Ram Dass Quotes

We're all just walking each other home.

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

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

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

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 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.

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

The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.

Be here now.

Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.

Your problem is you are too busy holding on to your unworthiness.

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

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

Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.

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.

Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.

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

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

Let's trade in all our judging for appreciating. Let's lay down our righteousness and just be together.

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.

I can do nothing for you but work on myself...you can do nothing for me but work on yourself!

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

The game is not about becoming somebody, it's about becoming nobody.

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

Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.

Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama.

I'm not interested in being a "lover." I'm interested in only being love.

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.

We're here to awaken from the illusion of separateness

If you think you are enlightened; go home for Thanksgiving.

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

The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.

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.

It's all real and it's all illusory: that's Awareness!

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

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

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

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

It's very different because the Indians live as if they are their souls and Americans live as if they are their egos.

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

Our interactions with one another reflect a dance between love and fear.

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?

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.

The Ego is an exquisite instrument. Enjoy it, use it--just don't get lost in it.

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

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.

By acting compassionately, by helping to restore justice and to encourage peace, we are acknowledging that we are all part of one another.

Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean.

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

Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings.

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.

Prolong not the past Invite not the future Do not alter your innate wakefulness Fear not appearances There in nothing more than this

When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.

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.

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.

The freer I get, the higher I go. The higher I go, the more I see. The more I see, the less I know. The less I know, the more I’m free.

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.

Our journey is about being more deeply involved in Life and yet less attached to it.

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 see my life as an unfolding set of opportunities to awaken.

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.

As one individual changes, the system changes.

Cosmic humor, especially about your own predicament, is an important part of your journey.

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.

This sense of perfection has a built-in contradiction, one that Ram Dass once captured very succinctly by a statement he had heard from his Himalayan guru: "The world is absolutely perfect, including your own dissatisfaction with it, and everything you are trying to do to change it.

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.

To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible.

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

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

You may protest if you can love the person you are protesting against as much as you love yourself.

If you want to be surrounded by Souls, become identified with your Soul. It takes one to know one!

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.

When your center is firm, when your faith is strong and unwavering, then it will not matter what company you keep.

The world is won by those who let it go.

Inspiration is God making contact with itself.

I didn’t arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind.”—A. Einstein

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.

Religions are founded by what mystics say when they come back; but what the mystics say is not the same as what happened to them.

Now is now. Are you going to be here or not?

Those who know do not talk And talkers do not know.”—Tao Te Ching

The dance goes from realizing that you're separate (which is the awakening) to then trying to find your way back into the totality of which you are not only a part, but which you are.

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.

What we're seeing "out there" is the projection of where we're at--the projection of the clingings of our minds.

Love is the most transformative medicine For Love slowly transforms you Into what psychedelics only get you to glimpse.

I think the message is that you don’t need to go to anywhere else to find what you are seeking.

Do what you can on this plane to relieve suffering by constantly working on yourself to be an instrument for the cessation of suffering. To me, that's what the emerging game is all about.

Once you have drunk from the water of unconditional love, no other well can satisfy your thirst. The pangs of separation may become so intense that seeking the affection of the Beloved becomes an obsession.

When we're identified with Awareness, we're no longer living in a world of polarities. Everything is present at the same time.

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.

When the heart is open, it's easier for the mind to be turned toward God.

You give up not meditating. It's called meditation action. There's no way out of it. Meditation means to be constantly extricating yourself from the clinging of mind.

I was no longer needing to be special, because I was no longer so caught in my puny separateness that had to keep proving I was something. I was part of the universe, like a tree is, or like grass is, or like water is. Like storms, like roses. I was just part of it all.

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.

The human mind is like that monkey, incessantly active by its own nature, then it becomes drunk with the wine of desire, thus increasing its turbulence. After desire takes possession comes the sting of the scorpion of jealousy at the success of others, and last of all the demon of pride enters the mind, making it think itself of all importance.

This love is actually part of you; it is always flowing through you. It’s like the subatomic texture of the universe, the dark matter that connects everything. When you tune in to that flow, you will feel it in your own heart—not your physical heart or your emotional heart, but your spiritual heart, the place you point to in your chest when you say, “I am.

When somebody provokes your anger, the only reason you get angry is because you’re holding on to how you think something is supposed to be. You’re denying how it is. Then you see it’s the expectations of your own mind that are creating your own hell. When you get frustrated because something isn’t the way you thought it would be, examine the way you thought, not just the thing that frustrates you. You’ll see that a lot of your emotional suffering is created by your models of how you think the universe should be and your inability to allow it to be as it is.

The cosmic humor is that if you desire to move mountains and you continue to purify yourself, ultimately you will arrive at the place where you are able to move mountains. But in order to arrive at this position of power you will have had to give up being he-who-wanted-to-move-mountains so that you can be he-who-put-the-mountain-there-in-the-first-place. 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.

It is only when you begin to understand that if you and I are truly in love, if I go to the place in me that is love and you to the place in you that is love we are ‘together’ in Love. We start to understand that what love means is that we are sharing a common state together. That state exists in you and it exists in me.

Faith is not a belief. Faith is what is left when your beliefs have all been blown to hell. Faith is in the heart, while beliefs are in the head. Experiences, even spiritual experiences, come and go. As long as you base your faith on experience, your faith is going to be constantly flickering, because your experiences keep changing.

A woman once came to Mahatma Gandhi with her little boy. She asked, “Mahatma-ji, tell my little boy to stop eating sugar.” “Come back in three days,” said Gandhi. In three days the woman and the little boy returned and Mahatma Gandhi said to the little boy, “Stop eating sugar.” The woman asked, “Why was it necessary for us to return only after three days for you to tell my little boy that?” The Mahatma replied: “Three days ago I had not stopped eating sugar.