Ram Dass Quotes
1. The quieter you become, the more you can hear.
2. We’re fascinated by the words–but where we meet is in the silence behind them.
3. It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.
4. 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.
5. I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion–and where it isn’t, that’s where my work lies.
6. In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.
7. The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.
8. Your problem is you are too busy holding on to your unworthiness.
9. As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can’t see how it is.
10. 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.
11. Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.
12. What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.
13. 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.
14. Only that in you which is me can hear what I’m saying.
15. Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.
16. Let’s trade in all our judging for appreciating. Let’s lay down our righteousness and just be together.
17. 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.
18. A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there’s work to be done.
19. The next message you need is always right where you are.
20. 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.
21. I’m not interested in being a “lover.” I’m interested in only being love.
22. The game is not about becoming somebody, it’s about becoming nobody.
23. Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama.
24. If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible.
25. Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.
26. 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.
27. We’re here to awaken from the illusion of separateness
28. I can do nothing for you but work on myself…you can do nothing for me but work on yourself!
29. Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.
30. If you think you are enlightened; go home for Thanksgiving.
31. The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.
32. Our whole spiritual transformation brings us to the point where we realize that in our own being, we are enough.
33. When we see the Beloved in each person, it’s like walking through a garden, watching flowers bloom all around us.
34. It’s very different because the Indians live as if they are their souls and Americans live as if they are their egos.
35. Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it!
36. Healing does not mean going back to the way things were before, but rather allowing what is now to move us closer to God.
37. The question we need to ask ourselves is whether there is any place we can stand in ourselves where we can look at all that’s happening around us without freaking out, where we can be quiet enough to hear our predicament, and where we can begin to find ways of acting that are at least not contributing to further destabilization.
38. Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.
39. Our interactions with one another reflect a dance between love and fear.
40. In our relationships, how much can we allow them to become new, and how much do we cling to what they used to be yesterday?
41. The Ego is an exquisite instrument. Enjoy it, use it–just don’t get lost in it.
42. By acting compassionately, by helping to restore justice and to encourage peace, we are acknowledging that we are all part of one another.
43. All spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion.
44. 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.
45. Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us.
46. Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings.
47. Just because you are seeing divine light, experiencing waves of bliss, or conversing with Gods and Goddesses is no reason to not know your zip code.
48. 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.
49. 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.
50. Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we’re so deeply interconnected with one another. Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is the supreme creative act.
51. Early in the journey you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW…so you stop asking.
52. Our rational minds can never understand what has happened, but our hearts.. if we can keep them open to God, will find their own intuitive way.
53. You and I are the force for transformation in the world. We are the consciousness that will define the nature of the reality we are moving into.
54. As one individual changes, the system changes.
55. I see my life as an unfolding set of opportunities to awaken.
56. A moment comes when “other” is no longer other.
57. 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.
58. Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean.
59. You may protest if you can love the person you are protesting against as much as you love yourself.
60. Cosmic humor, especially about your own predicament, is an important part of your journey.
