SAYING GOODBYE TO RAM DASS
Beautiful photo by Mary Godschalk
This has been a hard week for me and many of my friends. As students of Ram Dass, we’ve become family, joined in the embrace of attention, love and service that emanated from him. Although some of you may be members of that tribe, others may not, and for you I’ll try to lay some groundwork before getting into my personal story, to help you understand what this all means to me. Ram Dass passed on Sunday at the age of 88, but we’d say that he ‘left the body,’ that the spirit endures and that the soul, as Rumi wrote, is just a passing guest in the rooming house of each life. And it’s true- RD’s presence is very palpable still.
Ram Dass meant many things for many people. I joked with my friend Lily that if you asked 500 of his students what he’d done for them, you wouldn’t get two of the same answer. In fact, some might argue that ‘student’ is a misnomer altogether- ‘friend’ might be better; he was, especially in later years, so humble and dear and treated each being like a sister or brother. All would agree though that he’d changed their lives forever. For some, he was the irreverent iconoclast of the 60’s, popularizer with Tim Leary of LSD and usher of the New Age. For others, his book ‘Be Here Now’ was the gateway into eastern religion that changed the course of their search and gave it focused direction. He became a guide who presided over thousands of individuals’ inner work. For some, Baba Ram Dass opened doors to other pathways; they became rabbis, Buddhist nuns, or priests. Many endeavored instead to transform their lives within the fabric of mainstream culture, to live with greater awareness of everything they did: mothering awarely, driving awarely, eating awarely, nursing and doctoring awarely. There were no rules, and no contract to sign. Baba gave us our freedom and honored each person’s inner calling. His central message was that the work we do on ourselves is the greatest gift we can give to others.
For me personally, relationship with Ram Dass altered the course of my inner life forever, and my outer life has gradually followed, slowly and sometimes quickly re-forming itself around a changing inner landscape, like a suit that conforms automatically to weight loss or gain. I first met Baba in 2004 on the phone. I was in the free-fall of a full blown life crisis, when my friend Sruti Ram gave me RD’s phone number. When I tried it, miraculously Ram Dass himself picked up the phone, and spoke to me compassionately for half an hour. It was enough to start me back on the road to healing and getting my life back together. A hallmark of that conversation, something I will never forget, was how he wove his own personal story into our dialogue, in order to show me how to be kind to myself. That someone of his stature would reveal something so intimate for a stranger’s benefit was humbling and awe-inspiring to me. Ram Dass had suffered a massive, life altering stroke several years before. During the stroke and on the precipice of death, he said over the phone, his mind had gravitated toward the world and worldly concerns, not towards God. Then, after beginning a slow and tortured recovery, he was crestfallen at the concerns he had grasped at in that crucial moment. Where would his actual death find him? What would he cling to?
RD’s confessional honesty in our talk was a signature of all of his teaching and of all our subsequent discussions. “Love Everyone and Tell the Truth,” his guru Neem Karoli Baba had told him, and RD made this imperative the backbone of his life. Whereas some in the mainstream media have tried to frame Ram Dass’ life in terms of the New Age movement or restricted it to a caricature of a psychedelic hero, RD was foremost a translator and faithful vessel of ancient Vedic philosophy here in the west. Like Marpa the Translator in Tibetan history, importing and making accessible the Sanskrit scriptures of Buddhist India in the Tibetan colloquial, RD brought the fundamentals of Hindu Thought to the West. Furthermore, he was able to decode it and give it flesh, fitting it perfectly atop the structural bones of our western life, our particular conditioning and psychology. Beginning in 1961, when the then Richard Alpert began his first experiments with psychedelics in a New England living room, he became attuned to how we westerners are especially conditioned into being ‘somebodies,’ along with all of the roles that each of us somebodies plays.
On a wintery night, slipping away from the great poet Allen Ginsburg who had shared psilocybin with him, Alpert sat on a sofa alone and watched all of his roles dissolve into nothingness, one by one. The professor, pilot, son, cellist, etc, all disappeared until there was no one left. He panicked. Just then, he noticed that even his body had dissolved into thin air and he remained solely as witnessing awareness itself. The aware Presence that is the experiencer of all phenomena was all that was left.
That experience formed the basis of much of his early teachings. When he left for India several years later, meeting his guru Neem Karoli Baba (known as “Maharajji”), he also met a millennia-old philosophy which validated and explained his experiences with psychedelics- we are not the body, we are not the roles we play, we are not our thoughts, and we are not the stories we believe ourselves to be. Maharaji was a living embodiment of this philosophy, its fruition. And, unlike the trips that left the tripper back in her or his old self, Maharaji emanated undifferentiated, unconditional Love to all the thousands who sought his company, was almost imperturbable, and was apparently omniscient. He owned only a small vessel for water and the ubiquitous blanket which he wrapped himself in. He demonstrated to Ram Dass (a name conferred by Maharaji meaning ‘servant of God’) and to the cohort of young Americans who followed him there, a new vision of what is possible for a human to be: When we dissolve our identification with who we think we are, we rest as the pure Loving Awareness we truly are.
Ram Dass came back to America with a basket of techniques for cultivating awareness, for loosening the grip of our identification with the ego and its stories. But not only was Baba a vehicle for the philosophy and methodology he garnered in the east, he had also become a vessel of Maharaji’s energy itself. Though this may be difficult for the scientific mind to accept, Baba like other teachers like him, was a beacon which shone out the energy and presence of his master. Many, many people experienced episodes of redemptive power in Ram Dass’ presence over the decades, despite the fact that he was still working on himself. Hot-tempered, still carrying the haughtiness and arrogance of his Harvard professorship, he could be tremendously difficult. And yet, when push came to shove, he healed people emotionally and spiritually, uplifting them into greater self-awareness, forgiveness and joy.
The first time Baba and I met face to face, we butted heads. Fast forward 12 years from that initial phone call, and I am now sitting in the living room of a modest guest cottage on his property in Maui. A young caretaker wheels Ram Dass into the room and we exchange greetings, me proffering my deep gratitude for that life-changing phone call years ago, also seeking to remind this lovely 85 year old of the role he had played. He accepts my thanks and as the caretaker leaves, we get down to business. I’m here for a personal retreat, an intensive with the man, and there’s work to be done. I was propelled to Maui by a peculiar series of events. Since college I had meditated and done yoga, even having a guru at one point to whom I was devoted. But in recent months, while reading a book called ‘Letting Go’ by David Hawkins and practicing the technique inside, I had begun to experience a letting go of my own, and an opening into a much larger sense of what I might be, behind all the stories. But that experience hadn’t settled in fully, and was instead punctuated by returns to my normal old self, full of its worries and self-consciousness (though it wasn’t all bleak in there!). I was frustrated over the fluctuation of my new understanding and I couldn’t find any literature or YouTube’s about this kind of oscillation- only books and videos about or by people having had full-blown awakenings to the Truth. I decided to call Ram Dass.
As soon as I’d explained all this to him, he says, “its not real. It’s your ego.” This sent me into a tailspin. After all, I’d traveled all the way from New York to Maui to see a man I thought could help me to settle into my experience and help me understand it. Things were opening up for me, not closing down. But Ram Dass is now debunking the whole thing and I’m feeling lower than the lowest flea. We argued, and by the time we were done with our arguments, the caretaker came to retrieve him. RD left, suggesting I get a second opinion from another teacher. I was crushed.
In the days that followed, I barely managed to stay put. I was highly motivated to leave the retreat and never come back or speak to RD again. Somehow, I pulled myself together with the help of friends and my partner on the phone. And somehow, during our next visits together, Baba used the emotional strife I was experiencing to open a door in me to a deeper self-knowledge and self-acceptance. In the guest house, as days passed, I came to know a part of myself which had never been known. A crack opened in my heart that had previously been walled off from all joy, protected from the world and its miseries since losing my mother in childhood. Once again, it was RD’s sharing of his own intimate realities that proved pivotal.
“I’m gay. I’m gay. I’m gay.” Baba told me this thought had swirled in his mind throughout junior high and high school. He had been busted by his gym teacher for wrestling with another boy in the locker room, and ostracized for it. Ever since the event, the thought “I’m gay,” tortured him and made him feel separate and alone. This self-concept stayed with him throughout his higher education and into his professional years, causing him anxiety and alienation. But, as he explained to me, in the company of Maharaji, this understanding of himself began to fade. Not that he wasn’t homosexual anymore, but the inner space around that identification had grown so large that he now identified as the space itself, not the guy inside it. He was then able to enjoy his sexuality, loving himself, not chiding himself, as he did.
As he told me this story of transformation and the role Maharajji had played in it, Baba and the room all around him began to light up. A soft but tangible buzz started to fill the atmosphere, as if the cottage was going to lift off and go into outer space or inner space as the case might be. I felt as if I were part of the powerful energetic field of Neem Karoli Baba, and the photos of him on the wall began to glow. “We’re under Maharaji’s blanket!” RD whispered joyfully and conspiratorially, like a kid lighting firecrackers in an empty yard. “Now go from your head, down into your spiritual heart. Say the mantra ‘I am loving awareness. I am loving awareness. I am loving awareness.’ Move your awareness down into your heart, away from your thoughts....Loving awareness, loving awareness, loving awareness....” The room was fully alight now and my body glowed with inner warmth and a comfort not normally found in my PTSD self. I was in loving awareness, no longer identified with the Noah Hoffeld I thought I was, and a joy and connectedness to a soft, cushy Love-Field was present all around me and within me. A wellbeing beyond wellbeing. RD looked me in the eyes and said “Now where’s the trauma?”
Returning home after the retreat, life was forever changed. I noticed that the sense RD had conferred on me in that moment in the guest house had remained. It was as if he had energetically reorganized all my cells and I was in a different state of alignment with myself and with the outer world. I now felt more connected to loving awareness itself, and less strapped to the limiting notions of who I had thought myself to be. Though over the ensuing months this sensation could fade, it could be rekindled by doing the loving awareness practice. I went back to the house two more times for two more intensives in the next years. I was angry at Baba, especially after the teacher he had recommended disagreed with his assessment, but the depth of joy that Baba had brought to my life balanced it out, overwhelming the anger. With time, it too was consumed by the always-unfolding healing Ram Dass had left me with.
As years passed, RD’s anger faded as well. His close friends told me I was lucky to have met him after the stroke, which had forced him to become dependent on others, softening his Harvard arrogance. He became known as a pioneer in the fields of conscious aging and conscious dying. His phrase, “We’re all just walking each other home,” conveyed his deep trust in humanity and in community. Baba became gentler and more luminous all the time. Increasingly, Richard Alpert faded from view with each visit I paid. In his place was more and more of what the old timers who knew Maharaji said was Maharaji himself, coming through Ram Dass. During the last group retreat we all had this month on Maui, he emanated a powerful field of love and peace which filled whatever space he entered, from the meeting pavilion at the retreat, to the Maui Arts and Cultural Center, a very large venue. The feeling of tender and unconditional love for everyone suffused the halls, and there really are no words to describe the depth of peace that was present.
A couple of weeks after leaving the retreat, Baba left his body. He was at home and passed totally peacefully. The grief in our tribe has been deep, but so has the rejoicing at his leaving such his long-suffering body. And after all the transformation he experienced and all that he shared with us all, we all know where he is now.
He’s Home.