https://www.listennotes.com/e/06287a605bbb44beb8f069149bdaed93

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Truths cannot be repressed. It cannot be legislated out of existence. Psychedelics are a healthy pseudopod of a society, and they have to be honored. And they will be honored. You understand that the government's reaction is predictable and understandable, and I feel pain for their fear of change. But change is in the air, and we can't be hypocritical and make believe that it's ever going to be the same again. Because it isn't.

Welcome to the Ram Dass Here and Now podcast. This is episode 280, and I'm your host, Jackie Debrinska. And you. You are the Ram Dass community, this growing circle of seekers and truth lovers from around the world walking this path together. And today we're sharing a lovely and amazing talk Ram Dass gave at the MAPS conference in the early 1990s. And it came right after Timothy Leary gave his talk. And it was a time when psychedelic research had gone underground and only a very few visionary voices were still carrying the torch publicly. So maps, the Multidisciplinary association for Psychedelic Studies, had been founded just a few years earlier by Rick Doblin, and it was still in its sort of early scrappy phase. It was fighting for credibility, and it was pushing the MDMA research in a climate of fear and resistance. And it was the beginning of what would become decades of slow and patient and methodical effort to legitimize psychedelic medicine, not just through data and trials, which it did, but also through public opinion, academic institutions and policy. And Ram Dass, as always, he steps into this moment with clarity and heart and deep respect for both science and spirit. He honors his original partner, Timothy Leary. He speaks to the balance between research and revelation, and he reminds us that these substances, these molecules, they point us to our own awakening and maybe the awakening of a culture. So I just got back from the 2025 MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference and it was a delight to listen to this talk because it still feels so incredibly relevant. It's many of the same visionaries still speaking, still holding the torch. And with them has come all of these academics and researchers and spiritual leaders. Yes, the science is stronger and more compell. We're seeing results like 71% of veterans in MDMA trials no longer meet the criteria for ptsd. We're hearing about ibogaine trials to combat the opioid epidemic. We're hearing about ketamine research and global conversations between pharma and indigenous elders and policymakers so that we can move forward responsibly and ethically without losing potency. And yet, as Ram Dass says here, the heart of this movement, it can't be captured by science alone. We still have to come with our heart, with our awakening. We still have to live in the space between therapy and spirituality, between social change and inner transformation. We still have to look towards the mystical traditions who outlined how to move through these non ordinary states with wisdom, with groundedness, with heart, and how we anchor them and live differently and how we grow for love through these experiences. That's the work that continues now in community, in rites of passage, in integration, and in these conversations. So as you listen today, let this be more than just a time capsule. Let let it be a living transmission. Because once consciousness awakes, it doesn't go back to sleep. And it's needed now more than ever that awakening. So make sure you stay towards the end of the episode. We have a special gift. It's a beautiful east forest and John Hopkins collaboration Sit around the Fire and it features Ram Dass himself. And if this offer speaks to you, consider supporting us on patreon. Just visit patreon.com ramdass it allows us to continue to give these podcasts to everyone. Also, we always want to be cultivating connection and community. So consider joining the Soul Pod discussion group after this podcast so you can dive deeper. Or, or consider joining the Explorers Club where we investigate the intersection of psychedelic spirituality, creativity, heart and Science. Go to ramdas.org fellowships to find out more and all of these links are in the show notes. So let's sit back, let's listen. Here is Ram Dass here and now. Namaste and blessings.

Oh, it's a delight. And I really want to honor Timothy. Timothy was a person who took me out of a fate worse than death, which was being A successful citizen, and started me on a journey that I think is the richest possible journey I could have had in a lifetime. And I think that he was the first ray of light for me. And I want to honor that. I just want to add my voice by saying that this week in Congress, in a joint session of Congress, the new president of Czechoslovakia said, without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being. And even now, I'm afraid, President Bush and Mr. Sununu are trying to figure out how to contain the damage and potential chaos in which they lose their unstable king of the mountain position. But it is clear now that a historically irreversible process has started. And that's exactly what happened in the 60s. A historically irreversible process started. It didn't really start there, as Tim pointed out, it has. It goes way back in all of human history. But something did happen in the 60s that was prepared for by doors of perception, that was prepared for by the beats. In the 50s, something happened that was of no less moment than what has just happened in Eastern Europe and Tiananmen Square and so on. And we are all now cleaning up after it, not in a negative sense, but figuring out what to do with the fact that it happened. And we can hardly understand the implications of what it means in our lives. And we are sitting here often feeling like we are the downtrodden. And it's quite the reverse. We have figured out how it happened. And now, as people on the platform have said in the earlier panel, now it's up to each individual one of us. The way Gandhi said my life is my message now, the way each of us lives makes a statement that it did work, that it did happen. I can't really any longer be frightened of the dragons of government. I can't really, because I see how ephemeral and how paper tigerish they are. And I feel the fear in the culture and I feel that the what's required of us. It's interesting. I find myself in a funny position today because I'm. I'm caught between Rick's desire for us to put forward a good face, to be responsible researchers, to play a part in the game of Western science. And I'm also on the other side seeing that what has happened is far more profound than that and that what we are doing now is trying to find a way to bring more people along through trying to legitimize our game in society. But the underground process in which psychedelics have continued to be used in the society and have come into mainstream consciousness. That goes on independent of whether we lose or win on the front. We're talking about in research now. I was asked to talk about what are the benefits of what we did in the 60s and what are our mistakes. Tim didn't deal with what he might have done differently, so. But I can play the straight part, which I've done doing with Tim for years. Here are the things that happened as I can see it, from what started in that period. First of all, the culture broke out of the psychotomimetic model of using chemicals that up until then in this society, primarily these chemicals were considered psychosis inducing. And under the control of the psychiatric establishment, these chemicals started to be seen. These herbs and plants started to be seen as sacraments as they are used in other societies. They were used for creative purposes and the therapeutic possibilities started to become apparent. The chemicals in the early 60s among the 15 to 25 year olds became a rite of passage, which was shown in the Woodstock moment. In a culture very sadly lacking in rites of passage, where there is a lot of confusion about shift from childhood to maturity. That period made us clear that it wasn't just the chemical you ingested, but it was the set and setting. And here, of course, the traditions like the American Indian, the shamanic traditions, we knew all that, but we never listened to it. After I started with psychedelics, suddenly books that I had passed on, the bookshelf saying what a bunch of rot suddenly became the most treasured volumes for me. Books of American Indian law, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, things like that, the Upanishads and the Vedas. In other words, it opened our link to the east and to an incredibly rich philosophical, psychological and spiritual heritage of humanity that we had primarily been closed to, except for Max Mueller. Just a very few things. It really opened us to the east. And I've been living off it ever since. And the way, partly the way it did that was because the chemicals in the psychedelics allowed us to override our habits of thinking. And when we looked around in Western psychology for models about that, they were absent. And when we looked in the east, in things like the Visuddhi Magga, there they were very beautifully articulated. And here were a group of people in the east that we had treated really almost as barbarians that had a wisdom about human consciousness that became. And they became our elders. One of them of course, became my guru. So it opened us to meditation and spiritual practices. Of course it became faddish in the 70s, but beyond the fads of gurus and all that. There was a deep process and there is a deep meditative investment in this society at this moment. Whether you call it stress reduction or whatever you call it, it's there and it's growing all the time. And that's part of the result of what happened in the 60s. It opened ways for networking because it opened our horizontal power structures rather than our vertical power structures. And that's part of the information age that Tim's talking about now. In a way, it was a precursor of that in allowing us to see vertical institutions as much more ephemeral. And that was the deeper part of the shift that happened then, which I think is the most fundamental shift, which was the shift in our perception of reality that we. What happened to us was what I think Einstein did to Newton. It went from treating a reality as absolute to seeing that all realities are relative. And the minute you do that, social institutions are up for grabs. That changes the whole ball game right there. And that is one of the things that has happened and that isn't turnable back. And that's part of why there is so much chaos in the moment, in the culture. Because social institutions which kept the structures going are breaking down because people don't value them. In Boston, when I was growing up, on Sunday you went to church, now on Sunday you go to the shopping mall. That's a difference in values. Family structures broke down. And we don't have to say values, we just have to look at change. The question is, who rides with change and who gets frightened and tries to grab at the old history. And this is a moment when changing from absolute reality to relative reality is a tremendous opportunity for growth. And it has a lot of scariness to it. But that's part of what our work is. That shift of reality started to spread into the world through minstrels like Bob Dylan and like the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones and Big Brother and on and on. And it's gotten so far. Now I'll tell you how far it's gotten that if I speak now in the Middle west, which I'll be doing in a few weeks when I'm on tour, if I speak in a relatively medium sized city, I can look at an audience in which 70 to 80% of the audience has never taken psychedelics. They have never read Eastern literature, they've never been to the East. And I can say exactly the same things I said in 1965 or 70, which then were heard by an audience of a few people. Between 15 and 25. And that audience is going, yes, the audience in the Midwest is saying, yeah, we hear you. Now, how do they hear us? What happened? How did those values get inculcated into the culture? I think because you can't see it, you don't think it exists. But then when you get these little clues around the edge, you begin to see the profundity of what the social changes that were wrought at that point in the 60s. The Grateful Dead now is a major religious ritual, and it's on its way up. Our work with the dying, the work started really by Eric Cast and people like that way back, Beautiful Men, that has done incredibly in terms of awakening us, bringing death out of the closet, and a lot of the way in which now so many people want to work with the dying comes out of that kind of psychedelic process that happened in the 60s. Okay, I think I should say something about the mistakes of the early 60s of our research. In one way, I kind of am with Timothy. What mistakes? It was life. We did the best we could. So I don't say these in some sense of. I don't know what sense I say them in. I'll just say them. When we did that research at Harvard, very shortly after the beginning, we realized that this was a heresy to that social institution, that the Harvard is an institution committed to the intellect and to rational analytic process. And when we brought on something that dealt with intuitive, transcendent, unitive experiences in which the intellect became a subsystem rather than the meta system, we were taking on the priest class of the church. And we were doing it within the confines of that church. And what we were doing is going on to a football and to a tennis court with football cleats, is the way I would understand it. And I think that once we got going, because we were ingesting our own product, we lost our connection with the community around us. And I feel that this was neither our fault nor their fault. It was one of the results of the profundity of this experience that we couldn't turn away and couldn't turn back. But it did. We did lose our support system. And we didn't slow down enough to keep it with us because it finally got to the point of who's taken it and who hasn't. And that bridge became unbridgeable after a while. And it was shocking to us that people we loved and worked with as colleagues no longer were our colleagues. I think we got a little confused about evolution and revolution. And I think we played with the revolutionary Aspects of psychedelics, when to me, the far more interesting issue are the evolutionary aspects. And I think that had we been more evolved in our wisdom and not feeling we were inventing the wheel all over again, we would have had an appreciation of what the fears were of the society and how to work with those fears rather than just pitting ourselves against them. I don't think the way we did it was the only way it could have been done. I think we were over enthusiastic about how easy behavior change would be. When I look at many of my friends that were, that I took acid with in the 60s, I see that there's been a lot of work they've done, but there's a lot yet to do. And I remember Tim and I had a chart on the wall of how soon everybody would get enlightened. But the real changes are harder. I think we downplayed the fact that. That the psychedelic experience isn't necessarily for everybody and that people intuitively can be trusted. We did say this in politics of Consciousness. We said people must control their own consciousness. And all we have a right to do is educate people as to what the issues are and where you can go and what to be careful of and what to be aware of. And I think that we were somewhat insensitive to the issues of the people that weren't really ready to handle this. My personal era, in view of the fear people have of their children, for their children, and of their children now, was in giving psychedelics to undergraduates that started a chain. And I did that for many reasons. Sexual was not excluded. But at this point, the genie is out of the bottle. Plenty of us know the difference between crack and psilocybin. Plenty of us will continue to do just what we are doing to work on our consciousness. Laws notwithstanding, truth cannot be repressed. It cannot be legislated out of existence. Psychedelics are a healthy pseudopod of a society and they have to be honored, and they will be honored. You understand that the government's reaction is predictable and understandable. And I feel pain for their fear of change. But change is in the air and we can't be hypocritical and make believe that it's ever going to be the same again, because it isn't. I feel that psychedelics, just as our American Indian friends said, that it was a part of his life. I feel they have changed my life in the most profound way. I honor them and will continue to honor them. And I will stand up as a person who has had psychedelics many times more than 400, which is with the usual published report. And I continue to take psychedelics. If I am psychotic, I am a sample, but maybe I'm not. And maybe that was the training that was part of my preparation to be a social philosopher or a wise person in society. This meeting is a meeting in which in all of our hearts we know truth. How it will manifest outward depends on our commitment to our own truth. Now, as we face the ecological issues of the time times, the political issues of the times change and potential chaos, people that have already dealt with that chaos of mind psychedelically will be there to lend this culture strength and equanimity in the face of uncertainty. Thank you.

Going to close out with a rendition of that Sit around the Fire. We work thanks to John Hopkins. And you'll hear the longer Ram Dass Talk from the 70s at a Presbyterian church when he was very tapped in. Full blown heart open as you'll hear right away. And I want to thank love, serve, remember and all of you for cultivating this space today and continuing to keep this alive through the music, through these ceremonial listening experiences. Thank you so much. Pain, pleasure, loss, gain, fame, shame, Pain, pleasure, loss, gain, fame, shame. Life, death, good, evil. Loss, gain, pleasure, pain, fame, shame, pleasure, pain, loss, gain, fame, shame. Here, there, now then. Pleasure, pain, life, death. Beyond all polarities, I am. Let the judgments and opinions of the mind be judgments and opinions of the mind. And you exist behind that. Ah so. Ah so it's really time for you to see through the absurdity of your own predicament. You aren't who you thought you were. You just aren't that person. And in this very lifetime you can know it. Right now. The real work you have to do is in the privacy of your own heart. All of the external forms are lovely, but the real work is your inner connection. If you're quiet when you meditate.

If.

You truly open your heart, just quiet your mind. Open your heart. Quiet the mind, Open the heart. How do you quiet the mind? You meditate. How do you open the heart? You start to love that which you can love and just keep expanding it. You love a tree, you love a river. You love a leaf. You love a flower, you love a cat, you love a human. But go deeper and deeper into that love till you love that which is the source of the light behind all of you. You don't worship the gate, you go into the inner temple. Everything in you that you don't need, you can let go of. You don't need loneliness, for you couldn't possibly be Alone. You don't need greed because you already have it all. You don't need doubt, because you already know. Confusion is saying, I don't know.

That.

The minute you are quiet, you find out that in truth, you do know. For in you, you know, plane after plane will open to you. I want to know who I really am. As if in each of us.

There.

Once was a fire. And for some of us, there seem as if there are only ashes now. But when we dig in the ashes, we find one ember. And very gently, we fan that ember, blow on it. It's brighter. And from that amber, we rebuild the. The only thing that's important is that.

Emma.

That'S what you and I are here to celebrate. That though we've lived our life totally involved in the world, we know. We know the marine spirit. At first, that still small voice, that tiny ember, is overshadowed by the incredible pressures, desires, attachments, possessions, collection of the world, of the marketplace. The ember gets stronger. Flame starts to flicker a bit. And pretty soon you realize that all we're going to do for eternity is sit around the fire. We're going back into the Frida, the cave of the heart. And the only place beings that will sit around the fire with us are those who recognize the spirit. And the confusion in many of you comes from the recognition of that pull and the realization that that pull doesn't seem to fit in with the life you designed for yourself. Even a good life, even a yogic life, even a communal life, even an economically simple life. Because your life was built out of despair, out of a feeling that though you had touched the spirit, you could never be the spirit. Though you had touched love, you could never be love. But your unworthiness has led you to sell yourself short. Just feel in your heart now your own beauty. Allow for a moment yourself to recognize the light of the universe can pour through you. You just who you are.

Only.

We get educated, we go to therapists, but we really don't ever believe we could change. Change in the most profound sense. That where in the core of ourselves, we felt ugliness, there's suddenly beauty. Where in the core of ourselves we felt unworthiness, there is suddenly purity. Spirit. Who could have believed that you could be that beautiful? Do you believe it? Did you believe that you were a living spirit?

You believe coming?

Did you believe that that little flickery ember you felt now and then could become the flame that would consume every impurity within you and leave you like a new baby? Get closer and closer and closer, Sam.

I am loving awareness. I am loving awareness. I am loving awareness. I am loving awareness. I am loving awareness. I am loving awareness. I'm loving awareness. I am loving awareness. This podcast is brought to you by.

The Loveserve Remember foundation and Ramdas.org we.

Appreciate you listening and we appreciate all the support that you've given us. Please continue that support and donate@ramdas.org we.

Can then continue to share what Ram Dass has been sharing for all all of these years.

Thank you.