We at moments have an identity with our body and say, “Oh, I’m aging,” and we look at ourselves from outside in. I think that if both you and I look inside ourselves, we’ll realize that at our deepest place, we don’t have any age. How do you, a former rebel and wild child, feel about being an elder? Ram Dass’s changed physical circumstances have enabled him to explore that in ways he never could have anticipated when he created his “new mythology of aging.” There seems to be no more profound secret to finding this freedom than to be here now, whenever, wherever you are.
#RAM DASS FLICKERY FAITH FREE#
As he explained it, “To be free means standing nowhere and being everywhere.” In speaking with Ram Dass then, it was clear that freedom played an important role in his life. This interview with Ram Dass was originally published in Whole Life Times in 1996, before the crippling stroke from which he is still recovering. Ram Dass took his assignment very seriously and founded the Hanuman Foundation “to foster spiritual education and compassionate action in the world.” He also helped form the Seva Foundation, an international service organization.
There he met Neem Karoli Baba (as well as kirtan walla Krishna Das), who became his guru in the true sense of the word, in that “he represented the accomplishment of the inner freedom of a human being, rather than just pointing at it.” His guru instructed him to serve and feed people, and gave him the name Ram Dass, meaning “servant of God.” But back in the ’60s, no directions came with this new tool, so Alpert took himself to India in 1967 for some guidance in the kind of spiritual inner exploration he was doing with psychedelics.
Seekers in droves have experimented with not only LSD, the substance that caused havoc at Harvard, but mescaline, psilocybin, peyote, Ecstasy and a number of lesser-known hallucinogens. These days there is barely a campus in America where psychedelics can’t be found. Subsequently he moved on to teach at Harvard, but con servative academia in those hallowed halls took exception to some of his now-legendary research methods - the use of psychedelics for consciousness alteration in pursuit of transcendence and transformation - and sent him and fellow researcher, Timothy Leary, packing. in psychology at Stanford and was hired by the un iversity. The author, a nice Jewish boy from Boston then known as Richard Alpert, completed his Ph.D. Although many have tried, nobody since has articulated it better in three words or three thousand. In the three words of its ti tle, the author succinctly summed up one of the core values of a “conscious” life before he even got to the firs t page. Home about us advertise contact archives Ram Dass-Always Here, Always Nowįorty years ago, a little paperbound book was published with a simple title and message, Be Here Now.
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