The editor is a soul. I am a soul. The guru looks for you. 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?
Yeah, he was a sound engineer for the Grateful Dead. 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. For 50 years my mother did not talk about it. You can imagine my surprise that I had a year-old son. So much for being a good homosexual! Well, the stroke 5 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? 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. 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. 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. 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. The guru gave him the name Ram Dass, which means servant of God, and he returned to the United States. He wrote about his conversion in Be Here Now, which became popular in the s and provided a road map for the burgeoning New Age movement of spirituality.
In 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 that partially paralyzed him and hampered his speaking ability but left him feeling more compassionate and humble. In he moved to Hawaii and used the internet to deliver lectures. We initially encountered Ram Dass's work back in My wife, while going through a difficult time, was given a paperback copy of the book Grist for the Mill by her kindhearted, kirtan -playing landlord in Northampton, Massachusetts.
That summer, at the beach, we read each other passages as we lay in the sun; soon, also at the beach, a new friend gave her his copy of Be Here Now —Ram Dass's book of hypnotically illustrated spiritual exhortations.
That title was a fixture on every bona fide hippie bookshelf in the '70s and has sold over 2 million copies. But it wasn't until last year, when I was trying to find a more soul-fulfilling way to burn up the time on my daily commute, that I discovered the podcast and fully immersed myself in Ram Dass's message. Having detailed his origin story in the first few episodes—from hotshot Harvard professor to psychedelic pioneer to Hindu devotee to holy-man-at-large preaching across hippie America—Ram Dass's beautifully unfolding lecture more or less abandons linear autobiography by part five.
In it, he explores spiritual insights he gleaned from two trips to India, in , slip-sliding between key principles of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christ consciousness while effortlessly tying it all back to modern life in the Vietnam-era West.
As my wife and I hurtled down the highway listening to the podcast, one of Ram Dass's digressions gonged me so good it would have been safer if I had pulled over the car.
Trumpism had just dawned in America. The air was rife with fear, anger, and bluster: The Women's March had taken place in January and then Charlottesville in August. All of it was still raw. I remember being particularly anxious about the way the political moment was playing out on social media.
My feeds were full of strident partisan rhetoric and hard lines drawn in the sand. If you're not angry, you're not paying attention. That's when Ram Dass articulated an idea that held as much truth and force in as it did when he said it 49 years earlier.
The protesters create the John Birchers just as much as the John Birchers create the protesters. That as long as you are attached to whatever pole you are representing, the vibrations which you are sending out are creating its polar opposite around you.
If you can do whatever is your karma—which may be walking in a protest march or fighting in Vietnam, or being a conservative or a liberal or being a housewife or being a yogi—and can do it without attachment, and do it fully and thoroughly but without attachment, then you do not create that karma. You do not create the polar opposite. I had listened to this episode before, but I had not really heard it until that moment. I rewound the passage repeatedly until my wife asked if we could please let the episode play on.
As the parallels between today's fraught political environment and that of the Vietnam era multiply, Ram Dass's words and story are resonating again. In , Ram Dass is not exactly famous—not like he was in the s—but his fan base is large and ardent.
It consists of aging baby boomers, mostly. But there are younger audiences catching on, too. Marc Benioff, the chairman of Salesforce. I recently saw a young woman reading The Alienist on the New York City subway with a tattoo, in Courier typewriter font, that read: Be present. Be patient. Be here now. Mindfulness as a business tool has exploded in recent years, as young entrepreneurs mimic their own guru, Steve Jobs, who is said to have credited Be Here Now with getting him to try LSD.
Jobs was also a major contributor to Ram Dass's Seva Foundation, which strives to alleviate blindness across the world.
And Ram Dass's psychedelic work—from back when he was still a Harvard psychologist—is being actively reconsidered: Michael Pollan's No. Yoga, organic foods, the Grateful Dead, and Baba Ram Dass, too—all of them are back in fashion, and Ram Dass's Love Serve Remember Foundation has been right there to meet them, through modern tools like the Here and Now podcast episodes and counting and the babaramdass Instagram account nearly K followers.
Back in June, when tickets to a five-day Ram Dass retreat in Maui set for November went on sale, they sold out in six minutes. Even a throw blanket that hangs over the side of the large pinkish faux-suede couch bears the guru's likeness, with his elephantine shoulders and crooked smile. I was a clean Buddhist. The living room altar also holds figures of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman servant to Ram and the deity closely associated with Maharajji and his devotees and the Buddha, plus images of Christ, Gandhi, Mary, and other saints—as well as those of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
The message is simple: Love everyone. Hello, Buddha! Good morning, Maharajji! Hello, Bob. Because after all, [Bob Dole] is merely God in drag, saying, I bet you won't recognize me this way, will you?
They're all faces of the beloved. When I enter the kitchen, where he sits in his wheelchair, Ram Dass, who is 87, offers me a squeeze of his good left hand and says softly that he would like to do our interview upstairs, in his study, which he gets to by mechanical lift.
Ram Dass had a stroke on February 19, , and it left him paralyzed on his right side. It also caused expressive aphasia, which inhibits the exquisitely gifted lecturer's ability to find his words. His care and his household are administered by a friendly, tough, joyful woman I know as Dassi Ma, although her e-mail signature just says Kathleen Murphy. There are others—I don't know exactly what to call them friends? Up in the study, a strong, suntanned young man named Govinda helps Ram Dass from his wheelchair into a threadbare and faded La-Z-Boy that faces out the window.
Just a few hundred yards past the Jurassic Park-size tropical plants and giant red flowers is the coastline. 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.
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