Being with Ram Dass in 2018
(An updated post from 2019)
This week marks the 4th anniversary of Baba Ram Dass’ death. As students, we basked in his giant embrace of love and wisdom. He died at the age of 88, or ‘left the body,’ as it’s said in India, the spirit enduring. His presence is palpable still, as is the grief many feel in his absence.
Ram Dass’s central message was simple: the work we do on ourselves is the greatest gift we can give others. He taught his audiences and readers to live with awareness of everything they did in daily life, honored each person’s inner calling, and guided each one to listen closely to their own soft still voice within. Baba made no rules, and there was no contract to sign.
Baba meant many things to many people. For some, he was a consummate 60’s iconoclast, and popularizer of LSD with Timothy Leary. His blockbuster bestseller Be Here Now was a gateway into Eastern thought and practice, becoming a guide for thousands’ inner work. He opened other doors too- exposed to his teachings, some became rabbis, Buddhist nuns, and priests.
Meeting Ram Dass changed my own life forever. I was in a life crisis when a generous friend, Sruti Ram, gave me RD’s number. Baba spoke to me, getting me on a road to healing. I’ll never forget how he wove his own story into our dialogue, and I was awe-struck that someone of his stature would reveal his own intimate experience. He told me he’d suffered a massive stroke and, while on the precipice of death, had gravitated towards worldly concerns, not towards God. As one who had lived and taught others the primacy of spirit over matter, he was crestfallen.
Many years before, he had begun his journey. On a wintery night in 1961, when the then Richard Alpert first took psilocybin, he became attuned to how we Westerners are conditioned to be ‘somebodies’ and to identify with the roles we’re taught to play.
He watched his own roles dissolve into thin air- the professor, pilot, son, cellist. Even his body vanished. He remained as witnessing awareness itself. That Presence, the experiencer of all phenomena, came as a life-changing revelation to him. That first experience was a critical one, but over time he came to understand that psychedelics could provide only short glimpses of reality, not lasting liberation. Wishing to transcend the ups and downs of chemicals and find true freedom, he traveled to the East.
In India, he found his guru Neem Karoli Baba, known as Maharajji, a miracle-working saint with a ubiquitous plaid blanket. In him, he also met an ancient philosophy which validated his experiences- we are not the body, not the roles we play, and not the stories we believe ourselves to be.
Maharaji renamed him Ram Dass, meaning ‘Servant of God.’ He showed RD, and the cohort of young Americans who followed him to India, a radical vision of what humans can 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 techniques for cultivating awareness and loosening the grip of the ego. But if he was a transmitter of Eastern teachings, he was equally a beacon of Maharaji’s own energy, emanating the powerful loving essence of his teacher. Although he was still working on himself and could be angry and difficult, thousands had redemptive experiences with him, lifting them into greater self-awareness, forgiveness, and joy, and inspiring them to help those around them and the World at large.
The first time I met Baba face to face, we argued. Twelve years after that initial phone call, I was with him for a personal retreat. I had begun to experience a larger sense of awareness in my life, but it was punctuated by my usual worries and neuroses. I couldn’t find a solution anywhere, so I decided to call on Ram Dass. I traveled to his home on Maui, where he’d been marooned since the stroke, excited to share and to thank him for the help he’d given me years before. However, when I explained the situation to him, he said “It’s not real. It’s your ego,” and suggested I get a second opinion from another teacher. I was crushed.
Somehow, I pulled myself together with the help of my partner. And somehow, during our talks together, Baba harnessed my pain to open a door inside me. As the days passed, I came to know a part of me I had never known. My walled-off heart, separated from joy since the traumatic loss of my mother in childhood, opened. Once again, it was RD’s sharing of his own story that proved pivotal.
“I’m gay, I’m gay, I’m gay.” Baba told me the thought had swirled in his mind since his teens. A teacher had ridiculed him for wrestling with another boy in the locker room and, ever since, the stigma had stayed with him, causing him profound anxiety and alienation. But in meeting Maharaji, it began to fade. The inner space around the thought grew so large that he now identified as the space itself, not as the thinker inside. He was able to enjoy who he was, including his sexuality, and to love himself and others more fully.
As Ram Dass told me his story, a tangible hum filled the room, as if the house were going to lift off, and the photos of Maharaji on the wall began to glow. “We’re under Maharaji’s blanket,” Ram Dass whispered conspiratorially, like a kid lighting a firecracker. “Go into your heart, and repeat the words, ‘I am loving awareness, I am loving awareness, I am loving awareness.’ Move your attention from your mind to the spiritual heart. Loving awareness, loving awareness, loving awareness…” My body hummed with a comfort I didn’t normally enjoy, and I was no longer identified with the Noah Hoffeld I’d thought I was. Instead, I was inhabiting a soft, cushy Love-Field all around me and within me.
RD looked me in the eyes and said, “Now where’s the trauma?”
* * *
Returning home from the retreat, life was forever changed. As if RD had reorganized my cells, I experienced a state of alignment with myself and the world. I felt connected to loving awareness itself, less strapped to limiting notions of who I’d thought myself to be, and I had a new capacity for experiencing joy. Though over time this sensation could fade, it could also be rekindled by doing the loving awareness practice. I went back to Baba’s house two more times for retreats in the following years to learn more and nourish what he’d shared me. Although I was angry at him after the teacher he’d recommended disagreed with his assessment, the anger was soon consumed by the always-unfolding healing he’d given me. In hindsight, I see this healing as the effect of Maharaji’s grace, who said to his followers, “Love is the strongest medicine.”
As years passed, RD’s anger faded as well. The stroke forced him to become dependent on others, and softened him. He became a pioneer of conscious aging, and his phrase “We’re all just walking each other home” conveyed a deep trust in the spiritual nature of human experience, and in the power of friendship and community.
He manifested more and more of what those who knew Maharaji said was Maharaji himself. At the last gathering in 2019, he exuded a luminosity which filled every space he entered, from the pavilion at the retreat, to the Maui Arts and Cultural Center, a huge venue. A feeling of tender, unconditional love suffused the halls, and it’s hard to describe the depth of peace that was present.
A couple of weeks later, Baba left his body. He was at home and passed peacefully. The grief in our community was deep, but so was the joy at his leaving behind his long-suffering body, worn by twenty two years in a wheelchair. After all the transformation he underwent, and all he shared with the world, we know where he is now….
Home.
To learn more about Ram Dass and/or Maharaji, visit the wonderful website RamDass.Org and have a wonderful day.
