Ram Dass, Being Somewhere Else Now. RIP Ram Dass.
By Joan Duncan Oliver Dec 22, 2019
If there is an enduring figure emblematic of the consciousness revolution of the 1960s and 70s, it is arguably the Harvard professor and LSD researcher-turned-spiritual leader born Richard Alpert but known the world over as Ram Dass. With Timothy Leary, his colleague in the Harvard psychology department, he forever changed a generation of Americans through his explorations with psilocybin, LSD-75, and other psychedelics before reinventing himself as a spiritual teacher and humanitarian—a bhakti yogi with love as his path. When Ram Dass died on Sunday evening, one of the most beloved voices of the counterculture fell silent. He was 88 years old.
It was Leary who famously exhorted American youth to “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” but it was Alpert who became a model of awakening that wasn’t dependent on drugs. Fired from Harvard in 1963 for giving LSD to an undergraduate, Alpert moved to Millbrook, New York, with Leary, who had been fired ostensibly for not showing up for his classes. In Millbrook, the two continued their psychedelic experimentation with an ever-changing cast of psychonauts and acidheads. But in 1967, Alpert, still searching, left for India. There he found his guru, the Hindu sadhu Neem Karoli Baba, known as Maharaj-ji, characteristically wrapped in a blanket and seated on a wooden tucket, a low Indian bed. Curious to see how a spiritual adept would react to LSD, Alpert gave Maharaj-ji a whopping dose. It had zero effect on the holy man. Over the next few years until Maharaj-ji’s death in 1973, Alpert—by then renamed Ram Dass, or Servant of God, by Maharaj-ji—periodically returned to be with his guru. Resettling in America in 1974, he started a new life based on a different kind of turn-on—meditation—and his own synthesis of Buddhist, Hindu, Advaita, and Sufi teachings, and later, Jewish mysticism.
In Be Here Now, Ram Dass‘s first book for the masses, which has sold over 2 million copies since publication in 1971, he offered seekers an engaging, unconventional, slightly zany roadmap for finding a spiritual path and a more enduring connection to higher consciousness than a tab of acid could bring. From then on, in close to a dozen books and countless teachings, retreats, and podcasts, Ram Dass continued to share the wisdom of a journey that had long gone beyond personal transformation to embrace a cosmic worldview and social agenda.
https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/ram-dass-dies/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-ram-dass/ram-dass-psychedelic-drug-pioneer-dies-at-home-aged-88-idUSKBN1YR0KY
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You helped change a generation. A copy of Be Here Now still has a place of honour on my bookshelf.
Threw in some new age marketing and made himself a bucket load of money. Yes he helped many people in the fact it was kinda sorta a one stop shop to get down to the nitty gritty of it all...
Way too regimented for me... I went to one of the retreats in Upstate NY. They had repelling and zip lines "to challenge your fears". Me? I just wanted to zip line and repel and the intro price was right.
As with a few of these programs with seminars one is never enough. The facilitators kept telling you, you NEED to go to the next level (and pay another $700-$1000) for the training..
At the seminar the "challanged" us to wear a bathingsuit and have the trainers look VERY closely at out bodys. Many were in tears. At group meeting they would ask if you could tell stand up andthe group something you could NEVER EVER UNDER PAIN OF DEATH tell you mother..Now that was interesting. Lots of sexual deviants/beastiality/theft etc were revealed . Lots of pain came out.
All in all it was run like a boot camp... When I got home the phone would not stop with them calling (pre internet) to recruit me to go to the next level.. The longer I resisted the lower the price was... My take on the whole thing?
I liked zip lining and repelling...
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... which is a great, entertaining book by the way. But I bring it up because Ram Dass became a major figure in Pete Holmes' spiritual journey. He tells many interesting stories about how his show business career, his spiritual life and his love life have intersected and overlapped. A highly recommended book.
On that note, Rest In Peace Ram Dass. You have been a major force for good in this world and in our generation. Thanks for sharing it with us.
Gate, gate, param gate parasam gate bodhi svaha.
His Be Here Now, Grist For The Mill and Still Here. All enlightening.
I follow
https://mooji.org/
I can't tell you how much I love this guy. There are tons of his teachings and Satsangs on Youtube. I listen most days.
He is a student of Papaji who was a student of Ramana Maharshi.
I've also been in his presence. And I swear it is like what people reported about Jesus. That just touching his robe was healing. Being near Mooji, you can feel pure love, (or God....idk) wafting out from him. I've also been to his Ashram in Portugal and I swear, all the pain, (I've had chronic pain for a long time) just went away. The energy just pulls you out of yourself.
I'm planning on going again; this time for 2 months starting in March!
Ram Dass, spiritual seeker who brought Eastern mysticism to the masses, dies at 88
Ram Dass, left, and former Harvard University professor Timothy Leary visit the campus in 1988. (JOE WRINN/AP)
By Bart Barnes
Dec. 23, 2019 at 6:37 a.m. EST
Ram Dass, a popular author and white-robbed apostle of Eastern mysticism who began his transcendental journey more than 50 years ago as the right-hand disciple of psychedelic-drug advocate Timothy Leary, died Dec. 22 at his home on Maui. He was 88.
His death was announced on his official Instagram account. He had a paralyzing stroke in 1997, but the immediate cause of death was not disclosed.
“Be Here Now,” Ram Dass’s signature book, described his improbable evolution. Born Richard Alpert, the son of a railroad president and pillar of Boston’s Jewish elite, he grew up as a self-described “closet homosexual” in a “Jewish anxiety-ridden, high-achieving tradition.”
He gravitated to a lifestyle of heavy drug use in the 1960s while working as an associate professor of clinical psychology at Harvard University but found inner peace and spiritual enlightenment through meditation and yoga. An Indian guru gave him a new name, Ram Dass, which means “servant of God” in Hindi.
The book came out in 1971, just after the peak years of the socio-cultural revolution that dominated the 1960s, and sold 2 million copies. Decades later, New York Times book critic Dwight Garner called it the “counterculture bible.”
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Richard Alpert was born in Boston on April 6, 1931, and was the youngest of three sons. He had a history of tension with his controlling father, George, a high-powered Boston lawyer, president of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, and a founder of Brandeis University. His father harangued him to become a doctor, while the younger Alpert expressed interest in psychology.
After graduating in 1952 from Tufts College (now University) in Medford, Mass., he received a master’s degree in psychology at Wesleyan University in 1954 and a doctorate in psychology at Stanford University in 1957.
He developed a reputation in graduate school as a spellbinding teacher, and in 1958 joined the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor. “I had an apartment that was filled with antiques and I gave very charming dinner parties,” he later wrote in “Be Here Now.” “I had a Mercedes-Benz sedan and a Triumph 500 CC motorcycle and a Cessna 172 airplane and an MG sports car and a sailboat and a bicycle.”
But he never realized how unhappy he was, he said, until he began tripping and “felt a new kind of calmness” and “a place where ‘I’ existed independent of social and physical identity.”
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Gift of the artist to the writer (I did a lot of collaborations with Phil Frank on the San Francisco Chronicle's "Farley" strip). This particular strip features one of Phil's most lovable characters, Baba-Re-Bop, the "small medium at large", also known as the "multi-medium". Baba always struggles with the same problem in Phil's strips--he only has one follower, a day-trader from the financial district--and this student is a part-time worshipper at that. SCENE: This strip was written in March 1997, at the time that noted and beloved spiritual teacher Ram Dass was unfortunately suffering from a stroke. Knowing Ram Dass' excellent sense of humor, and knowing that he was going to make it through this OK, Phil and I decided to cheer him up by putting him into a comic strip. Unlike Baba, the real guru Ram Dass had many thousands of people who sat with him and listened to what he had to say (and he still does!) Ram Dass loved to play golf, and did in fact own an MG TD. Baba re Bop, ever the rascal, no doubt had designs on starting a temporary guru franchise of his own while Ram Dass recovered. (I don't think he ever got the car keys and golf clubs, though.) Ram Dass lives in Hawaii now and he's "still here" and still teaching, along with his assistants. We love you Ram Dass! Phil's original art is well worth what is being asked here. Also, a portion of this sale will be automatically be donated to Doctors Without Borders . So we are co-contributors! FREE shipping.
One teeny tiny quibble directed at those who want to blame my entire generation for all the ills of the world, this from the obit: "... he forever changed a generation of Americans through his explorations..."
Boomers are a large generation -- not our fault, by the way -- and nothing if not diverse in our experiences and opinions.
