"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."
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Academics from the United StatesMemoirists from the United StatesEducators from the United StatesReligious leaders from the United StatesPsychologists from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Is Ram Dass Still Here Now?, Rameshwar Das, Tricycle (12 Jan 2021)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ram_Dass
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Ram Dass
Ram Dass (6 April 1931 – 22 December 2019), born Richard Alpert, was an American spiritual teacher and author.
29 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Ram Dass →
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