The man who would become a forerunner of the New Age movement and play a leading role in bringing eastern spirituality to the west grew up as Richard Alpert in a Jewish family in Newton, Massachusetts. He considered himself an atheist, and after graduating from Tufts University and earning a PhD from Stanford University, was an up-and-coming psychology professor and researcher at Harvard University in the early 60s.
Things began to change when Leary joined the Harvard faculty and the two became close friends. He had been introduced to marijuana in by his first patient while working as a health services counselor at Stanford University but Leary took him farther with psilocybin, the compound that gives certain mushrooms hallucinogenic qualities.
Afterward, they had them fill out questionnaires about their experiences. 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 Psychedelics led to his second great awakening: his encounter with Maharaj-ji and spiritual transformation.
Then in , as Ram Dass was finishing Still Here, the second volume of his spiritual memoirs, he had his third great awakening, the stroke that began the final phase of his life. He was given only a 10 percent chance to survive. A lot of the fear that denial of death generated has gone from me. Death does not have to be treated as an enemy for you to delight in life.
Keeping death in your consciousness as one of the greatest mysteries and as the moment of incredible transformation imbues this moment with added richness and energy that otherwise is used up in denial. After the stroke, those observations seemed hopelessly naive, he said. The stroke had given him a far deeper understanding of what the suffering of aging, infirmity, and dying really means.
It also meant that the man who had spent much of his life helping others had to let others help him. Noting that before the stroke, he had co-authored a book about service called How Can I Help? The stroke showed me dependency, and I have people who are dependable. Following a near-fatal infection in , Ram Das was largely confined to his home on Maui. A sprawling, light-filled aerie with lush vegetation and a panoramic ocean view, it was a gift from devoted friends.
One of his pleasures was his weekly swim in the ocean, accompanied by a clutch of neighbors. After being wheeled to the shore in a dune buggy with enormous yellow balloon wheels and orange floats as armrests, he would launch himself into the sea. There, buoyed by a large black life jacket, he would paddle gently with yellow webbed mitts, a look of delight on his face. He lived out loud, with a rollicking laugh and seemingly irrepressible esprit de corps.
A burned-out Alpert sought relief in India. Alpert immediately had an extraordinary exchange with the spiritual teacher. Without Alpert telling him, Maharaji knew that his Western visitor had spent the previous night thinking about his mother, who had died six months earlier of an enlarged spleen. The holy man knew when she died and what caused her death. Alpert was stunned: He had not said a word to the mystic about the bottle of LSD he had hidden in his pack.
But he had brought the drug to India exactly for this purpose: to find a holy man who could explain the nature of its magic. He gave Maharaji micrograms, a substantial dose that should have produced a substantial reaction. But the mystic seemed unfazed. Love, Maharaji told him, was a much stronger drug. Over the next several months, Alpert stayed with the guru to study Hindu philosophy, yoga and meditation.
Back in the U. Such talk led some to scorn him as a new kind of snake-oil salesman. His father called him Rum Dum. But to many others who, like Alpert, had not found lasting fulfillment in psychedelics, Ram Dass was a sage for a new age.
During the s and s, critics attacked him for not supporting political and social causes. He responded by launching several nonprofit organizations, including the Seva Foundation, which works to alleviate disease and poverty around the world. He donated most of his speaking fees to charity, particularly his Hanuman Foundation. The affair caused him to lose credibility with his followers for a while, but he continued to write books and reach out to new audiences.
Two decades after he first burst into public consciousness as a counterculture icon, he found himself addressing large audiences of people who had never gotten high or chanted a mantra.
One night in early he was at home in bed in Marin County, contemplating an ending for his book about aging.
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