Ram Dass Quotes

I tried to go the renunciate’s way, to forget the needs of the body in order to avoid the suffering of the Ego. But the Soul depends on the Ego’s drama for its teachings. We have to be in the world to learn from it.

Drugs had changed me from a selfish, striving academic in search of recognition and power to someone who was aware of the soul. Psychedelics had introduced me to compassion, to recognizing and feeling love for others. Harvard seemed trivial by comparison.

Faith is not a belief. Beliefs are in the head. Faith is in the heart. Faith comes from within you. You cultivate it by opening your spiritual heart and quieting your mind until you feel your identity with your deeper Self. That opening to the deeper Self, when you have quieted your mind. comes through grace. The qualities of that Self are peace, joy, compassion, wisdom, and love.

We each have our path. There are many routes up the mountain, but they all end at the peak.

If we follow our heart, there is nothing to fear. As long as our actions are based on our pure seeking for God, we are safe. And any time we are unsure or frightened about our situation, there’s a beautiful and very powerful mantra — “The power of God is within me. The grace of God surrounds me” — which we can repeat to ourselves. It will protect us. Grace will surround us like a gentle force field. Through an open heart, one hears the universe.

My commitment is to truth, not consistency.

The journey of consciousness is about arriving at a balance in life where you are open to the mystery of it all. You can’t be open when you’re loaded down with a lot of conceptual stuff. In my own consciousness, I watch how long it takes, when an expectation isn’t fulfilled, before I come back again to being in the present moment. How long before I can let go of not getting what I wanted, and just be with what is?

Meditation raises the question: Who are we really?

Instead of seeing my life as a personal history or career, I see myself as a pilgrim on a spiritual journey. I am no longer an isolated ego narrating my own storyline; I am a soul, evolving toward oneness. I am a pinprick of awareness in the star field of the cosmos. I am part of it all.

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and who, though distant is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

That thought brought enormous gratitude for the moment of light and breath I was living — how sweet, how rare, to be given a body in which to move about this world!

The abstract point of this is that we don’t do anything to anybody else, anyway. Actually, people do things to themselves, and we are merely the environment in which they do it when they are ready.

The reason we form a conscious marriage on the physical plane with a partner is in order to do the work of coming to God together. That is the only reason for marriage when one is conscious. The only reason. If we marry for economics, if we marry for passion, if we marry for romantic love, if we marry for convenience, if we marry for sexual gratification, it will pass and there is suffering. The only marriage contract that works is what the original contract was — we enter into this contract in order to come to God, together. That's what conscious marriage is about. In fact, that is what everything we're doing is about.

In all spiritual practice, the strategy is the same: to identify the thing that frightens you and come as close to it as you can before you freak out.

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.