Ram Dass Quotes

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 have all the time in the world, but don’t waste a moment.

There are a number of bogeymen that accompany us into adulthood. The biggest one is this: “I’ll be old and alone with no mind, and when I die I’ll be alone, adrift, isolated in a cold, dark universe.” The Ego is the only part of us that believes this.

"What's fun is that when you're no longer attached to being one separate part of it, you get to be part of all of it. At that point the "all" is known to you subjectively, and you are everywhere at once, because you are no longer pinned in a space-time locus by your separateness. Metaphysics tell me that, and physics tell me that. Everything I have experienced in all my inner work points to that."

"Many people say to me, "Should I be a vegetarian or shouldn't I?" "Should I have sex or shouldn't I?" "Should I meditate forty minutes or shouldn't I?" People that meditate exactly the right number of minutes, eat exactly the right food, do all the things perfectly, can also be caught in the chain of gold, in the chain of righteousness and ritual. This is not liberation. But eventually one does perform the spiritual practices, not out of obligation, not out of guilt, but because we've got to do it. Because it's demanded of us by us. We end up going through hell in meditation to quiet our minds, not because someone says, "You ought to quiet your mind," but because our agitated minds are driving us up the wall, and it's keeping us from getting on with it. We'll learn how to pray, and read holy books, and practice devotional acts and chants, opening our hearts and asking Christ to fill us with love, not because we're good, but because with a closed heart we know we cannot come into the flow of the universe."

...we are all fellow human beings walking each other home.

There is a growing Awareness in the medical community that a lot of what has been diagnosed and treated as depression among older people may instead be a natural process of reorientation. Whether we attribute it to cellular-biochemical mechanisms, or psychodynamics, or spiritual processes, there’s a kind of drawing-inward that seems to be part of the process of aging. Not a paranoid drawing-inward; not being afraid of the world. Just a kind of deepening. I think it’s probably the nearness of death that leads many people to want to reflect on what life is all about.

True love is unconquerable and irresistible,” he said, “and it goes on gathering power and spreading itself, until eventually it transforms everyone whom it touches.

Home is where the heart is. Home is the quality of presence. It’s the quality of being. Home is always here.

A less pure teaching of a lineage traps us in the lineage, makes us a Buddhist or a Christian or a Hindu, not a free being, because when the people who lead do not have the full connection, they cling to the vehicle rather than to the truth toward which the vehicle is directed, and vehicles (institutions) corrode unless they are constantly fed by the living spirit. And the living spirit comes only through beings who are it. We can become organizational groupies as part of our path, but if we know it’s not enough, we must have the honesty to let it go.

We are born into the world of nature; our second birth is into the world of spirit.” — Bhagavad Gita

The Great Way is not difficult for those not attached to preferences. When neither love nor hate arises, all is clear and undisguised. Separate by the smallest amount, however, and you are as far from it as heaven is from earth. — Seng-ts’an, Third Patriarch of Zen

When you get to those edges where you say, “I can’t handle that” or “I’m not going to do that,” take a look at the mindset you are holding onto. There is the root of your suffering. That’s where your mind is in relation to what is.

Power comes from love, not the other way around.

'I have a relative who is in a mental hospital. He thinks he is Christ. Well, that's groovy. I am Christ also. But he doesn't think I am Christ. He thinks he is Christ. Because it happened to him and he took his ego with him. So he says: I'm special. And when I say to him: Sure man you're Christ. And I'm Christ too. He says: you don't understand. And when he's out he steals cars and things like that because he needs them because he's Christ and that's all right. So they lock him up. He says: I don't know ... me ... I'm a responsible member of society. I go to church. Me they put in a mental hospital. You're free. You've got a beard. You wear a dress ... you ... Sure. Because as far as I'm concerned we are all God. That's the difference. If you really think another guy is God he doesn't lock you up… Funny about that.