“It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed...
“We’re all just walking each other home.” — Ram Dass
In the late twentieth century, as modernity fumbled forward, toward its own edges, a curious alignment began to form between ancient teachings and emerging machines. On one side stood Ram Dass – the turned-mystic emissary of a collapsing Western rationalism, carrying the scent of incense, silence, and Sanskrit syllables. On the other stood the cypherpunks – architects of anonymity, pushing code through underground listservs, seeking freedom not through surrender but through entropy-resistant design.
They did not speak the same language. Yet somehow, they touched the same nerve.
The story of Ram Dass, the cypherpunks, and, inevitably, Bitcoin is not one of direct influence. It is a story of convergence; of intuitions meeting across domains. Each recognised, in their own idiom, that truth is not delegated, that sovereignty is not granted, and that once reality is perceived clearly, it demands transformation – of both self and system.
Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert – Harvard psychologist, psychedelic pioneer, and reluctant saint of the postmodern soul – held a mirror to the illusions of identity, progress, and control. He never wrote a line of cryptographic code and never lectured on Austrian economics. Yet the cultural terrain he helped seed, particularly the psychedelic, post-industrial counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, became the moral and metaphysical groundwork from which new architectures of freedom would later emerge.
His was a gospel of unbecoming; of shedding the roles, titles, and scripts that promised fulfilment but delivered only momentum. After psychedelics cracked the shell of his psychological inheritance, he turned eastward – not for answers, but for practices. When he finally returned, it was not with a belief system, but with a posture; attention as sacrament, surrender as discipline, presence as an act of morality.
Non-Dual Sovereignty: The Journey from Identity to Integrity
In 1961, Richard Alpert was a rising star at Harvard – tenured, well-funded, and well-dressed. He held degrees from Tufts, Wesleyan, and Stanford, and enjoyed the kind of pedigree that opened doors in every direction. A psychologist by title, his true vocation was proximity to power; intellectual, institutional, interpersonal.
He had what many wanted. But he didn’t have peace.
That fracture became undeniable when Alpert began working with Timothy Leary on psychedelic research. What started as a clinical curiosity soon spiralled into something larger; the collapse of professional boundaries, the emergence of altered states, and the disintegration of the self-image he had spent a lifetime perfecting. The Harvard establishment eventually expelled them, but by then, something irreversible had occurred: Alpert had glimpsed beyond the story he was living.
He left for India in 1967 with a busted compass and a backpack of LSD. There he met Neem Karoli Baba, a silent, blanket-wrapped sage who neither cared to ask about Harvard nor flinched at acid. Instead, he offered love – vast, unconditional, and precise. Alpert didn’t know how to process it. He cried. He surrendered. He stayed. And he emerged months later as Ram Dass: Servant of God. This was not a name change. It was a cosmological reorientation.
Ram Dass returned to America with a beard, mala beads, and a message. He wasn’t selling enlightenment. He was extending an invitation; to be real, to be present, to stop performing the self as a strategy for safety. Be Here Now (published in 1971) wasn’t a book in the conventional sense. It was a transmission – part diary, part scripture, part visual koan – arriving just as a generation was reeling from the failures of politics, war, and consumer liberation.
Ram Dass didn’t offer escape. He offered practice; a path from fragmentation to wholeness, not by rearranging the world, but by meeting it without illusion. And this is where sovereignty re-enters. Not as control, but as alignment. Although he never used that word, his teaching rested on a simple truth; autonomy without awareness is merely ego on a longer leash. For Ram Dass, freedom was not the power to do anything, but the capacity to witness everything. It was the shift from identification to participation – the move from self as story to self as field. Meaning, you are not your name, your role, your fear, or your ambition. You are the awareness in which all of these arise. When you stop clutching at the illusion of control, you begin to act from a deeper centre. One that is not strategic, but sound.
Rudolf Steiner called this moral imagination – the ability to act from the self that perceives directly, not abstractly. Abraham Maslow called it self-actualisation; the flowering that follows when fear and deficiency dissolve. Carl Jung named it individuation – the reconciliation of shadow and symbol, or the integration of the unconscious without being consumed by it. And Robert Pirsig, in his own metaphysical idiom, called it the pursuit of Quality; the alignment between perception and action, form and value. None of these thinkers proposed a flattening into formless bliss. Quite the opposite… They insisted on resolving form, via discernment and structure. Because freedom is not the absence of constraint; it is the presence of the right ones – those that reveal rather than distort what is real.
Bitcoin, in its way, is one such structure. It does not care who you think you are. It records what you do. It does not flatter, negotiate, or praise. It is, in the moral sense, a mirror; revealing, through time and cost, whether your action is sincere. Not because it watches, but because it is indifferent. Like karma, like dharma, like the Tao. This is no coincidence. The architecture of Bitcoin reflects a principle found throughout Ram Dass’s life and work: When the self is no longer defended, it can finally act; not react, not perform, but act.
This is non-duality in motion – not the dissolution of difference, but the liberation from false separation… Ram Dass didn’t build networks; he cultivated presence. And presence, it turns out, is the prerequisite for meaningful participation – whether in consciousness, community, or code.
Cypherpunks: Code and Consciousness
By the early 1990s, another culture was gestating – one of cryptographers, hackers, and network idealists, united by a suspicion of surveillance and moral drift. They didn’t quote sutras or chant the names of Ram, the Universe, or God. Nonetheless, they were building something sacred; a structure that did not praise, a system that demanded honesty, a tool that returned consequence to action.
Bitcoin, when it arrived in 2009, was not merely an economic event. It was a new ritual of trust. The link between Ram Dass and the cypherpunks is not doctrinal and it is not about shared beliefs. It is ontological; it concerns the very nature of being itself. Both movements arose from the same dislocation — a loss of trust in institutions, ideologies, and inherited authority. Both sought a return to what is real.
Ram Dass offered breath, mantra, and silence.
Bitcoin offers protocol, proof, and consensus.
Neither is a shortcut. Both are practices that require presence. In that sense, the late twentieth century witnessed two parallel awakenings – one spiritual, one digital – each responding to the same civilizational wound.
The Transmission of Integrity
Few at the time would have linked Ram Dass to the cypherpunks. Yet, when the lens widens, the resonance becomes audible. Not in vocabulary, but in atmosphere. The cypherpunk worldview was allergic to centralised control, suspicious of imposed consensus, and devoted to voluntary association. It reflected the same interior shift Ram Dass had embodied two decades earlier; the movement from conditioned identity to conscious participation. That resonance was not merely theoretical… it was lived.
In San Francisco during the 1980s and ’90s, Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, and other countercultural figures often spoke at the same events as early tech pioneers, passing the philosophical baton to a younger generation of builders. Gatherings like the Digital Be-In made this exchange explicit; assembling Grateful Dead lyricists, LSD researchers, and Internet architects into a single civic experiment. Their shared message was not uniformity, but interoperability; you could use different tools and still build from the same values.
One of those tools was Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), released in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann; a form of public-key encryption that allowed private communication without central authority. It was elegant, decentralised, and difficult to corrupt. It resembled a kind of technological yoga – a disciplined practice for maintaining integrity under pressure. The ethos spread.
Cypherpunks like Tim May, Eric Hughes, and John Perry Barlow began drafting manifestos. Their tone could be blunt and abrasive, but beneath the technical bravado lay a moral claim; that human beings deserve freedom not only politically, but informationally; that the right to consciousness implies the right to private expression; and that systems which record without consent are not just inefficient – they are anti-human.
Code as Devotion
Of course it seems strange to place Ram Dass alongside these cryptographic radicals. And yet - both confronted the same problem: How does one stay awake in a system designed to put you to sleep? Ram Dass framed the answer through silence and surrender; the cypherpunks through code and structure. Their expression was different, but their orientation was the same. Because for all his mysticism, Ram Dass never asked his students to withdraw from the world. Instead, he asked that they try to see through it. To act from a place not reactive but responsive; not fearful but grounded.
That same injunction – to act from source, not from fear – animates the best of the cypherpunk tradition. In a world addicted to surveillance, disinformation, and moral drift, the refusal to externalise trust is not nihilism. It is a kind of devotion, and a defence of the sacredness of responsibility. And so, born from that lineage, Bitcoin is not an escape from consequence. It is its reassertion; a digital instrument that, like a mantra or meditation practice, returns you again and again to the centre of your own responsibility.
A new block of transactions is added roughly every ten minutes in a rhythm deliberately slow, compared to the frantic pace of traditional finance. Like a heartbeat, this interval enforces a kind of mindfulness in digital commerce. Just as Ram Dass guided students to return to the breath and rest in presence, Bitcoin’s protocol quietly guides its users to accept the natural pace of a decentralised process. To stay with what is.
The cypherpunk, facing the entropy of centralised systems, makes the same move: Don’t run. Don’t fight. Build something better… freer, truer. In either path, freedom is not granted. It is chosen and then built, line by line, block by block, breath by breath.
It is tempting to describe Bitcoin as a purely economic technology. Yet this is insufficient. While it functions as a monetary protocol, its deeper resonance lies not in what it does, but how it does it, and what that how reveals with respect to value, time, and trust. Bitcoin is less an answer to fiat currency than a confrontation with the metaphysical architecture of civilisation itself.
To encounter it honestly is to face the same questions Ram Dass spent his life asking:
What are you depending on?
What are you avoiding?
What is real, and what is illusion?
These are not financial questions. They are existential ones.
Bitcoin as Spiritual Structure
Bitcoin, though formless in essence, insists on form. It is a hard-coded act of restraint in an age of improvisational power. It introduces consequence where convenience once ruled. It demands work and preserves memory. It cannot be bribed, rushed, or sweet-talked. There is no central server, no priesthood, no exception clause. In this sense, it is a moral structure; not because it makes one good, but because it refuses to let one hide.
Ram Dass might have recognised the symmetry. His spiritual journey – from the collapse of institutional identity to the embrace of radical presence – rested on the insight that freedom is not a state of exception but a relationship with reality. He never said “Be free.” Rather, he said “Be here now” – inhabit the actual. Face what is. Meet it cleanly.
Bitcoin does the same in machine language.
It encodes a worldview in which meaning is not performed but proven, where time cannot be skipped and consensus cannot be coerced. As Scott Dedels writes, Bitcoin is the Tao of money – not for its fluidity, but for its refusal to deviate from its own nature. Unlike the price (which is a distraction), in essence, the network neither follows the market nor mirrors the mood. It simply proceeds, block by block through its own unfolding.
Alignment of Form and Spirit
In Hermeticism, one of the world’s oldest esoteric traditions, a simple maxim endures: “As above, so below.” Meaning that structure and spirit reflect one another. If our systems are distorted, our perceptions will be too. If our money is dishonest, our relationships - whether economic, political, psychological, or cultural – inherit that distortion. The early Bitcoin adopters may not have quoted Hermes Trismegistus, but they intuited the same principle… Corrupt money corrupts meaning. Thus, sound money is not a fetish – it is alignment.
Similarly, Taoist philosophy speaks of wu wei – action without force, effort without strain. This is not passivity but congruence; the harmony that arises when form and function are no longer at odds. Bitcoin’s design embodies this virtue. It contains no unnecessary parts, no central arbiter, no top-down interference. It doesn’t govern. In fact, it makes large-scale governance unnecessary. This is not merely efficient. It is ethical.
Ram Dass, too, taught that true order arises not from control, but from depth. The soul, the psyche, the structure, all must align. Not symbolically, but operationally. And so, strange as it sounds, Bitcoin can be read as a spiritual artefact; a protocol that aligns incentives with consequence, participation with responsibility, and time with trust. It does not care who you are. It responds to what you’ve done.
In this way, it resembles karma – not as cosmic punishment, but as causal clarity. The ledger, like the soul, forgets nothing. Of course, Bitcoin is not perfect. It is a beginning, not a culmination. Yet it introduces – amid accelerating noise – a signal that cannot be faked. Bitcoin is a pattern of integrity and a scaffold for remembering - not of the past, but of what truly matters. And in that remembering, Bitcoin joins the lineage Ram Dass helped open; a lineage in which liberation is not abstraction, but action; in which technology and spirit are not rivals, but reflections; and in which freedom is not just a slogan, but an architecture.
Coherence and Consequence: The Turning Toward What Is
Ram Dass once said that suffering does not come from what happens, but from resistance to what is. This was not an invitation to passivity, but to alignment – to act from a place that no longer denies reality and meets it without distortion. For him, the spiritual path was never an escape from consequence. It was the reintegration of consequence into consciousness.
To be free, one must stop pretending.
The cypherpunks, in their own idiom, came to the same conclusion. In a world of surveillance, manipulation, and institutional drift, they recognised that freedom without structure is fantasy. Their task was not to overthrow the system with slogans, but to build an alternative. One that could not be captured, corrupted, or confused. A system that did not promise utopia, but restored reality.
Bitcoin is such a structure. So too is meditation. And so is the act of choosing truth when a lie would be easier. All of these – each in its own way – are disciplines of coherence. They do not erase suffering; they simply remove one layer of it. The suffering that comes from contradiction; from saying one thing and doing another; from wanting freedom but outsourcing responsibility; from demanding truth while tolerating illusion.
This is where the teachings of Ram Dass and the moral architecture of Bitcoin converge – not in metaphor, but in demand. Both insist that if you want peace, you must be willing to participate; that if you want integrity, you must practise it; that the world will not become coherent by chance, but only through choice. And if that choice is to mean anything, it must cost something.
This is what The Spiral of Sovereignty sought to surface; a framework in which economics, psychology, spirituality, and sovereignty are not competing disciplines but nested expressions of a single principle; of truth lived through form.
Indeed, it is the principle which links Steiner’s moral imagination to Hayek’s emergent order; Jung’s individuation to Pirsig’s Quality; Maslow’s actualisation to Bitcoin’s proof of work. Ram Dass belongs in this conversation not because he foresaw Bitcoin, but because he practised what Bitcoin encodes; the difficult, beautiful work of being human – and therefore accountable to reality. He refused the luxury of illusion. He did the work.
Where Ram Dass offered silence, story, and surrender, the cypherpunks offered code, consensus, and cryptography. Different languages. Same calling. Both pointing to the same human task; to live so that one’s systems – both inner and outer – do not fracture under pressure. To curate attention as carefully as one designs tools. To make peace not a desirable refuge, but a real and sustainable pattern.
And so the question is no longer whether Ram Dass influenced the cypherpunks, or whether Bitcoin is spiritual. Asking those questions miss the deeper point. The real question is coherence:
Is what you believe reflected in what you build?
Does your architecture of ethics align with what you claim to value?
If it doesn’t, what will you do about it?
That is not rhetoric. It is the root of responsibility. Ram Dass framed it in the language of the soul. The cypherpunks framed it in the language of protocol. Bitcoin expresses it as code. Nonetheless, the choice remains the same… Either to deny what is, or to live in alignment with it.
Only one of those will lead you back home. 🌀🔶 👀
