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Ram Dass

Spiritual teacher and author

United States · 1931–2019

American teacher and writer, born Richard Alpert, who was dismissed from Harvard's psychology faculty in 1963 over the psilocybin research he ran with Timothy Leary, travelled to India, and returned as the author of Be Here Now. He spent decades sitting with the dying and helped found the Living Dying Project. In February 1997 a cerebral haemorrhage left him partly paralysed and aphasic; he lived and taught from a wheelchair for twenty-two more years, and died in Maui in December 2019.

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Question What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it? Failure & regret read 30 other answers →

everyone saw me as a victim of a terrible illness. But what happened to my body was far less frightening than what happened to my soul. The stroke wiped out my faith. It took me so far from my guru that I felt my oxygen cord had been cut. ... I couldn't put the two together. Then I thought, maybe the stroke is a form of grace, and I hunted for that: how could the stroke be seen as grace? ... The stroke was giving me lessons, advanced lessons. ... It brought me into my soul, and that's grace.

Recorded Sara Davidson, Keynote talk at a conference on body and soul, Hyatt Regency, San Francisco, reported in the New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, 21 May 2000 source ↗

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