Ram Dass Mind Quotations

We've been proceeding so long on the plane of consciousness, we don't realize we are spiritual beings. Our minds, our senses, and the society around us all say, "Come on, you're getting into fantasy."

Religions are institutions that push you up the mountain and then they have their fantasies about the spirit. I mean they try to make God like the human psyche and it's wrong. I mean it's a projection of the mind, and you can use it to get a start and then you must leave it behind.

Faith, consciousness, and awareness all exist beyond the thinking mind.

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.

Birth, death, and suffering all bring us to the very edge of what our minds can understand.

If you keep examining your mind, you'll come to see that thoughts of who you are and how it all is are creating the reality you're experiencing.

Counseling has to do with intuition, with work on oneself, with the quietness of one's mind and the openness of one's heart.

The richness of a moment comes when it's both full and empty at the same time. The truth is, we live simultaneously in time and timelessness.

The thinking mind is what is busy. You have to stay in your heart. You have to be in your heart. Be in your heart. The rest is up here in your head where you are doing, doing, doing.

Love flows. Love doesn't know boundaries. The mind creates boundaries. The mind creates the boundary of separate me and you. The heart just keeps embracing and opening out.

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.

What we're seeing "out there" is the projection of where we're at--the projection of the clingings of our minds.

I remember my first visit with my guru. He had shown that he read my mind. So I looked at the grass and I thought, My god, hes going to know all the things I dont want people to know. I was really embarrassed. Then I looked up and he was looking directly at me with unconditional love.

I experience each moment like baklava: rich in this layer, and this layer, and this layer.

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.

My work as a human being is to quiet my mind, open my heart and do what I can to relieve the suffering with as much wisdom, skill, whatever I got.

Words engage our minds, but in the silence we hear the Presence of God.

You experience that you are cut off by being in your mind, and there is a quality that is starving in an individual that is locked in their mind. So when you move to another plane of consciousness which is no longer controlled by your intellect, which is really the sub-system and you move into the meta-system, what you feel at that moment is... you are the universe, you feel merged with it, you feel thick with the moment, and that richness is so fulfilling.

When you are completely identified with your thinking mind you are totally separate from everything else in the universe.

I don't think too much about the future. Not because I'm hiding my head in the sand but because I figured out that whatever the future was going to be, the thing I had to do was to quiet my mind and open my heart and do what I could to end suffering.

Nature is really important because it's a manifestation of love that hasn't been run through human minds.

You've been somebody long enough. You spent the first half of your life becoming somebody. Now you can work on becoming nobody, which is really somebody. For when you become nobody there is no tension, no pretense, no one trying to be anyone or anything. The natural state of the mind shines through unobstructed - and the natural state of the mind is pure love.

The interesting question is, how do you put yourself in a position so that you can allow ‘what is’ to be. The enemy turns out to be the creation of mind. Because when you are just in the moment, doing what you are doing, there is no fear. The fear is when you stand back to think about it. The fear is not in the actions. The fear is in the thought about the actions.

When the heart is open, it's easier for the mind to be turned toward God.

Our thinking minds deprive us of the happiness that comes when we are living fully in the moment.

Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.

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.

In an evolutionary perspective, the rational mind takes a certain distance and no further, & we must be able to transcend it.

Can you use the rational mind to transcend itself?