Ram Dass

Every time I went to a family gathering, I was the boy who made it. I was a Professor at Harvard and everybody stood around in awe and listened to my every word, and all I felt was that horror that I knew inside that I didn't know. Of course, it was all such beautiful, gentle horror, because there was so much reward involved.

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?"

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.

Whenever anybody that I trusted brought along some new chemical, I would open my mouth and off I'd go.

His [Bhagwan Dass'] teaching seemed to be no teaching because he always taught from within … that is, his lessons aroused in me just affirmation … as if I knew it all already.

He [Bhagwan Dass] wasn't the least bit interested in all of the extraordinary dramas that I had collected … He was the first person I couldn't seduce into being interested in all this. He just didn't 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.

I learned more in the six or seven hours of this experience than I had learned in all my years as a psychologist.

It would be best not to impose a model too soon, because the model that exists in the west for these states is pathological, and the model that exists in the primitive cultures is mystical and religious.

It was as if the whole western mind-training of individual differences had been made background instead of figure, so that you'd look at another human being and say, "Here we are." You'd see differences more as clothing, rather than as core stuff.

I have a relative who is in a mental hospital. He thinks he is Christ. Well, that's groovy. I am Christ also. But he doesn't think I am Christ. He thinks he is Christ. Because it happened to him and he took his ego with him. So he says: I'm special. And when I say to him: Sure man you're Christ. And I'm Christ too. He says: you don't understand. And when he's out he steals cars and things like that because he needs them because he's Christ and that's all right. So they lock him up. He says: I don't know ... me ... I'm a responsible member of society. I go to church. Me they put in a mental hospital. You're free. You've got a beard. You wear a dress ... you ...

Sure. Because '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.

During these travels he's starting to train me in a most interesting way. We'd be sitting somewhere and I'd say,

"Did I ever tell you about the time that Tim and I ..."

And he'd say, "Don't think about the past. Just be here now."

Silence.

And I'd say, "How long do you think we're going to be on this trip?"

And he'd say, "Don't think about the future. Just be here now."

I'd say, "You know, I really feel crumby, my hips are hurting ..."

"Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean."

We had gotten over the feeling that one experience was going to make you enlightened forever. We saw that it wasn't 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; there's a refractory period. We finally were just drinking out of the bottle, because it didn't seem to matter anymore. We'd 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.