Richard Alpert citations

Page 3

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

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“Our rational minds can never understand what has happened, but our hearts.. if we can keep them open to God, will find their own intuitive way.”

“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.”

“Inspiration is God making contact with itself.”

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

“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.”