Writer Bill Corbett said while Ram Dass was "pretty much a cliche s white-guy-who-studied-in-India guru" at first, "he was never content in the superficial for long". RIP Ram Dass. Ms Mandel recalled how he talked about speaking with a dying woman who complained that death was very boring.
I had not thought of that before. Ram Dass was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Boston, Massachusetts. His father was president of a railroad company. Ram Dass wrote that he came from "a Jewish anxiety-ridden high-achieving tradition". In , he earned a degree in psychology at Tuft's College and his doctorate at Stanford University in He began teaching and researching psychology at Harvard in During that time, as he would later describe, he lived in an apartment full of antiques, drove a Mercedes-Benz, owned a Cessna plane and vacationed in the Caribbean.
Leary helped popularise s counter-culture under the motto "turn on, tune in, drop out". Leary was researching the effects of psilocybin, the compound responsible for the hallucinogenic properties of some mushrooms. Leary gave Ram Dass his first taste of psilocybin at a party. Ram Dass wrote of his first experience: "The rug crawled and the pictures smiled, all of which delighted me.
Back to Terence McKenna. He questioned whether anyone, no matter how enlightened, would be unaffected by micrograms of LSD. He conjectured that Maharajji, wanting to impress his American devotee, pretended to consume the LSD through sleight of hand.
The gurus McKenna met in his travels in the East were certainly capable of such trickery. I got Ram Dass's number and called him. He had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage several years earlier, and his voice was shaky. But he insisted that his Maharajji anecdote was true, and that he had never told Krassner or anyone else otherwise.
When I emailed Krippner, he replied that Krassner must have misunderstood him. I called Krassner back to tell him what Kripper said.
But he retracted his claim and apologized to Ram Dass in a subsequent issue of High Times. As McKenna told me, western seekers were eager to believe that eastern adepts had supernatural abilities. Identify with your soul. Am I being unfairly judgmental? On my puja table 6 is Donald Trump.
When I went back and read the work of your old colleague Timothy Leary, he was all about expressing the hope that widespread use of LSD could transform society for the better. Is it possible that you and Leary were aiming at the wrong targets when you were promoting the revolutionary possibilities of psychedelic drugs? Maybe they can be revolutionary only on the individual level and not societally.
Tim was a social scientist, and he was experimenting with social situations. I think I want to delve into planes of consciousness. I gave my guru in India LSD, and he said that plants with similar effects were around in the olden times and that by taking them you could stay in the room with Christ for only a few hours instead of living with the Lord. They had methods for living with the Lord.
You talk about your guru as a perfect teacher. But at the risk of sounding glib, no one is perfect. Maharaji guides me, and I feel secure in that guidance, so I feel secure in my teaching. I serve Maharaji with that love.
This is all not to do, at the ultimate level, with a body. When did you know? When I arrived at my soul. Ego has very pronounced fear of dying. The ego, this incarnation, is life and dying. The soul is infinite. Are we even supposed to let go of desires like that?
Desire is desire. Attachment is attachment. Above it, the horizon line of the ocean hovers. The room is filled with the squawks and chirps of birds, and Ram Dass is surrounded here, too, by prayer flags and many images of the smiling guru. Truthfully, I am nervous to have an audience with this octogenarian pioneer of human consciousness—what do you ask a man who has simply acted as the mirror for your own self-discovery? So I start with the most basic of questions about his daily routine.
After a long period of heavy breathing, and through epic pauses as he searches for his words, Ram Dass speaks, describing getting up at 8 a. Ram Dass smiles, and his already slow-dripping speech becomes even slower and dreamier.
And I think… Yeah. After a beat, I can feel that he is summoning the moment, the corners of his mouth turned up, his arm still swirling the whirlpool around.
It feels as though the past and future are getting sucked in, leaving nothing but the here and now. His presence—his here-and-now-ness—is so strong and so grounded that he is able to open it up and share it with you. It is unlike anything I've experienced before. My rib cage seems to crack open.
My heart soars. You don't think about…the future. You just stay with the moment. And the moment is not in time. Ram Dass is perpetually telling and retelling his origin story, and it always begins around , with his former life as a year-old clinical psychologist on the faculty at Harvard named Dr. Richard Alpert. Alpert was an academic force, but somewhere along the way he started to register a disturbance. I felt as if I were in a soundproof room. In the face of this feeling of malaise, I ate more, collected more possessions, collected more appointments and positions and status, more sexual and alcoholic orgies, and more wildness in my life.
The turning point finally came in March of , when Alpert ingested a ten-milligram pill of synthetic psilocybin—the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms—at the kitchen table of his Harvard colleague Timothy Leary. Feeling, as Leary did, that they had uncovered a scientifically revolutionary wrinkle in human consciousness, Alpert threw himself headlong into Leary's Psilocybin Project at the university. That is micrograms of LSD a day. What happened in those three weeks in that house, no one would ever believe, including us.
And at the end of the three weeks, we walked out of the house and within a few days, we came down! It was a very frustrating experience, as if you came into the kingdom of heaven and you saw how it all was…and then you got cast out again.
Alpert was fired from the faculty for administering psychedelics to an undergraduate, and Leary got the boot, too. Undeterred, Alpert, Leary, and an orgiastic crew of friends and followers went first to Mexico and then to the Bahamas, then moved into a mansion in Millbrook, New York, where they continued their extreme explorations in experimental psychedelic living. Groovy as that all sounds, the Alpert biography really starts to get far-out in when, frustrated by psilocybin, LSD, and Leary himself, Alpert went on an odyssey eastward in pursuit of the great big high from which he would never have to come down again.
Months into his spiritual quest, after sharing LSD and other chemical wonders from his pharmacological travel kit with monks and holy men from Afghanistan to Nepal in search of an explanation for the drug and perhaps a truer, permanent pathway to consciousness, an exasperated Alpert finally landed at the feet of a Hindu sadhu, or wandering saint, in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas.
This was Maharajji, who lives on the razor's edge between form and formlessness, an enlightened being, Alpert said, whose existence consists of constant oscillation between his earthly body and the great beyond. Maharajji takes Alpert into his ashram and renames him Ram Dass.
He was taught by one of Maharajji's disciples using a piece of chalk and a slate to communicate. The lessons that Alpert learned in India as he transformed into Ram Dass are what he would bring back to the young, stoned seekers of the American counterculture. Levine finds Ram Dass, no longer in holy-man robes but in cutoff jean shorts and a Grateful Dead tee, riding from lecture to lecture with his friend and fellow Maharajji devotee Krishna Das. Life on the circuit is as rife with groupies, chemicals, egos, and rock 'n' roll as the world someone like Frampton might occupy, but on this circuit there are more hucksters and religious zealots playing on the fears and fantasies of a whole culture of people who weren't nearly as ambitious as Richard Alpert about what to do once the acid wears off and they've merged back into their personalities.
It seems that Timothy Leary, incarcerated for smuggling marijuana across the border from Mexico, has begun talking to the FBI in hopes of earning early parole. The group meets at a town house to plan a press conference, and the gathering includes Timothy Leary's son Jack and Allen Ginsberg. Maybe we should wait until we know what Timothy's saying. Some of you seem too one-pointed about this whole thing.
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