Becoming Love: a tribute to Ram Dass.
I’ve always preferred studying the lives of those who’ve followed the invisible spiritual Path. Their lives are invariably messy, flawed, prone to wandering and ultimately heartbreakingly beautiful. You can always tell if their journey has taken them to the mountaintop, as their lives inevitably & sharply change as they become a model how to be Love.
Ram Dass was one of those men. Born Richard Alpert, son of a founder of Brandeis University, he initially followed the straight-and-narrow path of an academic– landing a job teaching at Harvard University. There he struggled with issues of self-hatred and identity, often calling himself bisexual in an era where being gay was career suicide. Unbeknownst to him, he fathered a son who he wouldn’t meet for another 53 years.
His journey from Alpert-to-Dass came after he and his friend, Prof. Timothy Leary, were kicked out of Harvard for giving psilocybin to an undergrad as a part of their unorthodox experiments with consciousness at the Harvard psychedelic club. Renting an abandoned 64-room mansion from an heiress in Upstate New York for a dollar-a-year, Alpert and Leary continued their experiments; almost single-handedly coloring the psychedelic 60’s while turning-on a generation of doctors, bankers, poets and musicians to LSD.
When the high wore off (aided by night raids from G. Gordon Liddy), Alpert made a journey to India where he met Neem Karoli Baba, known to his followers as Maharaj-ji. Maharaj-ji was able to tell Alpert things he’d kept secret from everyone. He also proved himself impervious to the doses of LSD which had expanded the minds of those back home. Alpert believed this showed Maharaj-ji had attained permanently those states of mind to which drugs could only temporarily provide a glimpse. After studying at the feet of the sage, Richard returned home, carrying the name given him by his guru, Ram Dass, the servant of God.
On his arrival, he became a lecturer, poet, prison activist, environmentalist, and author of the best-seller “Be Here Now”. Perhaps one of my favorite lessons of Ram Dass was the truth that love is not a relationally based thing where “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family”. Such ideas are a construct of the ego, emerging from, and thus reinforcing our ideas of separateness, something the soul is not. The soul is One. It wants only to be in its natural state– Love. Dass once said, “It’s a true joy…to turn someone whom you didn’t initially like into the Beloved.” He used to practice this form of spiritual alchemy through meditation– using pictures of politicians he disliked. This was the legacy of his life: through learning to love himself and becoming Love, through identifying with the Soul and not the ego, Ram Dass showed generations how they too could do it in return.
Ram Dass on “Being Love”: https://www.ramdass.org/being-love/
