when he suffers, it brings him closer to God. I have found this, too.

  • When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be. It's a journey towards simplicity, towards quietness, towards a kind of joy that is not in time. It's a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body and our psyche, on to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification.

  • We come into relationships often very much identified with our needs. I need this, I need security, I need refuge, I need friendship. And all of relationships are symbiotic in that sense. We come together because we fulfill each others' needs at some level or other.

  • Pain is the mind. It's the thoughts of the mind. Then I get rid of the thoughts, and I get in my witness, which is down in my spiritual heart. The witness that witnesses being. Then those particular thoughts that are painful - love them. I love them to death!

  • The thinking mind is what is busy. You have to stay in your heart. You have to be in your heart. Be in your heart. The rest is up here in your head where you are doing, doing, doing.

  • Your problem is you're... too busy holding onto your unworthiness.

  • Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it!

  • Inspiration is God making contact with itself.

  • In working with those who are dying, I offer another human being a spacious environment with my mind in which they can die as they need to die. I have no right to define how another person should die. I'm just there to help them transition, however they need to do it.

  • Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom.

  • I have always said that often the religion you were born with becomes more important to you as you see the universality of truth.

  • If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.

  • My whole academic career was totally out of Jewish anxiety, and issues surrounding achievement and adequacy.

  • The next message you need is always right where you are.

  • The universe is an example of love. Like a tree. Like the ocean. Like my body. Like my wheelchair. I see the love.

  • Until we know that we can bear the unbearable, we're always running scared.

  • In the depth of the soul is the atman, the oversoul. And that oversoul is really love and compassion, peace, joy, and wisdom.

  • I feel vulnerable because my mind - because of the stroke, my mind doesn't focus. And then I feel vulnerable because I don't understand the world around me.

  • Most of us are convinced that we are our egos, which is who we think we are. The ego is part of our incarnation. It dies with the body, which is why we are so afraid of death. Death scares the hell out of who you think you are, especially if you think you are this body.

  • Don't think about the past. Just be here now.

  • Remember, Be Here Now.

  • Meditation means to be constantly extricating yourself from the clinging of mind. By letting go of even the thought 'I,' and 'me' what is left? There is nowhere to stand and no one to stand there. No separation anywhere. Pure awareness. Neither this, nor that. Just clarity and being.

  • I'm a Bhakti, meaning I practice devotional yoga and the heart and love, so I say to people, start with your ego and go down to your heart.

  • When we see the Beloved in each person, it's like walking through a garden, watching flowers bloom all around us.

  • We're all just walking each other home.

  • When you are already in Detroit, you don't have to take a bus to get there.

  • The offering up or cleaning up ego stuff is called purification. Purification is the act of letting go. This is done out of discriminative awareness. That is, you understand that you are an entity passing through a life in which the entire drama is an offering for your awakening.

  • I will work on myself, since the work on myself is going to be the highest thing I can do for it all, since I understand that as man up-levels his own consciousness, he sees more creative solutions to the problems that he's confronting.

  • The dark night of the soul is when you have lost the flavor of life but have not yet gained the fullness of divinity. So it is that we must weather that dark time, the period of transformation when what is familiar has been taken away and the new richness is not yet ours.

  • Spiritual practices help us move from identifying with the ego to identifying with the soul. Old age does that for you too. It spiritualizes people naturally.

  • What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.

  • Many of us are caught in separateness and we look for love out there, out there. But then as we proceed inside there will be the love. The universe is an example of love. Like a tree. Like the ocean. Like my body. Like my wheelchair. I see the love.

  • There is message to the community that a non-governmental process is underway to bring about social change, it's a public one, and people like Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, and Mikhail Gorbachev are throwing their weight behind it. In a world where there's a lot of cynicism and despair, this has a candle-lighting effect.

  • Death has such great importance in this society that it affects everything. I learned from my guru that death is not the enemy, I see it as another moment. Yet it's the end of an incarnation and means going on to other incarnations.

  • I hang out with my guru in my heart. And I love everything in the universe. That's all I do all day.

  • When you know how to listen everyone is the guru

  • As the haves and have-nots split further and further apart, destabilization ultimately leads to revolution, not evolution. If we're playing the evolution vs. revolution game, we are closer to revolution than we are to evolution in my concept.

  • If we are to help heal the world, we need to remember that it is a sacred place. Our actions need to be positive statements, reminders that even in the worst times there is a world worth struggling for.

  • Healing does not mean going back to the way things were before, but rather allowing what is now to move us closer to God.

  • I think the game is to bear the unbearable with a giggle. With your heart breaking. And then do what you do.

  • Institutions don't change the world in fundamental ways. The way the world changes is heart to heart to heart by individuals, not by institutions.

  • The satsang is - within the mass culture - like little mushrooms here and there, and somebody, maybe a Christian and a Hindu and a Buddhist, come together; doesn't matter, because those are paths. They're paths to the One. But those satsangs are what the world needs. And as I say - heart to heart - that's what satsang is.

  • If we can give up attachment to our roles as helpers, then maybe our clients can give up attachment to their roles as patients and we can meet as fellow souls on this incredible journey. We can fulfill the duties of our roles without being trapped by over-identifica tion with them.

  • All spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion.

  • I am not this body. I am in this body, and this is part of my incarnation and I honor it but that isn't who I am.

  • We're being trained through our incarnations--trained to seek love, trained to seek light, trained to see the grace in suffering.

  • The way you come to fully appreciate the infusion of the Spirit is to more and more come fully into the moment, where this moment is enough.

  • Behind everyone's learned behaviors and odd eccentricities lurks a soul, ready to make contact if only coaxed out through a crack in the ego.

  • I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion--and where it isn't, that's where my work lies.

  • The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving: it's in the being. When I need love from others, or need to give love to others, I'm caught in an unstable situation. Being in love, rather than giving or taking love, is the only thing that provides stability. Being in love means seeing the Beloved all around me.

  • Being in love means seeing the Beloved all around me.

  • Turn your melodrama into a mellow drama.

  • If you meditate regularly, even when you don't feel like it, you will make great gains, for it will allow you to see how your thoughts impose limits on you. Your resistances to meditation are your mental prisons in miniature.

  • We're fascinated by the words--but where we meet is in the silence behind them.

  • The soul is not part of the incarnation. It comes into the incarnation. And the soul is not afraid of death because it has done it so many times.

  • When you are in the presence of unconditional love, that is the optimum environment for your heart to open, because you feel safe, because you realize nobody wants anything from you. The minute that heart opens, you are once again letting in the flow. And that flow is where you experience God.

  • We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.

  • The most exquisite paradox; as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all.

  • After meditating for some years, I began to see the patterns of my own behavior. As you quiet your mind, you begin to see the nature of your own resistance more clearly, struggles, inner dialogues, the way in which you procrastinate and develop passive resistance against life. As you cultivate the witness, things change. You don't have to change them. Things just change.

  • Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying.

  • In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.

  • Caring is a reflex...You live, you help.

  • Maharajji told me, 'Give up anger and I'll help you.' I found that love freed me back into the ocean of love and my righteous anger didn't do that. And I would rather be free than right.

  • Psychedelics helped me to escape.. albeit momentarily.. from the prison of my mind. It over-rode the habit patterns of thought and I was able to taste innocence again. Looking at sensations freshly without the conceptual overly was very profound.

  • In mystical traditions, it is one's own readiness that makes experiences exoteric or esoteric.The secret isn't that you're not being told.The secret is that you're not able to hear.

  • I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves.

  • Our plans never turn out as tasty as reality.

  • Maharaj-ji, in my first darshan, my first meeting with him, showed me his powers. At that point I was impressed with the power. But subsequently, I realized that it was really his love that pulled me in. His love is unconditional love.

  • The stroke has given me another way to serve people. It lets me feel more deeply the pain of others; to help them know by example that ultimately, whatever happens, no harm can come. 'Death is perfectly safe,' I like to say.

  • I can go all over the world with Skype.

  • Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us.

  • You can't build joy on a feeling of self-loathing.

  • If you feel a sense of social responsibility, first of all keep working on yourself. Being peaceful yourself is the first step if you want to live in a peaceful universe.

  • The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.

  • Our whole spiritual transformation brings us to the point where we realize that in our own being, we are enough.

  • As one individual changes, the system changes.

  • A Tibetan Lama said to me, "The best place to stand, Ram Dass, is halfway between hope and hopelessness." So I can write a scenario for the 21st century in either direction. One is that it all goes to hell and that it's truly the dark age.

  • The richness of a moment comes when it's both full and empty at the same time. The truth is, we live simultaneously in time and timelessness.

  • Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.

  • By going into third world countries and serving, by actually feeding and helping people, I've been led to focus a little more on how people here try to be happy by ignoring other people who are unhappy.

  • The art of life is to stay wide open and be vulnerable, yet at the same time to sit with the mystery and the awe and with the unbearable pain - to just be with it all.

  • This society is not 'user-friendly' for older people.

  • So you work on yourself as a gift to other human beings. Then you use every situation you have with other human beings as a vehicle to work on yourself by seeing where you get stuck-where you push, where you grab, where you judge, where you do all the stuff.

  • As we grow in our consciousness, there will be more compassion and more love, and then the barriers between people, between religions, between nations will begin to fall. Yes, we have to beat down the separateness.

  • My belief is that I wasn't born into Judaism by accident, and so I needed to find ways to honor that.

  • In India, there's a way of seeing life as a cosmic play. It's called Lila. I can watch my life, and I can see my guru playing with me.

  • You can be still and still moving. Content even in your discontent.

  • From a Hindu perspective, you are born as what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it's got you.

  • When I look at my life, I see that I wanted to be free of the physical plane, the psychological plane, and when I got free of those I didn't want to go anywhere near them.

  • A being whose awareness is totally free, who does not cling to anything, is liberated.

  • A man said to me, "You talk to your dead guru?" And I said, "Yeah." He said, "That's in your imagination." And I said, "Yeah!" Because my guru is in my imagination anywhere. Anywhere.

  • A moment comes when "other" is no longer other.

  • A Oneness of all. An evolution in consciousness of us all that isn't about the egos.

  • Accidents are just from where you're looking; to the ego, it looks like it's miracles and accidents.

  • Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.

  • After one arrives at the summit, after going through the total transformation of being...there is yet one more step to the completion of that journey: the return to the valley below, to the everyday world. Who it is that returns is not who began the climb in the first place. The being that comes back is quietness itself, is compassion and wisdom, is the truth of the ages. Whatever humble or elevated position that being holds within the community, he or she becomes a light for others on the way a statement of the freedom that comes from having touched the top of the mountain.

  • Aging has its own beauty. It is a beautiful stage for doing inner work. You have a chance to not be so dependent on social approval. You can be a little more eccentric. You can be more alone. And you can examine loneliness and boredom instead of being afraid of them. There is such an art and a possibility of aging.

  • All you can do for another person is be an environment in which if they wanted to come up for air, they could.

  • Allowing dying to be so intensely present enriches both the preciousness of each moment and our detachment from it.

  • Along with faith comes the requirement for dogged persistence. At first meditation may bring you mild highs or some relief from suffering. But there may come a time - just as there does in the development of any skill - when there will be a plateau. You may be bored, discouraged, or even negative and cynical. This is when you will need not only faith, but persistence.

  • And then the witness, if you go down into the witness, that has the spiritual being. Down there, in your soul, you'll get far more love than you ever got out there.

  • As I've gone into soul and soul-land, and I connect with my soul and my ego, and my life is colored by my soul - people can identify from their ego, which is who they thought they are. The soul, which is who they really are, if they choose that transfer to the soul, then you live in an ocean of love.

  • As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.

  • As we grow in our consciousness.. there will be more compassion and more love. And then... the barriers between people.. between religions.. and between nations will begin to fall.

  • As you dissolve into love, your ego fades. You're not thinking about loving; you're just being love, radiating like the sun.

  • As you look at many people's lives, you see that their suffering is in a way gratifying, for they are comfortable in it. They make their lives a living hell, but a familiar one.

  • Ask yourself: Where am I? Answer: Here. Ask yourself: What time is it? Answer: Now. Say it until you can hear it.

  • At first you think that your sadhana Is a limited part of your life. In time you realize that Everything you do is part of your sadhana.

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