Douglas Martin writes:

[Richard] Alpert went to India in 1967, more as a tourist than as a pilgrim. Events led him to a twinkly old man wrapped in a blanket: Neem Karoli Baba, who was called Maharajji, or great king, by his followers. Maharajji appeared to read Mr. Alpert’s mind by telling him, accurately, that his mother had recently died of spleen disease — information that he said he had told no one in India.

The experience caused a spiritual upheaval in Mr. Alpert, who forever after considered Maharajji his guru. It was Maharajji who gave Mr. Alpert the name Ram Dass, or servant of God, and added the prefix Baba, a term of respect meaning father.

Ram Dass gave Maharajji some LSD, but it had no effect. He surmised that the guru’s consciousness had already been so awakened that drugs were powerless to alter it.

In 1968, Maharajji told him to return to the United States. Ram Dass later recalled that when he got off the plane in Boston — barefoot, robed and bearded — his father told him to get in the car quickly “before anyone sees you.”

He moved into a cabin on his father’s estate in New Hampshire. Soon, as many as 200 people were showing up to chant with him.

Ram Dass hit the lecture circuit, his presentation a mix of pithy wisdom and humor, often expressed in the same sentence. “Treat everyone you meet like God in drag,” he said in one talk.

Wavy Gravy, the eccentric poet and peace activist, once said, “Ram Dass was the master of the one-liner, the two-liner, the ocean liner.”

Ram Dass’s biggest public success came in 1971, when the Lama Foundation published “Be Here Now,” originally issuing it as loose pages in a box. It has had more than three dozen printings, with sales exceeding two million.

Here, in its entirety, is Page 2: “Consciousness = energy = love = awareness = light = wisdom = beauty = truth = purity. It’s all the SAME. Any trip you want to take leads to the SAME place.”

By the 1980s, Ram Dass had a change of mind and image. He shaved off the beard but left a neatly trimmed mustache. He tried to drop his Indian name — he no longer wanted to be a cult figure — but his publisher vetoed the idea. Ram Dass said that he had never intended to be a guru and that Harvard had been right to throw him out.

He continued to turn out books and recordings, however. He started or helped start foundations to promote his charities, to help prisoners and to spread his message of spiritual equanimity. He made sure his books and tapes were reasonably priced.

The old orthodoxies slipped away. He said he realized that his 400 LSD trips had not been nearly as enlightening as his drugless spiritual epiphanies — although, he said, he continued to take one or two drug trips a year for old time’s sake. He said other religions, including the Judaism that he had rejected as a young man, were as valid as the Eastern ones. [Continue reading…]

Will Welch writes:

Perhaps the greatest trick Ram Dass ever pulled, and what has continued to separate him from a zillion self-styled alternative religious leaders and cultists over the decades, is that he has never allowed himself to become attached to any one given “-ism.” He was born a Jew and transformed by a Hindu guru, but his lectures and books invoke Zen Buddhism, Sufi mysticism, Christ consciousness, one-pointed meditation, and bhakti (devotional) and karma (living) yoga. There is no name for the philosophy he has spent his life espousing, much less a church or temple, and he’s not selling a whole lot besides books, lectures, and the occasional license-plate frame. In the 2001 documentary Ram Dass, Fierce Grace, which focuses on his struggle with the daily physical realities of life after his stroke, a philosopher named Huston Smith says, “One of the virtues of [Be Here Now] is that it is not tied to any historical religious tradition. It just goes straight for the pay dirt and the essence and the heart that underlies them all.” [Continue reading…]