"It is like that moment depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel where the hands of God and man are about to touch. It's just at the moment when… - Ram Dass

"It is like that moment depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel where the hands of God and man are about to touch. It's just at the moment when the despair is greatest, when we reach up, that the grace descends, and we experience the knowledge or the insight or the remembrance that it all isn't in fact the way we thought it was. If it happens too violently, we decide you've gone insane. And there are people who are all too willing to reassure us that we have, and there are places for that. In hunting tribes, mystics are treated as insane — they're an inconvenience because the tribe has to be kept mobile and old people and crazy people have to be put away somewhere. But if we're in a certain position at the moment of seeing through, if the view has been gentle or if we're with somebody else that knows, or if we had intellectually known but didn't believe, all of which is a karmic matter, if we had some kind of structure or support system, we says, "Even though everybody else thinks I'm mad, I'm not.

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About Ram Dass

Ram Dass (6 April 1931 – 22 December 2019), born Richard Alpert, was an American spiritual teacher and author.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Birth Name: Richard Alpert
Also Known As: Baba Ram Dass
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Additional quotes by Ram Dass

When somebody provokes your anger, the only reason you get angry is because you’re holding on to how you think something is supposed to be. You’re denying how it is. Then you see it’s the expectations of your own mind that are creating your own hell. When you get frustrated because something isn’t the way you thought it would be, examine the way you thought, not just the thing that frustrates you. You’ll see that a lot of your emotional suffering is created by your models of how you think the universe should be and your inability to allow it to be as it is.

I realized that although everything by which I knew myself, even my body and this life itself, was gone, still I was fully aware! Not only that, but this aware "I" was watching the entire drama, including the panic, with calm compassion. Instantly, with this recognition, I felt a new kind of calmness — one of a profundity never experienced before. I had just found that "I", that scanning device — that point — that essence — that place beyond. A place where "I" existed independent of social and physical identity. That which was I was beyond Life and Death. And something else — that "I" Knew — it really Knew. It was wise, rather than just knowledgeable. It was a voice inside that spoke truth. I recognized it, was one with it, and felt as if my entire life of looking to the outside world for reassurance — David Reisman's other-directed being, was over.

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