Ram Dass Quotes

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“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.”

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

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

“A moment comes when "other" is no longer other.”

“As one individual changes, the system changes.”

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

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

“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.”

“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 we're identified with Awareness, we're no longer living in a world of polarities. Everything is present at the same time.”

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

“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.”

“Cosmic humor, especially about your own predicament, is an important part of your journey.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Only when I know who I am will I know what is possible.”

“Here I was, sitting with the boys of the first team in cognitive psychology, personality psychology, developmental psychology [at Stanford and Harvard], and in the midst of this I felt here were men and women who, themselves were not highly evolved beings. Their own lives were not fulfilled.”

“Every time I went to a family gathering, I was the boy who made it. I was a Professor at Harvard and everybody stood around in awe and listened to my every word, and all I felt was that horror that I knew inside that I didn't know. Of course, it was all such beautiful, gentle horror, because there was so much reward involved.”

“He [Bhagwan Dass] wasn't the least bit interested in all of the extraordinary dramas that I had collected … He was the first person I couldn't seduce into being interested in all this. He just didn't care.
And yet, I never felt so profound an intimacy with another being. It was as if he were inside of my heart. And what started to blow my mind was that everywhere we went, he was at home.”

“I learned more in the six or seven hours of this experience than I had learned in all my years as a psychologist.”

“I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people… To me, that’s what the emerging game is all about.”

“It was as if the whole western mind-training of individual differences had been made background instead of figure, so that you'd look at another human being and say, "Here we are." You'd see differences more as clothing, rather than as core stuff.”

“It would be best not to impose a model too soon, because the model that exists in the west for these states is pathological, and the model that exists in the primitive cultures is mystical and religious.”

“I had gone through game, after game, after game, first being a professor at Harvard, then being a psychedelic spokesman, and still people were constantly looking into my eyes, like "Do you know?" Just that subtle little look, and I was constantly looking into their eyes "Do you know?"”

“We had a Negro psychiatrist, Madison Presnell, working with us, and I had been trained to be a very liberal person about Negroes, which meant that you didn't have feelings. It was a phony kind of liberal thing. I went out of my way to be liberal. You know, that very self-conscious kind of equality. And Madison and I turned on together and I looked at Madison, and there we were, the same human beings. It was just that he was wearing that skin and I was wearing this skin. And it was no more or less than that. It was that shirt and this shirt and it had no more relevance than that. And I looked at that, and suddenly there we were, whereas before I had been so busy with my super-liberal reaction to color of skin, that I couldn't relax enough to share this unitive place.”

“His [Bhagwan Dass'] teaching seemed to be no teaching because he always taught from within … that is, his lessons aroused in me just affirmation … as if I knew it all already.”

“I thought inside "I must really be crazy, now — because craziness is where everybody agrees about something — except you!" And yet I felt saner than I had ever felt, so I knew this was a new kind of craziness or perhaps a new kind of saneness.”

“We were exploring this inner realm of consciousness that we had been theorizing about all these years and suddenly we were traveling in and through and around it.”

“During these travels he's starting to train me in a most interesting way. We'd be sitting somewhere and I'd say,
"Did I ever tell you about the time that Tim and I …"
And he'd say, "Don't think about the past. Just be here now."
Silence.
And I'd say, "How long do you think we're going to be on this trip?"
And he'd say, "Don't think about the future. Just be here now."
I'd say, "You know, I really feel crumby, my hips are hurting …"”

“Whenever anybody that I trusted brought along some new chemical, I would open my mouth and off I'd go.”

“We had gotten over the feeling that one experience was going to make you enlightened forever. We saw that it wasn't going to be that simple.
And for five years I dealt with the matter of "coming down."”

“I thought at that moment, Wow, I've got it made. I'm just a new beautiful being — I'm just an inner self — all I'll ever need to do is look inside and I'll know what to do and I can always trust it, and here I'll be forever.”