Ram Dass Art Quotations

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!

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

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.

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

I think the game is to bear the unbearable with a giggle. With your heart breaking. And then do what you do.

The giving and receiving is the tricky thing. It's not the gift. It's what the heart says in giving the gift, and from my point of view, one doesn't give or receive - that's a role we have to play. But the gift - it's God's gift. I think that it's better to be souls than roles.

Compassion and pity are very different. Whereas compassion reflects the yearning of the heart to merge and take on some of the suffering, pity is a controlled set of thoughts designed to assure separateness. Compassion is the spontaneous response of love; pity, the involuntary reflex of fear.

Institutions don't change the world in fundamental ways. The way the world changes is heart to heart to heart by individuals, not by institutions.

When you concentrate on the middle of your chest - this is where loving awareness lives. This is the spiritual heart. Not the beating heart, not the emotional heart. This spiri­tual heart goes way back - goes back many incarnations. We call it the soul.

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.

The thinking mind is what is busy. You have to stay in your heart. You have to be in your heart. Be in your heart. The rest is up here in your head where you are doing, doing, doing.

Love flows. Love doesn't know boundaries. The mind creates boundaries. The mind creates the boundary of separate me and you. The heart just keeps embracing and opening out.

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.

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.

When your mind is quiet, you enter into the flow of love, and you just flow from one moment to the next as naturally as breathing. Whatever arises, I embrace it with love in the moment. This is my practice of polishing the mirror to reflect love. In this moment there is just awareness and love. If someone asks me how to get into their heart, I give them this practice: I Am Loving Awareness.

The witness is always in the here and now and it lives in each instant of living. To be in the witness is to listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without clinging, without opinions.

I've firmly come to the conclusion that there are no 'themes' for me anymore. I can't be told who to hate, who to fight, who to subdue - I only see an 'us' in my heart.

If I'm going to die, the best way to prepare is to quiet my mind and open my heart. If I'm going to live, the best way to prepare for it is to quiet my mind and open my heart.

My work as a human being is to quiet my mind, open my heart and do what I can to relieve the suffering with as much wisdom, skill, whatever I got.

Look at the people you don't love and see them as an exercise for you to open your heart.

When our hearts open, when we know that we are in fact the world, when we experience the pain of others in our own blood and muscle, we are feeling compassion.

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

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.

The God within is your Spiritual Heart. Your Soul. And in that individual Soul, rests God- rests the One. Go into your soul and your heart-space which can be Awareness, Love, Compassion, etc…and just BE your heart-space. BE your Soul so that you can LOVE unconditionally.

Let the clock and the earth do their own thing... Let the comings and goings of life continue... But YOU stay HERE and NOW. This exercise is to bring you to the Eternal Present where it all is.

The pain of the world will sear and break our hearts because we can no longer keep them closed. We've seen too much now. To some degree or other, we have surrendered into service and are willing to pay the price of compassion. But with it comes the joy of a single, caring act. With it comes the honor of participating in a generous process in which one rises each day and does what one can. With it comes the simple, singular grace of being an instrument of Love, in whatever form, to whatever end.

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.

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

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.

If you rest in the silence inside, all those you meet will have their spiritual hearts resuscitated.

Watch how your mind judges. Judgment comes, in part, out of your own fear. You judge other people because you’re not comfortable in your own being. By judging, you find out where you stand in relation to other people. The judging mind is very divisive. It separates. Separation closes your heart. If you close your heart to someone, you are perpetuating your suffering and theirs. Shifting out of judgment means learning to appreciate your predicament and their predicament with an open heart instead of judging. Then you can allow yourself and others to just be, without separation...

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.

The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back. In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight. When we see the Beloved in each person, it's like walking through a garden, watching flowers bloom all around us.