150+ Ram Dass Notable Quotes Ideas – Spirituality is part of man’s existence. It is an essential aspect of human living. We eat, sleep, go to work and do other activities. There is a necessary one, which is to meet in contact with our spiritual life.
Many people today might have lost the idea of spirituality. People have to make it the first and most prominent of their life.
Ram Dass was America’s favourite spiritual being, however, his life was cut short in 2919, this was sad to his fans.
Richard Alpert is popularly known as Ram Dass. He was born in 1931, on April 6th in the city of Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. Ram Dass popularly provides spiritual therapy and other psychological treatment.
Ram Dass had a Bachelor’s degree of Arts in Psychology from Tufts University. He also went further to study for his master’s degree in Psychology at Wesleyan University in 1954. While he received his PhD in Psychology in the year 1957 from Standford University after concluding his Doctoral thesis on “achievement anxiety”.
Ram Dass became a spiritual teacher and was called a guru of modern yoga. He has had so many journeys in the development of his spiritual knowledge, that he had been to India, where he became a disciple of Hindu guru Neem.
The Guru has two notable charitable foundations which include the Seva Foundation and Hanuman Foundation. The Seva Foundation is an international foundation that provided health care for caring for and treatment of Blindness and other visual issues.
Ram Dass explored several beliefs to get to his peak in spirituality. Ramdass never married but had a son. he was known to be sexually involved with men and women as he even quoted himself to be Bisexual. He died at the age of 88 after baffling short time illness in Maui, Hawaii.
The guru is known to have several notable works in his lifetime which were authored and co-authored, they include; Be her now (1971), Doing your own being (1973), Grist for the Mill (1977), How can I help? (1985), and Polishing the Mirror (2013).
Meanwhile, during his lifetime Richard explored spirituality in several phases and has been noted to have gotten to its peak. In this article, we would be looking at some of his great quotes.
150+ Ram Dass Notable Quotes Ideas
Here is a list of 150+ Ram Dass notable quotes ideas;
“My Jewish trip was primarily political Judaism, I mean I was never Bar Mitzvahed, confirmed, and so on”
“I didn’t have one whiff of God until I took psychedelics”
“What I mostly remember about my bar mitzvah was that it was an empty ritual. It was flat. Absolutely flat. There was a disappointing hollowness to the moment. There was nothing, nothing, nothing in it food my heart”
“My belief is that I wasn’t born into Judaism by accident, and so I need to find ways to honour that”
“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”
“The stroke was giving me lessons, and I realized that was grace, fierce grace. Death is the biggest change we will face, so we need to practice change”
“I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people. To me, that’s what the emerging game is all about”
“Now, I am in my 80s. Now, I am ageing. I am approaching death. I am getting closer to the end. Now, I really am ready to face the music all around me”
“I have started to talk more about being bisexual, being involved with men as well as women, and added his opinion that who gay people are isn’t gay, and it is not non-gay and it is not anything. It is just awareness”
“The next message you need is always right where you are”
“I see my life as an unfolding set of opportunities to awaken”
“Welcome to the path of the heart! Believe it or not, this can be your reality, to be loved unconditionally, and to begin to become that love. This path of love doesn’t go anywhere. It just brings you more here, into the present moment, into the reality of who you already are”
“If I am going to die, the best way to prepare is to quiet my mind and open my heart. If I am going to live, the best way to prepare is to quiet my mind and open my heart”
“Only this moment is real, this moment of loving awareness. The past and the future are all just thoughts”
“We don’t need to wait until we are enlightened before we act in the world, and we don’t need to withdraw from the world to become enlightened. Conscious social action can be our own on ourselves that becomes the vehicle for our awakening”
“Our whole spiritual transformation brings us to the point where we realize that in our own being, we are enough”
“Any model of whether this is hard or easy is just another thought. All the metaphors I suggest are just more thoughts. Let them arise, notice them, go back to the breath”
“Well, are we real or aren’t we? well, it turns out we are relatively real. We are as real as anything else, but no more so then. And there is a lot of else that you are, also, that you are not being because you are busy being who you think you are too much of the time. So that’s the predicament, that is why you do practices, to get out of the trap of your own finite self”
“To Become of only yourself and deny us is also off balance”
“We are all that is only one thing”
“I think that alternative communities are potential role models for the game. And I think that they are great experimental situations for us to examine a lot of our ideals when they are made manifest”
“You have got to see that Christianity is coming to a lot of the new movements in which people are speaking in tongues, that is all part of a process that is forcing the Pope t to squirm a little bit on his throne and reconsider his position as well”
“Besides being members of the family, we as incarnates have other identities as well. And we have to honour all of those in order to be free. As long as you are pushing away any part of your incarnation, it’s got you”
“If you want to be free, you can’t be free pushing away your incarnation; you have got to be free by embracing your incarnation. Not being attached to it, but embracing it. How delicate”
“I mean, you really gotta flip it out one level to see the beauty of the whole thing. I mean, if you listen to my tapes every day in traffic, you will become as neurotic as I am. That is all I can guarantee”
“Finally, like the snake shedding its skin, the fear just isn’t enough to cut you off. And then you come in, and as you come into the totality, you are still a separate entity, and that separate entity, in itself, still has fear. And that’s what’s far out”
“At a symbolic level, what the Gita is, is a dialogue between God and the Seeker. And the battlefield turns out to be the inner battlefield, the battlefield of our own evolutionary being”
“When you start to live not on the physical time-space plane, you realize that our coming and going isn’t what it’s about. And when you realize our coming and going is not what it is about, you could never be lonely again”
“One could feel the yearning inside all of us, I think, for this kind of simple, deep, quiet, dharmic existence”
“When you meet another person and it moves into such an intense presence, a minute is a lifetime. There is no time, there is no measure any longer”
“I love psychedelics, and I think they are wonderful, but I very rarely feel the pull to take them”
“Instead of trying to get out of the shadow, the dark, which I think reinforces the shadow, actually, reinforces the reality of it, it is better to just do your practices”
“When we follow the breath in meditation, we are focusing on the mechanics of the mind, not the content of mind”
“Ultimately, the art is you need models to function in the universe, models of mind, you need structures, but you hold them so lightly, you hold them so lightly”
In (Engineer Ma’s) mind, her anger towards those children, the inability to let go, the karma of that mind, was what led to her husband’s death”
“I have got hundreds of these kinds of stories. See what they do to your minds and watch how they play with what reality is about. Look at the way they give you a feeling of the whimsy of the universe”
“Now, would you smell a paw on the monkey in the works? Would you suspect that there was some skulduggery afoot? or would you just say, oh well, chance works in strange and mysterious ways”
“I remember, we used to have charts on the wall, Tim Leary and I, as to how soon everybody would get enlightened. I mean, 10 years was like the maximum”
“When a person gives, they suck you into a contract of receiving. And for giving and receiving to occur, there have to be two of us”
“The rule of the game is so simple; desire creates the universe. If you want to live in a loving universe, you become a loving human being”
“The game is don’t be the singer, just let it happen through you. And if you don’t feel it happening through you, you don’t sing, nobody is counting”
“I applaud the removal of that stigma I struggled with so much. Sexual confusion, especially in the teenage years, is more natural than I knew. I take comfort in younger generations that celebrate the rainbow of sexual expression”
“I see that the Westerner is really interested in that which is the spirit, not in the structure of the religion per se, but only the ritual that will bring one into the spirit”
“Compassion, the practice of seeing that others are the same as us, the heart of the wisdom of oneness, all contribute to our sense of interdependence and harmony”
“What follows after the incarnation is what is created by the attachments of the moment of death”
“The wisest beings with whom I have made contact in this lifetime all assure me that a soul leaves the physical plane neither a moment too early nor a moment too late”
“Love really does transcend death, there is not a doubt in my mind about it”
“The problem with personality stuff is it’s like having a stone under a carpet and then putting more carpets on top. They just all have that little place where the stone is, they just keep getting like that all the time”
“I’d receive letters from these beings, and it felt like I was receiving letters from a monk in a monastery. And yet, they are imprisoned”
“When you meet a being that is cooked, there is only the dharma. It is no different than a tree or a river. There is nobody home”
“There is only one of us. One consciousness manifesting into different forms”
“Service exists in the nature of the interaction so that interaction between two human beings moves both people towards freedom”
“To the extent I identify with being the speaker, I make you into the spoken to, and I keep cutting myself off from the universe, from god, from spirit”
“I can only use all of my social action as a vehicle to work on myself, to offer my being for the relief of suffering”
“If you are not doing service in such a way that at the end of the service you feel freer, higher, clearer, lighter and more energized, you have got work to do”
“Realizing that there is an awakening possibility we start the journey that we have been on for lifetimes. What else is there to do than work to wake up and become free”
“Many of us are afraid that if we get free of our indignation or our upset about the condition of things, we won’t do what is necessary to right it. But there is another place to play from”
“The practice of kindness, of compassionate action, is something that draws you out of yourself”
“What do I mean by spirit? Religions are methods for coming into the spirit. What I am referring to as spirit is that which infuses all forms, but which also transcends all forms”
“I was looking at (my friend) and I went through plane, after plane, after plane and suddenly there he was, another being just like me. He was just wearing a different colour skin than I was”
“Human beings are part of nature. When you are seeing the ocean or the lake or the river, you are seeing yourself. Nature is a manifestation of God, and that manifestation is love all the way”
“When I was with my guru, I got a sense that when your awareness gets free of the stuff of your mind, you are like a baby again. There is a quality of innocence. It’s innocent wisdom, it’s simple wisdom”
“When my mind gave up, my heart opened”
“The game is that you take what is on your plate and you use it through which to become free”
“Before we can be together, we have to learn how to grieve with one another”
“I think we now realize, and it is very scary, that leaders are fallible”
“At some point, we have to start to treat it as a critical issue instead of something that will go away if we look the other way”
“Until I was centred enough until I was in that place in myself, I couldn’t really know that place in other beings. I saw that, finally, my responsibility was to work on myself”
“We are all just walking each other home”
This Awakening to our deepest self is not for later, it is for now”
“When you look at social structures, you see how much social institution is based upon the feeling of fragility within the human condition. Based on fear”
“The ego is so exquisite at masking and imitating the deeper voices of our truth”
“The game is to get to God. You can only do that through understanding your path in this life- your Dharma. Whatever part you play, you do your Dharma”
“There is no place where you are sitting at this moment that is not the optimum for you to come to God right now”
“You do what you do every day and if you are on the devotional path, you do it as an offering. An offering to Krishna, to God, to Guru”
“There is a reaction to a loss that is a grieving process, and you must try to deal with the grieving in a way that is true to yourself”
“It seems to me that when we face paradox within any system, it forces us a level of consciousness into a meta-system that is more embracing”
“In the west, everybody wants to be king. But in the East, everybody doesn’t want to be the king, everybody wants to do their dharma”
“I feel very little personal identification with Be Here Now, I feel very much like I was the middle man for something to happen”
“You and I recognize the power of the human heart as a social institution”
“Only this moment is real, this moment of loving awareness. The past and the future are all just thought”
“This moment is love. I am finite. I am loving awareness”
“The first thing I had to do was accept my own truth. I had to allow myself to be a human being”
“Truth is a funny thing, the truth gets yo free. The truth gets you high and it gets you free. It’s risky business, but it changes the whole name of the game”
“Maybe the true growth will not follow our expectations. And maybe your wanting mind will block you from receiving just that food which you hunger for”
“It’s in the midst of the darkness exists the light. it’s not that the light exists in spite of the darkness”
“From the other side of the curtain, you realize that you are never so much yourself as when you have surrendered into the totality of what reality is”
“Every role, every label you have, is just another somebody-ness”
“He is a being who is with me always, and sometimes he is with me so closely that I am him”
“And I am perfectly content to be the breath of Maharaji. That is, I think, enough of that”
“And that’s the far-out thing because no longer do I even have a desire to be enlightened. I am not interested in becoming, being all done”
“A guru only exists to serve his devotees, that’s the only reason for his existence. And seeing him in the physical form is only another part of the dance and another part of the illusion”
“I think it would be even too limiting to call him anything at all. Because in a way a being such as that is every way you think of him, he is. And there’s nothing you can say he isn’t, in a funny kind of a way”
“When you close your heart down to protect yourself from suffering, you also close yourself off from being fed by that same life situation”
“Isn’t that bizarre? with the very act of helping someone, you have to jump out of it and ask. “Who’s helping who anyway ?”
“I invite you not to cling. I invite you to open to the next moment and allow it to have its own richness. Nothing will kill the glow faster than clinging”
“The best practice for being fully present at that moment of choice is to practice being present in his moment”
“What will happen is that when I get there if I am so wedded to the plan I had made then, I will do violence to what the existential moment is in order to impose my plan at that time”
“These miracles start a process, they start an opening, a faith”
“You have got to understand the way these planes are related to desire systems”
“Don’t cling to whatever plane of reality you are in, including this one, because a free being is not bound by any plane of reality whatsoever”
“I can just feel that a quiet mind, and an open heart, and flowing energy is a beautiful balance for this journey”
“It’s taken me a while to learn that if I am gonna offer the gift of my being, it means offering the fullness of the moment we are in”
“She just keeps eating your Karma, that is what Kali does. She just keeps consuming your impurities”
“When you see what the game is, you are being fed by the mother, and everything in the Universe becomes food for you”
“You know why you get angry? You get angry because something in the world isn’t harmonious with how you think it ought to be. That’s all you get angry for”
“Certainly there is value in doing a practice regularly every day, even when you don’t want to do it”
“Now, the other thing is when you say, I have found my practice. You can’t assume that the practice you have found is the practice that is going to last you for the rest of your life”
“In terms of the question of discipline, you have got to work very gently with pressing against it, making right effort without turning it into a neurotic achievement game, which we in the West are masters of “
“There are many subtle issues surrounding these practices, of course, but those are the basics”
“This was a period of intense practice for me, in relative solitude in an ashram. But this stuff never really goes away. When I returned to the marketplace of the West, all the usual distractions were there”
“AT first, that still small voice, the tiny ember, is overshadowed by the incredible pressures, desires, attachments and possessions of the world”
“Karma Yoga is talking all of the good or something that you are going to do after your meditation, and making it into an offering and practice for awakening”
“Dualist practices are practices of purification. They are practices that lighten a lot of things. Extricating you from certain planes that you were deeply stuck in”
“There is a wisdom that tempers the way actions are done, and we just don’t value it very much in our society”
“All of your thoughts now, your memories, think of the political world, a breath for that”
“If you are going to have a love affair with the mother, you can’t just have the beautiful aspects, you have got to take it all”
Can you find a place in yourself where you don’t judge God? Where you look upon it all and see its perfection, including its horror”
“Yet I see that this stage is but a preparation for the ultimate climb that leads in the end to total liberation”
“As I look around at people I know who have been working intensely on themselves for some time, there is a dramatic change”
“We begin to feel a little like gods on earth. Where we see sadness and suffering around us, we are able to empathize and still feel lightness and joy”
“You should feel no guilt about where you are on your spiritual path”
“I recall the near anger I had towards spirituality as I saw my favourite rushes fall away”
“Meditation brings this change. Each moment starts to have a richness or thickness of its own. Fewer moments are special as more of them become richer”
“Hold no model of how it ought to be other than the way it is; allow for the moment to be what it is”
“The motives that draw you to spiritual practices have a lot to do with what you get out of the practice”
“Once you have become somebody, then you are ready to start the journey to becoming nobody”
“My method is to quiet down and move into the experience of myself as a soul who has chosen an incarnation as the optimum set of experiences through which to awaken”
“I have been thrown out of Harvard, so I don’t have that to go back to. And drugs aren’t working, so what will I do next?
“It’s like you put on a space suit and it comes with a control centre, little computer inside that runs it. The question is, is that who you are”
“For what is laid down first in the incarnation is the last to go in the spiritual journey, for it is the deepest”
“This is the mystical root of what we are talking about if you can hear that issue”
“Don’t try to control your breath. Simply watch it. Fast or slow, shallow or deep, the nature of the breath does not matter. Your full attention to it is what counts”
“Whenever you realize you are thinking about something else, return your awareness to your breath. Don’t try to fight off thoughts. Just let them go”
“I think the whole issue of birth and death is clouded in mystery, which we have not yet freed from the projections that come out of our own desires and our own fears. So it is really hard to hear the whole issue”
“For what is laid down first in the incarnation is the last to go in the spiritual journey, for it is the deepest”
“It’s dying in a psychological sense because having that last desire is your final statement of who you are”
“I can’t even try to be conscious, because even trying to be conscious is unconscious. So there is no more trying, there Is just being”
“Meditative awareness is a vantage point from which you can focus on any event from various levels of reality”
“Every event in your life is incredibly significant on level upon level upon level”
“Not only to the things that are being decimated but to the very deniers themselves”
“I don’t feel that in order to be happy, I have to make believe the sad things don’t exist. That keeps you off balance”
“Seeing the world as the mother, seeing everything as her manifestation, involves a shift in perception”
“The minute you understand that it’s all yoga, it is all a way of coming into union, everything becomes a vehicle. Everybody you meet”
“As you approach perfect truth, you meet the guru on deeper and deeper planes”
“Now, behind all of it is the one. And that is all there is. And that is all there is. All of us here are one in drag, appearing to be many. So we are all “soul mates”
“What you have found from your past marriages is that what you are attracted to in a person isn’t what you ultimately live with”
“And so you keep saying ‘where am I going to find the one where this doesn’t happen?’ And it will only happen when it doesn’t happen in you”
“Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them”
“Knowledge all by itself, without deep wisdom, ends up becoming despair”
“When you know how to listen everybody is the guru”
“Treat everyone you meet like God in drag”
“Once you get to your soul, then every person you look at is a soul”
“We are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness”
“Cosmic humour, especially about your own predicament, is an important part of your journey”
“Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it”
“Now is now. Are you going to be here or not”
“The world is won by those who let it go”
“It’s better to see God in everything than to try to figure it out”
“When the heart is open, it’s easier for the mind to be turned toward God”
Here we have listed a couple of Ram Dass’s quotes mostly of which have been taken from his teachings and book. These quotes can help inspire or motivate the well-being of your everyday life or boost your spirituality.
Conclusion
Ram Dass is a spiritual teacher, that speaks or preaches on various aspects of life. In other words, his lectures cover spiritual topics of all works. He is a PhD holder in the field of Psychology and Psychedelics. He has written and co-authored at least 12 notable books.
His birth name was Richard Alpert, and until he died in 2019, he has given several lectures on different topics. His existence is an example of love. He would be remembered for the good deed and love shared. That is why we have gathered some of his quotes from his books and teachings which can be a guide to you in the hustle of life.
References:
- Wikipedia.org – Ram Dass
- Ramdass.org – Ram Dass teachings
- everydaypower.com – Ram Dass quotes on self-love, Faith, and More
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