Everyone Could Do With A Ram Dass Sat-Nav In Their Life
Ram Dass died this week. He was probably the most loved teacher in the ‘spiritual but not religious’ demographic, which has grown since the 1960s to become a quarter of the American population. As such, he meant a great deal to many ‘seekers’, including me. Two years ago, I discovered the archive of his talks, and his calm, funny voice talked me through my tempestuous mid-life crisis. Everyone could do with a Ram Dass Sat-nav in their life.
He started off life as a rich, smart, Jewish East Coast kid. At 28, he had a PhD in psychology from Stanford, and a team of 40 researchers at Harvard. He remembered:
I had an apartment filled with antiques. And a Mercedes Benz, and Cessna airplane and a Triumph motorcycle, and an MG sports car and a sail boat. And I went to the Caribbean skin diving and I, you know, that kind of life.
Not really.
And I looked around, I looked at my psychological and psychiatric colleagues and they seemed to be really just about as neurotic as anybody else.
That I can relate to.
He met a post-graduate researcher called Timothy Leary, and fell under his spell. Leary had taken magic mushrooms in Mexico, and told Alpert he had learned more in one trip than in all the psychology text books he’d read. He got hold of some psilocybin (the psychoactive chemical in magic mushrooms) and gave Alpert a hit on March 6th, 1961. Alpert recalled:
I was sitting there and suddenly in the dark across the room, I saw a figure standing there and as I looked more closely I realized that the figure was myself. It was dressed in a cap and gown strangely enough, and what I saw was my ‘professorness’ across the room. It was what you call in psychology a dissociative experience. And so I looked at this ‘professorness’ and I said ‘Well I guess I don’t really need that anymore’ and I sat back and relaxed…And in a sequence went by all of my social roles, ‘loverness’, ‘wise man’, ‘kind person’, all of my roles and each one: ‘OK, well too bad about that one’, there it goes. And then went by ‘Richard Alpertness’. Now, this was another matter you see. This was, this was who I learned to be, way back then. What happened when you gave that up?… And I became aware at that moment that although everything by which I knew myself was gone, still there was something in me that was watching this whole process disappear.
Leary and Alpert subsequently set up the Harvard Psilocybin Project, and started doing the world’s first psychedelic experiments, including giving psychedelics to prisoners and priests (not at the same time). Pretty soon, the data-gathering was dropped, and they were just getting very high, creating their own spiritual clique in Harvard, and handing out LSD to everyone — staff, undergraduates, even Leary’s young children.
As a result, they were both fired from Harvard, and moved to Millbrook, a mansion in upstate New York leant to them by a rich patron. They and numerous hangers-on lived there for five messy years, taking more and more LSD — one time, Alpert drank it every day in a row for weeks, trying to stay high. Eventually he jumped out of a window, thinking he could fly. To his frustration, he always came down.
By this point, Leary had morphed from a psychologist into a prophet, founder of the League for Spiritual Discovery, performer in strange mystic musicals, celebrity ‘high priest’ of LSD. As he became more and more outspoken, Leary became a target for the police. He was busted repeatedly, and ended up on the run, living for a while with the Black Panthers in Algeria.
Alpert, instead, travelled to India in 1967. He was inspired on his journey East by Aldous Huxley, who’d given him and Leary a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. They were so impressed by it, they republished it as a psychedelic manual.
Alpert had barely been in India a month when he met his Guru, Neem Karoli Baba, or Maharaji-ji. A short, stocky old man wrapped in a blanket, he was said to have become enlightened meditating in the jungle. Some said he was an incarnation of Hanuman, the monkey god. Now, he travelled around India, staying with his adoring followers, impressing them with his feats of clairvoyance and teleportation.
Maharaji-ji made an immediate impression on Alpert. He said he never felt as loved as when the Guru looked on him. He fell deeply in love, and became his servant. ‘Go to America and make them laugh’, his Guru said to him.
He came back to the US a few months later, sporting a big beard, white kurta and beads, and calling himself Baba Ram Dass (servant of God). It was his turn, now, to be a spiritual teacher
In 1971, he published Be Here Now. It was published just at the right time, when acid-heads were looking for where to go next from the wreckage of the Sixties.
It was a DIY manual for spiritual self-development, a kind of hippy fanzine version of Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy. It mapped the road from psychedelics to eastern wisdom, a road first shown by Huxley, then forged by Ram Dass, and subsequently followed by other teachers, like Jack Kornfield and Joan Halifax. It gave hippies the vocabulary of Eastern spirituality for the far-out experiences they were having, assuring them at the same time they didn’t need to convert to any particular faith.
Ram Dass was a very funny and gifted speaker (as you can discover by listening to his talks). He taught through a series of Yiddish humorous anecdotes. Some of these became beloved routines — the time he gave his Guru acid; the time he was stopped by a highway cop, who he saw as the incarnation of Krishna; the time the old woman nodded all throughout one of his talks, like she was a highly realized being, and when he asked her what was her practice, she whispered ‘crochet’.
Then, after the laugh, he would introduce some high-level non-dualist teaching, usually with the introductory word ‘see’. ‘See, we’re all part of the same cosmic show, it’s all a game, see? Everyone is God in drag.’ And so on.
Like Alan Watts, he could talk for hours. Like Watts, this verbosity can get annoying. There’s a glibness in his 70s sermons, a pleasure in his own charisma.
Perhaps there was a bit of inflation there. He became a major figure in the ‘consciousness revolution’, an archetype in the collective unconscious, a figure in others’ dreams. Even Maharaj-ji had often said “Ram Dass is a great saint,” or “Ram Dass — Isha” (Christ), or “I am not your Guru, Ram Dass is your Guru.”
He was still a human, with human hang-ups, particularly about his homosexuality. He could be overly ascetic — Michael Murphy of Esalen (a famous Californian spiritual centre) tells the story of Ram Dass telling off him and his co-founder Dick Price for letting people bathe naked in their hot-tubs. Price, indignant, yanked off Ram Dass’ beads and the two rolled down the hill fighting.
Later, in the mid 70s, he fell under the spell of a charlatan called Joya, who stroked his ego then tried to make him part of her personality cult (he subsequently wrote a mea culpa). To his credit, he was always honest about his shortcomings, and he never tried to start his own cult.
In the 1980s, he took off his beads and put on a suit, co-founding the Seva Foundation, which provided eye care for 30 million people in the developing world. He increasingly preached karma yoga — liberation through service. He worked with prisoners, and with the dying, helping to inspire the ‘conscious dying’ movement.
In 1997, he had a stroke, which took away much of his power of speaking. He came to see it as grace. It took away his verbosity, the love of the sound of his own voice, and let him rest in loving awareness. It taught him to accept his dependence on others — he had put all his earnings into his charitable activities.
Maybe he really was a saint.
Did he have limitations? Probably. One, to my mind, was his lack of critical scepticism. He’d gone to India and met a great guru in three months. Listening to his stories of Maharaji-ji, one naturally wanted a similar experience. Many ‘gurus’ rose up to cater to this new spiritual hunger in the 1970s and 1980s. Almost all of them turned out to be abusive crooks.
Like Alan Watts, there is a wonderful, soothing certainty in Ram Dass’ preaching. If he ever had doubts about reincarnation, karma, or our ultimate salvation, he doesn’t show them. Is that a strength or a weakness?
But his strengths are far more apparent. His articulacy, his humour, his love. And the great lesson he taught all acid heads — that spirituality is more about service than special experiences.
Finally, he shows us the limits of our customary stories about the self — our jobs, our possessions, our mental constructs. What if we let all of that go? What is left? Can we practice that letting go before we die, and ease our journey to the next place?
That’s what he taught me through the ‘mini-death’ of my mid-life crisis. It’s OK to let go, and it’s OK to die. Something Greater is there to catch us.
PS — another good one-liner by him for Christmas: ‘if you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family’.
