Ram Dass is ready to die.

By David Marchese Photograph by Mamadi Doumbouya

For more than 50 years, Ram Dass has watched as other nontraditional spiritual leaders have come and gone while he has remained. He has been active since the early 1960s, back when he was still known as Richard Alpert and worked alongside his Harvard psychology department colleague Timothy Leary, researching the mind-altering effects of LSD and psilocybin and helping to kick off the psychedelic era. Later, as did many people before him, he ventured east, spending time in India as a disciple of the Hindu mystic Neem Karoli Baba. Upon his return, newly known as Ram Dass, he wrote the philosophically misty, stubbornly resonant Buddhist-Hindu-Christian mash-up “Be Here Now,” in which he extolled the now-commonplace, then-novel (to Western hippies, at least) idea that paying deep attention to the present moment — that is, mindfulness — is the best path to a meaningful life.

Published in 1971, that book, an early classic of New Age thinking, has sold around two million copies, according to his website; Ram Dass, who has since written a dozen other books, continues to find new readers via praise from the likes of Lena Dunham and the presidential candidate Marianne Williamson. The 88-year-old’s archived lectures have also found second lives as popular podcasts, and he has been the subject of multiple documentaries, including the life-spanning “Becoming Nobody,” which premieres on Sept. 6. “First I was a professor,” said Ram Dass, who in 1997 suffered a stroke that affected his speaking ability. “Then I was a psychedelic. Now I’m old. I’m an icon.” He smiled knowingly. “There are worse things to be.”

In “Be Here Now,”1 you write about going to an ashram in India and spending months in deep meditation. Most of us can’t drop out like that and can find it hard enough to not check our phones every five minutes or get away from work email for a day, let alone spend hours a night focusing on breathing, as you did. All of which is a preamble to asking: Is modern Western life anathema to the effort needed for the kind of spiritual development you espouse? Yes. Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts: Those are the daily attention-grabbers that make it so that you can’t come from your mind to your heart to your soul. The soul contains love, compassion, wisdom, peace and joy, but most people identify with the mind. You’re not an ego. You’re a soul. You’re not psychologically full of anxiety and fear.

Ralph Metzner, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) in 1965 in Laredo, Tex., where Leary was standing trial on charges of marijuana possession. Lawrence Schiller/Polaris Communications/Getty Images

Speak for yourself. If you identify with the ego plane, you’ll find you’re in time, you’re in space, you’re a little body. But go to the spiritual heart, and there will be a doorway to the next plane of consciousness: soul land. My guru2 once called me over after I threw a plate of food at a Westerner at the ashram. Maharaji said: “Ram Dass! Is something the matter?” I told him my complaints about the Westerners who were hanging around, and he got a glass of milk and fed it to me, and he said, “Now, you do it for them.” So I fed the milk to every one of the Westerners. It made me feel good in my heart. Feed them. Love everybody.

Well, along those lines, your belief is that the universe is unfolding perfectly. So how do we, as human beings, make sense of that perfection given the impending awful catastrophe of something like climate change? Humans can have consciousness on two planes. For example, when you are a reporter at The Times, it’s a game. It’s a dance. How many people do you have to impress? It’s stuff like that. But the soul has in it the witness, and it witnesses our whole incarnation. The soul watches the game without judgment.

Am I playing the game the right way? Um, no.

Ah, Christ. Is there at least a “but” coming? But your intellect will keep you on track! I sense that you are in your spiritual work. You are a soul. Your baby is a soul. Your wife is a soul. The reader is a soul. The editor is a soul. I am a soul. But many of those people don’t identify with their soul. There’s a metaphor that Maharaji described for me: There’s a fisherman, and he’s got a pole, and you’re the fish and I’m the worm. In India, they say: “Don’t look for a guru. The guru looks for you.”

You believe that the “I” is an illusion, and in your most recent book3 there are quick references to your being gay, which isn’t something I’d seen you mention before. But what does individual sexual orientation mean if the “self” is just a construct of the ego? It’s part of a dream. From when I was a teenager until I found Maharaji, I was homosexual in my head. In high school, prep school, I was attracted to men. That tendency shaped my life. Owsley — you know Owsley?

“A Discussion of LSD and Consciousness Expansion” poster for an event with Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass). Timothy Leary Papers/The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Yeah, he was a sound engineer for the Grateful Dead.4Yes. I was hanging around backstage, and he took a tab of acid and put it on my tongue. Then a girl had a tab of acid, and Owsley shepherded us to the dance floor. She and I had a jovial time from that dance and on through the next probably three months. Then years later I got a letter from a guy. He said: “I believe that you are the father of my older brother because I found you on the internet and you look like him. For 50 years my mother did not talk about it.” She was a graduate student at Stanford, and she became linked to me. You can imagine my surprise that I had a 50-year-old son. So much for being a good homosexual!

I don’t mean to be crass, but how has suffering the cognitive effects of a stroke inhibited your ability to move toward enlightenment? Well, the stroke5 took away my cello playing, golf, making love. So all I could do after the stroke was go inside and concentrate on my spiritual side.

Why do you think younger generations are showing a renewed interest in New Age thinking and practices? Nostalgia for the ’60s and ’70s. They’re tired of our culture. They’re interested in cultivating their minds and their soul.

Do you ever worry that all these individuals turning inward rather than outward are doing it as a way of avoiding political engagement? Social action and spiritual work are not mutually exclusive. The witness witnesses the politics or the many games we play. In the long run, this is beneficial to individuals and the culture.

Ram Dass at an ashram in India in 1971 with his guru, Neem Karoli Baba. Rameshwar Das

If you had an audience with President Trump, what advice would you give him that would be helpful to him in his job? Identify with your soul.

That could take some work. No.

No? Am I being unfairly judgmental? On my puja table6 is Donald Trump. When I look at his picture, I say to him, “I know you from your karma, and I don’t know you for your soul.” And I am compassionate about that soul because he has heavy karma.

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. That didn’t happen. 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. That’s where his focus was. In the last period of Tim’s psychedelic world, he heard the mantra: “Turn on, tune in and drop out.” That’s radical. That’s radical.

Ever want to take acid for old times’ sake? Yeah. 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. That’s why I went to the east. They had methods for living with the Lord.

Ram Dass in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in June 1972. Allen Ginsberg, from The Ginsberg Estate

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. “Ram Dass” means “servant of Ram,” and the highest ideal of that is Hanuman,7 who is completely selfless in his service and love. I serve Maharaji with that love. This is all not to do, at the ultimate level, with a body. It’s to do with that thing that’s beyond.

You’ve said that you’re ready to die. When did you know? When I arrived at my soul. Soul doesn’t have fear of dying. Ego has very pronounced fear of dying. The ego, this incarnation, is life and dying. The soul is infinite.

O.K., here’s something I’m struggling with: You teach that we’re supposed to be free from desires. I can imagine myself being free from the desire for prestige or money or some unattainable person’s attention. It’s much harder to imagine being free from the desire, for example, that my loved ones not come to any harm. Are we even supposed to let go of desires like that? Yep! Desire is desire. Attachment is attachment. When I came back to the U.S. from India, I came back bringing the message of Maharaji. I had never experienced the love that he showered on me. It was unconditional love. Everything in my life had been conditional love. When I was a good boy, then they loved me. When I was a good student, they loved me. When I was a good lover, they loved me. I thought that I could come back and show unconditional love. The core message is that kind of love.

About that core message: I’ve read “Be Here Now” probably a half-dozen times. I’ve listened to countless lectures of yours and read a bunch of your other books. And I have to say that I still find it difficult to explain exactly what your philosophy is beyond the phrase “Be here now,” which is admittedly a very useful phrase. So while I have you: What is your philosophy? “Be here now” is: In each moment, go into the moment. Our minds take us back and forth in time. I teach a moment. And I teach that we identify with the ego. The ego is a mind warp, and most people don’t identify with their soul. They’re worried about excess meaning. The soul witnesses the ego and witnesses thoughts. “Be here now” gives people an opportunity to reidentify outside of their thinking-mind ego and into that thing that’s called the soul. It is the perspective from which we could live a life without being caught so much in fear. To reidentify there is to change your whole life.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4346265&forum_id=2#38852276)

Ram Dass, psychedelic drug pioneer, dies at home aged 88

Ram Dass, who in the 1960s joined Timothy Leary in promoting psychedelic drugs as the path to inner enlightenment before undergoing a spiritual rebirth he spelled out in the influential book “Be Here Now,” died at home on Sunday. He was 88 years old.

“With tender hearts we share that Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert) died peacefully at home in Maui on December 22, 2019 surrounded by loved ones,” according to his official Instagram account.

“He was a guide for thousands seeking to discover or reclaim their spiritual identity beyond or within institutional religion.”

The man who would become a serene, smiling forerunner of the New Age movement and play a leading role in bringing Eastern spirituality to the West grew up as Richard Alpert in a Jewish family in Newton, Massachusetts.

He considered himself an atheist, and after graduating from Tufts University and earning a Ph.D. from Stanford University, was an up-and-coming psychology professor and researcher at Harvard University in the early ‘60s.

Ram Dass would later describe himself at the time as a driven “anxiety-neurotic” who had an abundance of knowledge but lacked wisdom. Things began to change when Leary joined the Harvard faculty and the two became close friends.

He had been introduced to marijuana in 1955 by his first patient while working as a health services counselor at Stanford University but Leary took him farther with psilocybin, the compound that gives certain mushrooms hallucinogenic qualities. In his first psychedelic experience, “the rug crawled and the picture smiled, all of which delighted me,” Ram Dass wrote in “Be Here Now.”

Ram Dass and Leary wanted to open the mind to a deeper consciousness and conducted experiments that included giving the drug to “jazz musicians and physicists and philosophers and ministers and junkies and graduate students and social scientists.” Afterward, they had them fill out questionnaires about their experiences.

Ram Dass said the subjects found bliss, heightened physical senses, accelerated thought processes, a relaxing of biases and hallucinatory experiences, such as seeing God.

Ram Dass and Leary began including the hallucinogenic drug LSD, which like psilocybin was legal at the time, in their experiments but Harvard was upset that they were using students as subjects and fired them in 1963.

The two former professors later moved to a mansion in Millbrook, New York, made available to them by heirs to the fortune of industrialist Andrew Mellon, and continued their experimentation there. Anti-war protest leader Abbie Hoffman and Beat Generation writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were among those who dropped in.

In an effort to avoid the disappointment of “coming down” from a drug experience, Ram Dass said he and five others locked themselves in a building at the estate for three weeks and took LSD every four hours.

“What happened in those three weeks in that house no one would ever believe, including us,” he wrote in “Be Here Now,” but they were not able to avoid the inevitable return to reality.

As the hippie movement grew, Ram Dass and Leary were among the counterculture luminaries at the Human Be-in, a 1967 gathering of some 25,000 people in San Francisco where Leary spread his “turn on, tune in, drop out” credo. Poets such as Ginsberg and Michael McClure, anti-war activists Dick Gregory and Jerry Rubin and rock acts Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane also took part.

ENLIGHTENMENT IN INDIA

In search for a more permanent enlightenment, later that year Ram Dass went to India, as members of the Beatles would in 1968. He found what he was looking for in the form of Hindu mystic Neem Karoli Baba, also known as Maharaj-ji. Alpert said that through Maharaj-ji he found a spiritual love deeper than anything he had experienced.

Ram Dass had taken a batch of LSD with him to India to share with holy men in order to get their opinion of it. At Maharaj-ji’s request, Ram Dass gave him a super-sized dose of LSD but said there was no discernable effect on him, nor was there three years later when they repeated the experiment.

The guru gave him the name Ram Dass, which means servant of God, and he returned to the United States with long hair, a beard and instructions from Maharaj-ji to “love everyone and tell the truth.” Drugs would no longer be a major factor in Ram Dass’ life.

He wrote about his conversion in “Be Here Now,” which became popular in the 1960s and provided a road map for the burgeoning New Age movement of spirituality.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who used LSD in his younger years, said the book “transformed me and many of my friends” and George Harrison used the title and general philosophy for one of his post-Beatles songs.

“I was a sort of spiritual uncle to a movement - to a consciousness movement bringing the East and West together,” Ram Dass told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004.

Ram Dass spread his interpretation of Eastern philosophy as an author and lecturer, advising acolytes to be loving (“we’re all just walking each other home”) and to sublimate the ego for the sake of the soul (“the quieter you become, the more you can hear”).

In 1978 Ram Dass co-founded the Seva Foundation, a charity to fight blindness and other health problems around the world.

Ram Dass suffered a near-fatal stroke in 1997 that partially paralyzed him and hampered his speaking ability but left him feeling more compassionate and humble. In 2007 he moved to Hawaii and used the internet to deliver lectures.

In his later years he focused on aging and dying without fear. “(I’m) an uncle to the Baby Boomers, teaching them about illness and aging,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004. “Not to be frightened of aging. That it’s OK.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-ram-dass/ram-dass-psychedelic-drug-pioneer-dies-at-home-aged-88-idUSKBN1YR0KY

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4346265&forum_id=2#39311468)