"My guru told me 'Be like Gandhi,'" Ram Dass tells PW. "Gandhi said, 'My life is my message.'"
The words come haltingly, phrases followed by long pauses. Ram Dass, who became famous in the '60s under his birthname Richard Alpert, seems to hunt for a word to match each new thought. The once-ebullient, irrepressible talker who helped launch a psychedelic movement at Harvard with Timothy Leary waits patiently, inspiring patience in the listener. Finally, he lets the effort go with a soft "yea."
"Before the stroke it was words, words, words," he says at last. "After the stroke it was silence, silence, silence."
Ram Dass and his interviewer sit near the window of his room in the Marriott Hotel in downtown Manhattan. Thirty stories high, we watch ferries and tugboats criss-crossing New York Harbor, riding low in the gray water.
With an apology, Ram Dass slips on the big wraparound sunglasses people must wear after cataract surgery. Smiling with the shades on, longish white hair feathering out around his head, he looks a bit like a hip elder version of the '60s icon and spiritual pioneer. Except for the speech. Except for the wheelchair.
Ram Dass is in town to speak at a conference called "The Art of Dying," organized by Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman and Tibet House. He thought of giving up speaking before audiences after the stroke, he tells PW. But he has learned to "surf the silence," and he invites listeners to "surf the silence with me."
More extraordinary, however, is the way a resonance, a grace imbues his latest book, the spare Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying, out from Riverhead/Putnam.
The stroke hit one evening in 1997, as Ram Dass lay in bed in California wondering how to improve the initial version of Still Here. He knew that the book, which explores the wisdom potential of aging, was missing a dimension. He was trying to imagine what it would be like to be very old and infirm, trying to conjure up the essence of age, when he was hit with a massive stroke that left him wheelchair-bound, partially paralyzed, unable to read or speak, requiring round-the-clock care. Over the months and years of his rehabilitation he has learned a lesson that is too rarely spoken about in our culture today.
"We think life is like one of these buildings, big and solid," he says, gesturing at the hotel around us. "But age is like an earthquake. Everything goes."
One of the great themes that drives the engine of literature, from King Lear to the latest spin on jaded youth, is how time and age strip away power, possessions, everything that grants us an illusion of permanence, leaving even mighty rulers naked in a world gone hard and strange. In Still Here, Ram Dass delves into the aspects of aging that terrify most of us--loss of status and independence, loss of our strength, loss of even our minds--affirming that there is a "Soul awareness" in each of us that transcends all the attributes and possessions of the ego that get wrenched away with age.
The special power of this book, however, comes as a gift from the stroke. When Ram Dass was well enough, his editor at Riverhead, Amy Hertz, brought in a well-known writer to read aloud what Ram Dass had written before the stroke, offering opinions and suggestions for revisions. "It wasn't fun," says Ram Dass. "He didn't reflect my heart, so what could I do?"
Ram Dass wanted to honor Hertz's vision of a book that would appeal to a broad audience. Yet he became determined not to let a stranger alter his meaning and his style. Working without an agent, as he always has, he turned to his assistant Marlene R der to help him find the words.
What has emerged from the struggle to stand firm is a humble masterpiece of being. Ram Dass isn't playing the role of a wise elder in the book, so much as he is embodying wisdom itself. "The stroke is my guru's imprint on this book," he declares.
Ever since he woke up in the hospital, Ram Dass tells PW, he has felt the presence of his guru nearby as a teacher and a loving friend. Almost daily since it happened, he says, he has whipsawed between two perspectives, his ego in despair over his new limitations, while the deeper, calmer awareness of his soul blossoms. "A friend told me that I've become much more human and humble since the stroke," says Ram Dass. "That's soul."
In a novel, it might seem too incredible a twist to make this old counter-cultural icon-this prodigal son who blew off Harvard to meditate in India-the perfectly trained guide and friend for an aging America. Ram Dass never thought of himself as an author so much as a seeker, eager to describe a path he started down one night at Harvard in 1961 when he tripped on psilocybin mushrooms with Timothy Leary and glimpsed within himself an abiding awareness, a witnessing "I," that years later he would call soul. Overnight, he stopped being just an ambitious young assistant professor of psychology with a Ph.D. from Stanford and became a psychedelic crusader, determined to find his way back to that place inside that "Knew."
Born Richard Alpert in Boston in 1931, Ram Dass came from a background that emphasized achievement. His father, George, a lawyer, helped found Brandeis University and was president of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. Yet, even before he tripped, Alpert sensed that he wasn't really a scholar. He wanted to live the truth, and he wanted to help others find their way. By 1963, not surprisingly, he was fired from Harvard along with Leary. From 1963 to 1967, his writings were aimed at capturing the experience and promoting the use of LSD. In 1964, with Leary and Ralph Metzner he co-authored The Psychedelic Experience, published by Morrow. Fans and f s alike treated the book as a kind of bomb-making manual for blowing minds, yet this very trippy interpretation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead foreshadowed Ram Dass's journey beyond drugs, to the wisdom of the East.
What made Alpert stand out even in the thick of these acid days was his willingness to be utterly transparent and vulnerable in his quest for the truth, to be honest about himself at all costs.
"One teaches only through being," he wrote in L.S.D., a photojournalistic essay co-authored with Life photographer Lawrence Schiller and Sydney Cohen and published by NAL in 1966. "I have tried in the manuscript to be just who I am."
By 1967, Alpert was done with writing and lecturing about LSD because after 300 trips he hadn't found a way to make his experience of soul consciousness stay. Depressed and unsure which way to turn, he accepted an invitation to travel around India with a wealthy friend. After months spent cruising around in a Land Rover, taking in every holy sight and experience he could think of, Alpert despaired. As he sat brooding in a hippie cafe in Katmandu, Nepal, wondering where to go next, he met an extraordinary young American who seemed to "Know."
"It was like meeting a rock," Ram Dass wrote in the classic guide to spiritual awareness, Be Here Now. "It was just solid all the way through. Everywhere I pressed, there he was!" Alpert literally followed "Bhagwan Dass" around India for months, fully aware of the irony of being a bigshot outlaw thinker making a pilgrimage to India, only to wind up following a 23-year-old from Laguna Beach.
"Just be here now," the kid said every time Alpert fretted about the future or ruminated about the wild old days with Leary. Ultimately, the young man took the former academic to meet his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, whom he called "Maharaji." According to Ram Dass, the little old
man, sitting on the ground, wrapped in a plaid blanket, saw through Richard Alpert and opened his heart. In Maharaji, the cocky, ex-Harvard psychedelic spokesperson had found an embodiment of true spiritual liberation. He stayed with his guru on and off for years, learning to see through the games of Richard Alpert so he could follow his soul and be "Ram Dass," or "Servant of God."
In 1970, the Lama Foundation published Be Here Now, the gripping story of Ram Dass's meeting with Maharaji. Instantly, it became a guidebook for an emerging generation of spiritual seekers. In its first incarnation, the book consisted of loose pages in a box. Copies were often given away. Still, the book sold out printing after printing. Within the year, however, the book's editor, Bruce Harrison, took the book with him to Crown, which published it in 1971. Currently in its 37th printing, it has sold nearly two million copies.
Further explorations on the same theme followed, including a collection of talks, The Only Dance There Is (Doubleday, 1974); Grist for the Mill (with Stephen Levine, Unity Press, 1977) and Journey of Awakening (Bantam, 1978), a user-friendly guide to spiritual practice. In 1978, the Hanuman Foundation, created by Ram Dass to launch service projects in prison and among the dying, published Miracle of Love, a rich compilation of stories about Neem Karoli Baba from myriad sources.
In the 1980s, Ram Dass shifted his focus to practical wisdom and service. How Can I Help?, co-authored by Paul Gorman and published by Knopf in 1985, has become a dependable source of inspiration for people in the helping professions. Standard reading in hospitals, nursing homes and hospices, this was his mainstream book, up until now.
With each passing phase, Ram Dass has had to deal with the legacy of being embraced as a guru but also dismissed as a dangerous goofball--in the early '70s, someone in the press dubbed him "Rum Dum." All of his writing has been shaped by his drive to dig for the deeper truth under the world of appearances, not as an academic nor even as a mystic but as a storyteller, or a child digging for the real. He has always written and spoken as if he is on a mission to encourage others, to tell the good news of the living truth. Yet, what some dismissed as reckless or glib was always tempered by honesty and a real capacity for devotion and service. In retrospect, his books are a progressive record of his attempts to get free of the surface trappings of the self, so that he and his readers can taste what it's like to be still and know that we Are.
"Years ago, I had a dream," Ram Dass confesses to PW. "I was in a huge amphitheatre full of people all in white. There was a woman on the dais. I was standing in the back and somebody was guiding me by the elbow. The woman saw me and said, 'Take him out, he isn't ready.'"
"I was just thinking that this book might be my pass to that circle," Ram Dass says. "This stroke is an ego drag. But for soul, it got me into that room."
He admits that he worries about the book being marketed as overly mainstream. "I often think I haven't honored Eleanor Rigby enough," Ram Dass says, referring to the Beatles song about a lonely woman watching life from a distance. "Eleanor Rigby hasn't known the love I have, and that's not fair."
Ram Dass wants to speak for himself. He frets a bit at the deliberate association between Be Here Now and Still Here, worried that the linkage will magically be expected to produce "big numbers." Riverhead chief Susan Petersen was even once married to Bruce Harrison, editor of the earlier book. "I feel a little bit like a child of divorce," he muses. "I was with one parent and now I've been handed off to the other."
There is a well of goodwill and respect for the editor and publisher in Ram Dass. But there is a twinkle of the old hippie, too. "The way I see it, Susan, Amy and I are all spreading dharma," he says. "They are very good spreaders."
Will we see more books on aging?
"Oh yes," Ram Dass affirms. "There is a wisdom connected with aging. This book is a brick in a building that is going up."
Ram Dass pauses and we sit together in the silence, watching out the window as a ship escapes the embrace of the city, threading its way to the open sea.
Tracy Cochran is a contributing editor to Publishers Weekly.
