Ram Dass Quotations

We're all just walking each other home.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Our souls are evolving towards becoming the one. That's what we're doing and we're using our incarnations as teaching devices.

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.

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."

I don't have a fear and urgency feeling inside myself about the state of the world affairs and everything collapsing.

I like walking in the pool. That isn't what makes me feel spiritual. But alive.

Religions are institutions that push you up the mountain and then they have their fantasies about the spirit. I mean they try to make God like the human psyche and it's wrong. I mean it's a projection of the mind, and you can use it to get a start and then you must leave it behind.

When your guru gives you a command, you better listen to it. I love everybody. Even George Bush.

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.

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.

Suffering brings your heart to bear. It gets you where you are!

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.

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.

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.

These are planes of consciousness, and I think human beings exist on two planes of consciousness, the soul and the ego.

When you get old, everything changes - your body changes, your family changes. You can't do what you've always done, anymore. And, either you can complain about things changing - or you can be content. Instead of complaining, you can say: "Oh, yesss! Look at all this change!" You can welcome it.

We gain internal freedom through external actions.

It wasn't until after I'd been around Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts, that I started to reflect about issues like the evolution of consciousness.

Faith, consciousness, and awareness all exist beyond the thinking mind.

Be patient. You'll know when it's time for you to wake up and move ahead.

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.

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.

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

Compassion is the ability to see how it all is.

Dying is the most important moment that exists in any incarnation

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.

My life is a creative act--like a painting, or a concerto.

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

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

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

The Ego ages... the Soul evolves... and to the Awareness, nothing happened!

Birth, death, and suffering all bring us to the very edge of what our minds can understand.

We kill each other over which name to call the Nameless.

If you keep examining your mind, you'll come to see that thoughts of who you are and how it all is are creating the reality you're experiencing.

Coming into the place of Soul-awareness is coming home.

When someone we love dies, we get so busy mourning what died that we ignore what didn't.

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.

True compassion arises out of the plane of consciousness where I AM you.

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

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

The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.

Counseling has to do with intuition, with work on oneself, with the quietness of one's mind and the openness of one's heart.

Faith is in the soul. Belief is thought. Faith is so rich. Faith gives me my spiritual self.

Suffering brings me so close to God.

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.

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

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.

Don't take yourself so personally.

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.

Gratitude opens your heart, and opening your heart is a wonderful and easy way for God to slip in.

Creativity springs from the yearning to be the fullness of who you are.

I'm ensconced in the soul … and I look around and everything is love.

You look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is...

The healing begins when we can start to feel more gratitude that our child came into our life than despair and outrage that our child died. The gratitude is what heals the despair.

I like to look at a tree and see that it's love. Don't you?

I look at you, and I see in you the yearning to get back to God. That yearning is love.

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

The person who says, 'I'm enlightened' probably isn't.

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

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.

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

The fun is having friends who help each other get free.

One of the ego's favorite paths of resistance is to fill you with doubt.

You have all the time in the world, but don't waste a moment.

When you live in love You see love everywhere you look. You are literally in love with everyone you look at.

Wisdom is one of the few things in human life that does not diminish with age.

I am embarrassed to admit what drew me to psychology. I didn't want to go to medical school. I was getting good grades in psychology and I was charismatic and people in the psychology department liked me. It was as low a level as that.

So many times each day we support each other informally without ever becoming 'helper' or 'helped.' Perhaps we're finding an article of clothing for a partner, cutting bread for one of the children, collecting the mail for the person at the next desk, holding the coat for someone at a restaurant.

What the word God means is the mystery really. It's the mystery that we face as humans the mystery of existence, of suffering and of death.

When you look back at your own life, you see ... the sufferings you went through, each time you would have avoided it if you possibly could. And yet, when you look at the depth of your character now, isn't a part of that a product of those experiences? Weren't those experiences part of what created the depth of your inner being?

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.

Remember, Be Here Now.

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.

You must come to see every human being Including yourself, As an incarnation In a body or personality, going through a certain Life experience which is functional.

If you think you are free, there is no escape possible.

There are no accidents whatsoever in the universe.

If you want to see how enlightened you are, go spend a week with your family.

I take the assumption that every religion has been rooted in some mystical or transcendent experience. From that assumption, I just look at all the different systems as metaphors or doorways to God.

Each person tells you who they think they are, and who they think you are.

Truth is scary. Truth has bad breath at times

Old age spiritualizes people naturally

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

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

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.

There is only one of us. One consciousness manifesting into different forms.

Our culture's zeal for longevity reveals our incredible collective fear of death.

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.

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

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

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.

You may have expected that enlightenment would come ZAP! instantaneous and permanent.This is unlikely.After the first ah ha expereince, it can be thougth of as a thinning of a layer of clouds.

Give it all up and you can have it all.

When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be. Its a journey towards simplicity, towards quietness, towards a kind of joy that is not in time. Its 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.

If I see one dilemma with Western man, it's that he can't accept how beautiful he is. He can't accept that he is pure light, that he's pure love, that he's pure consciousness, that he's divine.