Ram Dass Quotations | Page 2

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.