Quotes About Ram Dass

#1. All acts of healing are ultimately our selves healing our Self.
-Ram Dass

Ram Dass

#2. Spiritual joy is devotion, it's like a virus you know? It's a benevolent virus, but it spreads. It's infectious. Ram Dass was like a mentor in those days.

Surya Das

#3. 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.

Ram Dass

#4. Ram Dass, who described himself as a Hin-Jew, said that ultimately we're all just walking each other home. I love that. I try to live by it.

Anne Lamott

#5. We're all just walking each other home. - RAM DASS

Parvati Markus

#6. Why'd he name Ram Dass that? And Krishna Das that, instead of vice versa? Is Krishna Das more Krishna like and Ram Dass more Ram-like? Maybe ... why not? We grow into our names. But why did my parents named me Jeffrey and my brother Michael? Who knows?

Surya Das

#7. This sense of perfection has a built-in contradiction, one that Ram Dass once captured very succinctly by a statement he had heard from his Himalayan guru: The world is absolutely perfect, including your own dissatisfaction with it, and everything you are trying to do to change it.

Stanislav Grof

#8. You give up not meditating. It's called meditation action. There's no way out of it. Meditation means to be constantly extricating yourself from the clinging of mind.

Ram Dass

#9. 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.

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

#12. When you see the beloved all around you, everyone is family and everywhere is love.

Ram Dass

#13. Our interactions with one another reflect a dance between love and fear.

Ram Dass

#14. I remember my first visit with my guru. He had shown that he read my mind. So I looked at the grass and I thought, 'My god, he's going to know all the things I don't want people to know.' I was really embarrassed. Then I looked up and he was looking directly at me with unconditional love.

Ram Dass

#15. Once you have drunk from the water of unconditional love, no other well can satisfy your thirst. The pangs of separation may become so intense that seeking the affection of the Beloved becomes an obsession.

Ram Dass

#16. Remember, Be Here Now.

Ram Dass

#17. Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.

Ram Dass

#18. When you are completely identified with your thinking mind you are totally separate from everything else in the universe.

Ram Dass

#19. Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

#21. I hang out with my guru in my heart. And I love every thing in the universe. That's all I do all day.

Ram Dass

#22. Pain is the mind. It's the thoughts of the mind. Then I get rid of the thoughts, and I get in my witness, which is down in my spiritual heart. The witness that witnesses being. Then those particular thoughts that are painful - love them. I love them to death!

Ram Dass

#23. The next message you need is always right where you are.

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

#25. Real happiness lies in that which never comes nor goes, but simply is.

Ram Dass

#26. Spiritual practices help us move from identifying with the ego to identifying with the soul. Old age does that for you too. It spiritualizes people naturally.

Ram Dass

#27. Now is now. Are you going to be here or not?

Ram Dass

#28. We're receiving information from all the planes of our consciousness all the time, but we don't acknowledge their existence; we treat the information as static, as noise.

Ram Dass

#29. All of a sudden the progress will stop one day, and you will find yourself, as it were, stranded. Persevere. All progress proceeds by such rise and fall." - Vivekananda

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

#31. 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.

Ram Dass

#32. Behind everyone's learned behaviors and odd eccentricities lurks a soul, ready to make contact if only coaxed out through a crack in the ego.

Ram Dass

#33. Religions are founded by what mystics say when they come back;
but what the mystics say is not the same as what happened to them.

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

#35. 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.

Ram Dass

#36. My belief is that I wasn't born into Judaism by accident, and so I needed to find ways to honor that.

Ram Dass

#37. 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.

Ram Dass

#38. 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.

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

#45. When humans come together with a true spirit of dealing with the mystery collaboratively, it's incredibly beautiful.

Ram Dass

#46. I take the dust from the lotus feet of the guru to cleanse the mirror of my mind." So begins a sacred ode to Hanuman.

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

#48. Relationships only work in a spiritual sense when you and I really see that we are one.

Ram Dass

#49. 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.

Ram Dass

#50. The sooner one develops compassion in this journey, the better. Compassion lets us appreciate that each individual is doing what he or she must do, and that there is no reason to judge another person or oneself. You merely do what you can to further your own awakening.

Ram Dass

#51. A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there's work to be done.

Ram Dass

#52. The ego is frightened by death, because ego is part of the incarnation and ends with it. That is why we learn to identify with our soul, as the soul continues after death. For the soul, death is just another moment.

Ram Dass

#53. There's much more in any given moment than we usually perceive, and that we ourselves are much more than we usually perceive. When you know that, part of you can stand outside the drama of your life.

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

#56. I think that people should give gifts by really recognizing the spiritual worth of the person and their (the givers') own worth. You usually give a present that the other person needs or wants, and I think it just emphasizes wants and needs.

Ram Dass

#57. 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.

Ram Dass

#58. The dance goes from realizing that you're separate (which is the awakening) to then trying to find your way back into the totality of which you are not only a part, but which you are.

Ram Dass

#59. In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.

Ram Dass

#60. Knowledge all by itself, without deep wisdom, ends up becoming despair.

Ram Dass

#61. Nature is really important because it's a manifestation of love that hasn't been run through human minds.

Ram Dass

#62. 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.

Ram Dass

#63. Meditation raises the question: Who are we really?

Ram Dass

#64. 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.

Ram Dass

#65. The shadow is the greatest teacher for how to come to the light.

Ram Dass

#66. 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.

Ram Dass

#67. So you work on yourself as a gift to other human beings. Then you use every situation you have with other human beings as a vehicle to work on yourself by seeing where you get stuck-where you push, where you grab, where you judge, where you do all the stuff.

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

#69. Suffering lets us see where are attachments are - and that helps us get free.

Ram Dass

#70. I feel vulnerable because my mind - because of the stroke, my mind doesn't focus. And then I feel vulnerable because I don't understand the world around me.

Ram Dass

#71. 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.

Ram Dass

#72. Resting in Awareness, we transform all the 'stuff' of our lives.

Ram Dass

#73. 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.

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

#75. Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean.

Ram Dass

#76. When you know how to listen everyone is the guru

Ram Dass

#77. 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.

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

#79. 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.

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

#81. When I look at my life, I see that I wanted to be free of the physical plane, the psychological plane, and when I got free of those I didn't want to go anywhere near them.

Ram Dass

#82. 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.

Ram Dass

#83. Our plans never turn out as tasty as reality.

Ram Dass

#84. 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.

Ram Dass

#85. 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.

Ram Dass

#86. When we see the Beloved in each person, it's like walking through a garden, watching flowers bloom all around us.

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

#88. Words engage our minds, but in the silence we hear the Presence of God.

Ram Dass

#89. I will treat all my negative reactions to this form of meditation as merely thought forms prompted by my ego to keep me from taking it seriously. I will suspend judgment, criticism, and doubt.

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

#91. Turn your melodrama into a mellow drama.

Ram Dass

#92. External silence can be the doorway to inner silence.

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

#94. The point isn't to deny our Egos, but to extricate ourselves from our exclusive preoccupation with them.

Ram Dass

#95. Don't take yourself so personally.

Ram Dass

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

Ram Dass

#97. As we grow in our consciousness, there will be more compassion and more love, and then the barriers between people, between religions, between nations will begin to fall. Yes, we have to beat down the separateness.

Ram Dass

#98. Truth is scary. Truth has bad breath at times

Ram Dass

#99. The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everybody should follow any one path. Listen to your own truth.

Ram Dass

#100. Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It's not 'I love you' for this or that reason, not 'I love you if you love me.' It's love for no reason, love without an object.

Ram Dass