Paths to God Quotes

“The freer I get, the higher I go. The higher I go, the more I see. The more I see, the less I know. The less I know, the more I’m free.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“The world is won by those who let it go.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“Knowledge all by itself, without deep wisdom, ends up becoming despair.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“Gurdjieff used to say, “If you can serve a cup of tea properly, you can do anything.” That is, if you are able to perform any act in a true karma-yogic fashion, it’s because you’re acting from a place where you’re free of attachments and not busy being the actor—and being in that place will shape every act you do.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“But you know, you really don't have to worry about whether everybody else is doing it or not. You just begin to get your own house in order. Recognizing your complete interrelatedness with all of it and with your own spiritual source changes the meaning of each act, and therefore both the reason and the way it's done.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“Who in all his works sees God, in truth he goes to God.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“You are getting the benefit of all the work you‘ve ever done up until now, which has put you in the place where you‘re reading this bizarre book about a peculiar topic that most of the population couldn‘t care less about.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“Krishna says, “I am also Brahman. I am the formless, timeless, spaceless, beginningless, endless Brahman. In each individual, the spark of that Brahman, the Atman, is me.” So Krishna produced each individual; Krishna is each individual; Krishna is within each individual. We are all Krishna. We are all God.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“What's fun is that when you're no longer attached to being one separate part of it, you get to be part of all of it. At that point the "all" is known to you subjectively, and you are everywhere at once, because you are no longer pinned in a space-time locus by your separateness. Metaphysics tell me that, and physics tell me that. Everything I have experienced in all my inner work points to that.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“As pessoas argumentarão: "Mas se reencarnação é verdade, por que não me lembro de quem eu era? Por que não me lembro das minhas vidas passadas?"
Lama Anagarika Govinda, mestre tibetano, responde: "A maioria das pessoas não se lembra de seus nascimentos, e ainda assim elas não duvidam que nasceram recentemente. Elas esquecem que a memória ativa é apenas uma pequena parte da nossa consciência normal, e que nossa memória subconsciente registra e preserva cada impressão e experiência passada, que nossa 'mente desperta' falha em lembrar."
Carl Jung, em seu trabalho psicológico, continuou lutando com essa questão da memória subconsciente. Ele a chamou de "o inconsciente coletivo", que era uma maneira pela qual um ocidental poderia abordar a ideia da reencarnação, de informações que vem de fora desta vida.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“Gradually, as our perspective deepens, we begin to experience our own lives in the context of a wider purpose. We begin to look at all our melodramas and our desires and our sufferings, and instead of seeing them as events happening within a lifetime bounded by birth and death, we begin experiencing them as part of a much vaster design.We begin to appreciate that there is a wider frame around our lives, within which our particular incarnation is happening. One of the first things that kind of perspective does for us is to calm us down a great deal. The whole game isn’t riding on this one lifetime! Whew! There’s a great feeling of release inherent in that; it removes the anxiety and the sense of urgency. We don’t have to do it all right now—and in fact we see we’re not “doing it” anyway! It’s the lawful continuity of karma and reincarnation flowing through us lifetime after lifetime, kalpa after kalpa. What a relief!”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“Gradually, it begins to dawn on us that we are merely part of a process. Think about that: You and I are nothing more than process. I am a process of continuing mind-moments, each one separate from the others. There is no permanent “me, ” being incarnated and reincarnated—there’s merely the law of cause-and-effect, cause-and-effect, cause-and-effect, running on and on and on. It’s all just the passing parade of the laws of prakriti, of the laws of nature, of the laws of an unfolding illusion of manifestation.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“The Buddha believed in reincarnation, which means he thought that something reincarnates. The Pali literature says: “There are no real ego entities hastening through the ocean of rebirth, but merely life waves, which, according to their nature and activities, manifest themselves here as men, there as animals, and elsewhere as invisible things.” “Life waves”—that’s a nice image. In Hinduism they’re called vasanas, subtle thought-forms. Every act we do creates vasanas, life waves, based on the desires connected with the act. Those life waves go out and out. Even when we die, they continue; the physical body dies, and what remains are those subtle life waves, those mental tendencies that function like a kind of psychic DNA code to determine your next round. In Hinduism that’s called karma. Karma is basically a pattern of life waves, or desire waves, that keep going and going, life after life, until they spend themselves. When they do, there’s no more individual desire, no more separation, and therefore no more incarnation. The game is over.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“Instead of always preoccupying ourselves with trying to get what we think we want or need, we’ll start to quiet, we’ll start to listen. We’ll wait for that inner prompting. We’ll try to hear, rather than decide, what it is we should do next.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“Rumi, the Persian mystic: “I died as stone, and rose again as plant. I died as plant, and became an animal. I died as animal, and was born a man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? Yet once more shall I die as man, to soar with the angels. But even from angelhood, I must pass on. For all is change, except the face of God.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“What often happens when we face this stripping away of our models is that we will give up this and that, and instead grab onto that and this. It’s too uncomfortable not to have anything to cling to, and so we substitute a new set of attachments for the old ones.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“You learn it all, and then you offer it all up.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“But greater than any earthly sacrifice is the sacrifice of sacred wisdom, for wisdom is in truth the end of all holy work.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

“As I understand the law of it all, we are all dwelling in Grace all the time. The only thing that ever falls out of Grace is our own thinking mind:We fall because we think we fell.The minute we give up our thoughts—just our thoughts!—there we are. God is always exactly one thought away—and the minute we quiet that thought, here we are again.”
― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita