Another Quote from Ram Das, Paths to God

I like this quote. There is a lot in here:

Now, in a way, purification I s a hype. You take your body, just as it is, and your mind, just as it is, and your feelings, just as they are—and right here, in this very place, lies the Brahman, the enlightened state. It’s right here! It’s not there or then, it’s not in India or Tibet, it’s not being kept secret by “him” or “her,” it’s not in this book or in that book. It’s right here, and you are it—right now.

Okay, so then what’s the point of purification? What, in fact, is the point of any of these practices if we already are the Brahman? They’re to get rid of whatever in us prevents us from really knowing who we are at this moment. See, from a practical point of view, we’re faced with an interesting paradox. At one level of our intellectual understanding we know that we already have all the riches—we know that we are the atman, that we are the Buddha, that we are free. We know all that. But if we look inside, we’ll notice that although we know it, we somehow don’t believe it. And that’s what all the purification methods are about: getting us from where we seem to think we still are, to where we don’t think we’re anywhere anymore. Hence we have all these practices, like karma yoga and jnana yoga, like sacrifice and mantra, like renunciation and purification. All of them, by one route or another, are designed to get around that roadblock between our knowing and our believing.

P 128 Ram Das, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita