Monday, December 30, 2019

Ram Dass

It was with some sadness that I read today of the demise of Ram Dass at the age of 88. Here is the obituary that appeared in The Washington Post:


Washington: Ram Dass, a popular author and white-robed 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 on December 22 at his home on Maui. He was 88.

His death was announced on his official Instagram account. He had a paralysing stroke in 1997, but the immediate cause of death was not disclosed.

"Be Here Now", Ram Dass' 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".

A seemingly inexhaustible speaker, Ram Dass led marathon-length workshops and retreats that drew thousands of followers. He stood 6-foot-3 and was sinewy from years of disciplined eating and weight training, and wore robes that eventually gave way to cardigan sweaters and trousers.

His talks were filled with self-deprecating quips: "I'm not a guru. I'm only a student, and I give a good rap." He noted his own personal story while delivering a message that centred on self-reflection and finding meaning in a superficial, chaotic world.

In the Chicago Tribune, journalist Paul Galloway once described his teachings as an "Americanised Eastern philosophy" that was "nonthreatening, non-dogmatic, positive and cheerful, a kind of I'm-OK-You're-OK approach with a Zen spin, an assortment of comforting, if vague, prescriptions."

His message, sprinkled with phrases like "planes of consciousness," resonated in particular with his generation. "When I got into these planes in earlier days," he told one audience, "it was called getting high." But he added that he later learned "the game isn't to get high; the game is to become free."

Becoming free, he said, was to have contact with our "heart-mind source," or "who you are at your deepest level."

Early life

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, Massachusetts, 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 realised 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."

He befriended Leary, a Harvard clinical psychologist a decade older who had sampled psychedelic mushrooms during a summer in Mexico, and the two set about establishing a psychedelic program at Harvard. Leary became America's best-known proselytiser of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs. "Turn on, tune in, drop out" was his perennial exhortation to millions of followers of the "flower-child" generation. "You have to go out of your mind," he said, "to use your head."

As colleagues, Leary and Alpert preached a gospel of drug-fuelled, consciousness-raising sensory perception and mental expansion. Both men were enthusiastic users - Alpert at one point said he had used LSD 328 times in five years, journalist Don Lattin wrote in a 2010 book, "The Harvard Psychedelic Club."

The duo ran experiments on LSD with Harvard graduate students, and even tried to solicit the participation of eminent Harvard Divinity School professor Paul Tillich in their LSD trials. He turned them down.

But a 1963 article about their psychedelic experimentation in the Harvard Crimson, the daily student newspaper, led to Alpert's and Leary's dismissals. The former was fired for dispensing LSD to an undergraduate student in violation of his agreement with the University, the latter for dereliction in his teaching duties.

Within two years they were running an LSD research and experimentation centre at a farm near Millbrook, New York, where Alpert undertook a study that led to his disenchantment with the hallucinogens.

As told by Lattin, he locked himself in a bowling alley with five others, where once every four hours for two weeks they ingested huge doses of LSD. But it turned out that the larger the dosage, the less effective it was. The highs were no longer so high. Moreover, by the end of two weeks all of the participants had come to thoroughly hate one another.

"It was the beginning of the end of the dream," observed Lattin. "Alpert was starting to see that LSD would not save the world."

He went to India in 1967 to seek the guidance of an Indian guru, who gave him a new name. Back in Boston, he was met by his father, aghast at the sight of his son, then 39, with his hair and beard long and unkempt. He was barefoot, wearing a long white robe and carrying a tamboura for chanting.

"Quick! Get in the car before someone sees you," George Alpert told him, according to an account in the Times. The father mocked his son as "Rum Dumb." Other family members adopted more profane variants.

Ram Dass devoted the rest of his life to teaching, lecturing and writing about the techniques and principles of his new lifestyle, which he described as staying fully present in the moment.

He wrote sequels to his first book, including "Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying" (2000) and "Be Love Now: The Path of the Heart" (2010), and was the subject of several documentary films.

His personal life was complicated. In a 1977 Times article, he said he was bisexual and intimated that he had been involved with a female follower, but also pronounced himself celibate because his "sexual hangups would have a negative influence on my teaching, my followers."

Unbeknown to him for a half-century, one fling during graduate school produced a son. In 2009, DNA testing showed that Peter Reichard, a banker in Greensboro, North Carolina, was indeed his offspring. They stayed in touch on Skype.

Long based on San Francisco, Ram Dass made his home in later years on the Hawaiian island of Maui and received visitors regularly. He came there, he said, to die.

"The game," he once told the Times, "is not about becoming somebody. It's about becoming nobody."

The Washington Post

What a wonderful way to put it:

The game is not about becoming somebody.
It's about becoming nobody.

As Meher Baba said:

To get nearer and nearer to God you have to get 
further and further away from "I", "my", "me", and "mine". 
You have not to renounce anything but your own self. 
It is as simple as that, though found to be almost impossible. 

I have an electronic copy of his 1971 book, Be Here Now, which I confess to never having read back in the seventies nor even later. After downloading the ebook I still haven't read it right through. I think I must have heard about Richard Alpert/Ram Dass at some point but it was only by watching YouTube videos that I became acquainted with him again. I remember watching a video of him in his LSD days, before his trip to India. He was certainly sharp and smart but it was while watching a video of him talking after his 1997 stroke that I was attracted to him. He came across as a sincere and humble spiritual aspirant.

Sunday, December 15, 2019

In My Life


I was listening to Johnny Cash's version of The Beatles classic "In My Life" and I was struck by the lyrics that I guess I only really listened to closely for the first time. They run like this:
In My Life
The Beatles

There are places I'll remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone, and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends, I still can recall
Some are dead, and some are living
In my life, I've loved them all

But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life, I love you more

Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more
In my life I love you more

It's a perfect devotional song to sing for Meher Baba or Muhammed, Jesus Christ, Siddharta Gautama or any other transcendent being that has graced our planet and who has inspired that degree of love in us. In the official lyrics, the words are "In my life, I'll love you more" but I prefer Johnny Cash's "In my life, I love you more" because it centres the feeling in the present rather than the future.

Of course I'll be singing to Baba. The lyrics are befitting for a 70 year old such as myself to sing because by then one may have realised that love for a divine being trumps love for mere mortals:

But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new

This is just one of several songs that a suitable for devotional purposes. A long time favourite of mine has been "How Can I Tell You" by Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam). In that song, once the words "honey" and "girl" have been taken out, it is entirely suitable. I also alter the phrase "I need to know you, Need to feel my arms around you, Feel my arms around you" to "I need to know you, Need to feel your arms around me, Feel your arms around me" which seems more appropriate. It should be up to the master to initiate the embrace.



How Can I Tell You
Cat Stevens

How can I tell you
That I love you
I love you
But I can't think of right words to say
I long to tell you
That I'm always thinking of you
I'm always thinking of you
But my words just blow away
Just blow away
It always ends up to one thing
And I can't think of right words to say

Wherever I am
I'm always walking with you
I'm always walking with you
But I look and you're not there
Whoever I'm with
I'm always, always talking to you
I'm always talking to you
And I'm sad that you can't hear
Sad that you can't hear
It always ends up to one thing
When I look and you're not there

I need to know you
Need to feel your arms around me
Feel your arms around me
Like a sea around a shore
Each night and day I pray
In hope that I might find you
In hope that I might find you
Because hearts can do no more
Can do no more
It always ends up to one thing
Still I kneel upon the floor

How can I tell you
That I love you
I love you
But I can't think of right words to say
I long to tell you
That I'm always thinking of you
I'm always thinking of you
It always ends up to one thing
And I can't think of right words to say
Van Morrison's "Hymns to the Silence" is also very devotional, as are many of his songs:



Here are the lyrics:
Hymns to the Silence
Van Morrison 
 
Oh my dear, oh my dear sweet love
Oh my dear, oh my dear sweet love
When I'm away from you, when I'm away from you
Well I feel, yeah, well I feel so sad and blue
Well I feel, well I feel so sad and blue
Oh my dear, oh my dear, oh my dear sweet love
When I'm away from you, I just have to sing, my hymns
Hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence
Hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence 
Oh my dear, oh my dear sweet love it's a long, long journey
Long, long journey, journey back home
Back home to you, feel you by my side
Long journey, journey, journey
Yeah in the midnight, in the midnight, I burn the candle
Burn the candle at both ends, burn the candle at both ends
Burn the candle at both ends, burn the candle at both ends
And I keep on, 'cause I can't sleep at night
Until the daylight comes through
And I just, and I just, have to sing
Sing my hymns to the silence
Hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence
My hymns to the silence 
I want to go out in the countryside
Oh sit by the clear, cool, crystal water
Get my spirit, way back to the feeling
Deep in my soul, I want to feel
Oh so close to the One, close to the One
Close to the One, close to the One
And that's why, I keep on singing
My hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence 
Oh my hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence
Oh hymns to the silence, oh hymns to the silence
Oh hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence
Oh my dear, my dear sweet love 
Can you feel the silence? can you feel the silence?
Can you feel the silence? can you feel the silence? 
Hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence
Hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence
Hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence
Hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence
Hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence.