Top 357 Quotes & Sayings by Ram Dass - Page 6

There are no accidents whatsoever in the universe.

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.

Suffering brings me so close to God.

Those particular thoughts that are painful - love them. I love them to death!

Pain is the mind. It's the mind. It's the thoughts of the mind.

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

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.

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.

I experience each moment like baklava: rich in this layer, and this layer, and this layer.

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

Accidents are just from where you're looking; to the ego, it looks like it's miracles and accidents.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

My guru is in my imagination anywhere. Anywhere.

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

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.

There are wars and poverty and so on - it's based on fear. You can cure that with your being by not being afraid.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have written and spoken my thoughts over many years. Now I'm on new ground and spirit. I want to bring these together. Things like karma yoga, bhakti yoga, conscious dying, conscious aging. Consciousness.

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

Give it all up and you can have it all.

The soul is love, joy. Joy. Peace. Wisdom.

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.

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.

And then the witness, if you go down into the witness, that has the spiritual being. Down there, in your soul, you'll get far more love than you ever got out there.

There can be conscious revolution.

A man said to me, "You talk to your dead guru?" And I said, "Yeah." He said, "That's in your imagination." And I said, "Yeah!" Because my guru is in my imagination anywhere. Anywhere.

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.

Caring is a reflex. Someone slips, your arm goes out. A car is in the ditch, you join others and push... You live, you help.

In an evolutionary perspective, the rational mind takes a certain distance and no further, & we must be able to transcend it.

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.

Remember, Be Here Now.

I love everybody. Even George Bush.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I think the question is, how do we live with change? Change in our friends, change in our lovers? Change in me and change in my body, from the stroke. Things have changed this plane of consciousness. We've tried to keep things the same. It causes suffering. This suffering is another step in your spiritual life, in your spiritual journey.

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.

As I've gone into soul and soul-land, and I connect with my soul and my ego, and my life is colored by my soul - people can identify from their ego, which is who they thought they are. The soul, which is who they really are, if they choose that transfer to the soul, then you live in an ocean of love.

If you could stand back far enough and watch the whole process you'd see you are a totally determined being.

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