Ram Dass Quotes - Page 2

Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.

The spiritual journey is not about acquiring something outside yourself, rather, you are penetrating deep layers and veils to return to the deepest truth of your own being.

You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing. You don't have to do anything to earn it. Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical perfection, or social and economic success- none of that matters. No one can take this love away from you, and it will always be here.

I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion--and where it isn't, that's where my work lies.

As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.

When you look back at your own life, you see ... the sufferings you went through, each time you would have avoided it if you possibly could. And yet, when you look at the depth of your character now, isn't a part of that a product of those experiences? Weren't those experiences part of what created the depth of your inner being?

If you want to cure the world, don't emanate fear - emanate love.

All you can do for another person is be an environment in which if they wanted to come up for air, they could.

The greatest thing you can do for another being is to provide the unconditional love that comes from making contact with that place in them that is beyond conditions, which is just pure consciousness, pure essence. That is, once we acknowledge each other as existing, just being here, just being, then each of us is free to change optimally. If I can just love you because here we are, then you are free to grow as you need to grow.

It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.

The final awakening is the embracing of the darkness into the light. That means embracing our humanity as well as our divinity. What we go from is being born into our humanity, sleep walking for a long time, until we awaken and start to taste our divinity. And then want to finally get free. We see as long as we grab at our divinity and push away our humanity we aren’t free. If you want to be free, you can’t push away anything. You have to embrace it all. It’s all God.

We're sitting under the tree of our thinking minds, wondering why we're not getting any sunshine!

Suffering only shows where you are attached. That is why, to those on the path, suffering is grace.

I would say that the thrust of my life has been initially about getting free, and then realizing that my freedom is not independent of everybody else. Then I am arriving at that circle where one works on oneself as a gift to other people so that one doesn't create more suffering. I help people as a work on myself and I work on myself to help people.

It's very hard to grow, because it's difficult to let go of the models of ourselves in which we've invested so heavily.

Don't take yourself so personally.

So your first job is to work on yourself. The greatest thing you can do for another human being is to get your own house in order and find your true spiritual heart.

After meditating for some years, I began to see the patterns of my own behavior. As you quiet your mind, you begin to see the nature of your own resistance more clearly, struggles, inner dialogues, the way in which you procrastinate and develop passive resistance against life. As you cultivate the witness, things change. You don't have to change them. Things just change.

Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it!

Let the natural flow of the universe, course through your being, and harmonize your soul.

We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.

As you dissolve into love, your ego fades. You’re not thinking about loving; you’re just being love, radiating like the sun.

Old age spiritualizes people naturally

This is the pathless path - returning to where you were initially before you got lost. The deepest truth in you is where the journey leads - shedding, like taking off layers of an onion, until you come to your essence. The key to the spiritual journey is not acquiring something outside of yourself. Rather it is shedding the veils to come back to the deepest truth of your being.

The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.