Ram Dass is also known as Baba Ram Dass, was an American spiritual teacher, psychologist, and author. His widely-known book, Be Here Now (1971), has been described as “seminal”, and helped popularize Eastern spirituality and yoga with the baby boomer generation in the West. He authored or co-authored twelve more books on spirituality over the next four decades, including Grist for the Mill (1977), How Can I Help? (1985), and Polishing the Mirror (2013). These Ram Dass quotes will motivate you.
Best Ram Dass Quotes
- “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.” ~ Ram Dass
- “If you meditate regularly, even when you don’t feel like it, you will make great gains, for it will allow you to see how your thoughts impose limits on you. Your resistances to meditation are your mental prisons in miniature.” ~ Ram Dass
- “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.” ~ Ram Dass
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“We’re all just walking each other home.” ~ Ram Dass
- “The game is not about becoming somebody, it’s about becoming nobody.” ~ Ram Dass
- “Consciousness equals energy = love = awareness = light = wisdom = beauty = truth = purity. It’s all the same trip.” ~ Ram Dass
- “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.” ~ Ram Dass
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“Our journey is about being more deeply involved in life, and yet less attached to it.” ~ Ram Dass
- “The intellect is a beautiful servant but a terrible master. Intellect is the power tool of our separateness. The intuitive, compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity.” ~ Ram Dass
- “If you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family.” ~ Ram Dass
- “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.” ~ Ram Dass -
“If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible.” ~ Ram Dass
- “I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion–and where it isn’t, that’s where my work lies.” ~ Ram Dass
- “Ask yourself: Where am I? Answer: Here.
Ask yourself: What time is it? Answer: Now.
Say it until you can hear it.” ~ Ram Dass - “The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.
In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.
When we see the Beloved in each person, it’s like walking through a garden, watching flowers bloom all around us.” ~ Ram Dass -
“When we see the Beloved in each person, it’s like walking through a garden, watching flowers bloom all around us.” ~ Ram Dass
- “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.” ~ Ram Dass
- “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?” ~ Ram Dass
- “Without remaining open to change, we can not remain open to life” ~ Ram Dass
- “All you can do for another person is be an environment in which if they wanted to come up for air, they could.” ~ Ram Dass
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“When someone we love dies, we get so busy mourning what died that we ignore what didn’t.” ~ Ram Dass
- “The dark night of the soul is when you have lost the flavor of life but have not yet gained the fullness of divinity. So it is that we must weather that dark time, the period of transformation when what is familiar has been taken away and the new richness is not yet ours.” ~ Ram Dass
- “Don’t compare your path with anybody else’s. Your path is unique to you.” ~ Ram Dass
- “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.” ~ Ram Dass
- “The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. It isn’t true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.” ~ Ram Dass
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“Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.” ~ Ram Dass
- “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.” ~ Ram Dass
- “Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.” ~ Ram Dass
- “Faith is what is left after all your beliefs have been blown to hell.” ~ Ram Dass
- “I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are” ~ Ram Dass
- “Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.” ~ Ram Dass
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“Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it!” ~ Ram Dass
- “Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.” ~ Ram Dass
- “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.” ~ Ram Dass
- “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.” ~ Ram Dass
- “We’re sitting under the tree of our thinking minds, wondering why we’re not getting any sunshine!” ~ Ram Dass
- “As you dissolve into love, your ego fades. You’re not thinking about loving; you’re just being love, radiating like the sun.” ~ Ram Dass
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“The shadow is the greatest teacher for how to come to the light.” ~ Ram Dass
- “What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.” ~ Ram Dass
- “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.” ~ Ram Dass
- “Now is now. Are you going to be here or not?” ~ Ram Dass
- “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.” ~ Ram Dass
- “The universe is made up of experiences that are designed to burn out your attachment, your clinging, to pleasure, to pain, to fear, to all of it. And as long as there is a place where you’re vulnerable, the universe will find a way to confront you with it.” ~ Ram Dass
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“The next message you need is always right where you are.” ~ Ram Dass
- “So somebody comes along and gets to me. They get me angry or uptight or they awaken some desire in me, wow am I delighted. They got me. And that’s my work on myself. If I am angry with you because your behavior doesn’t fill my model of how you should be, that’s my problem for having models. No expectations, no upset. If you are a liar and a cheat, that’s your Karma. If I’m cheated, that’s my work on myself.” ~ Ram Dass
- “Real happiness lies in that which never comes nor goes, but simply is.” ~ Ram Dass
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“The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.” ~ Ram Dass
- “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.” ~ Ram Dass
- “In India when we meet and part we often say, “Namaste,” which means: I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides; I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides; I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace. I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us�.. “Namaste.”” ~ Ram Dass
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“Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.” ~ Ram Dass
- “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.” ~ Ram Dass
- “If you want to cure the world, don’t emanate fear – emanate love.” ~ Ram Dass
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“Suffering only shows where you are attached. That is why, to those on the path, suffering is grace.” ~ Ram Dass
- “Within the spiritual journey, you understand that suffering becomes something that has been given to you to show you where your mind is still stuck. It’s a vehicle to help you go to work. That’s why it’s called grace.” ~ Ram Dass
- “Let the natural flow of the universe, course through your being, and harmonize your soul.” ~ Ram Dass
- “The art of life is to stay wide open and be vulnerable, yet at the same time to sit with the mystery and the awe and with the unbearable pain – to just be with it all.” ~ Ram Dass
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“Turn your melodrama into a mellow drama.” ~ Ram Dass
- “Nature is really important because it’s a manifestation of love that hasn’t been run through human minds.” ~ Ram Dass
- “Let’s trade in all our judging for appreciating. Let’s lay down our righteousness and just be together.” ~ Ram Dass
- “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.” ~ Ram Dass
- “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.” ~ Ram Dass
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“Don’t take yourself so personally.” ~ Ram Dass
- “The sooner one develops compassion in this journey, the better. Compassion lets us appreciate that each individual is doing what he or she must do, and that there is no reason to judge another person or oneself. You merely do what you can to further your own awakening.” ~ Ram Dass
- “Look at the people you don’t love and see them as an exercise for you to open your heart.” ~ Ram Dass
- “This is the pathless path. Where the journey leads is to the deepest truth in you. It is really just returning to where you were initially before you got lost.” ~ Ram Dass
