psychologist, university teacher, writer, guru, philosopher, spiritual teacher
🔗 Read on Wikipedia1931 – 2019
When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be. It's a journey towards simplicity, towards quietness, towards a kind of joy that is not in time. It's a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body and our psyche, on to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification.
It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.
Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It's not 'I love you' for this or that reason, not 'I love you if you love me.' It's love for no reason, love without an object.
We come into relationships often very much identified with our needs. I need this, I need security, I need refuge, I need friendship. And all of relationships are symbiotic in that sense. We come together because we fulfill each others' needs at some level or other.
My guru said that when he suffers, it brings him closer to God. I have found this, too.
You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing. You don't have to do anything to earn it. Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical perfection, or social and economic success - none of that matters. No one can take this love away from you, and it will always be here.
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 is all about.
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 psychedelic stage; and the third, the yogi stage.
Here I was, sitting with the boys of the first team in cognitive psychology, personality psychology, developmental psychology [at Stanford and Harvard], and in the midst of this I felt here were men and women who, themselves were not highly evolved beings. Their own lives were not fulfilled.
Every time I went to a family gathering, I was the boy who made it. I was a Professor at Harvard and everybody stood around in awe and listened to my every word, and all I felt was that horror that I knew inside that I didn't know. Of course, it was all such beautiful, gentle horror, because there was so much reward involved.
I learned more in the six or seven hours of this experience than I had learned in all my years as a psychologist.
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 had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible.".
We were exploring this inner realm of consciousness that we had been theorizing about all these years and suddenly we were traveling in and through and around it.
It would be best not to impose a model too soon, because the model that exists in the west for these states is pathological, and the model that exists in the primitive cultures is mystical and religious.
It was as if the whole western mind-training of individual differences had been made background instead of figure, so that you'd look at another human being and say, "Here we are." You'd see differences more as clothing, rather than as core stuff.
Whenever anybody that I trusted brought along some new chemical, I would open my mouth and off I'd go.
I recall starting to "come down" and this huge red wave rolled in across the room. … It was all my identities, all rolling in over me. I remember holding up my hand and saying, "NO, NO, I don't want to go back." It was like this heavy burden I was going to take on myself. And I realized I didn't have the key — I didn't know the magic words, like "Abracadabra" or "Hocus Pocus" or whatever it was going to be that would stop that wave.
I thought inside "I must really be crazy, now — because craziness is where everybody agrees about something — except you!" And yet I felt saner than I had ever felt, so I knew this was a new kind of craziness or perhaps a new kind of saneness.
If you see yourself as God and then you come back from this state and somebody says, "Hey, Sam, empty the garbage!" it catches you back into the model of "I'm Sam who empties the garbage." You can't maintain these new kinds of structures. It takes a while to realize that God can empty garbage.
I had plenty of LSD, but why take it. I knew what it was going to do, what it was going to tell me. It was going to show me that garden again and then I was going to be cast out and that was it.
I had gone through game, after game, after game, first being a professor at Harvard, then being a psychedelic spokesman, and still people were constantly looking into my eyes, like "Do you know?" Just that subtle little look, and I was constantly looking into their eyes "Do you know?"
He [Bhagwan Dass] wasn't the least bit interested in all of the extraordinary dramas that I had collected … He was the first person I couldn't seduce into being interested in all this. He just didn't care. And yet, I never felt so profound an intimacy with another being. It was as if he were inside of my heart. And what started to blow my mind was that everywhere we went, he was at home.
His [Bhagwan Dass'] teaching seemed to be no teaching because he always taught from within … that is, his lessons aroused in me just affirmation … as if I knew it all already.
The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.
When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be. It's a journey towards simplicity, towards quietness, towards a kind of joy that is not in time. It's a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body and our psyche, on to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification.