The Spacesuit
Ram Dass speaks in 1992 about the somebody training we go through in our lives and the freedom that comes with holding our roles more lightly
This is one of the first teachings I stumbled into when I started out in this world in 2012. At the time I was in my early 20’s, fresh out of university, without any real spiritual direction, and deeply self-conscious about the roles I felt I was responsible for taking up as a newly minted “adult in society”.
Over time, Ram Dass helped me understand that these roles we take on, that society places upon us by virtue of simply being born, can be taken a bit more lightly with some practice and perspective. In those early years he taught me that there are other ways to engage in the world without getting so utterly exhausted, overstimulated and caught up in the “shoulds” (he used to say, “don’t should on yourself” and that still makes me smile).
There is a way to be in the world — helping others, engaging in community, playing a “role” — and still hold a wider perspective that we are more than that, too. Of course, I forget this on a daily basis, but I always try to come back when I remember I’m lost.
— Rachael Fisher, Creative Director, Love Serve Remember Foundation // RamDass.org
🔊 Listen to Ram Dass teach in his own voice & read the transcript below
Ram Dass: When, like you, I was born, I donned a space suit for living on this plane. And it was this body. This is my space suit. It had a steering mechanism—my prefrontal lobes and all the brain motor coordinating stuff.
Just like Rusty Schweickart and the others who go to the moon, they wear their uniforms, learn how to grab things and lift things, so I did that and I learned my prehensile capacities. And I got rewarded—you get little stars and kisses and all kinds of things when you learn how to use your spacesuit. You get really good at it.
You get so good at using your spacesuit that you can’t differentiate yourself from your spacesuit anymore. You think you’re your spacesuit.
Everybody comes up and says, what a nice suit. And you’re constantly looking into other people’s eyes to find out if you’re really wearing a nice spacesuit. It’s what I call “somebody training”. When you’re born, you go into “somebody training” because your parents know who they are and they’re going to make you “somebody” too.
My parents were very intent on making me somebody. They wanted me to achieve, be responsible, be healthy, be successful, bring pride to them. And if it didn’t interfere with any of those, I should be happy.
The problem that I experienced, though, was that the suit that I was wearing felt like one of these suits that doesn’t quite fit.
You’re a little uncomfortable and you’re constantly trying to readjust yourself. The suit didn’t fit, but everybody kept saying, beautiful suit, really impressive suit, you must be very happy. But I wasn’t.
If you look into their eyes and they tell you you’re happy and you’re not because the suit feels so weird, what do you conclude? It’s like those experiments in psychology where they have a group in a room and everyone in the group is a plant except for one person. They show two lines in which one is shorter than the other. And everybody in the room says that the shorter one is longer.
And then they ask this other person, this poor sucker, who’s the subject, is that longer or shorter? About 90% of the time, the person gives into the rest of the group, even though it’s obvious that the line is shorter than the other one. Because if you don’t, you’re so deviant. And who wants to be deviant? My God, life’s hard enough coping.
I felt when everybody said what a nice suit I was wearing that I must be sick. I went to an analyst. He was wearing another kind of weird suit. And what he did was he said that for a pittance he would teach me how to wear his suit instead of my suit. So I learned how to wear his suit, and even more people said, “beautiful suit!”
Part of learning how to wear that suit was you didn’t see people anymore. You just saw psychosexual stages of development. You saw anal retentives and early phallics and things like that. And I really wasn’t very happy in that suit either. In that suit I was a therapist, and I really needed to be a therapist because I was so identified with my needs at that point that everybody else had to be a potential patient.
If you wouldn’t be my patient, I didn’t have much use for you because I needed to be a therapist full time. So that suit felt weird as well. Then, through the kindness of a rather wild Irish fellow [Tim Leary], I took off my suits entirely and I stood naked as an elf. Or a little Irish gnome.
I took off my suit and I stood naked and it felt wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. I felt at home. I felt at peace. I felt content. I felt like this is where, I knew in my inner being, I really was. But somehow I’d never been able to get there ever since I had been born into somebody-ness, the somebody-ness had always short-shifted who I was.
As my friend pointed out, “You have to go out of your mind to use your head.”
What I had been trained in was an ego structure, a conceptual structure that defined who I was and who everybody else was. Most people are in these structures and they’re like huge mind nets that come out of your head.
You walk down the street, you’re somebody, you know who you are. You dress like somebody, your face looks like somebody. Everything is somebody in us. This is who I am, this is who I am, this is who I am. This is who you are, this is who you are, this is who you are. Everybody is reinforcing their structure of the universe over and over again. And they meet like two huge things—this is who I am and this is who you are.
We enter into these conspiracies: “I’ll make believe you are who you think you are if you make believe I am who I think I am.”
We just kind of bump against each other like huge shmoos or something. Big mental mind nets that keep walking down the street. You can see them in everybody.
Everybody’s busy being somebody.
So when I got out of my somebody-ness, which was very cramped, it was like a prison to me, I didn’t want to go back to prison. It’s like you go out, you see the stars and you smell the air, and then they say, okay, chemicals are wearing off. Back into prison. And you don’t want to go.
You say, “no, no!” But you go anyway. You go back in your suit and you feel weird again. You feel doubly weird now because you know that that isn’t who you are, but you’re caught in it…
- Ram Dass, 1992
Published by the Love Serve Remember Foundation, the nonprofit caretaker of Ram Dass’s teachings since 2010. Learn more at RamDass.org or join our virtual community and archive at Inneracademy.ramdass.org.
If this teaching resonated with you, it comes from Reimagined: The Teachings of Ram Dass → a 4-week self-paced course on the Ram Dass Inner Academy that traces Ram Dass’s journey of transformation throughout four life stages. Offering content from our archives and a fresh context for how to apply his wisdom to our own lives, we will open up to the possibility of taking off our masks and reconnecting to our loving, compassionate hearts.
Such a powerful perspective. I love Ram Dass
A classic