"In response to the stroke, I chose not to identify with my ego. I chose to change my identification to my soul. It was clear to me that the soul didn't have a stroke, just like the soul does not die. And the ego dies. I found out that the soul merely witnesses the drama, not lives it."Ram Dass was born in 1933 as Richard Alpert, son of a wealthy lawyer who was the president of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad. While at Harvard, Ram Dass' explorations of human consciousness led him to conduct intensive research with LSD and other psychedelic elements, in collaboration with Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, and others.In 1967, he traveled to India where he met his spiritual teacher, Neem Karoli Baba, and received the name Ram Dass, or "servant of God." Ram Dass's first book, "Be Here Now," has become a classic spiritual guide.
"I do believe we live mostly, except for certain special states of consciousness, we live mostly in the web of words. And learning which words control us and how to take control over the words. The whole area of neuro-semantics and neuro-linguistics, these seem to me the most vital things to study. Because we are communicating all of the time, even if we are not talking to someone else we are communicating to ourselves, in words most of the time. And we must learn which words are hypnotizing us and which words de-hypnotize us."Robert Anton Wilson is the coauthor, with Robert Shea, of the underground classics The Illuminatus! Trilogy and Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, and several nonfiction works of futurist psychology and guerilla ontology, such as Prometheus Rising and The New Inquisition.
"Leary said that in order to give this experience to people you have to have had it first. So we tried it out. From that point I realized that my mind was completely conditioned; it was completely automatic. And that I could change that, I could choose otherwise. I could choose how to direct my mind. I could choose what to look at. I could choose what to think."Ralph Metzner, Ph.D., has been exploring states of consciousness and transformational practices ever since he helped found the Harvard Psilocybin Project in 1960. He is a psychotherapist and professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where he teaches courses on ecopsychology and ecological worldviews.
"Dark energy is driving the universe. Yes, there are planets, stars, galaxies, but there is also the energy of nothing. The energy of the continuum. Nicola Tesla talked about vacuum energy, zero-point energy, the energy of nothing. People laughed at Tesla; now we think the universe is driven by dark energy."Dr. Michio Kaku is an internationally recognized authority in theoretical physics and the environment. He is one of the developers of the superstring theory and the ten-dimensional universe. His goal is to help complete Einstein's dream of a theory of everything, a single equation, perhaps no more than one inch long, that will unify all the fundamental forces in the universe.
“The term, the third eye, comes from the Tibetan, but it has its counterparts. Plato called it the eye of the soul, Sufis call it the eye of the heart. But never mind the terminology, all of them target an organ of perception capable of seeing things which our ocular eyes cannot take in.”Huston Smith is an internationally recognized philosopher and scholar of religion. His book The World's Religions has sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide. In 1996, Bill Moyers devoted a 5-part PBS special to Smith's life and work, The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith.
"Separation is an illusion. Our consciousness transcends space and time. Our awareness is able to experience what is in the region where we are, what is in the region beyond where we are physically, and indeed into the future and the past. It¹s the idea that the earliest Hindus had: All is Brahman.”Russell Targ is a physicist and author who was a pioneer in the development of the laser, and cofounder of the Stanford Research Institute's investigation into psychic abilities in the 1970s and 1980s.
"The kinds of things that happen in shamanic trance, rites of passage or healing rituals of various native cultures; the kinds of experiences that the initiates experienced in the mysteries of death and rebirth, that the yogi's are experiencing, or through Taoist meditation... I call these states holotropic states, moving toward wholeness. Your true identity is with the divine principle itself, with the totality of the creative absolute consciousness.”Stanislav Grof, M.D., born and educated in Prague, is one of the founders and chief theoreticians of transpersonal psychology and a psychiatrist with nearly 40 years of experience researching non-ordinary states of consciousness. His work has attracted worldwide attention and taken psychology into realms so radically new and far-reaching they challenge our understanding of the laws of nature and physics.
"I began, about twelve years ago, to work with people who had these so-called abduction experiences, encounters with strange beings, and I was at first incredulous, and then astounded, and then excited about what I was finding. I figured if I went out there and wrote about that, talked about that, everybody who could listen would find it equally exciting and find that this was really important that we were in relationship with beings from another dimension, or whatever it was, but that was not the response I received.”An esteemed professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, John Mack, MD, never intended to become an expert in the controversial study of alien abductees. But after investigating over 60 cases of alien abduction through hundreds of hours of interviews and treatment, Dr. Mack presents the mesmerizing tales of alien encounters revealed by his patients — none of whom are mentally ill — and the profound, surprising and at times deeply spiritual impact these experiences have had on their lives.
"And a lot of what you are here doing in many ways relates to what I call partnership spirituality – the search for a spirituality that is both immanent and transcendent, a spirituality that is not just off in some other worldly realm but that can inform our lives here on earth with love and with purpose and with meaning. And yes, a spirituality that we don¹t have to seek by going through this priestly hierarchy but that we can access directly through what we call gnosis, through our own ability to access what is really part of our human capacity to access what we call the spiritual."Riane Eisler is best known for her international bestseller The Chalice and The Blade and for her theories about ancient partnership cultures. A cultural historian and evolutionary theorist over the last 20 years, Eisler has done pioneering work in human rights, expanding the vision of international organizations to include the rights of women and children.
A panel discussion featuring six of the featured presenters – John Mack, Stanislav Grof, Michio Kaku, Riane Eisler, Gregg Braden, Russell Targ – was recorded at the Prophets Conference at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City in 2001.There was an illustrious group of speakers who discussed the different techniques they have discovered over their lifetimes that have had a profound effect on their perspective and world view. In Part 1, we hear from the first five speakers.
A panel discussion featuring six of the featured presenters – John Mack, Stanislav Grof, Michio Kaku, Riane Eisler, Gregg Braden, Russell Targ – was recorded at the Prophets Conference at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City in 2001.There was an illustrious group of speakers who discussed the different techniques they have discovered over their lifetimes that have had a profound effect on their perspective and world view. In Part 2, we hear from Russell Targ and then the panelists discuss whether consciousness arises from the brain or has a different source.