Comedy Sex God

by Pete Holmes

  Richard Alpert was gone, but there was something still there noticing the absence; now he just had to discover what that was.

  Once Alpert regained his footing and surrendered to what he would later call a bad trip, he found that for the first time in his life, all his desire for status and his upper-middle-class Jewish neuroses faded away, and he felt home, free for having dropped all the heavy bags the world told him he had to carry as somebody. “I stood naked and it felt wonderful,” Alpert reported afterward. “I felt at peace. I felt content. I felt like this is where I knew in my inner being I really was but somehow, I had never been able to get there. Ever since I had been born into somebody-ness, the somebody-ness had always short-shrifted who I really was.” The mushrooms had taken away every self-identifying thought he ever had, leaving him to wonder, “If all that’s gone, and I’m still here, what is left?”

  Alpert was determined to find out. After launching an academic investigation into the substance—which involved giving the drug to hundreds of students and volunteers—he was publicly shamed, and both he and Leary were fired from Harvard for corrupting the minds of naive undergrads. This meant they were no longer able to use school funds to buy thousands of milligrams of then legal LSD, but, not to be so easily undone, they each bravely continued the research on their own dime.

  Alpert and Leary took the drug hundreds of times, often enormous “heroic doses,” sometimes experiencing full, vivid, consciousness-constructed realities that seemed as real and tactile as this one, other times blurring into oneness with the Great White Light—a commonly reported phenomena—experiencing the total euphoria of absolute equanimity, clarity, and the bliss of interconnectedness with every star, squirrel, and can of Diet Coke in our galaxy. They were the original psychonauts, spelunking deeper and deeper into the unknown potential of their minds, decades before the first Tool album or white guys with dreadlocks.

  The only problem was—like me—Alpert always came down. At the end of every trip, he would be dragged kicking and screaming back into his human body, back into what he now perceived as the illusion of separateness that we all call everyday life. He said it was like breaking out of prison but only briefly. “You go out and see the stars and you smell the air,” Alpert said. “Then they say, ‘Okay, the chemical is wearing off, back into prison.’ And you don’t want to go. You say, ‘No, no!’ But you go anyway. And you’re back, and you feel weird again. You feel doubly weird now because you know that isn’t who you are but you’re caught in it. So that starts quite a journey.”

  That journey led Alpert to follow his intuition that there had to be more going on here than dejected professors taking recreational drugs. Comparing and logging their experiences, the two friends discovered striking similarities between hallucinogenic states and the bardos described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Alpert and Leary had thought they were the first people to experience anything like the things they had been experiencing, only to find a 1,300-year-old book describing the very same phenomena. Eastern monks had been visiting these places without the help of chemicals for millennia, so much so that they had maps of the terrain Alpert and Leary thought they had been the first to set foot on.

  (I had no idea traditions like this existed. Before I had heard this story, I always thought monks were going into the mountains to relax. I’m serious! As if the idea of getting a job or riding the bus was too stressful for them, so they fled to the mountains to wear orange robes and unwind, like they were visiting a spa with fewer amenities, occasionally banging a gong to signal lunch. I had no idea these serene, bald men were sitting under fig trees, closing their eyes, and tripping balls. Neither, apparently, did Alpert.)

  Everything we need to get from here to there was already inside of us. These states could be achieved, and maintained, without external stimulus from a roadie at Bonnaroo. This was quite a revelation.

  Leary remained in the States and turned into the iconoclastic rascal Nixon came to deplore, giving lectures that would bring him both fame and notoriety, traveling around and imploring kids to “turn on, tune in, and drop out”—basically a fancy way of saying “take acid, trust yourself, and quit school”—and thereby securing himself a firm place in the zeitgeist, making him a famous Moody Blues lyric, and eventually landing him in prison. Meanwhile, Alpert packed a bottle of LSD and flew to India, certain that one of the monks or yogis he would find in the mountains could answer his questions, like the now clichéd scenario that has inspired countless New Yorker cartoons.

  Alpert gave LSD to every holy man and wandering sadhu he came across, which in India is like going on a tour of every Starbucks in Cincinnati, and some of them liked it, some loved it, and some reported that they “preferred meditation.”

  Intrigued, but burned out from travel and too much hash, Alpert was about to leave India but decided to make one last trip to meet a holy man at an ashram in the Himalayas, shepherded by a six-foot-six yogi named Bhagavan Das, who repeatedly reminded the sometimes-cranky Alpert to “be here now.” When they arrived at the temple, Alpert was initially unimpressed with what appeared to be just a simple, overweight man wrapped in a blanket, but the man seemed to read Alpert’s mind, knowing personal details about his mother and how she died—details Alpert hadn’t told anyone—and, amazed, the former professor figured he had found the best subject to give a whole bunch of LSD. Alpert offered him one pill, but the man took four—basically, a dose large enough to kill Evander Holyfield. Alpert waited, regretting his open-handed offering of multiple pills, worried that he might drive the old man mad.

  He waited . . . and nothing happened.

  Nothing.

  The holy man should’ve been pinned to the ground drooling, or at the very least spinning in circles singing “Incense and Peppermints,” but he just stayed where he was, sitting on his takhat, casually chatting, smiling, and eating fruit. Occasionally he’d twinkle at Alpert, as if to say, “I know. Can you believe it?!”

  Alpert had found his guru, the great Indian saint whom I would see framed in Duncan’s apartment: this was Neem Karoli Baba, or Maharaj-ji.

  Alpert gave Maharaj-ji strong doses of LSD on two separate occasions, and both times, while Richard sat worrying that he had fried the man’s brain, there was no effect whatsoever. Wherever he was, LSD wasn’t taking him any further. Maharaj-ji wasn’t a tourist in that place, he was a resident; he wasn’t visiting a heightened state, he was living there, permanently, emanating a transformative love that cracked open the hearts of all those who visited him.

  “These medicines let you in the room with Christ,” Maharaj-ji told Alpert through a translator, “but you can only stay a few hours.” Alpert had his answer, and his suspicion was confirmed: the West was a materialist society, so God came to us, by His grace, as a material. But it was just the introductory course; there were other, better, methods for getting to God, Maharaj-ji said, adding that psychedelics were “good for beginners.”

  IT WAS STRANGE FOR ME TO HEAR ABOUT A HINDU saint referencing Christ at an ashram in India, but to Maharaj-ji, whether Christ or Krishna—take your pick—it was All One. All holy beings were tapping into the same this-ness, the same essential, unchanging I Am. This gave me a signpost back toward my own tradition. These guys weren’t about selling one specific way; they were about finding the fundamental truth laid within every tradition. Many wells, same water. It was comforting to think that the parts of Christianity that had resonated with me in the first phase of my life didn’t have to go into the trash heap—we could save the baby from the bath. It was comforting, too, hearing something familiar, that maybe the small truths I had uncovered in my own church could come on this journey with me.

  Alpert would also become comfortable relating what he was learning in the East back to the mainstream religion of the West. He called himself “somewhere between the pure mind of the Buddha and the heart of the Christ, which for a Jewish boy is not bad.”

  “All methods are traps,” Alpert said. “Meditation i
s a trap. You don’t want to end up a meditator, you want to end up free. Judaism is a trap. This is a hard one, for those that are Jews. You don’t want to end up a Jew, you want to end up free. We just have to choose our traps wisely, and hope they’ll self-destruct after they’ve served their purpose.” The great saint Ramana Maharshi shared in this idea, likening your method to a stick with which you stoke a fire. Once the flames were high enough, the last step was to throw the stick into the fire as well, so that all you are left with is Light.

  When our spirituality is tied to a symbol, even a beloved one like a Christ or a Buddha, you are limited to thinking about that symbol. It’s an object you perceive with your mind. You are always removed from it, looking from the outside, two instead of one. But the invitation from the divine is to more than a symbol. The invitation is to transcend symbol and thought and language and to merge with God. Ultimately, there is no room for your method, nor for your understanding of self. There can be no separation between you and it. Even the idea of you and it must go. It all has to dissolve away into a place beyond the mind, beyond your reason and your ego, where it and you are One.

  The desire to be a card-carrying member of a group is ego stuff, like wearing a Patriots jersey to the Super Bowl parade. It feels good, and it has its place, but it’s not the business of the spirit. You don’t want to be a Christian, you want to be free. Every tradition is pointing to a similar state, they all just have different words for it. “The Kingdom of Heaven” was the one I was raised with, although I always confused that with the idea of a heaven after I died. This definition didn’t make sense when Christ said things like “The kingdom of heaven is here but men do not see it,” so I just put it out of my mind. Then the work of mushrooms unlocking my direct perception of this state made me realize he was talking about something here and now, not later after one dies. It’s here. Now. And the other faiths have words for this wordless place, too. Buddhists call it Nirvana. In Judaism it’s called Shekina. Hindus call it the Brahman, Muslims the Garden of Allah. It’s right there for all of us to find, however we find it.

  As much as Alpert was learning, he was unlearning. He was picking things up as much as he was putting commonly held misconceptions down.

  Alpert was blown away and stayed in the ashram for many months, studying and learning everything he could from both his guru and the community of yogis who surrounded him. He learned about Hinduism, Buddhism, yoga, and pranayama years before you could find all those things neatly packaged in studios lining American beaches. Maharaj-ji gave him the name Ram Dass, meaning “Servant of God,” before sending him back to the States and warning him not to tell anyone about him.

  Thankfully, Ram Dass couldn’t help himself.

  He began touring, giving the lectures I gracefully stumbled upon in the airplane that day, trading his suit and tie for beads and a white dress, telling love-and-lighters that he had uncovered a clue as to what so many in the ’60s were glimpsing in the grassy parks of Haight-Ashbury.

  With so many experiencing the Great White Light, it was of great interest to hear about a man who had found a way to remain one with the universe. Telling the story of Maharaj-ji being unaffected by an ungodly dose of LSD, Ram Dass said, “When you’re in Detroit, you don’t have to take a bus to Detroit.” This lit up hundreds, myself included decades later, leaving us all to wonder, How can we all move to Detroit?

  You know. Metaphorically.

  yes, thank you

  I’VE ALWAYS HATED MUSEUMS.

  The worst part is, when you hate museums, you have to pretend you love museums, because you don’t want to look stupid or unsophisticated for hating museums. So for decades whenever someone asked me if I wanted to go to the museum, I would have to pretend to be all excited, when in fact I only cared that people thought I was the kind of guy who goes to museums. If I ever did go, I would “forget” to take off the little circle admission pin for weeks so people would notice it conspicuously still clasped to my book bag, so I could be like, “Oh, this? I was at the museum. And I got it. Whatever it is you’re supposed to get, I got it. I was quiet, I sketched, I got to know myself.”

  But that’s not what I was doing at the museum. I wasn’t looking at a painting to appreciate it, I was staring at it, trying to figure out how long was appropriate to look at it so when I walked away the other people in the room weren’t like, “Well, that guy didn’t get it at all.” So I would look at it and make my “museum face,” which is a face that suggests I’m deeply analyzing color choices and brushstrokes, but really, in my head, I’d just be singing, “Honey nuuuuut Cheerios! / Have ’em for breakfast or luuuunnch, you decide!”

  And that’s not even a real jingle.

  I didn’t care about the art, and I certainly wasn’t feeling anything, I was just completing a mental checklist, searching from room to room looking for the name brands. You know, the good ones, the Picassos and the Monets, the ones people would ask me if I’d seen. I’d find them, a crowd of people already circled around gazing, and a wave of relief would hit me. Now I’ve been to the museum. I’ve seen what I’m supposed to see. Now I can go, right after I buy magnetic representations of these paintings to prove that I wasted my day here.

  RAM DASS TAUGHT ME THAT THE THING THAT WAS keeping me from enjoying museums was the same thing that was keeping me from living in the moment and feeling divine connection: it was all in my head.

  Instead of enjoying a piece of art for what it meant to me, or for what it made me feel, I was wasting my time wondering what it was supposed to mean, careful not to waste too much time looking at it for fear that a better, more famous, more meaningful painting was waiting for me in the next room. Whatever it was that I thought I was looking for, it was always somewhere else, hiding, elusive, somewhere around the next bend. It was never simply here, and neither was I.

  In India, Ram Dass had learned a method around such endless mind-robbery.

  Maharaj-ji would repeat the Hindu name of God, Ram, out loud, over and over, most of the day. The other yogis and sadhus had mantras that they, too, would keep on a loop in their heads at all times. Turns out, repeating a mantra like this is one of the methods for quieting the mind to allow oneself to be fully immersed in the here and now.

  I had heard of meditation, but I thought it was just something rich and leisured showbiz jerks did twice a day for twenty minutes with their legs crossed and their eyes closed. I knew this because I was one of them. Lululemon pants, spa music Pandora. But I had never heard of meditation as being something that you did while you were stuck in traffic or delayed on an airport runway or in the shower. Or even behind a conversation with another person. As a Christian, I knew Paul had said to “pray without ceasing,” but I had never thought of taking that quite so literally.

  My whole life, talking to God was prayer, and prayer was asking for things—guidance, or money, or a new nickname to replace “Biter Shaft.” But repeating a mantra was different. It wasn’t about getting something, it was about losing something; namely, the never-ending stream of unsolicited horseshit our brains pump out effortlessly every second of every single fucking day. I’m hungry. I want noodles. I like noodles. Noodles have gluten. What is gluten? I should call my mom. I don’t really want to call my mom. Why does my eye hurt? Noodles.

  In India, Ram Dass heard the holy men compare the human brain to a drunken monkey—just a topsy-turvy, screaming monkey, drunk on banana schnapps, endlessly, thoughtlessly thinking thoughtless thoughts and chasing its own tail. And what do you do with a drunken monkey? You give it something to do. Like a kid screaming in the back seat of your minivan, waking meditation is the iPad strapped to the back of your headrest quieting them down with headphones and a Netflix account so you, the driver, can breathe for a change and notice the sky, crack the window, and taste some fresh air.

  Anyone who’s closed their eyes and tried to will themselves into not thinking knows how impossible it is. Look, I’m not thinking, you think. The only method for gettin
g out of your own way, then, is to give your brain a task. Something monotonous and hypnotic, so you can sneak past your mind like around a napping security guard. This was one of the ways we can be the here in Be Here Now now. Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram.

  When I was a Christian, we spent so much energy proving that what we believed was true by the Western model of reason. Even though our story was written by a people not the least bit interested in a journalistic approach to the story of Jesus, we tried and tried to find evidence that we had the truth and could show you exhibits A through Z to prove it. Head stuff. But now I was learning that communing with the Mystery was heart stuff, not head stuff. Proving historical accuracy was beside the point—this was about you transforming here and now. And your desire for certainty? It was in the way.

  This is why certain religious traditions repeat mantras, or chant a name of God over and over and over. In Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert compares this activity to giving your brain a mundane task, like moving buttons from one pile to another, so you can shut it up for once. Suddenly the Catholic practice of repeating prayers made so much more sense to me. I used to think Catholics prayed over and over as a punishment for shoplifting or going to second base, or that they prayed the same prayer more than once to make sure God would hear them. But now I understood it differently: you prayed the same prayer over and over not so God would hear you, but so you would hear God. As someone whose mind is plagued by endlessly looping pop songs, radio jingles, and the Chili’s baby back ribs song, the idea of giving my brain a Rubik’s cube to settle it down so I could sneak around it and experience some peace made a lot of sense.

  Ram Dass said that “the mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.” In church, we had a different word for it. We called it the devil. The devil—red and goateed, you’re picturing him correctly—was a liar and a thief, but now that rascally demon was starting to feel like another metaphor. It was my thoughts that were robbing me of the richness of Now, lying to me, telling me I was inadequate, or stupid, or that everyone must be thinking about me when we all know in reality they’re just stuck in their own heads just like the rest of us.