Ram Dass

Ram Dass (Richard Alpert)

1931-, American Psychologist, Teacher, Writer

Attention / Awareness
When awareness is identified with thoughts we only exist in a certain time/space dimension. But when awareness goes behind thought, we are able to be free of time and see thoughts appearing and disappearing, just watching thought forms come into existence, exist, and pass away in a millisecond. And when the intensity of concentration allows us to see the space between two thoughts, we see eternity. There is no thought there. We realize that thought exists against the backdrop of no thought. Against the backdrop of emptiness, of nothing, we exist. And there we are at the edge of perceiving who we are.
in Ram Dass & Stephen Levine, Grist for the Mill , 1976, 1987

There have been moments in your life when you were pure awareness. No concepts, no thoughts like "I am aware" or "That is a tree" or "Now I am meditating." Just pure awareness. Openness. A spacious quality in your existence … For that moment your image of yourself was lost in the gestalt, in the totality of the moment. You were not clinging to anything. You were not holding on to the experience. It was flowing – through you, around you, by you, in you. At that moment you were the experience. You were the flow … You had transcended the separation that thought creates. You were the moment in all its fullness.
Journey of Awakening: A Meditator's Guidebook , 1978

Being / Essence / Soul
If I see one dilemma with Western man, it's that he can't accept how beautiful he is. He can't accept that he is pure light, that he's pure love, that he's pure consciousness, that he's divine.
in Esquire , 1972