It has been 25 years since a hot-shot young Harvard professor named Dick Alpert sat in the kitchen of a friend`s home in Newton, Mass., and swallowed 10 milligrams of psylocybin, the first hallucinogenic drug he had ever taken. The friend was a Harvard colleague named Timothy Leary, and although That Night in Tim Leary`s kitchen may not be as momentous an event as the shot heard `round the world or the splitting of the atom, it nevertheless helped to trigger a generational conflict and a chain reaction that would affect many, many people, not the least of whom was Richard Alpert.
As every student of modern American history knows, Alpert and Leary would become pivotal figures in the enormous social, political and cultural upheavals that occurred in this country in the `60s and `70s. They were, in a sense, among the founders of the counterculture, psychedelic division.
Ultimately, their involvement with these powerful chemicals would lead to their dismissal from the Harvard faculty and propel Alpert toward a course marked by sharp turns and stunning transformations.
In 1967, on a pilgrimage to India, Alpert would meet Baba Neem Karoli, a holy man, and experience a religious conversion. The guru would give him the name Ram Dass, which means ”servant of God.” (It`s pronounced Rahm Dahss
–the a`s are soft.)
While these incarnations seem, on one level, breathtakingly bizarre, they are also, on another, perfectly consistent with our national penchant for making ourselves over, with what writer Nicholas Lemann refers to as ”that quintessential American trait, the desire to cast aside everything and start anew.”
From this perspective, what could be more American than going from super- straight, over-achieving college professor to zonked-out pied piper of hallucinogenic drugs to mystic, meditating popularizer of Eastern religion?
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It`s nearing 7:30 p.m. on a bitterly cold Sunday night. Despite the weather, almost 800 people have gathered in the sanctuary of the Peoples Church of Chicago, which is at 941 W. Lawrence in Uptown, to hear a lecture by the former Richard Alpert, who is now 55 years old.
Shortly before he appears, a young man excitedly turns to his date, who apparently is seeing Ram Dass for the first time. ”I hope the shakti isn`t too strong for you tonight,” he says.
Shakti is a Hindi word meaning energy. The young man is concerned that the occasion may simply be too overwhelming for the young woman.
What`s instructive here is that this is an audience with a vocabulary of words like shakti and karma and ashram, a stand-by-your-mantra group of people who aren`t necessarily talking about a former catcher with the New York Yankees when they mention yogi.
They are, for the most part, your basic peace-and-love crowd, gentle truth seekers with a disposition toward answers and practices from Eastern religions and spiritual, oneness-with-the-universe concepts.
They are also predominantly white, middle-class, well-educated college types, political leftists, anti-nukers, remnants and descendants of the flower-power people of yesteryear or present-day disdainers of consumerism and greed.
Shortly after 7:30 p.m., Ram Dass walks onto the raised pulpit area, steps out of his shoes and peels off his socks. Then he settles onto a wide, white wooden chair with a red cushion, folding his long legs into the lotus position.
He`s tall, perhaps 6 feet 3 inches, lean and bald. His mustache is gray, full and neatly trimmed. He`s wearing a pink cardigan sweater, a mauve, open- necked sport shirt and dark gray trousers, resembling a banker on his day off. Only a few years ago, he wore long, flowing robes, a long frizzy beard and allowed what hair he had left to grow to his shoulders.
On a small table to his left are two red apples, a vase with two red roses, a pitcher of water and a drinking glass. He folds his hands in his lap, closes his eyes and waits for the noise to subside. A microphone is two inches from his mouth.
”Hello, Chicago,” he says.
People in the back are having trouble hearing him.
”It`s all right if you can`t hear me,” he says. ”You know what I know or you wouldn`t be here. I`m just a mouthpiece for a process you`re all going through.”
What`s perhaps most remarkable about him is his staying power. For more than two decades, he has demonstrated an amazing resiliency and an uncanny grasp of how to package himself and his message.
Through personal setbacks and great mood swings in the nation`s psyche, he has maintained his place on stage, holding onto his constituency from the old days and reaching a younger generation as well.
The loyal core of followers who buy his books, attend his lectures and consider him a spiritual father figure are a fairly homogenous mix. ”There`s a much wider range of ages in my audiences than you might think,” Ram Dass had said in an interview that morning. ”Many have never taken drugs, have never gone to India. I get people who say, `My grandmother gave me a copy of
”Be Here Now.” ` ”
That`s the title of his first book, which is part biography and part training manual in Eastern enlightenment; it was published in 1971 and is now distributed in paperback by Crown Publishing. (It retails for $7.77, is in its 27th printing and has reportedly sold more than 700,000 copies.)
”I`m not a Buddhist or Hindu, a Jew or a Christian,” he tells the audience. It`s limiting and dehumanizing to judge people solely by their race, gender, age, looks or zodiac signs, he says. ”It`s our minds, our ego structures, that make us look at people this way.”
We can learn, he says, to find the ”planes of consciousness” that rise above the mind`s constraints and enable us to know that we are one with all fellow human beings. ”When I got into these planes in earlier days,” he says, ”it was called getting high.” But since then he has come to realize that ”the game isn`t to get high; the game is to become free.”
To be free, he says, we must go to our ”heart-mind source,” the
”center” of ”who you are at your deepest level.”
Ram Dass is charming, witty, warm and self-deprecating, an engaging and entertaining speaker, and the Americanized Eastern philosophy he dispenses is nonthreatening, nondogmatic, positive and cheerful, a kind of I`m-OK-You`re-OK approach with a Zen spin, an assortment of comforting, if vague, prescriptions.
But Ram Dass responds to a need that people have ”to speak of the unspeakable,” to talk about friendship and love and death and who we are and why we are here, to talk about how to live a life of value, how to relate to others and to make sense of a world that often seems mad, out of control.
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In ”Be Here Now,” Ram Dass writes of growing up in ”a Jewish anxiety-ridden, high-achieving tradition” in which success was essential, a duty. He is the son of a prominent family; his father was a founder of Brandeis University and president of the New Haven Railroad.
By 1961, when Alpert turned 30, he was more than measuring up to expectations: Tufts B.A., Stanford Ph.D., visiting professorship at the University of California at Berkeley and, the pinnacle, Harvard, where he was an associate professor of clinical psychology.
He was a yuppie before we knew there were such creatures. ”I had an apartment that was filled with antiques and I gave very charming dinner parties,” he writes. ”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 was he happy?
No. He was merely playing a game that was becoming more and more disillusioning. He had spent a bundle on five years of psychoanalysis, but before each lecture, he would still get ”extraordinary diarrhea and tension.”
His initial blast-off in the Leary kitchen would immediately alter his past perceptions. ”The rug crawled and the pictures smiled,” he writes. A few minutes later, to his horror, he saw his limbs and then his torso disappear. Or seem to disappear.
After the panic subsided, he ”felt a new kind of calmness.” He had discovered ”a place where `I` existed independent of social and physical identity.” It was an ”I” that ”was beyond Life and Death,” an ”I” that was ”wise rather than knowedgeable,” an ”I” that ”really knew.”
From the beginning, Alpert and Leary were a team. Convinced that they`d discovered the key to a new frontier of consciousness, they proceeded to feed generous amounts of psylocybin and LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) to their students, themselves and just about anyone else who was interested. It was all for research, they told Harvard.
The administration tolerated this departure from conventional scientific inquiry for almost three years, finally calling a halt and firing them both in 1963. Leary and Alpert continued their experiments in Mexico, and later they would issue a call to America`s youth in a memorable slogan typical of the rebellious naivete of the period: Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out.
A sizeable number of young people did.
Eventually, Leary and Alpert would go their separate ways, but before his moment of salvation in India, there would, for Alpert, be several drug-heavy, angst-laden years of searching for Truth, Beauty and Something Worthy and Significant to do with his life. The big problem, he writes, was that you couldn`t stay high forever.
When he met his guru, ”a little man in his 60s or 70s sitting with a blanket around him” on a hillside, he says that for the first time in his life, ”I felt I was in the presence of someone who didn`t want anything from me and who loved me unconditionally. This touched me very deeply.”
The new Ram Dass went the full robe-bead-and-barefoot route, and, according to a New York Times Magazine article, when he returned to Boston, his father was so embarrassed when he picked him up at the airport, he quickly hustled him into the car. Rum Dum, he would call his 39-year-old son in exasperation.
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”Now I take care of my father,” Ram Dass tells the audience. ”He`s 88 years old now, and we love each other very much. We sit and look at a tree or watch ball games together. He is a much nicer person now. When he was dynamic and powerful and successful, he had no time for his family.”
The way to know God, he says, is to serve people.
”We want the last half of the `80s to be remembered as the compassionate `80s,” he says. ”We want to overcome the materialism of the yuppies that has characterized the first half of the decade.”
Serving others is the theme of the 60-city speaking tour that has brought him to Chicago. All proceeds, minus expenses, are going to the Seva Foundation, which sponsors health projects in this country, Nepal and Central America. (Its address is Seva Foundation, Dept. H, 108 Spring Lake Drive, Chelsea, Mich. 48118.)
Ram Dass is board chairman of Seva (Sanskrit for ”service”), and his new book, ”How Can I Help?” (Alfred A. Knopf, $5.95 in paperback), co-written with Paul Gorman, an official of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, is dedicated to the foundation.
Since his conversion, Ram Dass has written six books, held innumerable retreats and made regular speaking tours. In addition, he oversees projects with the dying and with meditation for prison inmates through his Hanuman Foundation (Box 1558, Boulder, Colo. 80306).
In short, he`s an entrepreneurial holy man, a one-man, humanitarian conglomerate well attuned to today`s search-for-excellence climate. Yet. ”I`m not a guru,” he has said. ”I`m only a student, and I give a good rap.”
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He`s also the first to admit that it isn`t always easy to find those special planes of consciousness where the heart and the mind are one. ”Sure, I get depressed,” he has said. ”And I try everything Ram Dass teaches to get out of it, and sometimes it doesn`t work.”
And yes, he`s still as neurotic as ever. ”The difference today, though,” he says, ”is that I don`t let my neuroses control my life.”
One of his lowest points followed his break-up with Joya Santayana, whom Ram Dass once called ”the only enlightened being in the West.”
Their intense, ill-fated relationship during a year in the mid-`70s was chronicled in the New York Times Magazine article, which appeared in 1977 and was written by Colette Dowling, the author of several books, including ”The Cinderella Complex.”
Joya Santayana, Dowling writes, was formerly Joyce Green, ”a Jewish housewife from Brooklyn in her mid-30s who had been married to a Roman Catholic since she was 15” and who ”while doing yogic breathing exercises she`d learned in a weight-loss class” went into ”a religious trance state” that lasted for several hours and compelled Ram Dass to seek her out.
For a while, each was devoted to the other. Ram Dass was especially taken with Joya`s ”stigmata” sign. ”Joya sometimes bleeds a quart a day,” he would write. ” . . . it`s horrible to behold when the blood pours from her mouth.”
Dowling pressed Ram Dass on this and other points. She writes that he admitted that ”he misled people about the nature of his relationship with Joya and about her `powers.` ” Actually, he saw her spit up ”a pinkish liquid” into a tissue only once.
He said he called her the ”only enlightened being in the West” during an interview with The New Age Journal because ”she`d be furious and carry on” if he hadn`t.
He would not say whether he and Joya had a sexual relationship; he claimed then to be celibate because of a fear ”my sexual hang-ups would have a negative influence on my teaching, my followers.”
Dowling asked if he considered his ”being bisexual a hangup,” and he replied he did, because during his acid trips, he`d seen the way ”nature meant it to be between a man and a woman.”
He said that although he didn`t view himself as a holy man, ”I did allow that consideration to exist in the minds of others.”
In a scathing conclusion, Dowling wrote: ”It has been an outstanding mark of our recent cultural history that we give great power to people who consistently refuse to accept responsibility for their behavior, people who will lie blatantly and then detach themselves from any sense of personal guilt –people, in short, whose symptoms are close to, if not outright, psychopathic . . . . We actually choose not to see. We keep voting for these guys, and taking their classes, and buying their books. We keep forgiving and forgetting, trying to be `fair` . . . . Far better to have tainted heroes than none at all. Far better to be led astray than to have to grow up and find out we`re all alone.”
When he was asked about the Dowling article, Ram Dass said that it had been rewritten by an editor at the New York Times who was resentful of him and that he`d seen both versions.
”That`s just not true,” Dowling said in a telephone interview.
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After speaking for two hours and leading the audience in meditation, Ram Dass calls for a 30-minute break before an ”Ask Dr. Dass” question session, which will last until 11:30 p.m.
Asked about Werner Erhard, the founder of est, he replies: ”Yes, I`ve met him. He used to come to my lectures years ago. Since then he`s packaged my material exquisitely . . . .”
Asked about drugs, he replies that he takes LSD ”every few years to see what I forgot . . . . But I have no great desire for it.”
Asked about how to detect false teachings, he replies: ”What one sees in another human being is a projection of what you need. If your heart is pure, you`ll get a pure teaching.”
