Words of Wisdom: Quotations from One of the World's Foremost Spiritual Leaders

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The universe is an example of love. Like a tree. Like the ocean. Like my body. Like my wheelchair. I see the love.” It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.” In working with those who are dying, I offer another human being a spacious environment with my mind in which they can die as they need to die. I have no right to define how another person should die. I’m just there to help them transition, however they need to do it.” In 1997 Ram Dass suffered a major stroke from which he was given a 10% chance of survival. After a series of further health issues including a broken hip and sepsis, Ram Dass became quite frail and more dependent on his carers. He talks about how this enforced change resulted in a spiritual shift in how he viewed his service to others. Ram Dass became a being of presence and loving awareness. He loved nature and the natural world around him. Living out the later part of his life in Maui provided a connection to nature and its astounding beauty.

I first met Ram Dass on a Skype video call in 2012, more than fifty years after his first lecture. His mode of connection had shifted, and he was already in the twilight of his life, living with the aftereffects of a stroke that permanently altered his verbal communication. He had moved into a realm that valued silence over noise—to the quiet place behind his famous words Be Here Now—where he rested in loving, present awareness. There is an interesting part of the book where he discusses studying under different gurus. He refers to ‘gurus along the way.’ One promised him wealth and power, trying to pitch Yoga to a westerner in a way that the guru thought he would be interested. Wealth and power were not attractive to Ram Dass. They are not a spiritual path. He had experienced wealth and power in his career and he resonated more with Maharaji-ji’s path of the heart. His intention had moved from the head to the heart. The Neem Karoli Baba ashram in Taos, New Mexico, is dedicated to his guru and Ram Dass was heavily involved in its realisation. Neem Karoli Baba has certainly become known in the west due to the work and life of Ram Dass. As detailed in this ‘Being Ram Dass’ book review, the inspiration for the book was to see his life through the eyes of his own guru. When we’re dancing, we’re not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as we would be if we were taking a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point. When we play music, the playing itself is the point. Exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.” – Alan Watts Faith (1:09:20 )

Teaching Transcript: I’ll tell the root of one meditation that I love to do that might help people, because it helped me many times. It’s a meditation in which you envision or remember yourself in the middle of your difficulty at work, or family, or whatever. And then you let this surprise visit of some enlightened or awakened or loving being come and take your place. And it might be Gandhi or Buddha or the Mother Mary or Solomon or, you know, sometimes it’s Yoda or the Dalai Lama, or whoever it happens to be, your grandmother. And let them show you, they take over your body so no one knows they’re in there, and they show you how they would do it. Wu Wei is not a matter of cultivated passivity, even of cultivated spontaneity. You have to be able to realize that you don’t know what you really want to do, until you are very quiet and it tells you. So, to quote Jesus, ‘Unless you become again as a child, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’” – Alan Watts Embracing Our Humanity (52:13) Teaching Transcript: I have a little story to read, and then I’ll think of a task. The story goes like this: It’s a Hasidic, Jewish mystical rabbi who taught his disciples to memorize, reflect, contemplate, and place the teachings of the holy words on their heart. One day, a student asked the rabbi why he always used the phrase “on your heart.” And the master replied, “Only God, or the mystery, can put the teachings in your heart. Here, we recite and learn and put them on the heart, hoping that some day, when your heart breaks, they will fall in.” Explicating the process and implications of meditation and it’s uncoverings, Alan Watts highlights a methodology for becoming ‘interiorly silent and ceasing from the interminable chatter’ of the compulsively thinking mind. Describing the meditative process of moving behind thoughts and symbols to cultivate a direct relationship with reality, Alan uses music as an example for our experience, sharing that the purpose of life is not some serious trudging journey through the thinking mind, but rather a song and dance from the heart in the ever-changing immediate present moment of existence. The Ram Dass app is a simple and easy way to explore the teachings and timeless wisdom of Ram Dass & other esteemed spiritual teachers.

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.” The inspiration for buying a copy of Be Here Now was found in David Williams’ memoir ‘My Search for Yoga’ which you can read a review of here: https://yogasmiths.org/2020/05/28/my-search-for-yoga-by-david-williams-book-review/ Richard Alpert at the height of The American Dream Words of Wisdom is a distillation of hundreds of lectures and many hours of audio and video recordings from the last five decades—his core essential teachings.The book is full of beautiful insightful quotes. I wanted to share in this ‘Being Ram Dass book’ review the mantra that he gives the reader. So this is what I mean by a basic stance, so that for example if you look at someone like His Holiness, his default position is compassion. So whatever happens in his life, his first response is going to come from that standpoint. And then if the situation calls for something else, like a kind of tougher approach, then that will come later. So this we can learn through cultivation, through training, and it's kind of a habituation. Through habituation we learn to be in a particular way. So those are the things I was trying to make clear in the compassion and cultivation training. Being wise is when you get out of the time-space locus that says, I am the one who knows. When you merge with everything around you, you become wisdom. When you become wise, you don’t know you know. You give that up. When you are wise, whatever response comes out of you is the optimum response. And at the same time, nothing is happening inside you at all.