Ram Dass
Ram Dass
Ram Dassis an American spiritual teacher and the author of the seminal 1971 book Be Here Now. He is known for his personal and professional associations with Timothy Leary at Harvard University in the early 1960s, for his travels to India and his relationship with the Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, and for founding the charitable organizations Seva Foundation and Hanuman Foundation. He continues to teach via his website...
ProfessionYoung Adult Author
Date of Birth6 April 1931
CityBoston, MA
teacher light shadow
The shadow is the greatest teacher for how to come to the light.
buddhism voice space
All that you seek is already within you. In Hinduism it is called the Atman, in Buddhism the pure Buddha-Mind. Christ said, 'the kingdom of heaven is within you.' Quakers call it the ‘still small voice within.’ This is the space of full awareness that is in harmony with all the universe, and thus is wisdom itself.
art pain unbearable
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.
mean world moments
We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not.
powerful perception important
It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.
pain attachment long
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.
thinking mind moments
Our thinking minds deprive us of the happiness that comes when we are living fully in the moment.
giving-up ocean helping
Maharajji told me, 'Give up anger and I'll help you.' I found that love freed me back into the ocean of love and my righteous anger didn't do that. And I would rather be free than right.
independent circles people
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.
struggle years passive-resistance
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.
live-life meditation caves
We live life in the marketplace and then we go off to the cave or to the meditation mat to replenish ourselves.
giving-up mean meditation
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.
taken dark night
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.
rivers awareness
Thoughts are going by like a river; awareness simply is.