Quotes from Ram Dass

When you are in the presence of unconditional love, you are in the optimum environment for your heart to open.

NO ACCIDENTS If you could stand back far enough and watch the whole process you would see You Are A Totally Determined Being

Love is essentially self-communicative. Those who do not have it catch it from those who have it.

you base your faith on experience, your faith is

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.

Gurdjieff used to say, "If you can serve a cup of tea properly, you can do anything." That is, if you are able to perform any act in a true karma-yogic fashion, it's because you're acting from a place where you're free of attachments and not busy being the actor—and being in that place will shape every act you do.

to do anything with attachment. With desire . . . with anger..greed..lust . . . fear.. is only creating more karma, which is keeping you in the game . . . on the wheel of birth and death once you see through that. . . Desires can't help but fall away

Faith is not a belief. Beliefs are in the head. Faith is in the heart. Faith comes from within you. You cultivate it by opening your spiritual heart and quieting your mind until you feel your identity with your deeper Self. That opening to the deeper Self, when you have quieted your mind. comes through grace. The qualities of that Self are peace, joy, compassion, wisdom, and love.

When you experience fear or are unsure about your situation, there's a beautiful and very powerful mantra you can say: "The power of God is within me. The grace of God surrounds me." Repeat it to yourself or to a loved one in need. It will protect you. Experience the power of it. It's like a solid steel shaft that goes through the top of your head right down to the base of your being. Grace will surround you like a force field.

Meditation raises the question: Who are we really?

From a personality point of view, you develop judgment, but from the sou's point of view, you develop appreciation.

Whose presence reveals how subtle is the path of Love.

If you wear shoeleather, the whole earth is covered with leather.

No matter what someone else does to you, never put anyone out of your heart.

When someone asked Maharaj-ji how to meditate, he said, "Meditate the way Christ meditated. . . . He lost himself in love.

In The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment, Thaddeus Golas says, "You never have to change what you see, only the way you see it.

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin wonders if "the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death.

My Guru, Maharaj-ji, once told me, "Enjoy everything!" These days I try to simply love everything that comes my way, whether animate or inanimate, pleasant or painful. I hope you too can learn to absorb life's ecstasies and distresses into your spiritual practice so they are just more grist for the mill.

Part of the process of awakening is recognizing that the realities we thought were absolute are only relative. All you have to do is shift from one reality to another once, and your attachment to what you thought was real starts to collapse. Once the seed of awakening sprouts in you, there's no choice—there's no turning back.

Each of us has our own unique karmic predicament, our own unique work to do. The predicament is that there is nowhere to stand, because our identification with the person who has the karma is changing too. As you develop the witness and identify more with your spiritual heart, karma just is.

Aldous Huxley reminds us, "The body is always in time, the spirit is always timeless and the psyche is an amphibious creature compelled by the laws of man's being to associate itself to some extent with its body, but capable, if it so desires, of experiencing and being identified with its spirit.

The art of spiritual growth has to do with how quickly you recognize attachments and how quickly you can release them.

You can stay in touch with your soul by dwelling in the moment.

Whatever you need to do to get ready to die, you should have done it a minute ago. Do it now and get ready. Every moment is the moment you die. Every breath is the first and last. A conscious being holds on nowhere.