ram dass...a great teacher...listen up...

Here and Now

"What is your relationship to the mystery? Are you defending yourself from it? Are you making love to it? Are you living in it?."

with Ram Dass

When Ram Dass speaks, his voice contains the gentle sanctity of a Gregorian chant. His presence is filled with the warm fuzziness of that favorite stuffed animal you cherished as a child, and he nudges out of you, just by being there, a sense of your own divinity.

As Richard Alpert, he sewed on the psychology faculties at Stanford and the University of California, and in 1958 he began teaching at Harvard. His pioneering research with LSD and psilocybin led him into collaboration with Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner; Aldous Huxley, and Allen Ginsberg. His mind expanded in an inverse relationship to his professional reputation, however and in 1963, together with Leary, Richard Alpert was dismissed from Harvard in a flurry of hyperbolic publicity.

He continued his research, however; and in 1967 he made his first trip to India. There he met the man who was to become "the most important separate consciousness in my life, " his guru, Neem Karoli Baba. It wss Neem Karoli who gave Richard Alpert the name Ram Dass, which means "Servant of God, " and baptized his spiritual path through the transmission of dharma yoga.

In 1974, Ram Dass created the Hanuman Foundation to spread spiritually directed social action in the West. The foundation birthed the Prison Ashram Project and the Living-Dying Project, which still operate today, offering spiritual support to prison inmates, and to the dying and terminally ill. In 1978 he co-founded the Seva Foundation, (Seva means "sight" in Sanskrit), an international service organization working in public health and social justice issues, which has made major progress in combating blindness in India and Nepal. Ram Dass is the author of a number of self help hooks, and in the past ten years has lectured in over 230 cities throughout the world.

He has consciously reincarnated within his own lifetime, for when his knuckles began whitening on the ladder of success, Richard Alpert took a leap into the void and, as Ram Dass, has become a bosom buddy of emptiness. He is probably the only person with a photograph of Bob Dole on his altar: It is nestled among images of his guru, Christ, and the Buddha, and at his puja, Ram Dass attends to how his heart expands as he greets each of the first three, then flinches when he reaches Bob--an exercise that shows him where his spiritual homework lies.

We conducted this interview in his home in San Anselmo, California on August ~6, 1994. The house, of Chinese Victorian architecture, is a fitting vessel for a man who is a living bridge for the philosophies of the East and the West. The interview was punctuated with sweet silences and bubbling laughter; and took place in a magnetic field all its own. His perspective on the bends and wiggles in life 's road has elicited a humor that ensures that wherever Ram Dass goes, the cosmic giggle is not far behind.

RMN

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