"Before March 6th, which was the day I took Psylocybin, one of the psychedelics, I felt something was wrong in my world, but I couldn't label it in any way so as to get hold of it. I felt that the theories I was teaching in psychology didn't make it, that the psychologists didn't really have a grasp of the human condition, and that the theories I was teaching, which were theories of achievement and anxiety and defense mechanisms and so on, weren't getting to the crux of the matter. My colleagues and I were 9 to 5 psychologists: we came to work every day and we did our psychology, just like you would do insurance or auto mechanics, and then at 5 we went home and were just as neurotic as we were before we went to work. Somehow, it seemed to me, if all of this theory were right, it should play more intimately into my own life. I understood the requirement of being "objective" for a scientist, but this is a most naive concept in social sciences as we are finding out. ... Something was wrong. And the something wrong was that I just didn't know, though I kept feeling all along the way that somebody else must know even though I didn't. The nature of life was a mystery to me. All the stuff I was teaching was just like little molecular bits of stuff but they didn't add up to a feeling anything like wisdom. I was just getting more and more knowledgeable."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
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
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ram_Dass
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
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 →
Related Quotes
"When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, …"
"Only when I know who I am will I know what is possible."
"There are three stages in this journey that I have been on. The first. the social science stage; the second, the psyc…"
"Here I was, sitting with the boys of the first team in cognitive psychology, personality psychology, developmental ps…"
"Every time I went to a family gathering, I was the boy who made it. I was a Professor at Harvard and everybody stood …"
"I learned more in the six or seven hours of this experience than I had learned in all my years as a psychologist."
"I realized that although everything by which I knew myself, even my body and this life itself, was gone, still I was …"
"I thought at that moment, "Wow, I've got it made. I'm just a new beautiful being — I'm just an inner self — all I'll …"
"I'd get to a point with my colleagues when I couldn't explain any further, because it came down to "To him who has ha…"
"I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people… To me, that’s what the emerging game i…"