Words of Wisdom: Quotations from One of the World's Foremost Spiritual Leaders

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The universe is an example of love. Like a tree. Like the ocean. Like my body. Like my wheelchair. I see the love.” However, their family life was always slightly marred by his fathers multiple affairs. Richard’s father wanted him to become a doctor. He had already begun to feel a sense of ‘otherness’ or a feeling of being a bit of an outsider. This resulted in him being drawn to psychology. Working with the dying is like being a midwife for this great rite of passage of death. Just as a midwife helps a being take their first breath, you help a being take their last breath.”

Being wise is when you get out of the time-space locus that says, I am the one who knows. When you merge with everything around you, you become wisdom. When you become wise, you don’t know you know. You give that up. When you are wise, whatever response comes out of you is the optimum response. And at the same time, nothing is happening inside you at all.And then secondly, empathy: being aware of others, tuning in to other people, having rapport, positive relationships and interactions. Leaving other people feeling better after an interaction, no matter what it might be. And putting it all together for a nourishing relationship. That’s really what I mean by emotional intelligence, and it has different levels, you know. It’s come into schools under what’s called “Social Emotional Learning,” as we were talking about. Words of Wisdom is a distillation of hundreds of lectures and many hours of audio and video recordings from the last five decades—his core essential teachings.

Even before Alpert realized that psychedelics weren't the final answer to enlightenment, he was more interested in cultivating a shared heart space with his patients and friends than he was in the clinical, scientific side of psychedelia. Before the stroke, I was on a very spiritual plane. I ignored my body, took it for granted. When I look at my life, I see that I wanted to be free of the physical plane, the psychological plane, and when I got free of those, I didn’t want to go anywhere near them. But the stroke reminded me that I had a body and a brain, that I had to honor them.” For close to ten years now, I’ve been in a near-constant state of immersion in Ram Dass’s deep archive of teachings. I’ve been collecting the shiniest gems within hundreds of lectures and many hours of audio and video recordings from the last five decades—his core essential teachings—and putting them online as Words of Wisdom.

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In the 1980s when the HIV epidemic was rife he sought to comfort those dying and to spend time with them, hugging people in hospital.