All quotes from
Ram's book
If you
feel free only when you meditate, you’re not really free.
I would
like my life to be a statement of love and compassion – and where it isn’t,
there’s where my work lies.
Relax. You are being guided. In fact, the next message you need in the
treasure hunt is exactly where you are when you need it. The message may be in
the form of a teacher or a lover or an enemy or a pet or a rock or a chemical
or a book or a feeling of great despair or a physical illness or the eyes of a
person you pass on the street.
Where do
we begin? The answer is simple: you begin just where you are.
We’re all
the same being and that’s the problem--- we can only move as fast as we all can
move.
Practice
is like a roller coaster. Each new high
is usually followed by a new low. There
is in addition to the up-and-down cycles an in-and-out cycle. That is, there are stages at which you feel
pulled into inner work and all you seek is a quiet place to meditate and get on
with it, and then there are times when you turn outward and seek to be involved
in the marketplace. Both of these parts
of the cycles are a part of one’s practice, for what happens to you in the
marketplace helps in your meditation, and what happens in your meditation helps
you to participate in the marketplace without attachment. At first you will think of practice as a
limited part of your life. In time you
will realize that everything we do is part of your practice.
If you
think you are so enlightened, go and spend a week with your parents.
It is important to expect nothing, to
take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the
path, and to proceed.
Your ego
is a set of thoughts that define your universe.
Meditation
changes your desires in the course of fulfilling them.
You have
at this moment many constellations of thoughts, each composing an identity:
sexual, social, cultural, educational, economic, intellectual, historical,
philosophical, spiritual, among others. One or another of these identities
takes over as the situation demands
Your
resistances to meditation are your mental prisons in miniature.
The goal
of meditation is to free your awareness from its identification with your
senses and thoughts.
To
travel all over looking for the perfect teacher adds more to your melodrama
than your liberation. Virtually any
teacher is suitable simply to begin, and if no teacher is available, you can do
much on your own. In the end, you are
your own best teacher.
Teachers
and teachings are forms, and ultimately you must go beyond forms.
Solitude
shows you the way your mind creates your universe.
