Still Here Quotes

“In a non-traditional culture such as ours, dominated by technology, we value information far more than we do wisdom. But there is a difference between the two. Information involves the acquisition, organization, and dissemination of facts; a storing-up of physical data. But wisdom involves another equally crucial function: the emptying and quieting of the mind, the application of the heart, and the alchemy of reason and feeling.”
― Ram Dass, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying

“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!”
― Ram Dass, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying

“In all spiritual practice, the strategy is the same: to identify the thing that frightens you and come as close to it as you can before you freak out.”
― Ram Dass, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying

“I tried to go the renunciate’s way, to forget the needs of the body in order to avoid the suffering of the Ego. But the Soul depends on the Ego’s drama for its teachings. We have to be in the world to learn from it.”
― Ram Dass, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying

“There are a number of bogeymen that accompany us into adulthood. The biggest one is this: “I’ll be old and alone with no mind, and when I die I’ll be alone, adrift, isolated in a cold, dark universe.” The Ego is the only part of us that believes this.”
― Ram Dass, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying

“There is a growing Awareness in the medical community that a lot of what has been diagnosed and treated as depression among older people may instead be a natural process of reorientation. Whether we attribute it to cellular-biochemical mechanisms, or psychodynamics, or spiritual processes, there’s a kind of drawing-inward that seems to be part of the process of aging. Not a paranoid drawing-inward; not being afraid of the world. Just a kind of deepening. I think it’s probably the nearness of death that leads many people to want to reflect on what life is all about.”
― Ram Dass, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying

“Why are we still alive in these useless old bodies? This is a heartrending question to hear from old people who, in most other cultures of the world, would be the pride and joy of their communities, while in our own they are outcasts.”
― Ram Dass, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying

“Healing is not the same as curing, after all; healing does not mean going back to the way things were before, but rather allowing what is now to move us closer to God.”
― Ram Dass, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying

“Rilke advised, “with all that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek for the answers that cannot be given, for you wouldn’t be able to live with them, and the point is to live everything. Live the questions now, and perhaps without knowing it, you will live along someday into the answers.”
― Ram Dass, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying

“Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter,”
― Ram Dass, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying