An intimate dialogue between two friends and luminaries on love, death, and the spiritual path, with guidance for the end-of-life journey
We all sit on the edge of a mystery. We have only known this life, so dying scares us--and we are all dying. But what if dying is perfectly safe? What would it look like if you could approach dying with curiosity and love, in service of other beings? What if dying is the ultimate spiritual practice? Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush began their friendship more than four decades ago at the foot of their guru, Neem Karoli Baba, also known as Maharaj-ji. He transmitted to them a simple philosophy: love everyone, tell the truth, and give up attachment to material things. A year before Ram Dass passed, he reunited with Bush for an intimate dialogue--which became Walking Each Other Home. In this extraordinary book, you'll hear from two beloved teachers about the spiritual opportunities within the dying process. They generously share intimate personal experiences and timeless practices with courage, humor, and heart, gently exploring every aspect of this journey. Here you'll learn about guidelines for being a loving rock for the dying, how to grieve fully and authentically, how to transform a fear of death, leaving a spiritual legacy, creating a sacred space for dying, and much more. Everybody you have ever loved is a part of the fabric of your being now, says Ram Dass. The body may die, but the soul remains. Death is an invitation to a new kind of relationship, in the place where we are all One. Join these two lifelong friends and spiritual luminaries as they explore what it means to live and die consciously, remember who we really are, and illuminate the path we walk together.Sometimes illumination occurs spontaneously or, as Ram Dass experienced, in a heart-wrenching moment of opening. More commonly, it happens when we polish the mirror of the heart with daily practice--and see beyond the illusion of our transient thoughts and emotions to the vast and luminous landscape of our true nature.
For five decades, Ram Dass has explored the depths of consciousness and love and brought them to life as service to others. With Polishing the Mirror, he gathers together his essential teachings for living in the eternal present, here and now. Readers will find within these pages a rich combination of perennial wisdom, humor, teaching stories, and detailed guidance on Ram Dass' own spiritual practices, including: Bhakti Yoga--opening our hearts to unconditional loveHis deeply personal and profound process of inner transformation―through his guru's fierce grace and a life of love and service―is told with characteristic candor and humor. Rich with teaching stories, Be Love Now is an invitation to open our hearts. -- Yoga International
Ram Dass's long-awaited Be Love Now is the transformational teaching of a forty year journey to the heart. The author of the two-million-copy classic Remember, Be Here Now and its influential sequel Still Here, Dass is joined once more by Rameshwar Das--a collaborator from the Love Serve Remember audio recordings--to offer this intimate and inspiring exploration of the human soul.
Like Deepak Chopra's Book of Secrets, the Dalai Lama's Art of Happiness, and Jon Kabat-Zinn's Coming to Our Senses, Ram Dass's Be Love Now will serve as a lodestar for anyone seeking to enhance their spiritual awareness and improve their capacity to serve--and love--the world around them.
From Ram Dass, one of America's most beloved spiritual figures and bestselling author of Be Here Now and Be Love Now, comes this timeless classic about the experience of being and the risks and rewards of our spiritual path. Originally published in 1976, Grist for the Mill offers a deep spiritual journey of self-discovery, and a universal understanding of what it means to be and to grow as human beings. The book is fully revised with a new introduction.
As Ram Dass puts it, When the faith is strong enough it is sufficient just to be. It's a journey towards simplicity, towards quietness, towards a kind of joy that is not in time. It's a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body and our psyche, on to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification.
Ram Dass lived a full life and then some. His final statement is thorough and, yes, enlightening. --Kirkus Reviews
Perhaps no other teacher has sparked the fires of as many spiritual seekers in the West as Ram Dass. If you've ever embraced the phrase be here now, practiced meditation or yoga, tried psychedelics, or supported anyone in a hospice, prison, or homeless center--then the story of Ram Dass is also part of your story. From his birth in 1931 to his luminous later years, Ram Dass saw his life as just one incarnation of many. This memoir puts us in the passenger seat with the one-time Harvard psychologist and lifelong risk-taker Richard Alpert, who loved to take friends on wild rides on his Harley and test nearly every boundary--inner or outer--that came his way. Being Ram Dass shares his life's odyssey in intimate detail: how he struggled with issues of self-identity and sexuality in his youth, pioneered psychedelic research, and opened the doorways to Eastern spiritual practices. In 1967 he trekked to India and met his guru, Neem Karoli Baba. He returned with a perspective on spirituality and psychology that changed millions. Featuring 64 pages of color photographs, this intimate memoir chronicles the cultural and spiritual transformations Ram Dass experienced that resonate with us to this day, a journey from the mind to the heart, from the ego to the soul. Before, after, and along these waypoints, readers will encounter many other adventures and revelations--each ringing with the potential to awaken the universal, loving divine that links us to this beloved teacher and all of us to each other.An essential balm for these tumultuous times, this thoughtful and inspiring guide features never-before-published teachings to abandon the idea there is an other, bridging differences and cherishing the beautiful Earth that is our home, from beloved spiritual leader Ram Dass.
With the world seeming to teeter between democracy and authoritarianism, between humanitarianism and individualism, Ram Dass's teachings on wholeness and unity are more needed than ever.
There Is No Other is a groundbreaking work showcasing the late spiritual leader's thoughts and insights on broaching the divide and bringing disparate souls together. In these profound, never-before-released writings, Ram Dass shows us how a house divided against itself--whether that house is our individual self or the society in which we live--can come together in wholeness. There is no other, he explains. It is all one.
Structured in three sections, There Is No Other teaches us to open ourselves, come together in community, and love one another--and ourselves--across all our seeming contradictions and divisions. Anne Lamott contributes a beautiful foreword and each section is followed by a short essay reflecting on the endurance of Ram Dass's ideas penned by Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzberg, as well as guided meditations to deepen each lesson.
As he leads us toward wholeness not within our unique selves but as a human community, Ram Dass gives us the most precious gift: hope. Only in seeing ourselves in our complexity can we come together and honor the sacred planet we inhabit.
Ram Dass lived a full life and then some. His final statement is thorough and, yes, enlightening. --Kirkus Reviews
Perhaps no other teacher has sparked the fires of as many spiritual seekers in the West as Ram Dass. If you've ever embraced the phrase be here now, practiced meditation or yoga, tried psychedelics, or supported anyone in a hospice, prison, or homeless center--then the story of Ram Dass is also part of your story. From his birth in 1931 to his luminous later years, Ram Dass saw his life as just one incarnation of many. This memoir puts us in the passenger seat with the one-time Harvard psychologist and lifelong risk-taker Richard Alpert, who loved to take friends on wild rides on his Harley and test nearly every boundary--inner or outer--that came his way. Being Ram Dass shares his life's odyssey in intimate detail: how he struggled with issues of self-identity and sexuality in his youth, pioneered psychedelic research, and opened the doorways to Eastern spiritual practices. In 1967 he trekked to India and met his guru, Neem Karoli Baba. He returned with a perspective on spirituality and psychology that changed millions. Featuring 64 pages of color photographs, this intimate memoir chronicles the cultural and spiritual transformations Ram Dass experienced that resonate with us to this day, a journey from the mind to the heart, from the ego to the soul. Before, after, and along these waypoints, readers will encounter many other adventures and revelations--each ringing with the potential to awaken the universal, loving divine that links us to this beloved teacher and all of us to each other.