Ram Dass and Dying to Know

Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert is an American spiritual teacher and the author of the seminal 1971 book Be Here Now. Ram Dass is a man who has achieved a marvelous synthesis between the modern culture of the West and the Ancient culture of the East. He is what many would call a Spiritual Guru. He is known for his personal and professional associations with Timothy Leary at Harvard University in the early 1960s, for his travels to India and his relationship with the Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, and for founding the charitable organizations Seva Foundation and Hanuman Foundation. Ram Dass is a co-founder and advisory board member of the Seva Foundation (“seva” means “spiritual service” in Sanskrit), an international service organization. Seva supports programs designed to help wipe out curable blindness in India and Nepal, restore the agricultural life of impoverished villagers in Guatemala, assist in primary health care for American Indians, and to bring attention to the issues of homelessness and environmental degradation in the United States, along with other nations.

Ram Dass and the Search for Enlightenment

“The idea of anything that expands our thinking beyond conventional borders has always been of interest to me. When I see the living, breathing portraits of these characters, especially the early archival footage… To see them intelligent and smart – they were a kind of blessing considering how they have been caricatured in later times. I like what this film explores and I’m glad to be a part of it” -Robert Redford

Ram Dass first went to India in 1967. He was still Dr. Richard Alpert, a prominent Harvard psychologist and psychedelic pioneer with Dr. Timothy Leary. He continued his psychedelic research until that fateful Eastern trip in 1967 when he traveled to India. In India, he met his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, affectionately known as Maharajji, who gave Ram Dass his name, which means “servant of God.” Everything changed then – his intense dharmic life started, and he became a pivotal influence on a culture that has reverberated with the words “Be Here Now” ever since. Ram Dass’s spirit has been a guiding light for three generations, carrying along millions on the journey, helping to free them from their bonds as he works through his own.

Since 1968, Ram Dass has pursued a panoramic array of spiritual methods and practices from potent ancient wisdom traditions, including bhakti or devotional yoga focused on the Hindu deity Hanuman; Buddhist meditation in the Theravadin, Mahayana Tibetan and Zen Buddhist schools, and Sufi and Jewish mystical studies. Perhaps most significantly, his practice of karma yoga or spiritual service has opened up millions of other souls to their deep, yet individuated spiritual practice and path. Ram Dass continues to uphold the bodhisattva ideal for others through his compassionate sharing of true knowledge and vision. His unique skill in getting people to cut through and feel divine love without dogma is still a positive influence on many people from all over the planet. In 1961, while at Harvard, explorations of human consciousness led him, in collaboration with Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Aldous Huxley, and Allen Ginsberg, to pursue intensive research with psilocybin, LSD-25, and other psychedelic chemicals.

Out of this research came two books: The Psychedelic Experience (co-authored with Leary and Metzner, and based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, published by University Books); and LSD (with Sidney Cohen and Lawrence Schiller, published by New American Library). Because of the highly controversial nature of their research, Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary became personae non grata and were dismissed from Harvard in 1963. Tim Leary and Alpert then went to Mexico, ate mushrooms, and went from being academics to counter-culture icons, legends in their own time, and young at that. For Ram Dass psychedelic work turned out to be a prelude to the mystical country of the spirit and the source of consciousness itself. Mind expansion via chemical substances became a catalyst for spiritual seeking. This naturally led him eastward to the traditional headwater of mystical rivers, India. Once there, a series of seeming coincidences led him to Neem Karoli Baba and the transformation from Richard Alpert to Ram Dass.

In 1974, Ram Dass created the Hanuman Foundation, a non-profit foundation meant to embody the spirit of service inspired by his Guru. The Hanuman Foundation developed the Prison-Ashram Project, directed by Bo and Sita Lozoff, which helped prison inmates grow spiritually during their incarceration and the Dying Project, conceived with Stephen Levine, which helped many bring awareness and compassion to the encounter with death. Also as part of the Hanuman Foundation, Dale Borglum founded and directed the Dying Center in Santa Fe, the first residential facility in the United States whose purpose was to support conscious dying. The Prison-Ashram Project, now called the Human Kindness Foundation, continues under Sita Lozoff in North Carolina and the Living/Dying Project, now a separate non-profit headed by Dale Borglum in the Bay Area, provides support for transforming the encounter with life-threatening illness into an opportunity for spiritual awakening. Be Here Now, Ram Dass’s monumentally influential and seminal work, still stands as the highly readable centerpiece of Western articulation of Eastern philosophy, and how to live joyously a hundred percent of the time in the present, luminous or mundane. Be Here Now continues to be the instruction manual of choice for generations of spiritual seekers. Forty years later, it’s still part of the timeless present. Being here now is still being here now.

Other books include The Only Dance There Is (Anchor/ Doubleday); Grist for the Mill (with Stephen Levine, Celestial Arts); Miracle of Love: Stories of Neem Karoli Baba (Hanuman Foundation); How Can I Help? (With Paul Gorman, Knopf); Compassion in Action: Setting Out on the Path of Service (with Mirabai Bush, Bell Tower Press), Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying (Riverhead Books); One-Liners: A Mini-Manual for a Spiritual Life (Bell Tower Press); Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita (Harmony Books). In 1996, Ram Dass began a talk radio program called “Here and Now with Ram Dass.” Seven pilot programs were aired in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, and Ram Dass planned to launch the show on a nationwide basis the following year, but it was not to be. On February 19th, 1997, Ram Dass suffered a near-fatal stroke, which left him paralyzed on the right side of his body and expressive aphasia limiting his ability to speak, along with other challenging ailments.

The after-effects of the stroke have once again changed his life and vastly altered his day, but he has been able to resume teaching and continue to share and teach. In 2004, following a life-threatening infection, Ram Dass was forced to curtail travel and focus on recovering his health.

Ram Dass now resides on Maui, where he shares his teachings through the internet and through retreats on Maui. His work continues to be a path of inspiration to his old students and friends as well as young people who are just discovering the path of Being Here Now. His most recent book, “Be Love Now” (2010) follows the track of his own heart awakening and his quest to embody the unconditional love that he experienced with his guru Neem Karoli Baba.

In February 1997, Ram Dass had a stroke that left him with expressive aphasia, which he interprets as an act of grace. He no longer travels but continues to teach through live webcasts and at retreats in Hawaii. When asked if he could sum up his life’s message, he replied, “I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people … to me, that’s what the emerging game is all about.” Ram Dass was awarded the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award in August 1991. At 60 years of age, Ram Dass began exploring Judaism seriously for the first time. “My belief is that I wasn’t born into Judaism by accident, and so I needed to find ways to honor that”, he says. “From a Hindu perspective, you are born as what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it’s got you.”

In 2013, Ram Dass released a memoir and summary of his teaching, polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart. In an interview about the book, at age 82, he said that his earlier reflections about facing old age and death now seem naive to him. He said, in part: “Now, I’m in my 80s … Now, I am aging. I am approaching death. I’m getting closer to the end. … Now, I really am ready to face the music all around me.”

Ram Dass – Can drugs be used as vehicles of enlightenment?

During a classic interview given to the BBC of London, in 1981. Ram Dass tells his story. Ram Dass is a spiritual not a religious human being. “The entire universe is lawful in its unfolding. It’s not by chance that each event occurs. It is a set of lawful interactions. It is best to listen for your part in the play, not the chooser. We have taken a human birth to have a series of experiences which are vehicles for our awakening out of the illusion that we are exclusively separate. The journey of awakening goes from seeing yourself as separate to seeing that this “you” is only relatively real.” “You are separate on one plane, but going up one level, you see that we are not separate.”

Ram Dass was asked how he got to be the person he finally became; how he transformed himself from Richard Alpert to the internationally known Ram Dass. “I was born given the name of Richard and with the last name Alpert and born in Boston. I went to study psychology and got a Ph.D., taught at Harvard for some years and got involved in the early sixties in research with psychedelic chemicals, such as LSD I had researched these for 5 to 6 years, then went to India where I met a spiritual teacher and realized in India, that they had maps for the type of things that we were thinking, that we were the first explorers on the Earth; they already had maps of the terrains of consciousness. At the time I was given the name of Ram Dass, which means servant of God: Ram is one of the names of God and Dass means servant. I came back from India and became a somewhat of a yogi kind of a Yogi teacher, and the name Ram Dass was useful to me, because every time someone calls you The Servant of God, it reminds you about the business you are about, what Richard didn’t really do. I am not anymore a Hindu than I am a Christian or a Buddhist or a Jew or Muslim.”

Would you care to say in that Context what you are, you are not those things, or the sense or perhaps you are all of them?

“I think in every one of them it is living spirit and I Think I am completely hooked on Living Spirit, and that which truth brings you to, and at the highest or most esoteric essence of each of these religions are the same truth. I am attached to spirit not particularly to religious forms.”

Can drugs be used as Vehicles of enlightenment?

“I don’t think there is much doubt about it, for many of us at least psychedelic chemicals, not all drugs but psychedelic drugs have the capability to cut through the places you are attached and clinging to set them aside and show you a possibility, the problem is that they don’t allow you to become the possibility they only show you the possibility, and after a few hours you lose the view of the possibility and you do not always remember I made a very genuine effort in 5 years of Drug taking and didn’t work, I just kept coming out and taking down.”

Ram Dass – Dying to Know at the Illuminate Film Festival

Ram Dass and Timothy Leary and their true story are the subject of the intriguing Movie: “Dying to Know”, that will be presented at the Illuminate Film Festival in Sedona, AZ from May 27-30. Many Other Conscious Movies to enrich your soul would also be presented. Tickets are available NOW