In this recording from 1978, Ram Dass reads stories about his guru, Maharaj-ji, and his many miracles. We invite you to set aside your analytical mind and simply enjoy these miracles of love.

This episode of Here and Now is from a recording of Ram Dass at the Lama Foundation in June of 1978. Here, he reads stories from the manuscript of Miracle of Love, which would be published about a year later.

• Ram Dass begins by reading one of his own stories about Maharaj-ji, which involves a dead bird coming back to life. This was one of many experiences that overwhelmed Ram Dass’ analytical mind.
• Next, Ram Dass reads a series of stories from some of Maharaj-ji’s oldest devotees. He dealt with each person in a unique fashion and would often touch places of the deepest love within people.
• Ram Dass slips in a story about another great Indian saint, Ramana Maharshi. He then turns back to Maharaj-ji stories, focusing on miracles around food. Maharaj-ji said, “We have an inner thirst for food. We don’t know of it. Even if you don’t feel you could eat, your soul has a thirst for food.”

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“You see why it’s peculiar to live in a culture like India, where all of these events are sort of like everyday occurrences. In the villages we live in, in the mountains, every family has dozens of these stories, and they just sit by the fire of the evening telling them. To come back to the West, where these stories are thought to be ‘miracles,’ is very confusing sometimes, difficult to integrate.” – Ram Dass

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Speaking across the decades from the 1960s to the 2010s, Ram Dass shares his thoughts on the feeling of love and the path of the heart.

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This episode of Here and Now is a compilation of Ram Dass speaking about love and the path of the heart across the decades:

• We begin in 1969, with Ram Dass talking about Maher Baba, whom he calls the personification of pure love. He describes a particularly powerful LSD trip where he gained insight into the true nature of love. He says, “I now conceive of the fact that falling in love means like falling into a bathtub of love.”
• We move on to 1979, with Ram Dass addressing the Christian Community of San Francisco. He describes the different stages of falling in love and talks about the devotional nature of the path of the heart. “And that’s one of your predicaments,” he says, “that when you really fall in love, it just opens and opens and opens, and you just don’t know where to hold on anymore.”
• The next stop is 1986, with Ram Dass touching on conditional love and the deprivation model we’ve been working with all our lives. He digs deeper into the different stages of love and talks about the need to give up the deprivation model. He says, “You change from the deprivation model to the model where there’s an abundance of [love].”
• We fast forward to the 1990s, with Ram Dass reading from the I Ching about the path of love and the path of the heart. He talks about how we are hungry ghosts who get addicted to the method of love, but all methods are traps. “And yet,” he says, “the bizarre thing about methods is they don’t work unless you get trapped.”
• Finally, we end in 2017, with Ram Dass telling a delicious story about loving everything, including a rug with spots on it. He talks about how judgment is in the mind, but love is in the heart. “I don’t judge,” he says. “But if I do judge, I love it.”

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“Now, if you look at in the sense that, in the usual way of, ‘I fell in love with this person, there’s another way of seeing that, which is this person is a stimulus, is something in the world that was just right in a key sense to release us into the place in ourselves where we are love. And we say, as a result, ‘I am in love with you.’ Another way of saying it is, ‘You turn me on to the place in myself where I am love, where I can’t get to without you.’ Now we’re talking about you being my connection to that place in myself where I am love, where I can’t get without you. And then I want to hold on to my connection, just as any good junkie would like to do.” – Ram Dass

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Speaking at a MAPS conference in the early 1990s, Ram Dass looks back at some of the benefits and mistakes of the work he and Timothy Leary did with psychedelics in the 1960s.

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This episode of Here and Now comes from a talk Ram Dass gave at a MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) conference in the early 1990s. It immediately followed a talk given by Timothy Leary.

• Ram Dass reflects on the funny position he’s in between his desire for this gathering of MAPS to put on a good face and be responsible researchers, and his feeling that what has happened is far more profound than that. “What we are doing now,” he says, “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.”
• Ram Dass speaks to some of the benefits that came out of the pioneering research into psychedelics he conducted with Timothy Leary at Harvard University in the 1960s. This includes therapeutic possibilities, opening people up to wisdom from the East, and shifting our perception of reality.
• Ram Dass finishes by talking about some of the mistakes they made along the way, including how they got too involved with the revolutionary aspects of psychedelics rather than the evolutionary elements. But ultimately, the genie is already out of the bottle when it comes to psychedelics. “Truth cannot be repressed,” says Ram Dass. “It cannot be legislated out of existence. Psychedelics are a healthy pseudopod of society, and they have to be honored. And they will be honored.”
• This episode closes with a live performance of "Sit Around The Fire" performed by East Forest at the 2023 LSRF Ram Dass Legacy Retreat. This soundscape interweaves wisdom from Ram Dass around identity, inner work and interconnection. "Sit Around The Fire" was composed by East Forest and Jon Hopkins for the album Music For Psychedelic Therapy.

The Ram Dass community gathers regularly to engage in meaningful discussions about the podcast. We invite you to join us and share your curiosities, insights, and wisdom. Sign up for the General Fellowship to receive event invitations directly in your inbox.

“I think we got a little confused about evolution and revolution. I think we played with the revolutionary aspects of psychedelics, when to me, the far more interesting issue is the evolutionary aspects. 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’ve been done.” – Ram Dass

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