by Don Lattin
Those who know Ram Dass well say his stroke, as hard as it was, may have been the best thing to happen to him. He seems more human now. He’s got less of an edge. He seems to have mellowed out. Amid all the talk of compassion and bliss, there was always a slightly angry, snappish side that would reveal itself from time to time. “As he gets older, he gets sweeter and more loving,” observed his old friend from India, Mirabai Bush. “The stroke allowed him to let go of a lot of his critical judgments of people.”
During much of the 1980s and 1990s, Ram Dass lent his name and energies to a series of charities and volunteer projects. In the process, he became one of the most sought-after speakers on the New Age conference, workshop, and lecture circuit, where he was known for his ability to convey mystical ideas with lucidity, humor, and grace.
Many of those in his audience were aging baby boomers still trying to make sense of the soul-shattering, consciousness-raising experiences they had on psychedelic drugs way back in the 1960s. Ram Dass inspired many of them to go beyond the revelatory insights that psychedelic drugs can provide, and pursue a less dangerous, more life-affirming spiritual practice. “People’s minds were blown, shall we say, for lack of a better phrase,” Mirabai recalls. “He was the only one who really could explain and guide people into what was happening from a psychological perspective. He knew psychology and he knew psychedelics, and he was just the best at being able to put that together to know what was going on. Without that we could have lost a lot more people. People were so grateful. It was just the right moment. He had the right intelligence and background to work with it—and he was very charismatic.”*
Ram Dass never forgot the mission given to him in 1967 by his Indian guru, the late Neem Karoli Baba, to love God and serve people. He was the founding inspiration behind several ongoing charitable concerns, including the Seva Foundation, which has worked for three decades on health and welfare projects in India and Guatemala and on Native American reservations in the United States. Mirabai Bush, one of the cofounders of Seva, said there were many clashes on the Seva board over whether the organization should take a more political, activist stand on social issues. Ram Dass wanted to stick to straight charity. “He was critical of those of us leaning more toward social action,” she said. “He was often cranky about it. He was a bad boy a lot. He’d say, ‘That’s it. This is my last meeting!’ Then everything would stop while we dealt with that. Other people were angry about injustice, and he’d struggle with that. He’d say, ‘You’re just caught up in your anger.’ He wasn’t always very understanding about why people were angry.”
Social and political activism was never a priority with Leary or Alpert. They were not out marching to stop the war in Vietnam, nor even talking about it. In fact, they helped set the tone for the political disconnectedness of much of the human-potential and New Age movements, whose politics—or lack of it—were reflected in that line from the Beatle’s tune “Revolution.” If you want true freedom, the song suggests, “You better free your mind instead.”
Not surprisingly, this upset many of Leary and Alpert’s would-be allies in the more radical wing of the counterculture. Sixties political activist Michael Rossman, one of the leaders of the 1964 Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, remembers with disdain an evening in the 1970s when Ram Dass came to the Berkeley campus to address the next wave of Cal undergraduates. Rossman could hardly believe his ears when the professorial guru started talking about politics. “I know there’s a lot of oppression and injustice in this country,” Ram Dass told the crowd. “But we must remember to be grateful for the most important thing, that a meeting like this is allowed to go on here.” And then, Rossman recalled, Ram Dass “goes on with this song about the gods protecting us, and I wonder what function and whom this meeting serves, and feel a chill wind rising in this closed room of the spirit.”
In the early years, other Seva leaders wanted to take a more political approach to helping the poor, but they knew they couldn’t survive without Ram Dass. He was the organization’s superstar and fund-raising magnet. “Ram Dass always struggled over money, but he raised so much of it over his lifetime. And he gave it all away,” Mirabai Bush recalled. “When he had his stroke, he was broke. He had nothing. His father was a big fund-raiser, so he knew how to do it. He brought his upwardly mobile, Jewish, upper-middle class set of values around money, but never really knew what to do with it.”
Ram Dass also struggled with all of the fame and adoration of a generation that wanted to put him on a pedestal. “When we first came back from India, he couldn’t walk down the street. People were just coming from all over the place,” Mirabai recalled. “People would deify him. He didn’t want it. It gave him the creeps, but it’s hard to keep straight about all that when people are constantly telling you how great you are. The best part of him didn’t want it, but it was hard for him to manage.”
One of the more appealing aspects of Ram Dass’s story is the way he never quite seems to believe his own insight. Paradoxically, this self-deprecation only makes him more believable. “You see, I am so used to conning people. I’m used to being so charming and charismatic,” he told an interviewer in 1985. “People always want something from me. It can just be a smile, but they want something. . . . You don’t know how desperately I wanted that experience of not being able to charm somebody. Because the minute I charm, that paranoia begins. They don’t really know the real me.”
In 1991, Ram Dass came up with a rather creative way to remind his fellow seekers that true spiritual sustenance requires one to look outside oneself. To encourage “compassion in action,” Ram Dass hosted a series of events at the Scottish Rite Temple in Oakland, California. More than a thousand people—most of them white and middle class—signed up for a ten-week experiment called “Reaching Out,” a kind of giant support group to foster community service. Participants paid one hundred dollars and then agreed to engage in weekly acts of volunteerism, such as helping out in soup kitchens or working with the sick and dying. Then they discussed their experiences in small group meetings and completed weekly homework assignments of “inner work” and journal writing. Each week, under the gaze of television lights and cameras recording the proceedings for later broadcast, they gathered in the ornate Oakland auditorium. Ram Dass, microphone in one hand, prayer beads in the other, ventured into the audience like a consciousness-raising Oprah, searching for stories about the spiritual overtones of volunteerism. “You know,” he said, “this kind of work is far more than ‘doing good.’ When it’s done with a good heart, it’s unclear at the end of the helping act who is the helper and who is the helpee.”
In some ways, Ram Dass always seemed more like just another seeker on the path, less like some all-knowing guru. Like many in his generation, and the next, he stumbled along the way, and was always ready to admit his failings. Looking back on his life, he confesses that he was always more comfortable playing the loyal lieutenant, the number-two guy. He did that with Timothy Leary. He did it with Neem Karoli Baba. He did it with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the popular Tibetan Buddhist teacher and founder of the Naropa Institute, who tried to take Ram Dass under his wing. And he did it at least one other time, with some embarrassing results. In the winter of 1974, shortly after the death of Neem Karoli Baba, Ram Dass fell under the spell of a lady named Joya, a spiritual channeler living in New York City. He devoted himself to her and her teachings for more than a year. He would eventually denounce her as a fraud and write a long apologetic article about the experience. He published it in Yoga Journal under the headline “Egg on My Beard.”
Ram Dass doesn’t want to be worshipped, but he wants to be loved. He wants to be known. About five years after his stroke, film director Mickey Lemle released an intimate documentary about Ram Dass. It was a fine movie, but there was something missing. Despite all its intimacy, the film never points out that Ram Dass is gay. Part of that is the subject’s fault. “I’ve had a hard time getting my homosexuality into my drama,” he said. “
Most of my friends don’t like that I’m homosexual. They dissuade me from coming out. They feel people would have attitudes, would be put off by it.” Ram Dass loved the film’s depiction of his struggle with aging, sickness, and death, but he said he was sorry that the film sanitized his life. He said he didn’t like the way it portrayed him as a hippie saint.
Over the years, Ram Dass has avoided any detailed discussion of his own sexuality—with a few notable exceptions. In the 1980s, he would talk about himself more as a bisexual than as a homosexual. Here’s his answer to an interviewer who asked him, “Do you feel it’s significant that you’re not married?”
“Sure it’s significant that I’m not married,” he replied. “I mean, I love children and love women and I would like to be married in some ways. And then in some ways I wouldn’t. I live with a woman and I live with a man and everybody knows everybody and it’s all wonderful. I don’t live with them together. They live in different parts of the country. And I don’t live with them on a regular basis but we are extremely close and trusting and true and we are spiritual companions and there is also physical intimacy.”
Working with AIDS patients in the 1980s inspired Ram Dass to speak out a little more about his own sexual journey. Then, in the early 1990s, a few years before his stroke, he sat down for a detailed, almost confessional, interview about his sexual past. He talked about how in his college years he began having sexual encounters with men in parks and public bathrooms. He talked about the size of his genitalia. “I was confused,” he explained. “Later, when I moved to California to do postgraduate work at Stanford, I started to get more involved in gay life in San Francisco. I’ve only roughly estimated, sometimes to just blow people’s minds, but I’m sure I’ve had thousands of sexual encounters. It was often two a night. Then I returned east as a professor at Harvard and continued to have this incredible sexual activity. But I always had a woman as a front to go to faculty dinners and things like that.”
He remained confused about his sexuality after his return from India. One day, he found himself standing outside a gay porno theater in Chicago. “This hippie came walking by and saw me and recognized me. He stopped and started a conversation. As we talked I could see him registering where I was and his brain was scrambling to comprehend that Ram Dass, the spiritual teacher, was standing in line at the gay porn theater. In my mind I was trying to decide whether to be honest and go into the theater or to just walk down the street with him to get a cup of coffee. I chose to go into the theater. It took a lot of courage for me to do that. My own guilt and shame were so strong.”
In the end, Ram Dass decided that, yes, he was more homosexual than bisexual, but that being gay would never be his central, defining characteristic. “Because I live among so many straight populations, I’ve started to talk more about being bisexual, being involved with men as well as women. Most of the audiences with whom I do that are people who already love me so much they couldn’t care if I turned into a frog. Allen Ginsberg goes and confronts people with his gayness. I don’t see any reason to do that—it’s not my trip. I never deny it, but I don’t push it because it’s not part of my active identity.”
Sexual promiscuity did not make Richard Alpert happy. Later, sexual renunciation did little to foster the spiritual growth of Ram Dass. It only made him “a horny celibate.”
“In a still later stage,” he explained, “you realize that the aversion is keeping you from being free—and you want to be free, not just high. So you start to come back into who you are, passionate and nonattached. You are fully in life, joyfully participating—sex is a celebration. It’s all wonderful, and at the same moment, it’s all empty. That’s a very evolved stage of spiritual maturation.”
Much later in his life, sitting in his home in Hawaii, Ram Dass looks back and sees three great loves in his life—one straight, one gay, and one spiritual. There was Caroline Winter, the girl he met that night back in the sixties at that Grateful Dead concert in San Francisco, the only girl he ever took back to meet his mother. Then there’s Peter, a longtime male partner. “I can say to Peter, ‘God, I love you so much,’ but it’s not really a sexual thing. It’s been changing. The love goes out and out and out and out. Peter has gone from being a sexual object to my dear friend who I love. He is a person who, from my point of view, goes into the woodwork. The only person now like that is Maharaji. He’s my real love. That’s just the way it is.”
Now, more than ten years after the stroke, Ram Dass has settled down—for the last time, he says—into this spectacular house above the cliffs on the northeast coast of Maui, on the road to Hana. A wealthy benefactor bought the place and rents it to him to use until he dies. There are people here to take care of him. He says he’s come here to die, and anyone who wants to see him must now come to Maui. He’s done with all that flying around the world, working his wisdom on the consciousness-raising circuit.
Maybe the stroke was the best thing to happen to him.
Yet something still shifts in Ram Dass whenever Andrew Weil pops into the story. He’s still mad about the way Weil went to Ronnie Winston’s father and told him his son had to report Professor Alpert to the Harvard administration, to admit that he gave him drugs. The edge comes back when he talks about the time he met with Weil in the 1970s. Andy had been trying to arrange a meeting to reconcile with the Harvard professor he once brought down. It was the early seventies. Richard Alpert had become Ram Dass. Weil was just making his name as a sympathetic authority on the burgeoning youth drug culture. Ram Dass had finally agreed to meet with his old nemesis. Weil picked him up in his car. Weil remembers taking Ram Dass to the airport. Ram Dass doesn’t remember the airport part, but he does remember having a conversation in a car.
“Andrew said to me, ‘We turned on the society,’” Ram Dass recalls, barely concealing his condescension. “I remember that the steering wheel was pushing into his stomach. Then he says to me, ‘I want to be your student.’ I said, ‘OK. Lose some weight.’ He didn’t like that.”
Ram Dass laughed. Then shook his head. He wished he hadn’t said what he just said. “I know he’s done a lot of good work, but I’ve had it in my head for so long that he’s a bad guy. The way he went after Ronnie’s father, that was just . . .”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t have to. It was clear that there was still some reconciliation to be done between Ram Dass and Andrew Weil.
Ram Dass had been sitting in the chair by his picture window for a couple of hours when Andy Weil came up again.
“You know,” he said, “I’m sorry about the way I badmouthed . . . what’s-his-name.”
“You were just being honest.”
“Yes,” Ram Dass said, paused for a long time, then added, “I was.”
“Andy has the impression that you never forgave him.” “You can see that’s true,” Ram Dass replied. “I should be able to let that go. I should . . .”
Then he leaned back in his orange La-Z-Boy recliner, looked out the picture window at the waves crashing onto the shores of Maui, and sighed a deep sigh.
Trickster: Los Angeles March 1996
They say the best way to predict how a man will handle his death is to look at the way he lived his life. That may or may not be true, but it was certainly the case for Timothy Leary. He lived the life of a showman, a rascal, and a rebel. For Leary, life was a party. Why should death be any different?
Sometime in January 1995, Leary was diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer. He did not go quietly into the night. He would die in his bed at his home in Los Angeles shortly after midnight on May 31, 1996, ending a sixteen-month media circus in which he floated various stories about how he would turn on, tune in, and drop out one last time. In the mid-1990s, the Internet was the next big thing. Leary was always fascinated with the next big thing. Cyberspace was the new LSD. Virtual reality was the new reality. Leary would die—live!—on the Internet. In the end, he didn’t do it, but he livened up his convalescence, and got media
attention, by posting his daily drug intake on the Internet. Two cups of caffeine, thirteen cigarettes, two Vicodin, one cocktail, one glass of white wine, one line of cocaine, twelve balloons of nitrous oxide, and Leary Biscuits—marijuana in melted cheese on a Ritz cracker.
At a reunion in 1996, just a few weeks before his death, Timothy Leary, with thumb up, is joined (top row, left to right) by Ram Dass, Ralph Metzner, and Paul Lee. Also pictured are three other men who worked with Leary as graduate students at Harvard in the early 1960s—George Litwin, Michael Katz, and Gunter Weil. (Photo courtesy of Paul Lee.)
Then there was the cryonics scenario. Leary would be frozen until medical science could bring him back. No, just his head would be frozen, kept in the freezer until it could be attached to the body of a beautiful black woman.
Various delegations came to pay their last respects. Six guys who were there when it all began—Richard Alpert, Paul Lee, Ralph Metzner, and three other graduate students who started the Harvard Psilocybin Project in the fall of 1960—gathered around the dying Leary on March 16, 1996. The high priest of LSD, gaunt with bruised skin and wide eyes receding into his pale face, sat in his wheelchair wearing a blue Dodgers jacket and a baseball cap declaring himself “100% Irish.” It was a party, a predeath wake. Leary had surrounded himself with an unruly tribe of young groupies. There was lots of laughter, and smiles all around, but some of Tim’s old friends saw beyond the celebration.
Ram Dass, who spent decades working with the sick and dying, saw a lot of denial amid all the partying: “Tim wanted so much to avoid thoughts of death that he tried to keep his life going permanently. All that stuff about freezing his brain. Mostly it was all show biz. But he was denying death. I tried to talk to him about it, but I couldn’t break through. I worked with his caretakers. I told them how important it was that they try to see his soul, not just the surface Timothy Leary.”