Life’s work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will.
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What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.
Ram Dass (1931–2019) was an American spiritual teacher and psychologist. A student of the Indian guru Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaj ji), he wrote several books, including Be Here Now and Grist for the Mill, bringing Eastern spiritual teachings to a Western audience. His later books address aging and facing the end of life. He is also known under his previous name, Richard Alpert, for his research on psychedelics with Timothy Leary at Harvard in the 1960s.
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How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change.
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It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
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Stay a verb—don’t become a noun.
If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.
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Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking—and every now and then, those malfunctions open a new door to the adjacent possible. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.
In moving through apprehensive chills to mounting excitement and waves of moist tingling warmth, the body, with its innate capacity to heal, melts the iceberg created by deeply frozen trauma.
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Excessive use of external motivation can slow and even stop your journey to mastery.
Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it . . . the upward spurts vary; the plateaus have their own dips and rises along the way. . . .
What we call ‘mastery’ can be defined as that mysterious process through which what is at first difficult or even impossible becomes easy and pleasurable through diligent, patient, long-term practice.
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