301. RAM DASS, AMERICAN PIONEER OF INNER SPACE by un'Americana a Venezia

On April 6, a man best known today as Baba Ram Dass will celebrate his 82nd birthday in Hawaii.  Now thin and wizened, he is as operational as ever, nevermind that his body was thrown for a loop by a stroke in 1997.  He calls suffering the "sandpaper of our incarnation" that "does its work of shaping us"; he regards his stroke as a blessing in disguise.  He wasn't always called Baba Ram Dass, a Sanskrit name meaning "Servant of God" given to him by an Indian guru.  He was born Richard Alpert in Newton, Mass., into a wealthy Jewish home where education and success were all-important goals.  He earned his doctorate in Psychology at Stanford.  Soon afterwards, he was enjoying what was to have been a permanent post at Harvard where teams of graduate students and research assistants worked under him.  By 1961, Dr. Alpert was a published academician as well as a fun-loving bachelor with two cars, a yacht, and an airplane.  His field of expertise was child development, human motivation, and Freudian theory.  Despite his obvious success, he wasn't really satisfied.  "Something was wrong," he wrote, "and the something wrong was that I just didn't know--though I kept feeling that somebody, somewhere, must know, even if I didn't.  The nature of life was a mystery and all the little bits of molecular stuff I was teaching didn't add up to wisdom."  Later, once his search for wisdom was well underway, he said, "Information is just bits of data.  Knowledge is putting them together.  Wisdom is transcending them."  While he was enjoying prestige at Harvard, Dr. Alpert noticed an interesting colleague down the hall, Dr. Timothy Leary, a man who, in conjunction with Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), had already begun experimenting with a property found in hallucinogenic mushrooms, Psylocybin, the chemical that could open the human mind as described by Huxley in The Doors of Perception.  Leary was fast discovering that in test subjects, himself included, Psylocibin had the effect of heightening sensitivity; of shifting viewpoint; and of diminishing the sense of "other-self" while increasing "human-ness."  Alpert decided to give Leary's chemical a try, as did other academic pioneers of the period.  They ventured beyond the usual parameters of the field of Psychology and began exploring inner space, a zone of consciousness that has yet to be widely acknowledged by science.  As a result of their experimentation, Drs. Alpert and Leary were both formally dismissed from Harvard in 1963.  Not long afterwards, Richard Alpert made a journey to India with a spiritually motivated companion.  There Alpert encountered a little brown man in a plaid blanket who immediately displayed the uncanny ability to read Alpert's mind and to press all his psychological buttons.  Alpert intuited that there was something worth pursuing in that Indian ashram at the foot of the Himalayas.  Soon he would become ready to renounce the use of chemicals as a means to achieve higher consciousness.  He would also be ready to learn about the mystery of existence from his new guru, Neem Karoli Baba.  Charismatic, humorous, and able to teach, the former Dr. Richard Alpert was soon dubbed Ram Dass by Neem Karoli as he returned to the West to apply his new lessons to his own life, as well as to divulge them.  The rest is history. You can visit Ram Dass' website to learn about him and the Foundations he has inspired.  Or watch a film entitled "Ram Dass Fierce Grace".  Or read any of his fourteen books and listen to him speak at YouTube.  What does he talk about now?  What has he replaced Psychology with?  It's hard to say in words.  Here are a few quotes from Ram Dass that might help to explain:  "We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not.  Our actions and state of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another."  Then, "The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal.  It can't be organized or regulated.  It isn't true that everyone should follow one path.  Listen to your own heart."  And, "Working on our consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is a supreme creative act."  Thank you, Dr. Alpert, for daring to go so deeply into inner space and for coming back to tell others about it.  Many happy returns, Baba Ram Dass, for this new year of this blessed lifetime.     UN'AMERICANA A VENEZIA