Ram Dass Quotes

I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago.

Psychedelics are not flashlights into the chaos of the Freudian unconscious, they are tools for mathematically unpacking your mind into a higher dimensional space. In the Newtonian and print created space that we are walking around in you, are like a self extracting archive, that hasn't self extracted itself yet.

We need a new concept of reality and a new set of values for things to change in a positive direction. LSD could help to generate such a new concept.

If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't.

If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it's an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.

What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life.

I do think that taking these sort of natural mind-opening and altering drugs does have an effect. Doors and windows that you didn't even know were in the house are open and you're seeing views you've never noticed before. Even though, when you come down, the world sort of goes back to the way it was, an inkling of that transformed vision and experience of the world remains. I think it's a little bit medicinal, and over time it sort of builds up a new experience of the world. That's when I think smoking pot and doing drugs is really good for you, spiritually speaking.

So the single most vital step on your journey towards enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind.

The Art of Being: A state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club.

That's why I always recommend a psychedelic experience because it makes you realize that all you've learned is in fact just learned and not necessarily the truth.

It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that's frightening.

We are awakened to the profound realization that the true path to liberation is to let go of everything.

The power of psychedelics... is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime.

When one speaks of awakening, it means de-hypnotizatio n; coming to your senses. But of course to do that, you have to go out of your mind.

A mind that is disciplined, controlled, is free within its own pattern; but that is not freedom. The end of discipline is conformity; its path leads to the known, and the known is never the free.

The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind.

Those who have advanced rise to the mind which is in the head, - they have the play of their mental movements in the head itself. But all these are inside the body; man is, as it were, shut up in a box, his entire consciousness is confined within the organism. This imprisonment has to be undone.

Let go of your mind and then be mindful. Close your ears and listen!

What is revealed through the psychedelic experience, I think, is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. And I use 'higher dimensional' in the mathematical sense.

There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.

Alcohol make you drunk, man. It don't make you meditate, it just make you drunk. Herb is more a consciousness.

The Gaian mind is what were calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set.

What is the psychedelic experience? What promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children? And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel coming from the people in this room this evening? And I submit to you that it is nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been silent for at least a thousand years, the still small voice of the Logos of the planet.

LSD lets you in on something. When you're tripping, the idea of race disappears; the idea of sex disappears; you don't even know what species you are sometimes. And I don't know of anybody who hasn't come back from that being more humane, more thoughtful, more understanding.