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by Charles Carreon
March 14, 2006
It was summer 1970 in Boston. I arrived at
Logan airport, and had a layover in Boston for the night, so I stuck out
my thumb outside the airport and quickly had a ride with a guy in a cool
Porsche. I was fourteen years old, and I was sailing on the after-images
of a day flying in a 727 on a hit of orange sunshine. The guy in the
Porsche was really nice, had his professional trip and casual style. He
said he’d take me to his place to crash and drive me back to the airport
in the morning, but he needed to pick up a book downtown by this guy who
had just given a talk in town. When we got back to his place, he said he
had to crash because he’d been burning himself out. He gave me two hits of
purple microdot, saying they weren’t really that strong, and left me to
sit out the night. I dropped the two hits of purple microdot, which were
tiny little pills, domed on each side, with a flat ridge around the edge,
a dull purple color. They weren’t that strong, but they weren’t that weak,
either. As the night wore on, sitting in the nice man’s living room, I had
the company of the book he had just bought, that was also purple, and had
a chair on the front of it, locked in a circle at the center of
intersecting lines. Around the edge of the circle it said “BE HERE NOW.”
It was a long and beautiful night, a
strange trip away from myself. I didn’t follow all of the logic and
reasoning, not really, but the flow of images of saintly men and women, of
dancing gods and goddesses, illustrating the world as a vast golden loop
of infinity, drew me in like a net of seduction. By morning, when my very
gracious host rose to ferry me back to the airport as promised, I had one
more favor to ask of him – could I please buy this book from him? I still
have the book, and it bears on the inside front cover a wacky
fourteen-year-old-on-acid attempt to claim ownership of the book on behalf
of a non-self. It’s hilarious, and warming to remember when I wrote those
words, sailing aloft on wings of steel, peering out at the earth below,
glorying in my mind and in the fact that I had found friends. For years I
had been navigating the byways of psychedelic space with no vocabulary or
context to guide my explorations. My prep school pals and I had no tools
for confronting the inner landscape that yawned open before our youthful
eyes. Seeing is believing, and we had seen a world we had never suspected
existed within us. Now this guy, Ram Dass, Tim Leary’s pal that also got
kicked out of Harvard, was teaching this Indian guru path and making it
look cool.
Three years later I was seventeen, living
in Tempe, Arizona, going to school, wearing sandals, flowered shirts and
cutoffs, and I had a friend named Jane who was a waitress at Earthen Joy,
the extremely wonderful natural food restaurant next door to Gentle
Strength Coop and across the street from Changing Hands Books and the
Buffalo Exchange. One day I met Jane on the ASU campus and she told me she
was going to see this cool guy speak, so I went with Jane. It was Ram Dass,
the guy who wrote the purple book, that frankly I hadn’t thought about in
quite some time. It must’ve been hosted by the Yogi Bhajan crew, because
they had the front-circle position, and seemed to know what they were
doing. I was a young kid far more interested in girls than God, and yet,
there was something about his voice that I really liked. After an hour or
so, Ram Dass said it was time for some of us to go, and that’s when Jane
and I parted company, she staying, me going.
Of Death & Compassion
I went off into the Arizona night,
bicycling on the broad concrete arteries of the ASU campus, off into my
life. I met a beautiful, slender blonde girl during the spring semester,
and in one of those silly rebound things, I swapped my lukewarm
relationship with a Catholic girl who acted Jewish for a wild
head-over-heels obsession with the blonde. That summer we took a
hitchhiking trip from Denver to Dallas to Florida, back up into Tennessee
and Kentucky, north to Michigan and then back to Phoenix. We could cover
some territory in those days. My girl had a yard of flashing gold
streaming from her head, legs like a gazelle and a toothy smile. We made
good time, but in the American South, that just means you hit trouble
faster.
One night in Kentucky, we found ourselves
on the wrong side of Green River, having a verbal dispute in a car with a
man who was drunk, very big and strong. My girl said she had bad vibes
from the guy when the car lurched to a stop next to us as we walked down
the road. Our suspicions grew when he drove the car onto a one-car ferry
that, he advised us, stopped running at nine, and took us to the other
shore. As we drove on, the place he said he was taking us was just always
a little farther, a little farther into the darkening Kentucky hills until
the sunset turned to dusk turned to dark and at last in the pitch black
night he declared that we were at the place, out in the middle of nowhere,
and just needed to walk down to a lake. Nope, nope, nope. That wasn’t
something my girl was going to do. And besides, she said, we had to trade
places, because he’d been squeezing her leg during the whole ride. He was
mad when we decided not to walk down to the “lake,” madder still when I
insisted on sitting between him and my girl, and really mad after he
pulled off the main road and I said “Whoa, whoa, whoa, where are we
going?” He said he was taking a shortcut. I told him he was scaring us. He
told me he got scared sometimes, too, which is why he kept a 357 under the
seat.
Quick thinking was required, but what I
remembered was that guy in Tempe, in the robe with the beads and the
beard. I remembered the page in the Be Here Now book where Ram Dass is
looking at his own image in the mirror. It suddenly occurred to me that
the man behind the wheel, basically announcing that he was going to kill
us, was a very unhappy man. It occurred to me that Ram Dass might say we
should feel compassion toward this person. I remembered the page of Be
Here Now where Ram Dass wrote that as his torturers were nailing him to
the cross, Christ was probably feeling sorry for them. The driver got back
on the main road, to my relief. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was not
drinking or smoking, but the man was. I realized I must appear to be a
strange person, a skinny guy with long, curly hair who doesn’t smoke or
drink. I had quit smoking years before, and didn’t like beer much at all,
but I asked the man if I could have a beer and a cigarette. He said yes,
of course. I lit up and popped the beer can and drank and smoked,
genuinely thankful to our host, who suddenly began expressing the earnest
hope that we would not miss the last ferry and get stuck in the dark on
the wrong side of Green River. He was driving about as fast as you should
on the two-lane road, and when we saw that the last ferry was still there,
we were all joyful. As we reached the other shore, the man apologized for
the events of the night, explaining that sometimes he went kind of crazy.
He would like to make it up to us, he said, but we were out of the car,
hauling our huge backpacks as fast as we could, and literally tearing
through the woods away from the terror car at top speed to get away.
Go East, Young Seekers
My girlfriend and I didn’t actually change
our hitchhiking habits, just our choice of rides, but the fact was, life
in other people’s cars was hazardous. We married young and traveled around
the country. We got our own cars, but they were miserable experiences,
always breaking down, costing too much, sending you back to the grinding
system of cash generation with its boring, downer bosses, tedious material
trips, and of course, restaurant jobs. Reading gets you out of your space,
though, and I read anything I could find on yoga. Autobiography of A Yogi
was everywhere, being pushed through the food coops and head shops where
you found eastern spiritual literature in those days, and I was seized by
the miracles of consciousness laid out in the book. Paramahansa
Yogananda’s story was romantically beautiful. All of the problems of life
were intended to be resolved through inner peace. Nothing seemed more
likely to me. I had been on this subjective approach to reality for a long
time.
So had Richard Alpert, the Harvard
professor who would become Ram Dass. Until adulthood he enjoyed being a
rich man’s son, intelligent and handsome, a doctor, a professor with money
and friends. He was a tenured professor at Harvard before age forty, and
the world, as he put it himself, “was his oyster.” Indeed it was.
Psychedelic experiences, however, upped the ante. No longer good enough to
be rich, good looking, admired and respected. Now he needed to discover
the who-less who of himself, that he had become so acquainted with while
flossing his brain cells with Doctor Hoffman’s mold extract. For that,
only a trip to India, toting along a little medicine kit stuffed with
White Lightning, 305 micrograms per little white pill, would suffice. And
yes, at the top of a high mountain. Yes, at an old temple! Yes, a funny
old man! Who can take all the White Lightning in the bottle, enough to
make your face melt off and run down into your bellybutton, and just tease
you about it. Yes, it’s God – the acid-free acid-head! LSD was the fulcrum
of Richard Alpert’s psyche, the philosopher’s stone of consciousness, and
like a redneck who will respect anyone who can hold his liquor, Alpert had
to bow down to someone for whom acid was nothing. Not much of a
well-reasoned philosophy there, but it has a certain je ne se quois.
Having gotten out of Boston and into the
invigorating air of the Indian highlands, Richard Alpert found a new
source of authority to make up for his loss of his teaching position in
academe, the mysterious little-known holy man, Neem Karoli Baba. Neems are
a type of Indian pine tree, so you can deduce that this Baba lived way out
in nowhere, where nobody ever went to see him. The perfect guru for a man
starting over. And indeed, according to Ram Dass, the only recorder of the
events he described, they hit it off famously. Neem Karoli Baba once even
told an old disciple who wanted to touch his feet to go touch Ram Dass’s
instead. When the guy gave Ram Dass the devotional foot-touch, Neem Karoli
Baba smiled at him. You can take the meaning any way you want. Ram Dass
certainly did. The newly-named Ram Dass went to work on his image with a
lack of subtlety that would have caused comment if anyone had understood
what he was doing. We were so relieved to get someone who could talk about
Indian philosophy without an accent, who could wear a robe but not be a
priest, who had a beard like Freud, and joked about being Jewish and
getting bloated after eating ice cream, that we just didn’t criticize.
When he said we had to read the Bhagavad Gita, and we became the Arjunas
of our personal Mahabharata epics, we knew we had Ram Dass to thank for
entry into the mysterious East. No silly turbans like stage clairvoyants.
No table-tapping and parlor stunts like spiritualists. Just good old
fashioned internal holographic displays like you saw on acid, that had to
be real. Meditation isn’t that hard, man. You’ll be tripping out in no
time – Ram Dass is already on a much higher plane than the rest of us. His
guru told him to feed people. His guru could read his thoughts. His guru
was already so high that acid did nothing to him. Really! Talk about mind
over matter. That was proof that the West had nothing on the East. They
would just meditate those mushroom clouds into lotus blossoms.
So I and my girlfriend, like lots of other
people, followed Ram Dass’s example and traveled all the way to India. We
hitchhiked from Eugene to Phoenix to New York, caught the Icelandic cheap
fare to Luxembourg, Belgium, hitchhiked to Munich, caught the train to
Istanbul, and took buses through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Jammu and Kashmir, before we arrived at the Sacred Ganges river. There we
sought out the grandson of Yogananda’s guru. We found him without much
trouble. His address was as listed in the Spiritual Community Guide, but
he wasn’t, as the Guide claimed, “giving strong Kriya Yoga teachings.” He
wouldn’t teach us at all, he said, because a Guru took on a big job, a
lifetime job, with each disciple, and he couldn’t do it if we lived in
America. He had only one English-speaking student, and he spoke Hindi and
had read the Upanishads in the original language before they ever met. He
was sorry, and unmoved. We would have to get the yoga lessons through the
mail that Yogananda’s group offered. That was for us.
So the Hindus had no use for us, and
generally didn’t allow non-Hindus into their temples. While Ram Dass had
led us all to believe that spiritual bonhomie was the general rule in
India, we found this to be untrue. The Indians had little use for
foreigners entirely, unless they could sell us something, haggling with
earnest sincerity. As poor as we were, we took classes in tabla and
bonsuri from three men who were all from the same Brahmin family, and
through this contact gained some familiarity with the attitude of ceremony
and gentle arrogance typical of the Indian upper class. We wondered
without understanding as we saw people thronging the streets of Benares,
carbuncled with temples great and small, overgrown with banyans, populated
by orange-robed sannyasis, moving along the shores of the great Ganges
river, lined with burning ghats and temples, edge to edge for miles and
miles.
We studied some Buddhist meditation with an
English monk named Luong-Pi, who taught mindfulness meditation. I couldn’t
abide the stuffy stillness of the Buddhist approach, the tedious attention
to little sensations. I enjoyed the colorful style of the Hindus, the gods
and goddesses, the stories, the tales of how one deity created illusions
that other deities would purify and redeem. India was a great vacation
from the Western mindset, as Ram Dass had promised. We came back more
alienated from our homeland than before. The remedy for this feeling was
total immersion in spirituality.
Neo-Tibetans Take To The Woods
In 1978, my wife and I became the disciples
of a bonafide Tibetan Rinpoche, and we built a house in the woods with
help from several friends who knew nothing about carpentry, and lived
there for three years on next to nothing, exploring the life of the spirit
and the emptiness of the natural world. I dedicated myself to the life of
the spirit, trusting that the material world would take care of itself,
and in 1982 that had all lined up. I was living with my wife and two kids
in a yurt out in an Oregon meadow. We were homesteading as Buddhist
pilgrims in a field of alfalfa gone to seed and teasle making a comeback.
We lived on student aid, food stamps, and what I could make cutting wood
at about $2.80 an hour, not figuring the cost of saw-sharpening and other
necessary expenses.
Poverty – not having the money to buy
anything you wanted, and only some of what you needed – was our difficult
friend. It kept us simple, but it kept us weak. We had very little power
or independence. Like poor people all over the world, we kept as still as
circumstances permitted, to keep our expenses as low as possible. We knew
how long the honey, the peanut butter, and the whole wheat flour were
likely to last, and when we’d get food stamps next. I just read last night
in “The Intelligent Investor” by investing guru Benjamin Graham that from
1972, when I got out of high school, until 1983, when I left Oregon to get
a law degree in LA, the cost of living doubled — the largest ten-year rise
in US history. So times really were tough, and we bore them pretty
stoically, raising a couple of little kids in a little house in a meadow,
just like the Waltons, the TV family in “Little House on The Prairie,” a
popular show of which I never saw a full episode. Ironically, it made us
feel cutting-edge to be out of touch, because we were living the reality
other Americans were watching, since like the Waltons, we had no
electricity and no reception, and thus also like the Waltons, we weren't
distracted from the beauty of the natural world by television. We maybe
went to the movies twice a year, and ate out only under the direst
circumstances of necessity. Our main source of entertainment consisted in
feasting on scenery and silence, studying the shade of the sky, listening
to the birds and crickets, and hating the deer for eating our garden.
These were all healthy pursuits that cost nothing, except the loss of the
garden to the deer, hence the anger. Everyday living left us with nothing
extra to put towards pleasure travel.
So when we heard that our guru was giving a
talk along with Ram Dass up in Eugene, it was a conundrum. The drive was
four hours, and we didn’t want to risk the trip if it would cause us to
suffer a car breakdown. We could not abide the thought that our car might
break down. It was our lifeline to town. Everything depended on it. It was
local hippie lore that the drive to Eugene, over all the insane passes
north of Grants Pass, Rice Hill, etcetera, had put an end to more than one
good workaday vehicle. We didn’t know what to do, because we really wanted
to go. I had never thrown the I Ching before, but the matter seemed to
demand some third-party input. I tried to figure out the method of casting
the lines, and in fact got it backward, but derived a hexagram that said,
in the John Blofeld version: “The superior man does nothing that is
trivial.” The changing line added the commentary that “There is great
power in the cart axle.” The heavens had spoken. The matter was settled.
We roasted a chicken, made potato salad, packed the car and made the trip
to Eugene. Of course everyone went up to see Ram Dass, and no one paid a
lick of attention to my guru, who was an unromantic Tibetan man with
bucked teeth and a wicked sense of humor that, however, you had to take
the time to appreciate. I remember Ram Dass’s words to me as our eyes met
briefly when I went up to see him. He gave me a friendly guy-to-guy word
of encouragement – “We’ve been doing this for a long time, haven’t we?” It
felt great, like a shot of encouragement right in my heart. We’d been
doing it a long time, together, me and Ram Dass and all the other folks on
the liberation train. All of us.
Secret Teachings
A month or so later, I was talking with my
buck-toothed guru on a hill where there’s now a big temple. At that time,
all we had were underfunded projects, so we built things out of logs and
poles, and on that day we’d been working on a deck where some teachings
were going to take place that summer. My guru said to me that Ram Dass, or
“that guy,” as he called him, had taught him a lot. He said yes, that he
had spent three days reading over his texts, preparing with his translator
to deliver the teaching he gave in Eugene, but that Ram Dass had just sat
there on a chair with his legs folded under him, smiling like he was
having the greatest time, and talking about just anything. The Buddhist
Dharma, he said to me, was not very sexy. It was, he said, like a big,
ugly old truck with a noisy engine and a cab that fills up with dust and
exhaust. Still, all the great masters of the past, Guru Rinpoche, Milarepa,
Naropa, all of them, traveled in that same, ugly old truck, so we must use
it. Ram Dass, he said, offered a much more flexible, stylish alternative.
He recognized that, and was amazed at how Ram Dass had derived spiritual
lessons from everything. His teachings, my guru said, were like the CIA –
they might be hiding anywhere, behind any rock or tree. As he said this,
he jumped around, looking behind this tree and that rock until I grasped
his wacky analogy and laughed. I was in total agreement with his
confessional about the geeky appearance of our Dharma vehicle, but also, I
heard the ring of noble adherence to tradition in his voice, and was
attracted by it. The Dharma truck, yes, I would ride in the Dharma truck.
Around that same time, I encountered
Bhagavan Dass, the surfer-dude-cum-yogi who introduced Ram Dass to Neem
Karoli Baba, in the kitchen of our Ashland Buddhist center on 2nd Street,
in a location that has been turned into a garden restaurant because of its
sunny exposure in an above-the-boulevard location. It was a sunny day when
I met Bhagavan Dass, and while I was thrilled, he seemed to be a totally
regular guy, not a spiritual leader in any sense. You could say he was
unassuming, perhaps. What seemed strange was that in Be Here Now, Ram Dass
had described Bhagavan Dass as a stellar spiritual exemplar, a man who was
literally always in the flow and in the know. Perhaps, I figured, he
needed the hash he was smoking in India to keep his Shiva-baba mojo going,
and just slid down the psychic totem pole without it. I assumed Ram Dass
had told Bhagavan Dass to check out Oregon, because his joint appearance
in Eugene with Gyatrul Rinpoche had a huge turnout of over three-thousand
people. Of course, he might have been headed for Antelope, Oregon, the
town that the Osho/Rajneesh cult took over and turned into the last known
preserve where antique Rolls Royce automobiles could roam freely in the
open fields. Certainly such an environment would have been more congruent
with Bhagavan Dass's interests, that struck me as regrettably concrete. I
would have liked to ask him the whereabouts of Neem Karoli Baba, or his
reminiscences of sojourns in the upper Ganges regions where sadhus have
lived and grooved the life ecstatic for millennia. But he was focused on
prospects for immediate financial improvement, and just asked about
money-making opportunities in the astrological field, his wife's
specialty, to which I replied that in Ashland we were historically
overstaffed in that department. He and Mrs. Bhagavan Dass left town the
same day they arrived, as I recall.
I wasn't critical of Bhagavan Dass being
focused on his own welfare rather than ministering to the flock like his
friend Ram Dass — after all, everyone has to pay for their brown rice and
tofu, and indeed my own attention was increasingly focused on material
matters. Certainly the idea of me meditating had turned into a huge joke
with Gyatrul Rinpoche — once when I asked him what the secret mandala
offering was, he responded that it was the Chod practice of exorcism, but
that the real secret was how I'd been supposedly doing my preliminary
hundred-thousand mantras and mandala offerings for years now, and still
hadn't completed anything. About that time he also started calling me
“Grandma Lawyer,” apparently because I was as loquacious as an old Tibetan
woman. By alluding to my future career choice, my guru was gently showing
me the door to the yurt. It was time to venture out of the vajra circle
and attend to concrete reality.
I began to recognize that poverty was an
obstacle to fulfilling my life desires. Further, it became a source of
humiliation after wo students bought the land we were living on in a
homemade yurt, and gave it to Gyatrul Rinpoche. Now we lived on the
Buddha's land, and officious Dharma jerks would come by and critique the
layout of our yurt, the location of the outhouse, and the fact that our
refrigerator was under the porch. I wanted to buy land, and be close to my
guru, but I was so broke that owning land was a ridiculous pipe dream, and
my guru obviously took affluent people more seriously and regretted that
so many of the Dharma simpletons drawn to esoteric Buddhism literally
lacked even pots in which to piss. We were so obviously penniless that no
real estate agent would have even wasted time talking to us. Reagan had
become president, and was “staying the course” through the worst of the
post-cold war recession, and it seemed harder times lay ahead. My mom had
died unexpectedly, my father was sunk in grief, and the world without mom
was mighty unfriendly — she had always helped us financially in little
ways, and her death left us literally poorer than ever. In the summer of
1982, after my mom died, Gyatrul Rinpoche started work on the monumental
32-foot high statue of Vajrasattva Buddha, and told me to work only on
that project, to dedicate all the merit to my mother as the representative
of all sentient beings, and not to worry no matter how poor I got. I got
so poor I couldn’t buy shoes. I wrote a poem about it, but it didn’t make
me feel much better. I really had no shoes. My wife and I had created a
third child, a lovely little girl, and I started to feel motivated toward
material independence like never before in my life. Three months of
continous hard physical labor for ten to twelve hours a day, working on
the foundation of the statue, had a healing effect on my grief-stricken
mind, no doubt. When the academic year began, I returned to college,
finished my last year of undergraduate work, took the LSAT, and got ready
to join the rat race I had avoided for a decade.
Professional Buddhists
With Gyatrul Rinpoche’s strong
encouragement, I went to law school at UCLA. We moved to LA with three
kids and Tara at the wheel of a white and blue 61 Econoline church
window-van, and me pulling a U-Haul with no blinkers behind a slant six
Dodge half-ton pickup piled high with domestic belongings and crowned with
Tara's rocking chair. We looked painfully like the Beverly Hillbillies,
and were literally jeered by a drunk guy in a satin jacket crossing the
street and eating a slice of pizza — we startled him so badly with our
parade that he almost lost his cheese. Somewhere in the back of the pickup
was a Vespa scooter I got from Mitchell Frangadakis in exchange for a
kickass little gas-powered portable water pump that had been our running
water source in the yurt that we had lived in for three years and was now
lying disassembled inside an old barn in Colestine Valley. I sold the
Vespa to a black mod kid who would have pushed his grandma off a cliff to
get it, and a few months later he showed me the brutal gash on his shin
where he'd piled it into an open car door while lane-splitting. I sold the
truck a year later to an appreciative surfer dude from Tujunga for $425.
But the van I would not let go of. I drove out of Topanga one day with my
hand reaching into the engine compartment, grabbing the carburetor
throttle with my bare hands, a drive of about ten miles through stop and
go traffic on PCH. It was a goner, though, after some jerk yelled at Tara
in Century City as she toodled down Avenue of the Stars, “Get that junker
off the road!” We swapped it for a Mercedes 240D my dad spotted as a
bargain in Phoenix, that served until I burned it up three years later and
traded up to a Cherokee in preparation for our return to Oregon. But I'm
getting ahead of myself.
My wife got straight clothes, put on a
little makeup, got a job with no experience from a guy with no class by
agreeing to work two weeks for free. She worked as a top-flight legal
secretary for the next twenty years. I got a haircut, a California bar
license, large debts, and the means to earn money to buy land. I worked in
a skyscraper in a big city, about twelve hours a day, and in the evenings
we hosted Dharma events at our house, which was one of the main Tibetan
Buddhist centers in a large metropolis. Life was simple, and we kept it
that way. With the guru at the top, everything else fell into line.
Sometimes when he came to the big city, he stayed at our house.
My guru was almost always very pleasant
with me, and had a generally good feeling about my spiritual potential. He
had spotted me hundreds of thousands of mantras so I could take teachings
I wasn’t qualified to receive, but he figured I’d need a lot of retreat
time to grind off the worldly professional patina I was acquiring in my
big city job, and paying for the standard three-year retreat was another
conundrum. The years went by, and I remained stuck in the big city, and
when I came back to visit him, he would always ask if I was making
progress toward moving back. I often told him I needed to get out of debt
to move back near him, and once, after I’d been gone nearly ten years, he
asked, “Are you getting out of debt?” We were, but so slowly, at times it
was imperceptible. Eventually, debt or no debt, we had to get out of the
metropolis. The Rodney King uprising blighted the energy of the city
severely, and so in 1993, ten years after we exchanged hippiedom for
yuppitude, we reversed course and headed back to the woods to reclaim our
spiritual roots.
Back To The Compound
We built another yurt on a parcel of twenty
acres overlooking the impressive three-story temple my guru had built with
Chinese dollars and American sweat. My life seemed stable, and although
the isolated country setting was inconvenient for my kids’ social lives,
everyone had to sacrifice so we could be close to the Dharma. As luck
would have it, the whole thing was not a happy homecoming. There was a
terrible anticlimax about the whole situation. We had moved to the big
city, lived there for ten years, bought land and moved back to the country
to be near our guru, and built a house from the driveway of which we could
see the golden roof of his house every morning. What was wrong? Well, by
the time we got there, the guru was effectively gone. He had experienced a
marital upset – his wife running off with a young Tibetan monk to whom my
guru had shown great generosity. But there you have it – no good deed will
go unpunished.
I and all of the other students had thought
my guru and his wife were the Divine Couple, and as their relationship
unraveled, various students were drawn into intrigues, enlisted as allies
by the wife and guru respectively, and in several cases, watched as their
faith was sacrificed to the newly-pragmatic order of the day. Strange new
faces showed up around the temple – a Hollywood martial arts actor
newly-recognized as a reincarnated tulku and his entourage. It was enough
to give the most hardened stomach vertigo. The guru spent time huddled
with top disciples, planning countermoves, and students stayed away in
droves. A sorrow that would not disperse pervaded the place.
My guru seemed to lose all pleasure in
being at his temple, a place that had been built so tantric practitioners
could perform Dzogchen, Mahamudra, Trek Chod and Togyal meditations, and
realize the rainbow body. The place was lonely as hell. The mountain
beauty surrounding the temple became desolate and sad. The hearts of the
students were dazed, confused, and silently aching. Nothing made sense.
The looming temple, the monumental statues, the rows of gleaming water
bowls, the multicolored brocades, the bundles of incense, the flickering
butter lamps, all their colors faded when deprived of the presence of the
guru whose inspiration had brought it all together, then abandoned his
creation.
My guru ultimately moved away to a windy
hilltop near the sea, a few hundred miles from the temple. The house was
provided for his use by a wealthy young woman who had appeared about a
year before at the temple. They moved into a big house on a hilltop hear
the Pacific, and the coterie of devotees who must be close to the guru,
and have no children or other ties to bind them, moved down there and
assembled a new court.
So after ten years in the big city and
moving back to the country to connect with my spiritual circle, after a
couple of years back in the compound, the whole arrangement unraveled like
an old sweater when somebody pulls the wrong thread. An empty temple is a
lonely place that engenders a lot of strange game-playing among the
students. Once in Benares we walked through a temple where a single lonely
sadhu was dolefully playing a drum and singing. The local fellow who was
showing us the way to our destination told us it was a temple where the
guru had died. Well, that had struck me as a problem with gurus –
succession planning might be difficult – but I didn’t do anything to deal
with it. When the time came, and my guru effectively abdicated his throne
to deal with a case of personal depression, it left me, and more
importantly, the devoted members of my family, bereft of direction.
Wipeout
For my wife, losing faith was about as
painful as losing her skin. For over twenty years she had invested every
waking thought in the project of self-perfection according to the Tibetan
Buddhist philosophy. She had performed a hundred thousand prostrations,
many more than a million mantras, transcribed and edited teachings by our
guru, built thrones, sewed every ecclesiastical fabric creation requested
of her, and managed hundreds of meals and ceremonies, large and small.
When she realized that nothing good had happened to her mind as a result
of all her efforts, and that she was just as far from clear on the meaning
of Buddhism as she had been years before, she was enraged. As the
thought-structure she had created began to come apart, it was about as
dramatic as the Challenger explosion, and for several years she was
condemned to repeat it daily. Self-deprogramming from a delusive worldview
can be painful.
My faith in Buddhism had always been
tenuous, but losing it altogether was no fun. By tenuous, I mean that I
always felt like a phony practitioner. My mind is incorrigibly active, and
meditating had always made me more uptight, to be honest. I certainly
didn’t get the hang of trancing out in meditation, like Ram Dass, who
found it an adequate substitute for drugs. I generally considered myself
more lucky than good, but luck is all about associating with the lucky.
The lucky ones in my pantheon were the Siddhas and Mad Saints who
overleaped the restraints of this world to declare the triumph of the
human spirit. I had gotten quite used to relying upon their company to
enliven the dreary confines of the workaday world. I was also very used to
the company of wrathful and peaceful deities whose presence I had
cultivated. My Buddhist lifestyle had made me able to balance various
different personalities on the theory that my inherent nature was empty,
but in actual fact, I had gone somewhat crazy. I woke up to my condition
one day after reading a book by a Miriam Williams who had spent fifteen
years of her life in the Children of God Christian sex cult, a cult that I
myself had been in just before it went altogether freaky. I realized I’d
been in one cult, then gotten into another one, and spent twenty years in
it. My self-delusion that I hadn’t been in a cult crumbled as I reviewed
the last years of my life, how I had ended up living in a remote backwoods
location near an empty temple where an old Tibetan lama had broken up with
his wife, and nothing very interesting was happening at all.
When we lose faith, we lose several sources
of psychological comfort. We lose the social agreement and ritual
activities we shared with other believers. We will no longer share
homilies with the Sangha. We will not regularly read Dharma books with a
reverent air. We will not push ourselves on toward the goal of
enlightenment for the sake of all beings with that terribly earnest style.
We will not wear special clothes, sport prayer paraphernalia or religious
fashion accents. The evenings become strangely lonely when you have no
fellow-believers to shore up your self-image.
I have recounted how my experiences first
led me to embrace, then reject, spiritual doctrines of the sort endorsed
by Ram Dass, because few people experience religious disillusionment after
a long period of belief, and apostates are often not very outspoken about
their despair. The faithful certainly don’t want to hear about it.
Therefore, it is significant that Ram Dass clearly states in Fierce Grace
that after a lifetime of faith, his near-death experience devastated his
beliefs, leaving him far less certain of his beliefs than he appeared
during his long and apparently self-deluded career as a spiritual teacher.
During the last quarter of the twentieth
century, Ram Dass was iconified as the epitome of a New Age guru with
unquestioned credentials. His achievements were logged in the hall of fame
and required no further confirmation. As he passed into middle age, he
kept cranking out lectures that were turned into books, and kept
certifying the experiences and writings of other spiritual lights. Like a
restless explorer always looking for new places to discover, he at last
settled into “aging” as his next big frontier. Of course, he subjected his
encroaching decrepitude to the same internal scrutiny he had perfected
with his meditator’s eye. One day he was visualizing what it would be like
to have failing eyesight and other weakened faculties, when it stopped
being an experiment, a speculation. Most human potential fans say that if
you visualize something really clearly, it becomes reality, and Ram Dass
should’ve probably taken that promise more seriously.
Ram Dass had just answered the phone when
he began exhibiting severe symptoms caused by a cerebral hemorrhage from a
ruptured blood vessel in his brain. A cerebral hemorrhage leads to
unconsciousness, coma, brain damage and death as blood pressure increases
inside the braincase. Ram Dass had begun to slur his words, and his friend
on the other end of the line, concerned, called the paramedics. “When I
answered the phone, my right side wasn't working, my words were slurred,
and the friend on the phone was worried,“ Ram Dass said about the stroke.
”My friends called 911. I was on the floor when these big young firemen
came. They stared at me and suddenly, I knew what it was to be old. On the
gurney I remember the pipes and the long faces of the doctors and nurses.
Later, I found out they thought I was dying.” An attending physician said,
“Ram Dass had a massive left hemorrhagic stroke and I believe he had
chronic hypertension. Since I am not his personal physician, I cannot tell
you how closely his blood pressure was followed nor if it was controlled,
so that may have played a part in his stroke.” The lay name for
hypertension is high blood pressure. When the blood pressure went up too
high inside Ram Dass’s blood vessels, one of them ruptured in his brain,
and then the pressure started going up inside his braincase, and then he
started dying.
Ironically, most doctors today will tell
you “yoga” is good for reducing your blood pressure. The doctors of course
are thinking of hatha yoga asanas and pranayama, the rhythmic stretching,
relaxing and breathing exercises that some yoga practicioners perform.
Apparently Ram Dass was dedicated to a subtler “heart yoga,” which he
sometimes taught people to practice by imagining that they had nostrils in
the middle of their chest. It must have worked for him, but he apparently
missed the fact that he wasn’t taking care of his body. Like many
spiritual athletes filled to the brim with the adulation of disciples, his
specialness had inflated to such a dimension that it blocked an honest
view of himself. In the midst of the last thirty years of hoopla, it had
slipped his mind that, when it comes to death, one size fits all.
Some of us don’t look forward to dying, but
Ram Dass had been anticipating the moment when death would remove the
fleshly barrier between himself and “Rama” the big blue God-king from
ancient India whose name he had by now repeated millions of times.
Constant recitation of Rama’s name was said to be like “placing a lamp at
the door of the mouth, so there will be light within and without.”
Pronounced with the last “a” silent, as in “Rahm,” Ghandi shouted out the
holy name the moment his assassins cut him down. Ram Dass was fond of this
story, of course.
But to his own great disappointment, during
the moments when his brain was failing and he was plummeting toward death,
Ram Dass didn’t remember Rama, God, guru, enlightenment, or anything
spiritual at all. Of course, you can hardly blame him, since nothing
happened to remind him of his planned after-death scenario. He didn’t
travel through a long tunnel, he wasn’t drawn to a beautiful light, no
guides showed up to meet him, and he didn’t return to this world because
he still had work to do among the living. He just stared at the pipes on
the ceiling, noticing that they were there. He didn’t think about God, not
one little bit. There’s no mystery here, unless you want to invent one.
Ram Dass’s malfunctioning brain couldn’t access the programs he’d stored
to know when he was dying, and how to act. He’d locked his spiritual keys
in his material vehicle, and wasn’t going anywhere.
Ironies abound in Ram Dass’s situation. Ram
Dass apparently thought the power of the spirit could trump physical
limitations, but his physical collapse has underlined the folly of
ignoring one’s physical health if one wishes to enjoy continued mental
clarity. He didn’t even know he had high blood pressure, or must’ve
figured he’d just muddle through on good vibes. High blood pressure kills,
and you don’t argue with the numbers – you get your blood pressure down or
you die.
Ram Dass believed, however, that spirit and
body were fundamentally distinct, and that he had set things up in such a
way that his consciousness would trend upward into clarity and peace,
gradually freed from earthly constraints into “liberation.” That is the
fairy tale. Now, paralyzed and cognitively impaired, unable to drive his
new car, to roll his own wheelchair, to speak clearly or express his
intentions unambiguously, he is a living demonstration of how the mind
depends on the body to experience suppleness and beauty.
The entire wisdom of Ram Dass’s teaching is
of course called into question by his own sense of complete befuddlement
when faced with precisely the event for which he’d been preparing for the
last thirty years. Ram Dass’s philosophy flowed from his first psychedelic
experience, when he believed he suffered “ego death,” and discovered that
even though “nobody was home,” his existence-less self was still “minding
the store.” After getting over the shocking effects of ego-death, Richard
Alpert decided it was a good thing to go through, and that it should,
logically, turn you into a holy man, which is why he became Ram Dass by
means of the available route – going to India with a stash of psychedelics
and looking for God among the hash-smokers of Benares. But whatever
Richard Alpert’s ego-death was, it must have been really different from
Ram Dass’s near-death experience, because he clearly did not conceive of
it as a good thing, and it didn’t turn him into a holy man. It turned him
into a very sad man.
Ram Dass placed his faith in the power of
the spirit to soften the reality of life. By dint of good fortune and a
kindly disposition, he did in fact make his life pleasant, and he
articulated a cozy philosophy that has no doubt comforted legions of
believers. The history of his popularity and the adulation he received are
in the record books. But when death came it didn’t stop to look at the
clippings and the videos and the audiotapes. It came straight for him, and
he was unable to take proactive, conscious steps to manage the death
experience. In the Mission Impossible moment when the smart yogi hot-wires
reality and flies off with the dakini in a magic vehicle, he froze.
Nothing looked right, and he forgot what to do. Whoa! Had he been studying
the wrong map? Was he like an old convict who had always said he would
escape, but dozed through the big jailbreak, and woke up inside the same
old slammer? Or was the whole escape story just bullshit? Was there no
“outside?” Perhaps what we see is all there is. Certainly Ram Dass
couldn’t testify to anything different based on direct experience. He fell
from a height of certainty into a chasm of doubt about our mortal destiny.
Based on his own spiritual criteria, Ram Dass announced at the beginning
of the film: “I failed the test. I have a lot of work to do.” Ram Dass
never recants this dark declaration, and all by itself, this statement
undermines a lifetime of confident pronouncements, as both his theory and
practice appear to have left him a goodly distance short of the finish
line.
Revisiting The Legacy
Fierce Grace doesn’t retell a fraction of
Ram Dass’s career as a guru, and indeed, doesn’t pretend to be an entire
biography. Nevertheless, to leave out the scope of his life activity
presents a one-sided view of the man. His involvement in pyramid schemes
like The Circle of Gold in the late seventies, which siphoned money into
the hands of a few spiritual and political elitists based on a ridiculous
metaphysical proposition that a pyramid scheme was just a brilliant method
of investing money that would make the whole world rich if we’d just let
it do its work. I remember two local healers brought two of the official
Circle of Gold chain letters up from the Bay Area, that you had to buy for
$150, and conveyed the right to sell them to two people for the equal
price. A big selling point was that Ram Dass and other spiritual
luminaries appeared as senders of the original letter. The healers were
unable to sell the letters to the unventuresome Ashland hippies, who
wanted to buy large bags of granola and dried fruit, not silly letters
that anyone could write. A few months later the whole scheme went bust.
Quite a saintly venture, that.
Left out entirely is the saucy story of Ram
Dass’s humiliation at the hands of Chogyam Trungpa during the early years
at Naropa Institute, when Trungpa, a throwback feudal lordling with eleven
incarnations in the Tibetan Ancien Regime, showed him how a tulku wields
spiritual power. Ram Dass felt unable to compete when Trungpa talked about
lineage. He hadn’t even asked Neem Karoli Baba what his lineage was. In a
painful humiliation that ran the spiritual circuit worldwide like a
satellite transmission, Ram Dass’s friend, the Hindu troubadour, had his
ass-length sadhu braid cut off by Trungpa as he lay unconscious after a
night of drinking at Naropa. Trungpa explained that the braid was for
sannyasis, not drunkards. After that major tonsorial event, Bhagavan Dass
acquired a permanent shit-eating grin that he still displays in the movie,
and although the braids are back and look okay, his eyebrows are
ridiculous.
Fierce Grace also completely misses the
Joya Santanya scandal. Ram Dass indiscriminately legitimized a lot of
mediums and holy people. One of his channel-surfing buddies, Hilda
Charlton, introduced him to Joya, a thirty-something Brooklyn Jewish
housewife who fell into trances from doing “the yogi breath” in the
bathtub for six hours as an appetite-reduction thing. Guess she was really
hungry, and Samadhi was her only refuge. After falling into trances, she
developed this problem of seeing “an old man with a blanket.” Hilda asked
Ram Dass to see Joya, and just like catching a fever, dear old Ram Dass
went head over heels for Joya. He decided the old man in the blanket was
Neem Karoli Baba, so he got his guru back, because Joya was a channel.
Better yet, she was a channel with huge capacity, a virtual spiritual
television who could channel anyone from Crazy Horse to Mohandas Ghandi.
Joya was a scandalous divine mother given to salty language and straight
talk. A little bit of Dr. Laura, a little Leona Helmsley, and a lot of
Helena Blavatsky. She grabbed Ram Dass and took him like an elevator
straight to the top. She taught Ram Dass what it meant to have superstar
status, and locked him into a lie – they were having sex, but publicly
claimed to be celibate. There was of course a discovery, more discoveries,
a coverup, a scandal, an explosion, an implosion, and egg all over Ram
Dass’s face, as he admitted in his book Grist For the Mill.
Ram Dass’s complete failure to perform as a
guru on an equal level with Trungpa, or as a partner with Joya, is omitted
from the movie, and the filmmakers don’t ask Ram Dass about those years. I
would have thought they merited as much attention as the silly “Millbrook
experiment,” a free-floating assemblage of self-conceived geniuses dosing
on acid in a groovy mansion owned by those signal exploiters of humanity,
the Hitchcock-Mellons. Wow, utopia. Not. Leary and Alpert had just been
kicked out of Harvard because they had given in to the desire to
proselytize and liberate the chemical sacrament, as they conceived it.
They had been giving LSD outside the parameters of their job authority,
and were proving for everyone that LSD caused people to lose their sense
of social reality. Indeed, the fact that both Leary and Alpert seemed
totally fine with their disgrace was virtual proof that the drug they
championed had caused them to lose the very rationality that had been the
whole reason for being Harvard professors at all.
We can thank this incredibly stupid faux
pas by the Leary-Alpert pair for giving the DEA a huge win in its effort
to ban an expanding spectrum of mind drugs of every type, including
traditional native medicines. But even after living through a lifetime and
a near-death experience, Ram Dass doesn’t realize that by getting run out
of Harvard in disgrace while sporting a silly acid smile, he squandered
the opportunity to experiment legitimately with psychedelics in one of the
world’s finest educational institutions. Instead of defaming psychedelics
with his own childish behavior, proving unable to apply scientific
protocols to a serious endeavor, he could have kept his head. He could
have been more like the discoverer of LSD, Dr. Albert Hoffman, for
example, who died recently, mourned by all, and fit as a fiddle until he
stepped off the stage.
Ram Dass also seems a bit of a selfish
child grown large. He seems willfully oblivious to the shock his abrupt
decision to kamikaze his career must have given his father. Shock or no,
Ram Dass’s father aged far better than his youngest son Richard. As has
Ram Dass’s older brother William, a silver-haired, tanned gentleman. He
reminisces briefly about how Richard once wrecked a brand new boat within
seconds of taking control. The future guru manhandled the shifter, causing
the boat to slam back and forth between the dock and another obstacle.
That was all the boating they did that day. With a resigned note in his
voice, William wraps up the story with an explanatory declaration — “That
was Richard” — tilting his head, raising his brows, and twisting his mouth
wryly in a tolerant expression.
Yes, that was Richard, the same Richard who
returned from India as Ram Dass to host flocks of barefoot young people on
the golf course adjacent to his father’s country estate. That was Richard,
earnestly but self-impressedly telling the crowd through closed eyes,
“Now, we will meditate … for about …” here pausing for a self-adoring
smile, the better to select a mystic number, “seven minutes ...” No doubt
seven minutes became the right amount of time to meditate for dozens of
people that day. Richard, now Ram Dass, never realized how silly he must
have looked to his relatives, and how sorry his brother must feel for him
now. No wife, no kids, no one to care for him. Sure, he had a hell of a
good ride, the incense smoke and the adulation, but it wasn’t very virile
or very challenging, and now it’s tired, cold and lonely with a crew of
hangers-on standing in for a family.
We Can Do This
The moviemakers are not very receptive to
criticism of Ram Dass’s past or present personality or “teachings.”
Ignoring the obvious fact that a great part of Ram Dass’s spiritual value
to students and devotees has been crushed under God’s careless hammer,
this film highlights the silver lining in the clouds that have engulfed
Ram Dass in their darkness. The feel-good machine has to be turned on high
to accomplish this transformation, but after all , what is the New Age all
about but doing amazing things with film? As the movie maneuvers to a
feel-good conclusion, the background music becomes more encouraging. Ram
Dass, it turns out, has come out of his funk. He’s battling back against
the paralysis, getting on his feet, blending his own arcane grief with the
pedestrian sufferings of others. He is writing a book with a man who
finishes his sentences, although at the beginning of the movie he said he
prefers that people not finish his sentences. The “writing” process comes
across, literally, as a charade. Ram Dass is trying to make his mind
produce speech from thoughts that aren’t even fully there. The writer is
sitting there putting words in his mouth, writing stuff down, just
guessing what to say, and he has no gift for this – he knows he’s failing,
but he keeps trying. After the writer manages to come up with a complete
cheeseball of a closing line, Ram Dass, smiling beatifically the while,
ekes out the comment, “You’re so … New York schmaltzy”. The writer backs
up, exposed. Okay, we’ll just cut that last part, he volunteers. Ram Dass
says no, let’s finish it. So it is finished, but when books are written
this way, by civil negotiation between a wordsmith and an aphasic older
gentleman formerly-famous for his metaphysical eloquence, something has
gone seriously awry. Spiritual leadership has been redefined at this
point. In Ram Dass, the New Age has found its Reagan, an old warrior
venerated even in dotage. Reagan had Nancy. Ram Dass has the publishing
industry.
Thanks to the publishing industry, Ram Dass
has got his groove back, and in so getting it back, he echoes what Wavy
Gravy says to the camera with total non-seriousness – he is going ahead of
us baby boomers into the tunnel of aging, bringing back the information we
need to make it through. We’re not going to be let down by this movie, I
realize. It’s a recovery story. As the theme sweeps onward to its
conclusion, Ram Dass is interviewed in front of a hall that is never quite
shown to be full of people. Baby boomers, particularly women, come to say
hello, to express deep warmth, to give hugs, and Ram Dass is back on his
game. He’s talking better, and he has a new rap down. A somber moment
falls when his caregiver rolls him out of the empty hall, shown in its
unfillable expanse for the first time. It is a lonely moment.
What’s a little lame about Ram Dass’s
recovery is how he doesn’t own the bummer he was on after he first
recovered from the stroke. He blames it on other people – everybody around
him thinking “poor Ram Dass,” causing him to believe their negativity.
Okay, I don’t want to beat up on an old man trying to get through a very
hard day such as Ram Dass faces daily. But at the beginning of the film
Ram Dass said he’d been jolted by his failure to manifest spiritual
awareness during imminent death, and was deeply grieved by mental and
physical deficits resulting from brain damage. That’s enough for anybody
to be entitled to be a little bleak of spirit, but it’s typical of Ram
Dass’s willingness to rise to the role of role model that he preserves his
image even under hellish circumstances. At this point, his time for naked
honesty is past. He needs to survive and keep on, so he is now buying into
the revisionist history constructed by his handlers.
Like a Hallmark greeting card that rises to
any occasion, Fierce Grace tries to make everything all right. Doggedly,
the producers plow on, attempting to show how Ram Dass is carrying on. He
explains to the camera that he had lost faith, and reclaimed it when he
realized how bleak life is without it, so again he's a believer. We can
all breathe a sigh of relief. Ram Dass is saved from a permanent bummer,
and we won’t have to digest his grief! But what Ram Dass believes in is a
pretty vague quantity. His faith seems like a cup that’s been broken and
glued back together – marginally functional and unable to bear ordinary
use. It’s not entirely clear that it is an unalloyed pleasure for this old
man to sing bhajans anymore. As he claps to the rhythm of a roomful of
blue-state Americans singing Hindu holy songs, he gets a pained, confused
look on his face. Behind closed eyes, Ram Dass seems to be digging for
meaning, until he gives up the process, his emotions carry him away, and
he starts to cry wretchedly. Throughout the uplifting singalong, Ram
Dass’s face reveals difficult emotions, and he looks very little like the
other devotees, affecting serene transports as their reward for devoted
crooning. Among his many expressions, one recurs most often – ambiguous
bewilderment – the look of a man who is trying to laugh along, but is not
sure if he has exactly got the joke.
This is a big loss for everybody, because
before his stroke, Ram Dass knew, and taught his beliefs with confidence.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told his close disciples, “Ye are the
salt of the earth. If the salt shall lose its savor, wherewith shall it be
salted?” Jesus was telling his disciples that they had to be filled with
faith, to communicate faith to others, just as salt must be salty to be of
any use. Ram Dass was the salt – he communicated the flavor of the
Buddho-hippie-Hindu-reincarnationist philosophy to all of us. By his own
admission, however, he has slid considerably down the scale of relative
saltiness. He isn’t very salty at all any more, in fact, he probably needs
salt, but as the former saltiest man in America, where would he get a
supply?
Despite the obvious fact that it’s time to
scale down the myth to fit the reality, the makers of Fierce Grace have
quite another story to tell. Ram Dass, they push us to believe, deserves
continued veneration as a saint. However, they simultaneously disregard
his true message, perhaps because Ram Dass isn’t consistent in
communicating it, and really no one wants to hear it. Ram Dass’s true
message was politically unacceptable for those in the religion business,
so the filmmakers sweep it under the rug.
Instead of airing the truth that Ram Dass
is disoriented by his brain damage, and is recovering from depression, the
movie is intent on burnishing his credentials and piling up fuel to fire
the funeral pyre of his legacy. For example, at the start of the movie, a
couple from Ashland describes how Ram Dass’s letter to them after the
sudden death of their daughter helped them heal from their bereavement.
This scene seemed ill-conceived, like several others in the film. Granted
that he wrote good consolatory correspondence with students, Ram Dass can
no longer perform at that level of intellectual and emotional subtlety.
Besides, what is the point of this bit of character-testimony? Obviously
no one was willing to say he’d healed the blind or made the lame to walk,
but why get into the competition at all? Perhaps because, with a bit of
nostalgia, we can honeycoat this reality and pretend that, notwithstanding
Ram Dass’s disheartening cry of pain and fear at the moment of his rude
awakening, it is all okay. We’ll just crank up some emotional footage with
guitar music to cover it up. Don’t worry folks, we can do this. Just close
your eyes to reality, and the movie’s spin will take you to a good space
where it’s “all good.”
A Diagnosis and Report of Cure
Reviewing the evidence, I would submit that
Ram Dass suffered from a form of narcissism I have dubbed TIDS (“Tantra-Induced
Delusional Syndrome”), a proposed entry for the Diagnostic Symptoms Manual
for Mental Disorders. TIDS comes in three flavors – Student-Side,
Guru-Side, and Transitional. Student-side TIDS causes the slavish,
self-hating behavior typical of many cult adherents. Guru-side TIDS leads
to a “god-realm” attitude in which internal and external events reinforce
delusions of wisdom, greatness, goodness, and significance in the subject,
who floats ever-higher on a spiral of self-reinforcing self-adulation.
Transitional TIDS is an advanced stage of Student-side TIDS, in which the
subject develops the delusion that they are turning into a guru, something
that so rarely happens as to be discounted entirely from the realm of
possibility. Transitional TIDS-sufferers are often highly energized and
competitive, and thus are found in high levels of spiritual organizations,
currying favor and partaking of the true Guru’s reflected glory, fancying
themselves greater than they are ever likely to become.
While hardly anyone gets Guru-side TIDS
without the aid of outside persons who “recognize” the spiritual genius
within them, virtually no one recovers from it. The self-delusive lock is
self-reinforcing. Having experienced the impossible pleasure of complete
guru-hood, their minds just won’t go back. Even if Andrew Cohen ends up
living in a dumpster, he will still think he’s a guru. But I think Ram
Dass is off the high. At the start of the movie, Ram Dass was terribly put
out because he failed to think of God at all, and became absorbed in the
appearance of pipes on the ceiling above him. Perhaps if he’d been
practicing “bare-awareness” meditation, this sterile perception wouldn’t
have disturbed him so deeply, but Ram Dass was apparently expecting some
confirmation of his beliefs when the death process began, and there was
none. His Guru-side TIDS condition collapsed when it was punctured by the
sharp point of reality.
The proof comes from a sad scene toward the
end of the movie, shot with a young girl who has come to Ram Dass
distraught over the murder of her activist boyfriend by a Central American
death squad. Ram Dass tries to comfort her by saying that God doesn’t
follow our desires, but he clumsily invokes as an example his own
disappointment at being unable to do a radio show he’d been planning
before he lost his mental capabilities. Most people would say that was an
insensitive response to death – to compare not doing a radio show with
never seeing your sweetheart again – and the girl’s face shows it. She
seems to be wondering, “What the hell? This is helpful?” By the time Ram
Dass blurted that malapropism, though, the interview had turned into a
debacle. He had harvested a rejection when he tried to give the girl a
flower. Smiling beatifically like a sweet old grandpa didn’t work either.
This girl wanted answers to deep questions, and Ram Dass struggles to
converse about everything. He said to her that “losing a lover is a path,”
but that didn’t help. She told Ram Dass about a dream in which she
communicated with her dead boyfriend, but with his limited vocabulary, Ram
Dass could barely get out a crippled exclamation that evoked a rudimentary
mental state: “Yummy! Oh, yum, yum!” It’s a tortured scene. Ram Dass can’t
express himself clearly; the girl’s not getting any empathy; she’s having
to cover for his frailties; the whole exchange is humiliating. Ram Dass
breaks down. The young lady leaves after they exchange a cute hug and she
gives him a kiss. Who the hell thought this was a good idea? Well, at any
rate, his career as a guru is clearly at an end.
As a Guru-side TIDS sufferer, Ram Dass’s
prognosis for recovery was terrible, but he beat the odds when the outer
and inner framework supporting the delusion fell apart. From the outside,
he lost the charming eloquence that made him a spiritual personality in
modern media. He lost the chance to do a radio show. The few cooling
embers of his career can’t get his kettle boiling. And on the inside, Ram
Dass lost the illusion that he enjoyed for all the years when he thought
that his spirit, independent of his body, would travel on into eternity to
continue the joys of consciousness. He knows death is coming with a gun
loaded with darkness that he can’t see into, and he doesn’t believe the
pretty pictures he painted on the darkness for a lifetime. He is free from
TIDS, and subject again to the normal constraints of humanity. But don’t
try to tell the moviemakers. They’ve got TIDS themselves.
Ram Dass:
Fierce Grace, directed by Mickey Lemle
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