The Kabbalah and Hasidism were not as popular as they are now. Most of the Middle Eastern religions, the maps about the directness of experience, were part of the esoteric instead of the exoteric religion, and thus they were sort of guarded, in a way. The best maps that were available to us at that time (that seemed to be readily available) were Eastern maps: maps from Buddhism, Hinduism, those traditions. To understand what was happening to us, we started to look for maps. So that, in a way, a person nowadays has much more options about reality than they had at the time that I was coming through graduate school, for example-as is reflected in all the proliferation of new kinds of social institutions for education. Now, how do they know? How do they know? And, of course, the reason they know is because these values, the shift from that narrow view of reality into a relative reality-which made all institutions up for grabs if you look deep enough-all of that has permeated into the mainstream of the culture. And I would say most of those people, at least 70 to 80 percent, have never smoked dope, they’ve never taken psychedelics, they’ve never read Eastern mysticism. And I’m saying roughly the same thing-probably not to my credit, but I’m saying the same thing I was saying 25 years ago. And 25 years later, when I speak in, say, Des Moines, Iowa, there are 1,500 people. And these meetings were like members of the explorers club, and we were just comparing maps of the terrain of the travels. When I was lecturing in those days, I was speaking to audiences between the ages of 15 and 25-those were the explorers in those days. We might spend our entire life without knowing of their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus and there they are in their completeness.” And of course it’s interesting that William James said that when he was a professor at Harvard, and I was thrown out of William James Hall for doing what he said.īut it’s interesting how mainstream those ideas have gotten in the 25 years since that time. You remember his quote: “Our normal waking consciousness is but one type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the slightest veils, lie other types of consciousness. William James, of course, had said that many years before. And that was a major shift that occurred in the sixties: the shift from what you call absolute reality: thinking that what you saw and what your thinking mind thought it understood was only one kind of reality. But he spoke this morning about realities and the shift in reality. And it took a while before he described to me how he would, once a year, go out into a field where the flowers were with his wife, to explore with psychedelics.

I was meeting the head of research for Sandoz, which (from our point of view) was quite a coup.

And we had lunch together outdoor restaurant. I know this is in confidence, but the first time I met Dr.

Ram dass flickery faith