99th Monkey (eBook)

I was in my car with a friend, driving on the streets of New York City one Sunday morning in December of 1975, listening to Ram Dass on WBAI's In the Spirit. I had read his book, Be Here Now, and it had resonated deeply within me. 'I've got to meet this guy,' I said to my friend, and he guided us to WBAI's church-front studio in the East Village. We got out of the car, I pressed the buzzer, anda female voice said, 'Who is it?' I said, 'Elliot.' 'Who are you here to see?' 'Ram Dass.' She buzzed us in, and it became apparent that apart from the engineer and Ram Dass sitting in a glass booth, we were the only people in the entire building. Within a few minutes, the show was over, and Ram Dass came out to greet us. He shook my friend's hand, he and I hugged.

Hugging strange men was a completely uncommon event for me back then, this was prior to going through the Human Potential Movement, when not hugging strange men would be suspect.

So like thousands of other people who had formed a profoundly intimate connection with Ram Dass in a relatively short time, I instantly had the uncanny sense that we knew each other deeply.

Prior to going to India and returning as Ram Dass, Richard Alpert had been a professor of psychology at Harvard, a colleague of Timothy Leary's. They were both kicked out for conducting experiments with graduate students on the effects of psilocybin, or magic mushrooms. The day the story made the front page of the New York Times, Ram Dass has said that he never felt more alive and whole, knowing he was on the right track for himself, even as his reputation was going down the tubes in full view of the public. Leary would go on to notoriety as an outlaw and champion of LSD, eventually staging his own 'designer death' on the Internet which never quite happened the way he planned it, but he nevertheless went out in the trickster style for which he was famous.

(I once reached Leary on the phone, requesting an interview for The New Sun magazine. There was a moment of silence on the other end, and then he said: 'Nah, I don't see any fun potential in that, no fun potential at all.' He apparently based all of his choices in life on their fun potential. This was in direct contrast to his more serious-minded former colleague and drug partner, Ram Dass, who used to say, 'If I have any more fun I think I'm going to throw up.' For Ram Dass, it was time to get on with the spiritual journey, which, as he put it, was no longer about 'getting high,' but rather about 'being high,' a state that could be arrived at through arduous spiritual discipline or perhaps dumb luck, but certainly not through the pursuit of fun or pleasure.)

Alpert went off to India, embarking on a spiritual quest that over the years would make him a leading countercultural hero of the spirit whose greatest contribution may well have been the three simple words that formed the title of his first book, and which have since become a spiritual cliche: Be Here Now. I still havea muslin prayer flag with the cover of Be Here Now imprinted on it that I use to drape across my color printer. At times I have a Ram Dass screensaver.

Alpert returned to the States spreading the simple message of his wild and wonderful guru, Neem Karoli Baba: 'Love people, Serve people, and Remember God.' (Neem Karoli Baba died about 35 years ago. My mother once saw a photo of him on my wall and thought it was the actor Ed Asner. And I'm certain there is somebody somewhere who would insist that Ed Asner is Neem Karoli Baba.)

After our hug, Ram Dass asked about my spiritual practices. Since I didn't have any, I mentioned that I had recently taken the est training.