Ram Dass famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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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.
-- Ram Dass -
We live life in the marketplace and then we go off to the cave or to the meditation mat to replenish ourselves.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
I've got to love the souls of people. Because I can't love every incarnation. To love their souls, I have to identify with my own soul.
-- Ram Dass -
We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not.
-- Ram Dass -
Nature is really important because it's a manifestation of love that hasn't been run through human minds.
-- Ram Dass -
Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.
-- Ram Dass -
I don't have a fear and urgency feeling inside myself about the state of the world affairs and everything collapsing.
-- Ram Dass -
I would say that the thrust of my life has been initially about getting free, and then realizing that my freedom is not independent of everybody else. Then I am arriving at that circle where one works on oneself as a gift to other people so that one doesn't create more suffering. I help people as a work on myself and I work on myself to help people.
-- Ram Dass -
I don't think too much about the future. Not because I'm hiding my head in the sand but because I figured out that whatever the future was going to be, the thing I had to do was to quiet my mind and open my heart and do what I could to end suffering.
-- Ram Dass -
A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there's work to be done.
-- Ram Dass -
I think that people will find a tremendous joy and fulfillment in service to other human beings, and that often this is what is missing in their lives.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
I like walking in the pool. That isn't what makes me feel spiritual. But alive.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
When your guru gives you a command, you better listen to it. I love everybody. Even George Bush.
-- Ram Dass -
Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it!
-- Ram Dass -
I love everybody and they, in turn, love everybody, and that's spreading love heart to heart to heart. That's my approach of my work.
-- Ram Dass -
The sooner one develops compassion in this journey, the better. Compassion lets us appreciate that each individual is doing what he or she must do, and that there is no reason to judge another person or oneself. You merely do what you can to further your own awakening.
-- Ram Dass -
Our souls are evolving towards becoming the one. That's what we're doing and we're using our incarnations as teaching devices.
-- Ram Dass -
Caring is a reflex. Someone slips, your arm goes out. A car is in the ditch, you join others and push... You live, you help.
-- Ram Dass -
Be patient. You'll know when it's time for you to wake up and move ahead.
-- Ram Dass -
There's much more in any given moment than we usually perceive, and that we ourselves are much more than we usually perceive. When you know that, part of you can stand outside the drama of your life.
-- Ram Dass -
All that you seek is already within you. In Hinduism it is called the Atman, in Buddhism the pure Buddha-Mind. Christ said, 'the kingdom of heaven is within you.' Quakers call it the ‘still small voice within.’ This is the space of full awareness that is in harmony with all the universe, and thus is wisdom itself.
-- Ram Dass -
We've been proceeding so long on the plane of consciousness, we don't realize we are spiritual beings. Our minds, our senses, and the society around us all say, "Come on, you're getting into fantasy."
-- Ram Dass -
Our journey is about being more deeply involved in life, and yet less attached to it.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.
-- Ram Dass -
I think the question is, how do we live with change? Change in our friends, change in our lovers? Change in me and change in my body, from the stroke. Things have changed this plane of consciousness. We've tried to keep things the same. It causes suffering. This suffering is another step in your spiritual life, in your spiritual journey.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
I've got to love the souls of people. Because I can't love every incarnation. I have to identify with my own soul. And then I can have such compassion for that soul who has an incarnation like George Bush. I feel compassion. That's karma of the here. Compassion and love, that's all.
-- Ram Dass -
If you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family.
-- Ram Dass -
The game is not about becoming somebody, it's about becoming nobody.
-- Ram Dass -
I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion--and where it isn't, that's where my work lies.
-- Ram Dass -
The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.
-- Ram Dass -
Within the spiritual journey you understand that suffering becomes something that has been given to you to show you where your mind is still stuck. It’s a vehicle to help you go to work. That’s why it’s called grace.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
We're sitting under the tree of our thinking minds, wondering why we're not getting any sunshine!
-- Ram Dass -
The gift you offer another person is just your being.
-- Ram Dass -
The interesting question is, how do you put yourself in a position so that you can allow ‘what is’ to be. The enemy turns out to be the creation of mind. Because when you are just in the moment, doing what you are doing, there is no fear. The fear is when you stand back to think about it. The fear is not in the actions. The fear is in the thought about the actions.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
Souls love. That’s what souls do. Egos don’t, but souls do. Become a soul, look around, and you’ll be amazed-all the beings around you are souls. Be one, see one.
-- Ram Dass -
The universe is made up of experiences that are designed to burn out your attachment, your clinging, to pleasure, to pain, to fear, to all of it. And as long as there is a place where you’re vulnerable, the universe will find a way to confront you with it.
-- Ram Dass -
What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.
-- Ram Dass -
It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.
-- Ram Dass -
Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama.
-- Ram Dass -
Healing does not mean going back to the way things were before, but rather allowing what is now to move us closer to God.
-- Ram Dass -
As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.
-- Ram Dass -
It's only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.
-- Ram Dass -
The next message you need is always right where you are.
-- Ram Dass -
Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is a supreme creative act.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
The shadow is the greatest teacher for how to come to the light.
-- Ram Dass -
Let the natural flow of the universe, course through your being, and harmonize your soul.
-- Ram Dass -
The way we regard death is critical to the way we experience life. When your fear of death changes, the way you live your life changes.
-- Ram Dass -
Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings.
-- Ram Dass -
Our thinking minds deprive us of the happiness that comes when we are living fully in the moment.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
In meditation we can watch the itch instead of scratching it.
-- Ram Dass -
When we see the Beloved in each person, it's like walking through a garden, watching flowers bloom all around us.
-- Ram Dass -
I see my life as an unfolding set of opportunities to awaken.
-- Ram Dass -
Our whole spiritual transformation brings us to the point where we realize that in our own being, we are enough.
-- Ram Dass -
Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.
-- Ram Dass -
Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.
-- Ram Dass -
If you would truly bring peace to the world, identify with that place within you where you are Peace.
-- Ram Dass -
Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.
-- Ram Dass -
Ask yourself: Where am I? Answer: Here. Ask yourself: What time is it? Answer: Now. Say it until you can hear it.
-- Ram Dass -
As you dissolve into love, your ego fades. You’re not thinking about loving; you’re just being love, radiating like the sun.
-- Ram Dass -
Souls love. That’s what souls do. Egos don’t, but souls do. Become a soul, look around, and you’ll be amazed-all the beings around you are souls. Be one, see one. When many people have this heart connection, then we will know that we are all one, we human beings all over the planet. We will be one. One love. And don’t leave out the animals, and trees, and clouds, and galaxies-it’s all one. It’s one energy.
-- Ram Dass -
Let's trade in all our judging for appreciating. Let's lay down our righteousness and just be together.
-- Ram Dass -
The final awakening is the embracing of the darkness into the light. That means embracing our humanity as well as our divinity. What we go from is being born into our humanity, sleep walking for a long time, until we awaken and start to taste our divinity. And then want to finally get free. We see as long as we grab at our divinity and push away our humanity we aren’t free. If you want to be free, you can’t push away anything. You have to embrace it all. It’s all God.
-- Ram Dass -
We reap in age what we have sown, in our values, all along the way.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
Faith is what is left after all your beliefs have been blown to hell.
-- Ram Dass -
Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.
-- Ram Dass -
Now is now. Are you going to be here or not?
-- Ram Dass -
Who you think you are will always be frightened of change. But it doesn't make any difference to who you truly are.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
So your first job is to work on yourself. The greatest thing you can do for another human being is to get your own house in order and find your true spiritual heart.
-- Ram Dass -
Being in love means seeing the Beloved all around me.
-- Ram Dass -
The humor is that finally when you have the power to move the mountain, you are the person who placed it there-so there the mountain stays.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
The intellect is a beautiful servant but a terrible master. Intellect is the power tool of our separateness. The intuitive, compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity.
-- Ram Dass -
In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.
-- Ram Dass -
The Ego is an exquisite instrument. Enjoy it, use it--just don't get lost in it.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear...
-- Ram Dass -
There is a larger frame to the painting than the one that bounds our life's events.
-- Ram Dass -
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.
-- Ram Dass -
Be open to all teachers And all teachings, And listen with your heart.
-- Ram Dass
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