Ram Dass Quotes - Page 13

Birth, death, and suffering all bring us to the very edge of what our minds can understand.

You must come to see every human being Including yourself, As an incarnation In a body or personality, going through a certain Life experience which is functional.

Coming into the place of Soul-awareness is coming home.

The healing begins when we can start to feel more gratitude that our child came into our life than despair and outrage that our child died. The gratitude is what heals the despair.

I look at you, and I see in you the yearning to get back to God. That yearning is love.

From a Hindu perspective, you are born as what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it's got you.

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

What the word God means is the mystery really. It's the mystery that we face as humans the mystery of existence, of suffering and of death.

There are no accidents whatsoever in the universe.

Those particular thoughts that are painful - love them. I love them to death!

There are wars and poverty and so on - it's based on fear. You can cure that with your being by not being afraid.

When you get old, everything changes - your body changes, your family changes. You can't do what you've always done, anymore. And, either you can complain about things changing - or you can be content. Instead of complaining, you can say: "Oh, yesss! Look at all this change!" You can welcome it.

Religions are institutions that push you up the mountain and then they have their fantasies about the spirit. I mean they try to make God like the human psyche and it's wrong. I mean it's a projection of the mind, and you can use it to get a start and then you must leave it behind.

If you want to see how enlightened you are, go spend a week with your family.

Give it all up and you can have it all.

I think that people will find a tremendous joy and fulfillment in service to other human beings, and that often this is what is missing in their lives.

Being in love, rather than giving or taking love, is the only thing that provides stability. Being in love means seeing the Beloved all around me.

Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom.

Faith is in the soul. Belief is thought. Faith is so rich. Faith gives me my spiritual self.

Faith, consciousness, and awareness all exist beyond the thinking mind.

The giving and receiving is the tricky thing. It's not the gift. It's what the heart says in giving the gift, and from my point of view, one doesn't give or receive - that's a role we have to play. But the gift - it's God's gift. I think that it's better to be souls than roles.

A Tibetan Lama said to me, "The best place to stand, Ram Dass, is halfway between hope and hopelessness." So I can write a scenario for the 21st century in either direction. One is that it all goes to hell and that it's truly the dark age.

Until we know that we can bear the unbearable, we're always running scared.

You may have expected that enlightenment would come ZAP! instantaneous and permanent.This is unlikely.After the first ah ha expereince, it can be thougth of as a thinning of a layer of clouds.

I think the question is, how do we live with change? Change in our friends, change in our lovers? Change in me and change in my body, from the stroke. Things have changed this plane of consciousness. We've tried to keep things the same. It causes suffering. This suffering is another step in your spiritual life, in your spiritual journey.