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.

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