Ram Dass

"When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are."

"I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people… To me, that’s what the emerging game is all about."

"Id get to a point with my colleagues when I couldnt explain any further, because it came down to "To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible."."

"Here I was, sitting with the boys of the first team in cognitive psychology, personality psychology, developmental psychology [at Stanford and Harvard], and in the midst of this I felt here were men and women who, themselves were not highly evolved beings. Their own lives were not fulfilled."

"I recall starting to "come down" and this huge red wave rolled in across the room. … It was all my identities, all rolling in over me. I remember holding up my hand and saying, "NO, NO, I dont want to go back." It was like this heavy burden I was going to take on myself. And I realized I didnt have the key — I didnt know the magic words, like "Abracadabra" or "Hocus Pocus" or whatever it was going to be that would stop that wave."

"We had gotten over the feeling that one experience was going to make you enlightened forever. We saw that it wasnt going to be that simple. And for five years I dealt with the matter of "coming down." The coming down matter is what led me to the next chapter of this drama. Because after six years, I realized that no matter how ingenious my experimental designs were, and how high I got, I came down. At one point I took five people and we locked ourselves in a building for three weeks and we took 400 micrograms of LSD every four hours. That is 2400 micrograms of LSD a day, which sounds fancy, but after your fist dose, you build a tolerance; theres a refractory period. We finally were just drinking out of the bottle, because it didnt seem to matter anymore. Wed just stay at a plateau. We were very high. What happened in those three weeks in that house, no one would ever believe, including us. And at the end of the three weeks, we walked out of the house and within a few days, we came down! And it was a terribly frustrating experience, as if you came into the kingdom of heaven and you saw how it all was and you felt these new states of awareness, and then you got cast out again."

"We were exploring this inner realm of consciousness that we had been theorizing about all these years and suddenly we were traveling in and through and around it."

"He [Bhagwan Dass] wasnt the least bit interested in all of the extraordinary dramas that I had collected … He was the first person I couldnt seduce into being interested in all this. He just didnt care. And yet, I never felt so profound an intimacy with another being. It was as if he were inside of my heart. And what started to blow my mind was that everywhere we went, he was at home."

"We had a Negro psychiatrist, Madison Presnell, working with us, and I had been trained to be a very liberal person about Negroes, which meant that you didnt have feelings. It was a phony kind of liberal thing. I went out of my way to be liberal. You know, that very self-conscious kind of equality. And Madison and I turned on together and I looked at Madison, and there we were, the same human beings. It was just that he was wearing that skin and I was wearing this skin. And it was no more or less than that. It was that shirt and this shirt and it had no more relevance than that. And I looked at that, and suddenly there we were, whereas before I had been so busy with my super-liberal reaction to color of skin, that I couldnt relax enough to share this unitive place."

"I have a relative who is in a mental hospital. He thinks he is Christ. Well, thats groovy. I am Christ also. But he doesnt think I am Christ. He thinks he is Christ. Because it happened to him and he took his ego with him. So he says: Im special. And when I say to him: Sure man youre Christ. And Im Christ too. He says: you dont understand. And when hes out he steals cars and things like that because he needs them because hes Christ and thats all right. So they lock him up. He says: I dont know ... me ... Im a responsible member of society. I go to church. Me they put in a mental hospital. Youre free. Youve got a beard. You wear a dress ... you ... Sure. Because as far as Im concerned we are all God. Thats the difference. If you really think another guy is God he doesnt lock you up…Funny about that."

"I never knew Richard Alpert. I met him as Ram Dass at the first talk he gave when he returned from India in 1968. I was in my junior year at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where Richard Alpert had earned his master’s degree around 14 years prior. I expected to hear about the annals of LSD from one of the members of the intrepid advance team of Timothy Leary and Alpert. Instead of the former Harvard professor, in walks a guy with a long beard in a white dress, barefoot in the frozen mud of New England in March. Forty or fifty people were sprawled around a lounge at the College of Letters. At 7:00 p.m., Ram Dass started speaking about his transformation in India. He had just spent six months learning yoga and meditation in the Himalaya foothills, keeping celibate, mostly in silence. Through those practices, he had built up a lot of spiritual energy. Ram Dass’s words and thoughts flowed like a spring freshet after snow melts and the ice breaks. The concepts he wove were exhilarating, like shooting rapids in a canoe."

"I had gone through game, after game, after game, first being a professor at Harvard, then being a psychedelic spokesman, and still people were constantly looking into my eyes, like "Do you know?" Just that subtle little look, and I was constantly looking into their eyes "Do you know?"