Ram Dass Quotes

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.

You can't build joy on a feeling of self-loathing.

The question we need to ask ourselves is whether there is any place we can stand in ourselves where we can look at all that's happening around us without freaking out, where we can be quiet enough to hear our predicament, and where we can begin to find ways of acting that are at least not contributing to further destabilization.

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.

Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.

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

You may protest if you can love the person you are protesting against as much as you love yourself.

Compassion is the ability to see how it all is.

As you dissolve into love, your ego fades. You’re not thinking about loving; you’re just being love, radiating like the sun.

The universe is made up of experiences that are designed to burn out your attachment, your clinging, to pleasure, to pain, to fear, to all of it. And as long as there is a place where you’re vulnerable, the universe will find a way to confront you with it.

These are planes of consciousness, and I think human beings exist on two planes of consciousness, the soul and the ego.

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

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.

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.

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

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

You have everything in you that Buddha has, that Christ has. You've got it all. But only when you start to acknowledge it is it going to get interesting. Your problem is you're afraid to acknowledge your own beauty. You're too busy holding on to your own unworthiness. You'd rather be a schnook sitting before some great man. That fits in more with who you think you are. Well, enough already. I sit before you and I look and I see your beauty, even if you don't.

Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.

Be patient. You'll know when it's time for you to wake up and move ahead.

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.

Don't think about the past. Just be here now.

If we can give up attachment to our roles as helpers, then maybe our clients can give up attachment to their roles as patients and we can meet as fellow souls on this incredible journey. We can fulfill the duties of our roles without being trapped by over-identifica tion with them.

If you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family.

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.

Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.

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.

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.

I get rid of the thoughts, and I get in my witness, which is down in my spiritual heart. The witness that witnesses being.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

One cultivates spaciousness or awareness which allows you to acknowledge the emotions and see them as part of the human condition. Emotions are like subtle thought forms and they all arise in response to something outside yourself. They are all reactions. You cultivate a quietness in yourself that watches these emotions rising and falling and passing away.

If you meditate regularly, even when you don't feel like it, you will make great gains, for it will allow you to see how your thoughts impose limits on you. Your resistances to meditation are your mental prisons in miniature.

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.

At the moment when there's nothing more to lose, the Ego breaks open - and then we see who we are behind who we thought we were.

There can be conscious revolution.

You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing.

In communications empathy knowing respect spirituality tolerance understanding. Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying.

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

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

Compassion and love, that's all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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