Ram Dass:

There is a Tibetan stanza that’s a great spiritual practice condensed into five lines. It reads: Prolong not the past, Invite not the future. Alter not your innate wakefulness. Don’t fear appearances.There is nothing more than that.

You can work with those lines — they can be a whole practice for you: Let it all go. Past? Future? Just dream-stuff. Don’t let it disturb your “innate wakefulness,” your soul-view.

I find it helpful, in carrying out this curriculum of aging, to restructure my life so that my time is not quite so filled with activities.

It gives me more opportunity to remember that I’m a soul. If I stay locked too tightly into chronological or physical time, time itself tends to seduce me into ego-view. So I let go of my busy-ness. I spend some time just looking out the window, say, or watching the flow of a stream; I slowly let myself into a different time scale, and that helps me open into the soul-perspective.

And if I go further still, if I leave the soul-view and enter into pure Awareness, it is timeless.

There was a beautiful, spiritual woman, a great Indian saint named Anandamayi Ma. Millions of people came to be in her presence, because it felt so spacious and unconditional and loving. At one point, Paramahansa Yogananda said to her, “Ma, who are you?”

She replied, “Father, there is little to tell. My consciousness has never associated itself with this temporary body. Before I came on this earth, Father, I was the same. I grew into womanhood, but still I was the same. When the family in which I had been born made arrangements to have this body married, I was the same. And Father, in front of you now, I am the same. — Beliefnet.com