Ram Dass Quotes (1931-2019)

“As far as I'm concerned we are all God That's the difference If you really think another guy is God he doesn't lock you up Funny about that.”

“I thought inside “I must really be crazy, now—because craziness is where everybody agrees about something—except you!” And yet I felt saner than I had ever felt, so I knew this was a new kind of craziness or perhaps a new kind of saneness.”

“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.”

“If you see yourself as God and then you come back from this state and somebody says, “Hey, Sam, empty the garbage!” it catches you back into the model of “I'm Sam who empties the garbage.” You can't maintain these new kinds of structures. It takes a while to realize that God can empty garbage.”

“Negative stereotypes about Jewish women permeated the Left and counterculture, making it even harder for radical women to identify as Jews. Naomi Weisstein recalled an incident when, while a doctoral student in Harvard's graduate psychology program, gurus Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert handed out magic mushrooms. Many students became delusional; Weisstein had a paranoid nightmare and hallucinated for a month. "We knew you would," Leary commented. "You're an uptight Jewish female who can't let herself go." Weisstein called them "sleazeballs."”

“Born Richard Alpert, Dass was a trained psychologist who taught at Harvard University in the Sixties, which is how he linked up with psychologist and writer Timothy Leary and became immersed in the world of psychedelics. Later in the decade, he would venture to India and study under the Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, who would give Alpert his new name, Ram Dass, meaning “Servant of God.” When Dass returned to the United States, he became a guru in his own right, lecturing around the country and, most notably, releasing a wildly popular book, Be Here Now, in 1971, which would sell more than two million copies. As The New York Times reports, Richard Alpert was... a child of great privilege whose father worked as a lawyer and was president of the New Haven Railroad... Alpert majored in psychology at Tufts University, studied for his master’s in the subject at Wesleyan University and, despite failing his oral exams there, became a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University. He taught at Stanford for a short while before being appointed a professor of psychology and education at Harvard, which is where he met Leary.”

“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.”