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I had this old Rampart article I wanted to put on Beezone but I don't know the year it was published...1974?...also, here is a recent picture of Ram Dass (February 2000) with me at dinner.

The Metamorphic Journey of Richard Alpert

by Sara Davidson

Sara Davidson is a free-lance journalist who lives in New York City. Her articles have appeared in Life, Harper's, and Esquire.

On a sunny May afternoon, a 41-year-old man with long, wiry, graying hair emerged from the Boston International Arrivals Terminal carrying a suitcase full of Indian silks and an unwieldy, bowl-shaped instrument called a tamboura. Tall and light of step, he wore a sweater and bell bottom slacks, and his face shone with healthy color. He hesitated at the door to the waiting room, for in his head was flickering an extraordinary film: a film in which he saw himself swallowed by a living wave of white-robed bodies, strangled by hugs, and suffocated by a hail of flowers, grapes and mangos. For the man was Baba Ram Dass, formerly Dr. Richard Alpert, returning to the United States after a year and a half in India, his second journey to the East.

During his absence from this country, a book he had written, Be Here Now, had been published in paperback and sold 200,000 copies. That is twice the trade most bestsellers do, although the book was not promoted and never acknowledged by any national publication. Tapes of his lectures had been played on radio stations, and transcripts were printed in underground papers and scholarly journals. For a year, Ram Dass had been receiving about 100 letters a week, asking and begging for his attention and advice.

A week after his return, Ram Dass reflected, "I was afraid of the karma I had brought on myself with that book, afraid of the numbers that were going to overwhelm me. So I put off coming home, and hung around England for. six weeks. I felt I wasn't ready to wrestle with fame and power." Finally he cabled his father that he was on his way to Boston. "I got to the airport all prepared for some Frank Sinatra hysteria scene, and there was nobody there. Nobody! My father was out of town and didn't get the cable." Ram Dass took a bus into the city, checked his tamboura and wandered around "really digging this total reversal of my expectations."

Had he sent word of his arrival to a few strategic people, there indeed would have been throngs at the airport, and I might have been among them. I had read Be Here Now in 1971 and was interested in meeting the author. Although I had had many opportunities to see the folly of this impulse, there, nevertheless, it was: if I could just talk to Ram Dass, get near enough and ask the right questions, certain mysteries and doubts might be resolved -

The concepts Ram Dass expressed matched suspicions I had long held but never fully trusted. What hit the strongest chord was his assertion that one could hold all the keys to the kingdommoney, power, beauty, achievementand still not be happy, still have an unsatisfied gnawing in the gut: "It's not enough." You might want success in a project, or a trip to South America, or a house in the country, and as soon as you get it, you find yourself wanting something else.

Most of us, he said, spend the first part of our lives living in the future ~and the rest living in the past. In order T6 ive in the moment, totall fulfilled, one must be free of att~'chm~gt to those unending desires. We have all had tastes of the here-and-now experience: sailing on a perfect summer day, or sitting with a group of especially close friends, when there is an absence of wanting, of needing anything more. For a fragment of time, we're not worrying about past troubles, or planning what to do when the boat docks or the friends leave. We are, briefly, outside time, outside desire. And by "working on yourself," Ram Dass said, one can progress toward inhabiting that state more frequently.

I made inquiries about interviewing Ram Dass, for habitually, whenever I have wanted to pursue an interest, I've found a way to make a work project out of it. He was back in India, and when I met him a year later, his tuning had subtly changed. The stakes in his game had been jacked up since the last round. He was headed for the gap across which lies sainthood, or psychosiswhatever you want to call ita state beyond the range of perceiving we consensually call normality.

One of the first things he said was, "I'm living in a totally psychotic space now, because in my universe there's only one other being besides me and it's God. All day long I'm constantly talking to Him. That's clearly not a sane statement in the Western rational model." He said he sensed in India the profundity of the surrender required, "the power of the death, the true death of the ego. I had figured I could go through the whole transformation without ever missing a step. But you can't take any personality baggage with you. Whoever is left of the old separate being has to die. It feels as if some thing irrevocable has happened and my faith is not quite shakeable anymore. My relationship to my guru and through him feels somewhat beyond the pale."

Because of this faith, he no longer needs to wear white garments and holy beads, or set up a little altar wherever he goes with his books, candles and pictures of saints. "I don't need the physical reminders for fear I'll go under." Neither does he need to persuade or teach anyone. He will avoid public activities, speaking to large groups and "playing the holy man so much. I'm just going to be another guy and hang out."

So once again, the master metamorphosis has pulled his disappearing trick. Ram Dass said, "I see my value at this moment as symbolic: somebody who was a psychology professor, was a drug person, and is still all but primarily none of those anymore; somebody who was an Indian student but is not primarily that now either. By changing form, I can help people get the essence of the thing without getting caught in the form. That's really the fun, because they'll say, 'I thought you were !' and I'll say, who was that? You were focusing on the wrong thing, it's just that I was wearing a brown jacket yesterday." He laughs. "When expectations are broken, people grow."

Ram Dass once said he felt "blessed by having been given everything that Western society could offer: affluence, lots of love, the best education, and the fruits of advanced technology, including drugs, the best drugs. All that was part of my preparation to now know something else." The affluence came from his father, George, a dignified, Republican financier-philanthropist, who was president of the New Haven Railroad and helped found Brandeis University.

When Ram Dass talks about Richard Alpert, he tends to paint him, often hilariously, as a tormented, miserable wretch. But those who knew him as a student and later at Millbrook say he was always warm and charismatic, with an infectious sense of humor and zest. David McClelland, a psychology professor for whom Alpert worked at Harvard, says he was an excellent and ambitious scholar, who gained rank with rare speed. "No one observing him would have known about the inner anxiety, and he didn't talk about it."

At Harvard, Alpert taught psychology and practiced psychotherapy. He flew his own plane, collected antiques, cars, a sailboat and scuba-diving equipment. Although he had spent five years in psychoanalysis, he says, he was tense and suffered diarrhea every time he lectured. He drank heavily and was a closet homosexual, "living with a man and a woman at the same time in two different parts of the citya nightmare of hypocrisy." He looked at his colleagues on the A team at Harvard and saw that none seemed fulfilled or content. He feared he himself would wake up 40 years later no less neurotic or more wise, and he panicked. "I thought, the best thing I can do is go back into psychoanalysis. But then I started to have doubts about the analyst. Is his life enough? Whose life is? Who's saying, right, it's enough?"

He was, at this time, an atheist, and had difficulty even pronouncing "spiritual." But on March 5, 1961, a tab of psilocybin was to blow out all the old holding pegs. One of his faculty drinking buddies, Timothy Leary, had started a research project with mind-altering drugs, allegedly to explore their potential benefit for criminals, addicts and sick people. Alpert was brought in as the steadying influence, to control Leary's wild flights and keep the research within respectable scientific bounds. But the first time Alpert took psilocybin with Leary, he discovered an exalted place inside himself where an "I" existed, an essence deeper than his social and physical identity, a steady center unaffected by the play of time. And this "I" was all-knowing. The more drug trips he took, the more he trusted the inner voice, and the less reinforcement he needed from the environment. In 1963, when he and Leary were fired from Harvard in a ritual of public exorcism, they barely broke stride; moving to Millbrook, New York, they set up the Castalia Foundation to study the mystic aspects of drugs. They created the word "psychedelic"mind revealingand for seven years used their bodies as test chambers to discover a permanent route to higher consciousness. They took new drugs as fast as they were invented, but each seemed to have built into it a crash back to the ordinary waking swamp.

By 1967 Alpert was in a state of despair the dimensions of which must have been truly hideous. He had cut all his lifelines and was adrift in the midst of nowhere. He could not go back to the straight world, and after hundreds of acid visions, neither he nor anyone knew how to make constructive use of the experience.

His mother died early in the year, and when a friend invited him to travel across India, he accepted ..not in hope of learning anything but because, oh well, what else? He watched the countryside go by and his depression never lifted. Then, in Katmandu, a chance encounter with a gigantic, blond, 23-year-old American boy led him to an ashram in the Himalaya where he met his guru, Maharaji (a title meaning Great King).

For each of us, it probably takes a certain kind of jolt to break the shackles of absolute faith in the rational mind. For Alpert, it was meeting a twinkly, fat, old man wrapped in a blanket, who immediately told him exactly how his mother had died, and indicated that he knew everything in Alpert's head. At first, Alpert says, his mind raced to come up with an explanation. Then, like a computer fed an insoluble problem, "my mind just gave up. It burned out its circuitry." There was a violent wr.enching in his chest and an outpouring of tears. "All I could say was it felt like I was home. The journey was over."

I have heard an assortment of rumors about Ram Dass and they all center on what "really happened" in India. According to various, comically murky sources: Alpert was on morphine; Bhagwan Dass was on heroin; Alpert followed Bhagwan Dass because he was sexually attracted to him; Alpert never went barefoot; Alpert spoke constantly about his mother and it would have been no feat for the guru to pick up the vibe. The need for these rumors is puzzling, because the undeniable fact is that something happened in India and Alpert came back transformed.

In his book, he describes studying yoga in the Temple of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey God who exemplifies the perfect servant. Dass means servant, so Ram Dass, the name Alpert was given, means servant of Ram, or God, as Ram was one of the incarnations of the God Vishnu, the preserver, Baba means father, and is a term of endearment and respect.

Alpert followed a ritual of study, meditation, a cold bath at 4 a.m., vegetarian diet, exercise, breathing and cleansing practices. He vowed sexual continence, and for six months he was silent, using chalk and a slate to communicate. As a result of not speaking or expending sexual energy for so long, when he returned to this country he was like a spring uncoiling with tremendous force. He met withTim Leary in San Francisco, who suggested he simply hadn't finished with his sexual trip. "If you're turning incident later, he said, "I saw it allof your energies into your own strange man with a beard, driving a being, it becomes autoerotic, masturbation.

to be continued..................

The rest of this I have to finish and edit...........