Wonderful Grace

Subtitle: In the sixties, after he squeezed everything he could out of hallucination mushroom experiences, Richard Alpert met his Guru, who told him: “Be conscious, and serve those who suffer”. He became Ram Dass, servant of God, and devoted his life to help hundreds of thousands people. Even after he had a stroke, he continues to write and give lectures. Recently, a documentary movie on his life, called “Fierce Grace”, was released. Dana G. Peleg spent some time with him.

Ram Dass is one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met. No, he doesn’t look younger than his years on Earth. He is  a heavy-bodied man, sitting in a wheel chair. His features are handsome, but this is not where his beauty dwells. He has light. He is present. He is totally present, and this presence does not swallow other people.  On the contrary, this light, this beauty, makes me feel so much love, to grow, to breathe. He sits in his place and seems planted in it, as if he has always sat there, and at the same time seems like he could just walk to the kitchen, and get a glass of water.  In his book he wrote that despite the pressure to start walking again, after the stroke he had a couple of years ago, he feels comfortable in his chair.

He speaks slowly, and the conversation with him is full of silences, but is not fragmented. If I wouldn’t have been told, I wouldn’t have guessed it’s due to that stroke. It’s a very focused speech, that welcomes the listener into the speaker’s world. This way, when I complete a word, or a sentence of his, I don’t feel like I was interrupting him rudely.  In these moments we are together, two souls in a journey, and just like souls, the time has no significance for us. I think I fully understand now what a true guru is (unlike all the horror stories I’ve heard), the person who by his or her own entity shows me the divine inside of me, eye-to-eye.

But, of course, it wasn’t always like this. In the beginning there was Richard Alpert, the young and beloved son of a rich Jewish family. His father was a successful attorney and the CEO of the New Haven Railroad Company, mother did charity work, and the bright kid was sent to the best schools. He didn’t want to become a doctor, and chose Psychology. By the age of 27, in 1958, he was already a Professor at the Department of Psychology in the prestigious Harvard University, and later even got a chair in the Personality Research Center. He had a successful career, a racing car and even a small plane, he was popular among students and professors and he published books and articles and had patients too. It seems everything was laid in front of him. But under the surface he felt great frustration, discomfort and lived a double life, as a closeted homosexual, as he told me. Even though he went through Psychoanalysis, he felt something was wrong. “And the something wrong was that I just didn’t know” he wrote in his famous book, “Be Here Now”, “although I kept feeling all along the way that somebody else must know, even though I didn’t. The nature of life was a mystery to me. All the stuff I was teaching was like little molecular bits of stuff but they didn’t add up…”

In 1961, a new professor came to the department, and he also felt that psychology didn’t give real answer to people’s questions. His name was Dr. Timothy Leary, and the two of them befriended quickly. After a short while Leary discovered mushrooms and the LSD. “I learned more in six or seven hours of this experience”, said Leary to Alpert, “than I had learned in all my years as a Psychologist”.

The experience Alpert underwent changed his world totally. “The first part of the experience”, he wrote, “was comparable to a strong pot-high. A little bit more dramatic, a little more intense… A few hours later a deep calm pervaded my being. The rug crawled and the pictures smiled, all of which delighted me. Then I saw a figure standing about 8 feet away, in a cap and a golden hood, like a professor”.  The figure was no other than he himself, as a Harvard Professor, and separated itself from him. And so, 30 something years old Dick Alpert watched all his figures walking away from him: the social cosmopolite, the cellist, the lover, the pilot, and so on. The last figure he saw was his Richard Alpertness. “Sweat broke out on my forehead. I wasn’t at all sure I could do without being Richard Alpert”. He felt that his body was disappearing, and then heard the question: “But who is minding the store”? When he finally was able to focus on the question, he realized to the fact, that although everything by which he knew himself, even his body and life itself, had gone – he was fully aware. “Not only that, but this aware “I” was watching the whole drama, including the panic, with calm compassion”.

He was asked by Journalist and Writer, David Jay Brown, “when did Dr. Richard Alpert became Ram Dass”, and he replied: “I took my first Psilocybin on Friday night, and on Monday morning I was lecturing on stuff which was basically lies, as far as I was concern”. Later Alpert and Leary were thrown out of the University, and went, with a group of activists, to the Millbrook farm in the State of New York. They started giving workshops and lectures about psychedelics all over the US. It was Leary, the constant rebel, who coined the slogan:  “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out”. It meant: Use LSD to get inside your self, tune in to other realms of consciousness, look differently at the outside world.

And so, another problem arose: coming down. “I realized that no matter how ingenious my experimental designs were, and how high I got, I came down”. He wrote. “I was around the best people, but even if they had the Eastern models, they couldn’t wear them – the suits didn’t fit. We just didn’t know enough. We had the maps, but we couldn’t read them”.

And years later, how did you experience trips as a conscious person?

Ram Dass: “It’s the wisdom of inverse. You are inside, you see things from the inside. It’s all very vivid. The structures I learned in the East helped me remember the experience. This way, for example, I could identify energy of the fifth Chakra. I could describe what I saw”. In other words, he learned to read the map. “But”, he warns, “it’s a dangerous tool. I saw too many people who were burned by this stuff. I recommend working with it in certain conditions. Without kids around, for example”.  These days he talks mostly about marijuana.  He feels it’s a magical medicine, in addition to being a tool for expanding consciousness. “It’s much less strong than LSD, less intense. It’s like baby steps”.

So, you recommand taking a beginners course in marijuana, and only later the advanced course in LSD?

Ram Dass: “Certainly”.

And so, arrived Alpert to India and met Neem Karoli Baba, AKA Maharajji (Not the Beatles’ guru). The night earlier, when he got out and looked at the stars, he felt his Mother’s (who died before the trip) presence very strongly. “I was thinking about her – not about how she died or anything like that. I just feel her presence. And I feel great love for her, and then I go back to bed”.

The next day, when he came, with his fellow, Bhagwan Dass to the guru, the following scene occurred: Bhagwan Dass got out of the borrowed Land Rover jeep they drove, went to the guru, threw himself on the ground, his hands stretched out and touch Maharajji’s feet. “And he’s crying and the man is patting him on the head and I don’t know what’s happening. I’m standing on the side and thinking: I’m not going to touch his feet. I don’t have to…” Next, the man turned to him, and referring to the jeep, he asked: “Will you give it to me?” Alpert resisted, but Maharajji continued and asked if he would buy him the jeep. Alpert who came from a family of fund-raisers for the United Jewish Appeal freaked out:  “He doesn’t even know my name and already he wants a $7,000 vehicle.  ‘Well’, I said, ‘Maybe’…”

Then Maharajji served them a meal of kings, and called Alpert. He looked at him and said: “’You were out there under the stars last night’.

-‘Um-hum’

‘You were thinking about your mother’

‘yes’ (‘wow’, I thought”, he recalls in his book, “he is really good. I never mentioned that to anybody’).

‘She died last year’.

‘Um-hum’.

‘She got very big in the stomach before she died’.

‘yes’”.

The guru leaned back and said: Spleen. She died of spleen”.

Alpert felt tremendous wrenching and started to cry. He cried for hours. He was brought into the ashram, and changed his name to Ram Dass, servant of God, and began studying from Maharajji and other teachers. “I asked my guru, how I would become enlightened, and he told me: ‘be conscious and serve those who suffer’”. When he returned to the US, he was completely changed: his beard had grew, he wore a robe and strings, and walked barefoot. He started teaching. This time he taught Eastern spirituality, in groups and workshops. He wrote and published, with the Lama Foundation he established, the book “Be Here Now”, which made him famous.  Ram Dass founded also Hanuman foundation, whose Prison/Ashram project gave inmates a way for spiritual work, and was a co-founder of Seva Foundation, that finances eye surgeries in Nepal and provides health services for Native Americans, among other activities. Most of his income is dedicated to this foundation. Another project he was involved in is The Dying Project, in which he used his knowledge on consciousness to support dying people and help them cope with the biggest fear of all, the fear of death.

In addition to all that, he gives lectures, workshops (you can see his busy schedule in his web site) and seminars on community, business, spirituality and other matters, in which spirituality is used as a tool for social growing, not only personal. In the unofficial Ram Dass site he is quoted under the headline:  “Conscious Action”: “You don’t complete your inner work before you do your outer work. Nor do you say:  ‘well, the hell with the inner work; I’ll go do the outer work because it is so important and pressing. That is not conscious either”.

And that was the question I wanted to ask Ram Dass: What a spiritual leader as himself, who witnessed all the sorrow and pain of the world, who wrote about aging, and dying and death, who worked with and for people of all kinds, and even as an individual who has been living on the Earth for over 70 years, what can he tell us, today, in Israel? “War captivates”, he says. “In order not to be captivated, you need to get deep inside, and find loving compassion and wisdom.  You can use them to handle the situation”.

I’m telling him about the fear to go outside, the harsh energies I feel, the violence that is everywhere. I describe how helpless I feel in front of a regime that recycles that violence, which closes, and destroys and annihilates. He senses my pain. “Oh boy” is his first reaction. “We feel the same about our government”, he tells me, “Citizens have no power. It’s like Germany in the 1930s. You want to give people a tool to handle their fear?”

There is a long silence and then he continues: “Most of the people are afraid of the suffering and death in the future. The future is thoughts. You are afraid of your thoughts. The way here, is to be in the resent, the present that includes the fear. You can’t reject fear. You have to experience it fully. Otherwise you are afraid of fear”.

I feel that the fear is running politics here, in a vicious circle of victim and victimizer.

Ram Dass: “You can look for a movement that works from the heart, and invest your energies in it. Make sure they don’t do uncompassionate things, trying to make the government fall. It doesn’t have to be a political movement. It should work from people’s hearts”.

In “Being Love” you wrote that one of your exercises is to put the picture of the politician you don’t like, on your altar, with the Buddha and guru pictures.

Ram Dass: “The only way to get to Sharon is through his heart”.

I also feel that there is no more use in demonstrations, at least for me.

Ram Dass:  “That’s right. I was invited to talk in a ceremony for the September 11th, in the name of peace, against the government. The word ‘Peace’ became a war word. I didn’t accept”.

Five and a half years ago Ram Dass had a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body. This was, in fact, inseparable part of the writing process of his book, “Still Here”. He had been writting the book for eighteen months, “but somehow the book’s conclusion eluded me”, he wrote in the preface to the book.  “Lying there in the dark, I wondered why what I’d written seemed so incomplete, not quite rounded, grounded, or whole. I tried to imagine what life would be like if I were very old – not an active person of 65, traveling the world incessantly as a teacher and a speaker, caught up in his public role – but as someone of ninety, say, with failing sight and failing limbs. I fantasized how that old man would think, how he’d move and speak, what desires he might have as he slowly surveyed the world”. During the process, he noticed his leg fell asleep. The phone rang, and when he got up to answer it, he fell to the floor. “In my mind”, he wrote, “that was still part of my ‘old man fantasy’. I didn’t realize that my leg was no longer working because I’d had a stroke”.

He picked up the phone, and the friend on the other side, who sensed that something was wrong, called Ram Dass’ secretaries, and he was rushed to the hospital, still not completely in his body.

There is a belief that if you do spiritual work, nothing bad can happen to you.

Ram Dass: “Yes, I believed in it too, but then I was stroked. It certainly feels unblessed, ungraced. I woke up in a hospital and all I could do was count the wires on the ceiling. I couldn’t think even one spiritual thought. I was very disappointed”.

“The stroke happened to me for many different reasons, including karmic and spiritual ones. But on the physical level, one reason for the stroke was the fact I was ignoring my body”, he writes. “I had spent most of my life keeping my Awareness “free of my body”, as I thought of it then; but I can see now that I also ignoring my body, pushing it away. By forgetting to take my blood pressure medicine, I showed how I was disregarding my body… so then came the stroke”.

Ram Dass differentiates Healing from Curing. “Curing”, he says, “brings you to the place where you have been before; Healing brings you closer to God. I haven’t been cured by my stroke, but I have been healed by it, in many ways”, he continues.

In his book, in the last chapter he called “Stroke Yoga” he describes his life after the stroke, and the process that made him acknowledge that “fierce grace” had blessed with. “Fierce Grace” is also the title of a documentary movie on Ram Dass’ life, by Mickey Lemmel, that I hope we’ll get to see in Israel too.

The stroke also gave Ram Dass Aphasia, a speech defect that causes a gap between the clear thought and the verbal process. In other words:  a difficulty to find one’s words. For Ram Dass, “a word merchant”, as he puts it, that was a great loss. However, today he chooses his word carefully, and doesn’t need many of them. He is quieter and uses Vipassana meditation to become more aware to his pain. In the spiritual level, he sees the stroke as a lesson his guru, Maharajji, gave him, as a lightning bolt that woke him up and brought him to a new place in his consciousness. The stroke pushed him into the Soul level, brought more love into his world, and more humanity.  “I saw all theses hearts opening all around me. I had try to do that, through my lectures and my tapes, and here it was, happening by itself”.  He wrote.

This is Ram Dass, the man who was one of the LSD pioneers in the sixties, who brought the Eastern philosophies to the West in the seventies, who in the Eighties, used his spiritual knowledge to help those in need, who taught the Baby Boomers to age, in the Nineties. And this man tell us, now, in the 2000 years, in complete confidence, that faith and love are stronger than any change, stronger than aging, and probably also – than death too.

 The name has double meaning: it refers to a beautiful Israeli movie by that name, about a young gay man who is dying of AIDS (by Amos Gutman, who dies of AIDS), and, of course to the documentary about Ram Dass, and the famous hymn.