2- Select Quotes of Ram Dass

Ram Dass has been one of the foremost disciples of Neem Karoli Baba(Maharaj Ji). In the 1960s, Ram Dass had been under the direct tutelage of Maharaj Ji. He was a Harvard psychology professor and was into psychedelic drugs, but his life was fully transformed when he met Maharaj Ji. He later went back to America and became a spiritual teacher. His book-“Be here now” is a classic, and a joyous must read for spiritual seekers. Here I am sharing with you some of his selected quotes from his teachings. I hope you find them meaningful and profound, equally as I do:-

1. “We’re all just walking each other home.”
2. “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.”
3. “I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion–and where it isn’t, that’s where my work lies.”
4. “Be here now.”
5. “Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.”
6. “The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving: it’s in the being. When I need love from others, or need to give love to others, I’m caught in an unstable situation. Being in love, rather than giving or taking love, is the only thing that provides stability. Being in love means seeing the Beloved all around me.”
7. “What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.”
8. “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.”
9. “Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.”
10. “Only that in you which is me can hear what I’m saying.”
11. “Let’s trade in all our judging for appreciating. Let’s lay down our righteousness and just be together.”
12. “A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there’s work to be done.”
13. “I can do nothing for you but work on myself…you can do nothing for me but work on yourself!”
14. “I’m not interested in being a “lover.” I’m interested in only being love.”
15. “The game is not about becoming somebody, it’s about becoming nobody.”
16. “Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.”
17. “When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.
18. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”
19. “The universe is an example of love. Like a tree. Like the ocean. Like my body. Like my wheelchair. I see the love.”
20. “I hang out with my guru in my heart. And I love every thing in the universe. That’s all I do all day.”
21. “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.”
22. “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.”
23. “My guru said that when he suffers, it brings him closer to God. I have found this, too.”
24. “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.”
25. “If you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family.”