Ram Dass Quotes

My main calling in life is to seek and achieve spiritual balance, and to express that through my instrument. Everything else is here today, gone later today.

I want to tell people how to live spiritually. After you've bought all your houses and your clothes, you want something bigger.

By 1968, both The Beatles and The Beach Boys had plenty of fame - we were looking for something deeper. The Maharishi taught us how to go beyond thinking and action in order to grow from within.

I had to find some clarity about approaching life more spiritually. I think I'm kind of dense, and it makes me pull the process into mind and struggle over it in finding the path.

Since 2005, I have been on a steadfast journey inward as a self-proclaimed Spirit Junkie. And I've never looked back.

I've been on a quest for spiritual answers for a long time. The things I've learned about interconnectedness and non-duality and the feeling of tapping into your soul that goes beyond the edge of your skin is important to me. Once I learned that, I'm far less often trapped in my own little man problems. Me against the universe problems.

To be conscious of Being, you need to reclaim consciousness from the mind. This is one of the most essential tasks on your spiritual journey.

Spiritual practice is not just sitting and meditation. Practice is looking, thinking, touching, drinking, eating and talking. Every act, every breath, and every step can be practice and can help us to become more ourselves.

There is a veil between the Supermind above and the lower Prakriti below - the veil of ingrained formations. This veil may completely withdraw or be partially withdrawn. Thus even if there is some little opening, with the contact of Light from above the lower nature will get slowly changed.

Meditation is like light: when meditation comes, politics disappears. So you cannot be meditative and political. That is impossible: you are asking for the impossible. Meditation is not one pole: it is the absence of all conflict, all ambition, all ego trips.

Not even the deepest sleep will give you such a rest as meditation can. The mind goes on jumping even in deepest sleep. Just those few moments in meditation your brain has almost stopped. ... You forget the body. ... You feel such pleasure in it. You become so light. This perfect rest we will get in meditation.

Meditation was invented as a way for the soul to venture inward, there ultimately to find supreme identity with Godhead. Whatever else it does, and it does many beneficial things, meditation is first and foremost a search for the God within.

I see my life as an unfolding set of opportunities to awaken.

Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now.

You can enter yoga, or the path of yoga, only when you are totally frustrated with your own mind as it is. If you are still hoping that you can gain something through your mind, yoga is not for you.

Awareness of death is the very bedrock of the entire path. Until you have developed this awareness, all other practices are obstructed.

I have come not to teach but to awaken.

Religion lies in being and becoming, in realization.

Meditation is the direct means of enjoying the greatest happiness and is the only means to quench the thirst for happiness on earth.

What is meditation? Meditation is our conscious awareness of something vast and infinite within us. Meditation grants us Peace, Light and Bliss.

We need to learn how to honor and use a practice for as long as it serves us—which in most cases is a very long time—but to look at it as just that, a vehicle, a raft to help us cross through the waters of doubt, confusion, desire, and fear.

Contemplation must bring forth right action in order to permit further growth.

I had NO interest in being a theologian, especially not a Christian, as I had been raised by progressive atheists. We bowed down every morning to the golden calf of the New York Times, Noam Chomsky, Hannah Arendt. I tried to get my parents to respect and nourish me, let alone delight in me, so even though I secretly loved and believed in the Divine Something - Goodness, Good Orderly Direction, Gift of Desperation, the Cosmic Muffin - I wasn't ready yet to commit myself to the study of a higher power.

You have to pull all your energy back to the present moment. And the moment the whole energy becomes a pool, here and now, the explosion of light happens and you are, for the first time, absolutely yourself - an eternal being, an immortal being, who knows nothing of death, who has never come across any darkness.