Ram Dass

All acts of healing are ultimately our selves healing our Self. -Ram Dass

Prolong not the pastInvite not the futureDo not alter your innate wakefulnessFear not appearancesThere in nothing more than this

I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves.

Relationships only work in a spiritual sense when you and I really see that we are one.

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

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.

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.

Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom.

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.

It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.

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.

I have always said that often the religion you were born with becomes more important to you as you see the universality of truth.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Your problem is you're ... too busy holding onto your unworthiness.