Top 357 Quotes & Sayings by Ram Dass - Page 4

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.

In the depth of the soul is the atman, the oversoul. And that oversoul is really love and compassion, peace, joy, and wisdom.

If you would truly bring peace to the world, identify with that place within you where you are Peace.

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

We gain internal freedom through external actions.

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.

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

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

Compassion and love, that's all.

External silence can be the doorway to inner silence.

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.

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

Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.

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

When we practice dying, we are learning to identify less with Ego and more with Soul

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.

We live life in the marketplace and then we go off to the cave or to the meditation mat to replenish ourselves.

Finally you come to a point where you almost know it all. You are very wise. You are very pure... except for the fact that you may well have gotten caught in the last trap... the desire to know it all and still be you, "the knower." This is an impossibility. For all of the finite knowledge does not add up to the infinite. In order to take the final step, the knower must go. That is, you can only BE it all, but you can't know it all. The goal is non-dualistic - as long as there is a "knower" and "known" you are in dualism.

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

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

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 you know how to listen everyone is the guru

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.

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.

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

You see that who you are isn't moving in time. Time is describing the incarnations, the packing changes.

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

In meditation we can watch the itch instead of scratching it.

The gift you offer another person is just your being.

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

You experience that you are cut off by being in your mind, and there is a quality that is starving in an individual that is locked in their mind. So when you move to another plane of consciousness which is no longer controlled by your intellect, which is really the sub-system and you move into the meta-system, what you feel at that moment is... you are the universe, you feel merged with it, you feel thick with the moment, and that richness is so fulfilling.

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.

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

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

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

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

Can you use the rational mind to transcend itself?

The ego is a tool. You don't separate it. It's a tool for the spirit.

The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.

If I go into the place in myself that is love, and you go into the place in yourself that is love, we are together in love. Then you and I are truly in love, the state of being love. That's the entrance to Oneness.

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

We've gotten lost in our Ego and have forgotten that our Soul's only motive is to merge with the Beloved.

Fear of death only comes through the brittleness of the ego.

I will work on myself, since the work on myself is going to be the highest thing I can do for it all, since I understand that as man up-levels his own consciousness, he sees more creative solutions to the problems that he's confronting.

Heaven & Hell are both creations of desire.

I am not this body. I am in this body, and this is part of my incarnation and I honor it but that isn't who I am.

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

When you want to become free, your righteousness and anger are much less interesting than they used to be.

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

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

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?

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.

I've got to love the souls of people. Because I can't love every incarnation. I have to identify with my own soul. And then I can have such compassion for that soul who has an incarnation like George Bush. I feel compassion. That's karma of the here. Compassion and love, that's all.

I think it's darkness before the dawn, because the next evolution is going to be a consciousness evolution instead of a communication revolution.

There is a larger frame to the painting than the one that bounds our life's events.

The way you come to fully appreciate the infusion of the Spirit is to more and more come fully into the moment, where this moment is enough.

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

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

The offering up or cleaning up ego stuff is called purification. Purification is the act of letting go. This is done out of discriminative awareness. That is, you understand that you are an entity passing through a life in which the entire drama is an offering for your awakening.

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