Ram Dass: Still Here Now

By Katherine Lemons, WireTap. Posted May 30, 2000.

Baba Ram Dass is, as the title of his new book proclaims, "Still Here."

Ram Dass, known by most for his consciousness exploration and counter-cultural writing at the height of the 1960s, has joined the ranks of many Vietnam-era activists increasingly interested in what the media has billed the "new student activism." Accompanied by yoga instructor Sat Santokh, Ram Dass has gone back on the road to push his new book -- once again turning his attention toward a college audience.

Ram Dass continues to pursue his life-long goal of pushing others to expand the limits of their consciousness, equipped with open hearts and a firm resolve in the importance of social activism. Some of the young people he seeks to connect with appear to be stimulated by second-hand tales of the '60s and '70s. In late May, Ram Dass and Santokh spoke about the merging of activism and spirituality -- which they advocate through an initiative called "Creating Our Future" -- at the Ananda Church of Self Realization, south of the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto.

The crowd which filled the sanctuary represented two groups who share Ram Dass's concerns: mainly those seeking knowledge about aging and dying, and those engaged in activism and spirituality. The crowd was predominantly middle-aged, but approximately fifteen Stanford students sat on the floor at the front of the church. The flow of words from Ram Dass's mouth was punctuated by long pauses -- the result of a recent stroke which left him with a paralyzed right side and slight aphasia.

Ram Dass, formerly Richard Alpert, received a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford in the early 1960s before joining the Harvard Psychology Department. During the forum, he told the audience, "I am having a personal experience. This whole area has for me associations with my doctoral thesis and me teaching at this university. I have gotten some chills around here."

Ram Dass's early career was that of a traditional academic. He held appointments in four Harvard University departments, and had spent time as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Then, along with Harvard colleague Timothy Leary, he began to explore the use of psychedelic drugs as tools for expanding the realm of consciousness, and was fired from Harvard in 1963 for distributing LSD to his students. After his dismissal, Alpert traveled to India where he deepened the exploration of consciousness he had experienced during his psychedelic "trips" in new ways. He spent a year with his teacher -- who he refers to as Maharijji -- and returned to the United States bearing the name Baba Ram Dass, servant of God. He wrote the book "Be Here Now" which established him as a guru of the early 1970s and hero of the counter-culture movement.

In the book, he traces his own personal "transformation" in three stages which he calls the social science stage, the psychedelic stage and the yogi stage. The older members of his audience at Stanford have followed a different path -- with stages that might be defined as the spiritual stage, the establishment stage, and a stage which, for many, appears to be a more mature return to the first.

Sara Davidson writes in the New York Times magazine, "during the years that 'Be Here Now' was circulating among people I knew, it seemed that many were 'on the path' or seriously flirting with it. They were learning to sit on a meditation cushion or becoming vegetarians and reading Sufi stories and running to Chinatown for tai chi and to hear a lecture by R.D. Laing." Over the years, his followers seemed to lose sight of him, though, as they came into money, began establishing families and started eating meat again. After several decades of forgetfulness, the middle-aged baby-boomers who were the eager college students of the early 1960s are now seeking the familiarity of his message as they confront the aging process.

At the same time, a new group of twenty-year-olds are discovering the work of his earlier years, and seek in him the guru their parents found. The new generation of counter-culture vegetarian students finds inspiration in "Be Here Now" along with other 1960s classics such as Kahlil Gibran's "The Prophet." For several of the students at the Palo Alto talk, "Be Here Now" is their only point of contact with Ram Dass.

A Stanford senior said that a friend she met while vacationing in the Bahamas during High School recommended Ram Dass's book to her. She said, "It is a book that resonates," although she no longer remembered why. She thinks that its resonance stems from the fact that she has now had many of the experiences he calls upon in the book, among them the use of LSD.

Stanford junior Matt LePay, said that he also knew the name Ram Dass only in association with "Be Here Now" -- which he found when he was "into the beat generation." He understood Ram Dass to be the "spiritual side" of the group of writers. All of the Stanford students at the lecture have lived at one time or another in one of its vegetarian co-operatives, which are magnets for both sides of the divided group which Ram Dass described as defining the social make-up of the sixties: the social activists and the counter-culture, spiritual hippies. The latter element was much more broadly represented at Stanford.

While Ram Dass and Santokh aim their initiative at both elements of the student population, in the wake of the recent WTO protests in Seattle and IMF protests in Washington, D.C., they hope to show young activists how to combine their social justice work with a deep sense of spirituality. The mission statement of "Creating Our Future" is to "train students in how to work together effectively for social and environmental change from a spiritual perspective."

After a musical and verbal introduction, Ram Dass, who sat in a wheelchair wearing a pink turtleneck and round sunglasses, leaned toward the mike and began to speak. Alternately serious and light, his words repeatedly caused the attentive, sympathetic audience to dissolve into long periods of knowing laughter as he alluded to "getting high" and chortled over his self-identification as a "Jewish Hindu."

Being a member of the younger generation who did not know of Baba Ram Dass until recently, I found myself laughing at jokes which I only understood as the embodiment of an image which I have created, of an era I never knew. A deep nostalgia pervaded the older portion of the audience, and I had the feeling that I had stumbled upon a family reunion at which Ram Dass was the loved and revered patriarch.

Ram Dass seemed to enjoy the deep silences which found their way between his words, and he advised the audience to "surf the silence." "Surfing the silence, like a station, give us enough impotence ... um ... impetus," he interrupted himself with a chuckle and added with a teasing smile, "I'm a Freudian. I didn't get enough fluid" and laughed again with hearty support from the audience.

"There are ways which perform social action ... There are ways with compassion," Dass said, delving into the heart of his message. "In the sixties we bifurcated," he said. "I was the spiritual part of that team. Many of my friends became political activists around issues of the Vietnam war, sexual freedom, women's rights and pot."

He described the social activists as angry at an "other" and himself and his more spiritually-minded friends as engulfed in self-exploration. Each group, he said, felt that they were "on the forefront." He has grown to recognize that the distinction is a bad one and that the artificially separated elements are mutually supporting and necessary.

Sat Santokh, who identifies himself as a representative of the activist camp in which he has been invested since the 1950s, began his part of the presentation by leading the assembled group in a meditation and a series of breathing exercises. He then traced the path of his involvement in activism and his spiritual journey. "I thought the purpose of spiritual practice was to become a better activist," he said. He gradually came to feel that "any action that was not done from this heartfelt space was not worth anything." While the two have ultimately ended up feeling the importance of integrating action and spirituality, Santokh said that he hopes to "teach people how to do social action from a place of spirituality," and Ram Dass maintains that "I do social action to deepen my spiritual nature."

For Ram Dass, it is aging and death which provoke most of his personal thought in the wake of his stroke. Davidson writes that, "He completed 'Still Here' at the very moment when aging and departure had become a growth subject. 'Baby boomers are getting old,' Ram Dass says. 'Mick Jagger is getting old. I'm learning how to get old for them.' In the book he describes growing old as an opportunity to reach for wisdom, contentment and a deeper connection to the soul." Ram Dass described his stroke to the audience as the "grace" which has pushed him to delve ever more deeply into his own spirituality, allowing him to "prepare for the next step of my soul." It is for these insights that the older generation looks to him. While there is some student interest in Ram Dass, only two of the thirty or so Stanford students with whom I spoke who had not been at the church knew of him. His main audience remains the elder version of the fans of his earlier work. He recently gave the key-note address to 2,000 people at a conference on body and soul at the Omega Institute, a spiritual retreat center in up-state New York, and later spoke to 1,500 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. His university stops have drawn significantly smaller crowds.

During the question and answer session which followed the speeches, several students raised concerns about what their generation has to offer, how they can incorporate the '90s cynicism which has replaced the '60s naivete into their action, and how to change other people's actions without turning them into the "other" which Ram Dass earlier described as the target of 1960s activists. Both Ram Dass and Santokh repeatedly advised the students to focus on themselves and to remember that they bear the legacy of a generation which did not know God until the "door was opened" with the use of psychedelic drugs. Ram Dass told the group to "drink in the wisdom and stand on our [the older generation's] shoulders."

When asked how he would like to be remembered, Dass first responded that "an article in the paper said I was the person who turned the Beatles on to LSD," which suited him, but then with deep seriousness, he modified his answer. "I don't particularly think that I want to be remembered," he said, reminding the audience that it is of primary importance to be in the present.

Santokh told the audience that he and Ram Dass would "hang out" after the music, and hang out they did. The balance between students and members of their parents' generation evened out in the group which remained to meet the man who was, for some, an icon of an era they would like to recapture -- whether or not they lived through it -- and for others, a guru. Some waited for a full half-hour to speak to Ram Dass who sat on the stage in his wheelchair and received each person individually. After the event, Matt LePay commented that "I like the fact that he is so down to earth and is an approachable spiritual figure. "I really enjoyed [the evening] with its focus on spirituality and social activism," he added.

For the large percentage of the student body who looks at Ram Dass as an artifact, an icon of an age long past, or does not know of him at all, it is unlikely that his thoughts will have much direct influence. Yet Le Pay believes that the merging of spirituality and social activism that is increasingly present in the current generation of college students is evidence that his message does have an audience. But in order to fully implement it, LePay says, there must be a "push for people involved with activism to incorporate that loving kindness."

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