Part 5 Quote 6
“When you lose your fear of death, you gain a love of life.”
Part 5 Quote 5
“Scientists go to the brain to get to the mind. But neuroscience has never been able to adequately define consciousness. It’s like the guy who loses his keys and is looking for them under a streetlight. Someone comes along and asks him where he lost them, and he says, ‘back in the alley.’ The passer-by asks, ‘So why are you looking here?’ and he says, ‘The light’s better here.'”
Part 5 Quote 4
“Enlightened beings say that when we take birth, a veil of unknowing covers our soul, lest the knowledge of our previous incarnations distract us from our work in this life. The veil is part of māya, the illusion of separateness that accompanies incarnation, and comes with having a body and an individual consciousness. Each of us has to go through the lila, the dance, of forgetting and remembering.”
Part 5 Quote 3
“Almost everyone in the West who reports a near-death experience tells of a loving, light-filled return to the Source, the home of the soul. They report an experience of wholeness outside time and space…. I imagine that death is like finally coming home, home to an old friend who has always known me and loved me completely.”
Part 5 Quote 2
“I love nature, and that love is a method, an entrance into the vastness…. I am the trees, I am the ocean, we are together in the One, in Ram.”
Order at Your Favorite Bookseller
—Ram Dass
Perhaps no other teacher has sparked the fires of as many spiritual seekers in the West as Ram Dass. If you’ve ever practiced meditation or yoga, tried psychedelics, or supported anyone in a hospice, prison, or homeless center—then the story of Ram Dass is also part of your story.
From his birth in 1931 to his luminous final years, Ram Dass saw his life as just one of countless incarnations of which we’re all taking part. This memoir puts us in the passenger seat with the one-time Harvard psychologist and lifelong thrill-seeker Richard Alpert, who loved to take friends on wild Harley rides and test nearly every boundary—inner or outer—that he would face.
Here, Ram Dass shares his life’s odyssey in intimate detail: how he struggled with issues of self-identity and sexuality in his youth, pioneered today’s psychedelic therapies, opened the doorways to Eastern spiritual practices, and trekked to India to find his guru Neem Karoli Baba, who quickened in the young skeptic a divine emergence that would in turn touch millions.
Populated by a cast of luminaries and celebrities ranging from Timothy Leary to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kornfield, Aldous Huxley to Charles Mingus—this intimate memoir chronicles Ram Dass’s experience of the cultural and spiritual transformations that resonate with us to this day.
Before, after, and along these waypoints, readers will encounter many other adventures and revelations—each ringing with the potential to awaken the universal, loving divine that links this beloved teacher to all of us.
Part 5 Quote 1
“Love holds the universe together. Love is the emotion of connection and merging. Viewed from the soul, this world is a manifestation of love. Love is the glue, the transfer of energy between form and formless, matter and spirit.”