Presenting his unique life as a case study, Ram Dass offers insights into the human mind and altered states of consciousness to a gathering of the American Psychological Association.

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This episode of Here and Now is from the first part of Ram Dass’ address to the Meeting of the American Psychological Association in Montreal, Canada, on September 3rd, 1980.

• Ram Dass presents his case to the American Psychological Association, talking about a set of experiences and shifting perceptions that confronted him with the issue of what reality truly is.
• He explores his time as a professor at Harvard, meeting Tim Leary, and the power of his first psychedelic experience. That experience propelled Ram Dass to years of research with these consciousness-altering chemicals and a deep exploration of the human mind.
• Having become a master of getting high, Ram Dass talks about the horrors of coming down. But these studies with psychedelics helped him to empty his mind, become more of a witness to his experiences, and be less associated with his emotional states.
• Finally, Ram Dass shares what led to him going to India, his experience of giving his guru psychedelics, and how his concept of time started to change. He closes by talking about the different planes of consciousness.

“I found myself becoming less identified with my emotional states and my psychological qualities and characteristics, and perplexedly enough, at the same moment, more involved with them. I seemed to be living more fully in the moment of the feelings, and yet, at the same moment, being more spacious around them.” – Ram Dass

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In this half-hour guided meditation, Ram Dass uses concentration and mindfulness techniques to help us sit on the river bank of the mind and watch the thoughts, sensations, and feelings flow by.

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Take a seat on the river bank of your mind with this guided meditation Ram Dass conducted during a retreat in Vancouver, Canada, in February 1992.

• Ram Dass begins the guided meditation with a Samadhi, or concentration, practice. “Every time the mind wanders to any sensation or thought,” he says, “the minute you notice that it has wandered away from the breath, just very gently, non-judgmentally, draw the awareness back to the next breath.”
• The meditation shifts to a mindfulness practice. “Now just open up into mindfulness,” says Ram Dass, “just being aware of what is. Let the mind be drawn to whatever primary object it is drawn to. If it’s drawn to a feeling in your back or in your legs, notice that. If it’s drawn to a memory or a plan or an emotion, a listening, tasting, whatever sensation or thought, let it flicker to that, let it sit with it, don’t hold onto the thought or sensation, and then watch it be replaced by another one.”
• For the last part of the meditation, Ram Dass tells us to focus on the thought of “I.” He says, “Look and see if you can find out where that is. Where is the thought of I? Who is this I? In the ocean of awareness, where is I?”

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“It’s as if you were sitting on a river bank watching the mind’s stuff go by. Here comes a floating sensation from the knee. Here comes a thought about the whole process. Here comes the listening to a sound. They just come, and they go.” – Ram Dass

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How can we learn to live by changing our relationship to death? Ram Dass addresses the staff at a hospital and shares his vast perspectives on death, not getting caught in the drama of dying, and dealing with burnout.

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Today’s episode is from a lecture Ram Dass gave to the staff of Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, New York, on November 26, 1986.

• Ram Dass begins by exploring different perspectives on death. He talks about how the Western perspective on dying can often frame death as the enemy, then shares how the Eastern perspective contains a lot more lightness about death.
• Ram Dass touches on the hospice movement and then discusses his work with the Living Dying Center. He talks about how death is often the biggest drama in town, but the process of dying can be used to awaken rather than keep people identified with their separateness.
• Finally, Ram Dass addresses the issue of burnout in the medical community. How can one function in the role of being a healer without emotionally being attached to whether or not the patient lives or dies? But we can approach pain and suffering in a way where we don’t get lost in it.

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“I must just encourage you to explore the possibility that you use the adventure of service as a vehicle for opening up the exploration of who you are in relation to what you’re doing. Because I think if you were less a nurse and less a doctor, and more an awareness who was being a nurse and doctor, your payoff would be improved considerably, and death would become an interesting part of nature rather than an error or a failure. And you could still do your work, in fact, perhaps even more impeccably.” – Ram Dass

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