Ram dass who is

We initially encountered Ram Dass's work back in My wife, while going through a difficult time, was given a paperback copy of the book Grist for the Mill by her kindhearted, kirtan -playing landlord in Northampton, Massachusetts. That summer, at the beach, we read each other passages as we lay in the sun; soon, also at the beach, a new friend gave her his copy of Be Here Now —Ram Dass's book of hypnotically illustrated spiritual exhortations.

That title was a fixture on every bona fide hippie bookshelf in the '70s and has sold over 2 million copies. But it wasn't until last year, when I was trying to find a more soul-fulfilling way to burn up the time on my daily commute, that I discovered the podcast and fully immersed myself in Ram Dass's message.

Having detailed his origin story in the first few episodes—from hotshot Harvard professor to psychedelic pioneer to Hindu devotee to holy-man-at-large preaching across hippie America—Ram Dass's beautifully unfolding lecture more or less abandons linear autobiography by part five. In it, he explores spiritual insights he gleaned from two trips to India, in , slip-sliding between key principles of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christ consciousness while effortlessly tying it all back to modern life in the Vietnam-era West.

As my wife and I hurtled down the highway listening to the podcast, one of Ram Dass's digressions gonged me so good it would have been safer if I had pulled over the car. Trumpism had just dawned in America. The air was rife with fear, anger, and bluster: The Women's March had taken place in January and then Charlottesville in August. All of it was still raw. I remember being particularly anxious about the way the political moment was playing out on social media. My feeds were full of strident partisan rhetoric and hard lines drawn in the sand.

If you're not angry, you're not paying attention. That's when Ram Dass articulated an idea that held as much truth and force in as it did when he said it 49 years earlier. The protesters create the John Birchers just as much as the John Birchers create the protesters. That as long as you are attached to whatever pole you are representing, the vibrations which you are sending out are creating its polar opposite around you.

If you can do whatever is your karma—which may be walking in a protest march or fighting in Vietnam, or being a conservative or a liberal or being a housewife or being a yogi—and can do it without attachment, and do it fully and thoroughly but without attachment, then you do not create that karma. You do not create the polar opposite. I had listened to this episode before, but I had not really heard it until that moment.

I rewound the passage repeatedly until my wife asked if we could please let the episode play on. As the parallels between today's fraught political environment and that of the Vietnam era multiply, Ram Dass's words and story are resonating again. In , Ram Dass is not exactly famous—not like he was in the s—but his fan base is large and ardent.

It consists of aging baby boomers, mostly. But there are younger audiences catching on, too. Marc Benioff, the chairman of Salesforce. I recently saw a young woman reading The Alienist on the New York City subway with a tattoo, in Courier typewriter font, that read: Be present.

Be patient. Be here now. Mindfulness as a business tool has exploded in recent years, as young entrepreneurs mimic their own guru, Steve Jobs, who is said to have credited Be Here Now with getting him to try LSD. Jobs was also a major contributor to Ram Dass's Seva Foundation, which strives to alleviate blindness across the world.

And Ram Dass's psychedelic work—from back when he was still a Harvard psychologist—is being actively reconsidered: Michael Pollan's No. Yoga, organic foods, the Grateful Dead, and Baba Ram Dass, too—all of them are back in fashion, and Ram Dass's Love Serve Remember Foundation has been right there to meet them, through modern tools like the Here and Now podcast episodes and counting and the babaramdass Instagram account nearly K followers.

Back in June, when tickets to a five-day Ram Dass retreat in Maui set for November went on sale, they sold out in six minutes. Even a throw blanket that hangs over the side of the large pinkish faux-suede couch bears the guru's likeness, with his elephantine shoulders and crooked smile.

I was a clean Buddhist. The living room altar also holds figures of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman servant to Ram and the deity closely associated with Maharajji and his devotees and the Buddha, plus images of Christ, Gandhi, Mary, and other saints—as well as those of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The message is simple: Love everyone.

Hello, Buddha! Good morning, Maharajji! Hello, Bob. Because after all, [Bob Dole] is merely God in drag, saying, I bet you won't recognize me this way, will you? They're all faces of the beloved. When I enter the kitchen, where he sits in his wheelchair, Ram Dass, who is 87, offers me a squeeze of his good left hand and says softly that he would like to do our interview upstairs, in his study, which he gets to by mechanical lift. Ram Dass had a stroke on February 19, , and it left him paralyzed on his right side.

It also caused expressive aphasia, which inhibits the exquisitely gifted lecturer's ability to find his words. His care and his household are administered by a friendly, tough, joyful woman I know as Dassi Ma, although her e-mail signature just says Kathleen Murphy. There are others—I don't know exactly what to call them friends? Up in the study, a strong, suntanned young man named Govinda helps Ram Dass from his wheelchair into a threadbare and faded La-Z-Boy that faces out the window.

Just a few hundred yards past the Jurassic Park-size tropical plants and giant red flowers is the coastline.

Above it, the horizon line of the ocean hovers. The room is filled with the squawks and chirps of birds, and Ram Dass is surrounded here, too, by prayer flags and many images of the smiling guru. Truthfully, I am nervous to have an audience with this octogenarian pioneer of human consciousness—what do you ask a man who has simply acted as the mirror for your own self-discovery?

So I start with the most basic of questions about his daily routine. Ram Dass said the subjects found bliss, heightened physical senses, accelerated thought processes, a relaxing of biases and hallucinatory experiences, such as seeing God.

Ram Dass and Leary began including the hallucinogenic drug LSD, which like psilocybin was legal at the time, in their experiments, but Harvard was upset that they were using students as subjects and fired them in The two former professors later moved to a mansion in Millbrook, New York, made available to them by heirs to the fortune of industrialist Andrew Mellon, and continued their experimentation there.

In search for a more permanent enlightenment, later that year Ram Dass went to India, as members of the Beatles would in He found what he was looking for in the form of Hindu mystic Neem Karoli Baba, also known as Maharaj-ji. Alpert said that through Maharaj-ji he found a spiritual love deeper than anything he had experienced. The guru gave him the name Ram Dass, which means servant of God, and he returned to the United States. Ram Dass passed from earth a few hours ago. How perfect that he left this plane on the first night of the Festival of Lights.

May he be forever blessed. American producer Judd Apatow also said Ram Dass "had an enormous impact on my life". Writer Bill Corbett said while Ram Dass was "pretty much a cliche s white-guy-who-studied-in-India guru" at first, "he was never content in the superficial for long". RIP Ram Dass. Ms Mandel recalled how he talked about speaking with a dying woman who complained that death was very boring. I had not thought of that before. Ram Dass was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Boston, Massachusetts.

His father was president of a railroad company. Ram Dass wrote that he came from "a Jewish anxiety-ridden high-achieving tradition". In , he earned a degree in psychology at Tuft's College and his doctorate at Stanford University in He began teaching and researching psychology at Harvard in During that time, as he would later describe, he lived in an apartment full of antiques, drove a Mercedes-Benz, owned a Cessna plane and vacationed in the Caribbean.

Leary helped popularise s counter-culture under the motto "turn on, tune in, drop out". Leary was researching the effects of psilocybin, the compound responsible for the hallucinogenic properties of some mushrooms.

Leary gave Ram Dass his first taste of psilocybin at a party. Ram Dass wrote of his first experience: "The rug crawled and the pictures smiled, all of which delighted me. The two began experimenting on the therapeutic uses of the compound, until , when both were fired from Harvard - Ram Dass because he gave LSD to an undergraduate student and Leary for shirking his teaching duties.