130 Ram Dass Quotes on Healing & Compassion

3. “Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.”

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

5. “We’re all just walking each other home.”

6. “As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be, you can’t see how it is.”

7. “In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.”

8. “We’re fascinated by the words, but where we meet is in the behind them.”

9. “Don’t think about the past. Just be here now.”

10. “The quieter you become, the more you can hear.”

11. “The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.”

12. “A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there’s work to be done.”

13. “Let’s trade in all our judging for appreciating. Let’s lay down our righteousness and just be together.”

14. “Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.”

15. “Your problem is you are too busy holding on to your unworthiness.”

16. “Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.”

17. “The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving—it’s in the being.”

18. “The ego is an exquisite instrument. Enjoy it, use it—just don’t get lost in it.”’

19. “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.”

20. “We are all affecting the world at every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.”

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21. “I’m not interested in being a ‘lover.’ I’m interested in only being in love.”

22. “Once you have drunk from the water of unconditional love, no other well can satisfy your thirst. The pangs of separation may become so intense that seeking the affection of the Beloved becomes an obsession.”

23. “Love is the most transformative medicine, for love slowly transforms you into what psychedelics only get you to glimpse.”

24. “When the heart is open, it’s easier for the mind to be turned toward God.”

25. “And suddenly I realized that he knew everything that was going on in my head, all the time, and that he still loved me. Because who we are is behind all that.”

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

27. “Compassion, simply stated, is leaving other people alone.”

28. “A relationship starting out as one that awakens love can only remain a living vehicle for love to the extent that it is continually made new or reconsecrated.”

29. “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.”

30. “Grace is at the nexus of love and awareness. There, it’s all open and it’s all love.”

31. “In the course of your journey, it is most likely that your day-to-day companions or friends may change. Some may fall away as your interest in the Spirit pulls you from the worldly interest which brought or kept you together, but new friends who share your current interests will appear.”

32.“True love is unconquerable and irresistible; and it goes on gathering power and spreading itself, until eventually it transforms everyone whom it touches.”

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

34. “That’s who we all are on this path—spiritual family and friends. It’s just one big family. We’re all relatives until we realize we’re really all the same and there’s only one of us—one loving awareness. May you be one in that love.”

35. “You two are together in the stars, but not in this world, in this life.”

36. “It is only when you begin to understand that if you and I are truly in love, if I go to the place in me that is love and you to the place in you that is love, we are ‘together’ in love. We start to understand that what love means is that we are sharing a common state together. That state exists in you and it exists in me.”

37. “This love is actually part of you; it is always flowing through you. It’s like the subatomic texture of the universe, the dark matter that connects everything. When you tune in to that flow, you will feel it in your own heart—not your physical heart or your emotional heart, but your spiritual heart, the place you point to in your chest when you say, ‘I am.’”

38. “Souls love. That’s what souls do. Egos don’t, but souls do.”

39. “Emotions are like waves—watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean.”

40. “You may protest if you can love the person you are protesting against as much as you love yourself.”

41. “In our relationships, how much can we allow them to become new, and how much do we cling to what they used to be yesterday?”

42. “Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings.”

43. “Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being in love is the supreme creative act.”

44. “Whose presence reveals how subtle is the path of love.”

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45. “Trust the messages coming from your heart and intuition.”

46. “We’re here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.”

47. “Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us.”

48. “All spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion.”

49. “Just because you are seeing divine light, experiencing waves of bliss, or conversing with gods and goddesses is no reason to not know your zip code.”

50. “In mystical traditions, it is one’s own readiness that makes experiences exoteric or esoteric. The secret isn’t that you’re not being told, the secret is that you’re not able to hear.”

51. “Our rational minds can never understand what has happened, but our hearts, if we can keep them open to God, will find their own intuitive way.”

52. “What we’re seeing ‘out there’ is the projection of where we’re at—the projection of the clingings of our minds.”

53. “Religions are founded by what mystics say when they come back; but what the mystics say is not the same as what happened to them.”

54. “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.”

55. “Faith is not a belief. Faith is what is left when your beliefs have all been blown to hell. Faith is in the heart, while beliefs are in the head. Experiences, even spiritual experiences, come and go. As long as you base your faith on experience, your faith is going to be constantly flickering, because your experiences keep changing.”

56. “Who in all his works sees God, in truth he goes to God.”

57. “See God in everyone. It is to teach by individual differences and karma.”

58. “It’s better to see God in everything, than to try to figure it out.”

59. “I will treat all my negative reactions to this form of meditation as merely thought forms prompted by my ego to keep me from taking it seriously. I will suspend judgment, criticism, and doubt.”

60. “The power of God is within me. The grace of God surrounds me.”

61. “The more conscious that a being becomes, the more he can use any occupation as a vehicle for spreading light.”

62. “That thought brought enormous gratitude for the moment of light and breath I was living—how sweet, how rare, to be given a body in which to move about this world!”

63. “The journey across the great ocean of existence is a journey inward—ever deeper and deeper—and the deeper you get in, the more you meet truth.”

64. “Meditation raises the question, ‘Who are we really?’”

65. “What the word ‘God’ means is the mystery, really. It’s the mystery that we face as humans—the mystery of existence, of suffering, and of death.”

66. “The spiritual journey is not about acquiring something outside yourself. Rather, you are penetrating the layers and veils to return to the deepest truth of your own being.”

67. “Don’t treat yourself so gingerly; you can let go of stuff. Sometimes it takes three breaths instead of two to do it, but you can do it. Be a little tougher and don’t cling to stuff.”

68. “You give up not meditating. It’s called meditation action. There’s no way out of it. Meditation means to be constantly extricating yourself from the clinging of mind.”

69. “Death has such great importance in this society that it affects everything. I learned from my guru that death is not the enemy. I see it as another moment. Yet, it’s the end of an incarnation and means going on to other incarnations.”

70. “When your center is firm, when your faith is strong and unwavering, then it will not matter what company you keep.”

71. “When we’re identified with awareness, we’re no longer living in a world of polarities. Everything is present at the same time.”

72. “If you want to be surrounded by souls, become identified with your soul. It takes one to know one!”

73. “We’re being trained through our incarnations—trained to seek love, trained to seek light, trained to see the grace in suffering.”

74. “Inspiration is God making contact with itself.”

75. “Do what you can on this plane to relieve suffering by constantly working on yourself to be an instrument for the cessation of suffering. To me, that’s what the emerging game is all about.”

76. “If you think you are enlightened, go home for Thanksgiving.”

77. “Our whole spiritual transformation brings us to the point where we realize that in our own being, we are enough.”

78. “When we see the Beloved in each person, it’s like walking through a garden, watching flowers bloom all around us.”

79. “Healing does not mean going back to the way things were before, but rather allowing what is now to move us closer to God.”

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80. “The next message you need is always right where you are.”

81. “The game is not about becoming somebody, it’s about becoming nobody.”

82. “Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama.”

83. “If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible.”

84. “I can do nothing for you but work on myself. You can do nothing for me but work on yourself.”

85. “It’s only when ‘caterpillarness’ is done that one . That, again, is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away ‘caterpillarness.’ The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.”

86. “Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.”

87. “The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.”

88. “It’s all real and it’s all illusory—that’s awareness!”

89. “Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it!”

90. “It’s very different because the Indians live as if they are their souls and Americans live as if they are their egos.”

91. “Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.”

92. “The question we need to ask ourselves is whether there is any place we can stand in ourselves, where we can look at all that’s happening around us without freaking out, where we can be quiet enough to hear our predicament, and where we can begin to find ways of acting that are at least not contributing to further destabilization.”

93. “Our interactions with one another reflect a dance between love and fear.”

94. “By acting compassionately, by helping to restore justice and , we are acknowledging that we are all part of one another.”

95. “There’s much more in any given moment than we usually perceive, and that we ourselves are much more than we usually perceive. When you know that, part of you can stand outside the drama of your life.”

96. “Psychedelics helped me to escape—albeit momentarily—from the prison of my mind. It over-rode the habit patterns of thought and I was able to taste innocence again. Looking at sensations freshly without the conceptual overly was very profound.”

97. “Spiritual practices help us move from identifying with the ego to identifying with the soul. Old age does that for you too. It spiritualizes people naturally.”

98. “Early in the journey, you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later, you will see that where you are going is here and you will arrive now so you stop asking.”

99. “You and I are the force for transformation in the world. We are the consciousness that will define the nature of the reality we are moving into.”

100. “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 , and trees, and clouds, and galaxies—it’s all one. It’s one energy.”

101. “As one individual changes, the system changes.”

102. “I see my life as an unfolding set of opportunities to awaken.”

103. “A moment comes when ‘other’ is no longer other.”

104. “Our journey is about being more deeply involved in life and yet less attached to it.”

105. “The freer I get, the higher I go. The higher I go, the more I see. The more I see, the less I know. The less I know, the more I’m free.”

106. “Cosmic humor, especially about your own predicament, is an important part of your journey.”

107. “Now is now. Are you going to be here or not?”

108. “The dance goes from realizing that you’re separate to then trying to find your way back into the totality of which you are not only a part, but which you are.”

109. “To him who has had the experience, no explanation is necessary. To him who has not, none is possible.”

110. “The world is won by those who let it go.”

111. “The human mind is like that monkey—incessantly active by its own nature. Then, it becomes drunk with the wine of desire, thus increasing its turbulence. After desire takes possession, comes the sting of the scorpion of jealousy at the success of others, and last of all, the demon of pride enters the mind, making it think itself of all importance.”

112. “My life is a creative act—like a painting, or a concerto.”

113. “I think the message is that you don’t need to go anywhere else to find what you are seeking.”

114. “The art of listening comes from a quiet mind and an open heart.”

115. “This getting straight not only applies to people but to things as well, such as , disliked foods, special treats, avoided places, all your toys, etc. Everything must be rerun through your compassion machine.”

116. “Knowledge, all by itself, without deep wisdom, ends up becoming despair.”

117. “Free yourself from the illusion of good and bad days. Labeling time makes us nostalgic of the past and demanding of the future. There is only here and now. Let it be.”

118. “As we acquire a certain degree of equanimity in self-image, we are that much more likely to . We know what it’s like to be a ‘self’ moving through the world of ‘others.’ When someone feels particularly isolated or , we don’t need a great deal of information in order to come to his or her aid.”

119. “If you listen to your own inner voice, it will tell you where you are now and which method will work best for you in your evolution towards the light.”

120. “ and trust the process.”

121. “As soon as you give it all up, you can have it all”

122. “So we won’t take ourselves too seriously, because taking something serious doesn’t make it go away any faster. In fact, it keeps making it a little bit worse.”

123. “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.”

124. “All acts of healing are ultimately ourselves healing ourselves.”

125. “Most of us are so caught in righteousness, we’re afraid of truth.”

126. “You do what you do because that’s what the harmony of the universe requires.”

127. “Inevitably is an excellent word—inevitably means you’re on a train, and the train is going one way, and you’re at the front of the train running as fast as you can toward the back of the train, in the opposite direction from where the train is headed. But it doesn’t matter, because when the train gets to the station, you get there too. That’s inevitably. That’s my life.”

128. “We each have our path. There are many routes up the mountain, but they all end at the peak.”