Ram Dass

Once a sadhu offered me some land that he had, so that I could have an ashram for fellow Westerners. I asked Maharajji about it. He said, “He wants to give you his attachment. It’s not a pure gift. If it were pure he’d just give it to you instead of talking about it.” (R.D.)

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin wonders if “the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death.

The world is won by those who let it go.

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

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

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

My Guru, Maharaj-ji, once told me, “Enjoy everything!” These days I try to simply love everything that comes my way, whether animate or inanimate, pleasant or painful. I hope you too can learn to absorb life’s ecstasies and distresses into your spiritual practice so they are just more grist for the mill.

When I get back, I decide to listen to a talk Ram Dass once gave about what happens after death. When you die, where your consciousness is at the moment of death is a reflection of your level of evolution. If you are ready for the transformation that occurs at the moment of death, when there is a dissolving of the control mechanism and an intensification of all the energies, and you are not identified with all that so that you have equanimity through it, you can witness from a place of presence. You can witness the entire process of dying, and your consciousness doesn’t flicker. Most people, however, are attached to some way of looking at the world, and when that starts to dissolve at the moment of death, they go unconscious. They go through the process unconsciously and pick up the thread later on, because it happens too fast and requires letting go too fast. So the art is to let go before you die, so that when you die, there is no letting go required. That’s the most evolved state. They say in the literature that one who sees the way in the morning can gladly die in the evening. Die before you die, so that when you die you need not die. There is a great quote from Kabir: ‘If you don’t break your ropes while you are alive’ — that is, if you don’t break the identification with your body and your personality while you’re alive — ‘do you think that ghosts will do it after?’ The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic just because the body is rotten, that is all fantasy. What is found now is found then. If you find nothing now, you’ll simply end up with an apartment in the city of death. But if you make love with the Divine now, then in the next life, you will have the face of satisfied desire. So plunge into the truth. Find out who your teacher is. Believe in the great sound. In other words, do your sadhana so that you can break the identification now. Then, at the moment of transformation, you can just go. If you have fear, you will be met and guided and prote

It's only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. 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.

Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.

And as a therapist I felt caught in the drama of my own theories. The research data showed that Rogerian patients ended up saying positive statements, and Freudian patients ended up talking about their mother because of subtle reinforcement clues — it was so obvious. I would sit with my little notebook and when the person would start talking about his mother, I’d make a note and it didn’t take long for the patient to realize that he got his “note” taken, he got his pellet, every time he said certain things. And pretty soon he would be “Freudianized”.

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

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and who, though distant is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

I didn’t arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind.” — A. Einstein

Dina Bandhu, Dina Nath, Mere dore tere hath