The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

  Richard Nixon was president, and Andrew Weil, hippie, would not last long in the drug-study division of the U.S. Public Health Ser vice. He was about to publish his first book, The Natural Mind: A New Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness, and let the world know which side he was on. His new bosses did not like his counterculture stance on their “war against drugs.”

  Neither did Lester Grinspoon, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, where Weil had earned his medical degree. In a scathing review in the New York Times, Grinspoon found that Weil presented little evidence to support his basic argument in The Natural Mind—that the human desire to get high is as natural as our love of sex and food. “The author attempts to make his arguments irrefutable primarily through his snide dismissal of any facts, experiments, observations or data which do not coincide with his basic premises,” Grinspoon wrote. His review found that Weil was “particularly pompous in his ex-cathedra denunciations of all that Western medicine has achieved.” Grinspoon dismissed Weil’s defense of “stoned thinking” and “straight thinking,” taking aim at Weil’s warning about how “intellectuals . . . must begin to wake up to the tyranny of the rational (straight) mind.”

  Grinspoon’s harsh critique of Weil’s research sounded a lot like Weil’s attack on Leary and Alpert’s work six years earlier in the Harvard Crimson. “The shoddiness of their work as scientists,” Weil wrote back then, “is the result less of incompetence than of a conscious rejection of the scientific ways of looking at things.”

  Decades later, Weil could not look back on that whole period without noting the supreme irony of the whole thing. “I found myself in the same position as Alpert at that point because of my marijuana work,” he said. “I was being persecuted for my beliefs.”

  By the early seventies, Alpert had gone through his own transformation. He had returned from India with an even bushier beard than Weil was sporting and a new name. Weil listened to one of the new spiritual teacher’s first lecture tapes, and was blown away. “It had a profound effect on me,” Weil recalled. “I realized that I had to make some resolution with the man.”

  Weil called, but Alpert would not return the call. Richard Alpert may have morphed into the new Ram Dass, but he was still pissed off at the old Andrew Weil.

  Chapter Seven

  Pilgrimage and Exile

  Seeker: Kathmandu, Nepal December 1967

  Richard Alpert came to India more as a tourist than a pilgrim. He was traveling with a wealthy friend and patron—a young, retired millionaire Alpert had guided through several psychedelic sessions. They were shocked by the poverty they found in India, and a bit embarrassed by the shiny new Land Rover they’d shipped to Tehran, the starting point for their journey to the mysterious East.

  In the four years since he’d been kicked out of Harvard, Alpert had spent much of his time on the lecture circuit, talking about psychedelic drugs and other ways to expand human consciousness. He was burned out. Deep down, he knew he didn’t really know what he was talking about, and the hypocrisy of it all was starting to get to him. He went to India not because he thought he was going to find anything. He just didn’t know what else to do. He needed a break. He needed a vacation.

  Alpert and his friend took some wonderful slides, smoked lots of hash, made tape recordings of Indian music, and then headed up to Kathmandu. By this time, the Nepalese mountaintop was crawling with Western seekers, and one of them, a tall, blond, and beautiful young man from southern California, caught Alpert’s eye. His name was Michael Riggs, but he’d been calling himself Bhagavan Das since his encounter with a Hindu guru named Neem Karoli Baba. Alpert decided that Riggs knew something he didn’t. He started following him around India. At first, Alpert had little interest in meeting his new friend’s guru. Hinduism seemed like a big, confusing, colorful joke. Alpert was more into Buddhism, a religious philosophy that was neat, clean, and intellectually exquisite. Hinduism seemed a bit sloppy—too garish, gauche, and emotional for his refined taste.

  Nevertheless, Alpert agreed to go and at least see Riggs’s guru, known to his followers as Maharaji, then took the Land Rover up into the mountains. Alpert’s wealthy friend had gone back to the States but had left the luxury car behind for Alpert to use. Riggs was driving and, at one point in the journey, suddenly pulled off the road alongside a little temple, got out of the car, and started running up the hill, crying tears of joy because he knew Maharaji was waiting for them at the top. Alpert went after him, realizing all the way how absurd the situation was. Here was this American guy, barely out of high school, running up to see this Hindu holy man. And here was Alpert, an ex-Harvard professor, running barefoot after him.

  They got to the mountaintop, but Alpert was not impressed by what he saw. Maharaji was sitting on a blanket on the ground, surrounded by a small group of Indians. Riggs ran up to him and prostrated himself on the ground, face down, touching the holy man’s feet. He was sobbing, and the guru was patting him on the head. Alpert observed the scene, saying to himself, “No way am I doing that!”

  Maharaji looked up at the skeptical Alpert.

  “You came in the big car?”

  “Yes,” Alpert replied.

  “You give it to me?”

  Alpert didn’t know what to say. First of all, the Land Rover didn’t even belong to him, and why in the world should he give it away to this con artist? But before he could answer, Riggs spoke up.

  “Maharaji,” Riggs said, “if you want it, it’s yours.”

  Alpert was shocked by the offer. “But . . . you can’t,” he stuttered. “It’s not our car.”

  Everyone started laughing hysterically, and Alpert turned red with embarrassment. Oh, he thought, they’re just playing with my head.

  “You made much money in America?” Maharaji asked.

  “Yeah,” Alpert replied.

  “How much do you make?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, about twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “So you’ll buy a car like that for me.”

  Alpert decided to play it cool.

  “Well, maybe,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  At that point, Maharaji lost interest in this encounter and shooed Alpert and Riggs away. A few hours later, the guru called for Alpert to come and see him.

  “You were out under the stars last night?”

  “Yeah, I was.”

  “You were thinking about your mother.”

  “Yeah,” Alpert said, thinking the trickster had made a lucky guess.

  “She died last year.”

  “Yes,” Alpert said softly.

  Maharaji closed his eyes.

  “She got very big in the belly before she died.”

  “Yeah.”

  At this point, Richard Alpert’s mind began to race. His mother had died six months ago at a Boston hospital after her spleen had enlarged tremendously. How could this guy know that? He hadn’t talked to Riggs about any of this.

  They sat in silence for a few moments. Alpert started to feel a violent wrenching in his chest, as if a door that had closed long ago was suddenly being forced open. He started sobbing. He wasn’t sad. He wasn’t happy. About the only words that could describe the feeling were “I’m home.”

  Alpert went off to spend the night in a nearby house. He couldn’t get the encounter out of his mind. Sure, there could have been some way for this strange little man to know about his mother’s death. But it didn’t seem to matter. The tears were real.

  During the night, Alpert remembered that he’d brought a little vial of LSD with him from the States, and had this vague plan that he might offer some to any Indian holy man he might come across to see what kind of reaction they would have to psychedelic drugs. Here was his chance.

  Maharaji called Alpert over to see him the next morning, but before Alpert could mention his little experiment, the guru asked, “Where’s the medicine?”

  “Medicine? What medicine?”

  “The medicine, the medicine.
”

  “LSD?” Alpert asked.

  “Yes, bring the medicine.”

  Alpert went over to the Land Rover and pulled out a shoulder bag that contained his medicine kit. He gave the guru three hundred micrograms of LSD—a sizable dose. Alpert spent the whole morning with Maharaji, and nothing happened. Later, the guru told Alpert that LSD could be useful, but it was not true samadhi, that highest state of yogic concentration that the Bhagavad Gita describes as “seeing the self as abiding in all things and all things in the self.” The guru said drugs like LSD can allow you to visit the state of consciousness of a saint but won’t let you stay there. He used Jesus as an example.

  “This medicine allows you the visit of Christ, but you can’t stay with him. It would be better to become like Christ than to visit, and this won’t do that for you.

  “Love,” the guru said, “is a much stronger drug than this.”

  Alpert stayed with Maharaji for eight months for a rigorous meditation regime called raja yoga, a method for fostering spiritual evolution. He’d get up each morning at 4:30, bathe in the river in a rite of purification, light candles, chant, and read sacred texts of various faiths, including the Chris tian faith. Every once in a while he’d look at himself from his old Harvard psychologist state of mind and start laughing. Here he was, a Jew reading the New Testament for the first time, and he was doing it in a Hindu temple in the Himalayas.

  Maharaji gave Richard Alpert a new name. He was now known as Ram Dass, which translates into “servant of God.”

  “Serve people,” his new guru told him. “Feed people.”

  Alpert returned to the States in 1968 and spent two years lecturing as Ram Dass. In Berkeley, an audience of 150 people gathered in a high school auditorium to get their first look at the reincarnated professor. Gone were the horn-rim glasses, clean-shaven face, and slightly nerdy look of the Harvard academic. Ram Dass walked onto the stage bearded and barefoot, wearing a long white robe. A cloud of incense and scented candles drifted across the congregation as he began to speak in a deep, sonorous voice. “Here and now is the existential, holy moment,” he said. “You already know that. The only problem is you don’t know you know it. That’s the Western hang-up—the tremendous need to know, along with not knowing that you know.”

  To some ears, those were pearls of wisdom. Others heard spiritual clichés and doubletalk—or something you’d hear from someone hopelessly stoned on acid. Outwardly, Richard Alpert was a man transformed, but there were still inner conflicts. He was now wearing the robes of Ram Dass, but he still felt like a phony. He still struggled with his obsessions, especially his bottomless appetite for junk food and anonymous sex. He confessed to a friend that he still had to steel himself against “sneaking out for a pizza or going out to see a pornographic movie.” Meanwhile, devotees were lying down to touch his feet, placing their spiritual lives in his hands. Ram Dass charmed them with brutal, self-deprecating honesty. “I don’t feel like a holy man,” he told them. “I feel like an over-aged hippie, an explorer dilettante.” It just made them love him all the more. How humble! How wise!

  Ram Dass decided that he wasn’t pure enough, and he took off for a second trip to India in November 1970. He wound up at a temple in Bodh Gaya with seventy-five students attending a tenday Buddhist retreat. Among them were a half-dozen American seekers who would go on to become some of the most popular Buddhist writers and teachers in the United States. Sitting in meditation with Ram Dass were Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Daniel Goleman, Krishna Das, John Travis, and Wes Nisker.

  Another seeker at the retreat was Mirabai Bush, a spiritually thirsty grad student from Buffalo, New York. She and her fellow travelers were merely the latest wave of pilgrims to visit the sacred city of Bodh Gaya over the past twenty-five hundred years. They came in the footsteps of original seeker, Prince Gautama Siddhartha, who, according to Buddhist lore, sat under a bodhi tree for three days and three nights until he attained enlightenment.

  Mirabai got her first taste of that elusive state about a year before she made her trek to India. She’d been a graduate student at the State University of New York, where she was teaching English to undergraduates and wondering what the hell that had to do with everything else that was going on in the world. Protests against the Vietnam War had turned the campus into an armed camp. It seemed like the only real escape from all the turmoil came in the form of one of those tiny tablets of LSD.

  Everyone seemed to be taking psychedelics. For many, the experience made the university seem instantly irrelevant. Then a friend who’d been to India and studied with a Tibetan teacher returned to Buffalo with a suitcase full of Tibetan thangkas— those wildly colorful, embroidered prayer banners depicting multiarmed Buddhist saints making love or meditating on cushions flying through outer space. What was that all about? Something very different was going on out there in the wide, wide world.

  Mirabai decided to go for a look, and soon found herself at the temple in Bodh Gaya with Ram Dass and the rest of the dharma bums.

  On his first trip to India, Ram Dass had immersed himself in the devotional Hindu practices of his new guru, Neem Karoli Baba. This retreat in Bodh Gaya was led by the Burmese Buddhist teacher S. N. Goenka, who taught a “body scan” meditation technique in which students focus their attention on various parts of their bodies. The practice would later form the basis of the stress-reduction and pain-management work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, the best selling author and founding director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Ram Dass would also borrow heavily from these Vipassana mindfulness teachings.

  The monastery at Bodh Gaya offered a series of ten-day retreats. Some of the Western seekers stayed for months. There was lots of meditation practice, and there was lots of partying. It was one of the first retreats where Goenka had encountered Westerners. These folks were not exactly monks. They would smoke dope in the middle of the retreat and drop acid between sessions. Goenka would give his dharma talk in the evening and go off to bed. Then Ram Dass would start holding court, talking about how the Buddhist teachings related to his Jewishness or his Hindu-ness. Something was brewing in Bodh Gaya, and it was a heady brew.

  At the end of one retreat session, a group of Westerners decided it would be fun to go off to Delhi. Magically, a bus appeared with a driver willing to make the trip. So with Ram Dass as ringleader, thirty-four people climbed onto the bus and headed out. Along the way was the city of Allahabad, which hosts a massive spiritual pilgrimage known as the Khumba Mela, which draws sages, sadhus, and saints down from the mountains to ritually bathe in the River Ganges. One of the boys on the bus, Danny Goleman, had been to the festival a few weeks before. Goleman, who would go on to become a noted psychologist, New York Times science writer, and best-selling author of Emotional Intelligence and other books, thought it would be very cool to make a short detour to the festival site.

  “Man, I’d love to have you all see where the Mela was held,” he said.

  Amid affirmative cheers of “far-out” and “right on,” Ram Dass chimed up as the voice of reason.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s kind of late in the day, and we have a small child with us here, and we’re all a little tired. It’s a long drive to Delhi. Plus, the Mela is over. All we’ll see is an empty fairground.”

  “Yeah,” Goleman replied, “but the vibrations will be very beautiful.”

  “Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t. Vibrations are very ephemeral, especially when you’re tired. Let’s pass this time.”

  “OK, man,” Goleman replied. “Whatever you say.”

  Then Ram Dass thought about it again. Maybe he was just being an old fart.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  They got to the junction. The bus driver made a right turn and started heading down a bumpy road. They parked the bus at the bottom of the hill in a deserted fairground. Trash was piled up or blowing across the dusty field. Ram
Dass was just starting to think, “So much for good vibrations,” when someone yelled, “Look! There’s Maharaji!” Everyone piled out of the bus and fell at the feet of Neem Karoli Baba.

  “Come,” the guru said, “follow me.”

  Everyone climbed back on the bus and followed a little rickshaw carrying the guru to a house where food and lodging had been prepared for thirty-four people.

  Ram Dass could only shake his head. He had no intention of going to see his guru with a bus full of stoned seekers from the States. How did he know they were coming? What is going on here? That just led to more questions for Ram Dass about his own ideas about himself. Who was it sitting in the bus deciding whether we would go to those grounds or not? Who am I? What do I really think the game is? What is behind my decisions? What is ego? What is personality? What is choice? What is free will? What is the possibility of human consciousness? What the hell is going on here, anyway?

  Mirabai Bush was equally blown away. Right before the unexpected encounter with the guru, everyone had been sitting around reading the first edition of Ram Dass’s counterculture classic, Be Here Now, which was put together after Alpert’s first trip to India and had just come out in the States. Someone had brought a copy to the monastery at Bodh Gaya, and they had all been passing it around. They’d been reading the stories about this mysterious guru who lives up in the mountains and how you’ll find him only if it’s in your karma. And there he is. Standing outside the bus! Before she met Ram Dass and encountered his guru, Mirabai had planned to spend about two weeks in India. She wound up staying two years. She took Neem Karoli Baba as her guru and began a lifelong association and friendship with Ram Dass.