Ram Dass Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

True compassion arises out of the plane of consciousness where I AM you.

The most exquisite paradox; as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all.

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

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

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.

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

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.

By going into third world countries and serving, by actually feeding and helping people, I've been led to focus a little more on how people here try to be happy by ignoring other people who are unhappy.

Suffering brings your heart to bear. It gets you where you are!

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

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.

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

There are no accidents.

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.

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

In India when we meet and part we often say, "Namaste," which means: I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides; I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides; I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace. I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us�.. "Namaste."

Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it!

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.

The way we regard death is critical to the way we experience life. When your fear of death changes, the way you live your life changes.

Most of us are convinced that we are our egos, which is who we think we are. The ego is part of our incarnation. It dies with the body, which is why we are so afraid of death. Death scares the hell out of who you think you are, especially if you think you are this body.

Drop your identification with the illusion of separateness.

The root of compassion is not empathy; that is kindness. Kindness is great, but it is not the ultimate compassion. Ultimate compassion relieves the suffering that comes from separateness. The suffering that comes from separateness is relieved only when you are fully present with another person, not when you are separately present.

I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are

I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves.

Science and religion both teach that we are all interconnected, and thus interdependent. And at the very core, we are all One. But how do we live as if we know this?

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

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

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

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

One of the ego's favorite paths of resistance is to fill you with doubt.

I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion--and where it isn't, that's where my work lies.

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.

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

Psychedelics helped me to escape.. albeit momentarily.. from the prison of my mind. It over-rode the habit patterns of thought and I was able to taste innocence again. Looking at sensations freshly without the conceptual overly was very profound.

You and I are the force for transformation in the world. We are the consciousness that will define the nature of the reality we are moving into.

I'm ensconced in the soul … and I look around and everything is love.

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.

We kill each other over which name to call the Nameless.

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

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.

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

If I see one dilemma with Western man, it's that he can't accept how beautiful he is. He can't accept that he is pure light, that he's pure love, that he's pure consciousness, that he's divine.

You're afraid, you will just keep making the fear. If you want to change it, you change from your soul.