Ram Dass
If I go into the place in myself that is love, and you go into the place in yourself that is love, we are together in love. Then you and I are truly in love, the state of being love. That's the entrance to Oneness. That's the space I entered when I met my guru.Collection: Space
When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be. It's a journey towards simplicity, towards quietness, towards a kind of joy that is not in time. It's a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body and our psyche, on to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification.Collection: God
I sit with people who are dying. I'm one of those unusual types that enjoys being with someone when they're dying because I know I am going to be in the presence of Truth.Collection: Truth
Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom.Collection: Wisdom
It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.Collection: Experience
I have always said that often the religion you were born with becomes more important to you as you see the universality of truth.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Love
The stroke has given me another way to serve people. It lets me feel more deeply the pain of others; to help them know by example that ultimately, whatever happens, no harm can come. 'Death is perfectly safe,' I like to say.Collection: Death
Pain is the mind. It's the thoughts of the mind. Then I get rid of the thoughts, and I get in my witness, which is down in my spiritual heart. The witness that witnesses being. Then those particular thoughts that are painful - love them. I love them to death!Collection: Death
Working with the dying is like being a midwife for this great rite of passage of death. Just as a midwife helps a being take their first breath, you help a being take their last breath.Collection: Death
When I look at relationships, my own and others, I see a wide range of reasons for people to be together and ways in which they are together. I see ways in which a relationship - which means something that exists between two or more people - for the most part reinforces people's separateness as individual entities.Collection: Relationship
Inspiration is God making contact with itself.Collection: God
Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It's not 'I love you' for this or that reason, not 'I love you if you love me.' It's love for no reason, love without an object.Collection: Love
We come into relationships often very much identified with our needs. I need this, I need security, I need refuge, I need friendship. And all of relationships are symbiotic in that sense. We come together because we fulfill each others' needs at some level or other.Collection: Friendship
In our Western culture, although death has come out of the closet, it is still not openly experienced or discussed. Allowing dying to be so intensely present enriches both the preciousness of each moment and our detachment from it.Collection: Death
As we grow in our consciousness, there will be more compassion and more love, and then the barriers between people, between religions, between nations will begin to fall. Yes, we have to beat down the separateness.
Your problem is you're... too busy holding onto your unworthiness.
Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying.
The thinking mind is what is busy. You have to stay in your heart. You have to be in your heart. Be in your heart. The rest is up here in your head where you are doing, doing, doing.
When you are already in Detroit, you don't have to take a bus to get there.
If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.
I hang out with my guru in my heart. And I love every thing in the universe. That's all I do all day.
Our plans never turn out as tasty as reality.
You can be still and still moving. Content even in your discontent.
I can go all over the world with Skype.
My guru said that when he suffers, it brings him closer to God. I have found this, too.
When I used to perform weddings, the image I always had was the image of a triangle, in which there are two partners and then there is this third force, this third being, that emerges out of the interaction of these two. The third one is the one that is the shared awareness that lies behind the two of them.
Maharaj-ji, in my first darshan, my first meeting with him, showed me his powers. At that point I was impressed with the power. But subsequently, I realized that it was really his love that pulled me in. His love is unconditional love.
When I look at my life, I see that I wanted to be free of the physical plane, the psychological plane, and when I got free of those I didn't want to go anywhere near them.
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 universe is an example of love. Like a tree. Like the ocean. Like my body. Like my wheelchair. I see the love.
I remember my first visit with my guru. He had shown that he read my mind. So I looked at the grass and I thought, 'My god, he's going to know all the things I don't want people to know.' I was really embarrassed. Then I looked up and he was looking directly at me with unconditional love.
My belief is that I wasn't born into Judaism by accident, and so I needed to find ways to honor that.
In working with those who are dying, I offer another human being a spacious environment with my mind in which they can die as they need to die. I have no right to define how another person should die. I'm just there to help them transition, however they need to do it.
I feel vulnerable because my mind - because of the stroke, my mind doesn't focus. And then I feel vulnerable because I don't understand the world around me.
In India, there's a way of seeing life as a cosmic play. It's called Lila. I can watch my life, and I can see my guru playing with me.
The ego is frightened by death, because ego is part of the incarnation and ends with it. That is why we learn to identify with our soul, as the soul continues after death. For the soul, death is just another moment.Collection: Death
Our journey is about being more deeply involved in life, and yet less attached to it.Collection: Freedom
Watch how your mind judges. Judgment comes, in part, out of your own fear. You judge other people because you're not comfortable in your own being. By judging, you find out where you stand in relation to other people. The judging mind is very divisive. It separates. Separation closes your heart. If you close your heart to someone, you are perpetuating your suffering and theirs. Shifting out of judgment means learning to appreciate your predicament and their predicament with an open heart instead of judging. Then you can allow yourself and others to just be, without separation.Collection: Heart
Without remaining open to change , we can not remain open to lifeCollection: Letting Go
Faith is what is left after all your beliefs have been blown to hell.Collection: Belief
We're all just walking each other home.Collection: Home
Souls love. That’s what souls do. Egos don’t, but souls do. Become a soul, look around, and you’ll be amazed-all the beings around you are souls. Be one, see one. When many people have this heart connection, then we will know that we are all one, we human beings all over the planet. We will be one. One love. And don’t leave out the animals, and trees, and clouds, and galaxies-it’s all one. It’s one energy.Collection: Heart
If I'm going to die, the best way to prepare is to quiet my mind and open my heart. If I'm going to live, the best way to prepare for it is to quiet my mind and open my heart.Collection: Heart
Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.Collection: Wisdom
Don’t compare your path with anybody else’s. Your path is unique to you.Collection: Unique
Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.Collection: Wise
Suffering only shows where you are attached. That is why, to those on the path, suffering is grace.Collection: Grace
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?Collection: Character
The game is not about becoming somebody, it's about becoming nobody.Collection: Spiritual