Ram Dass

ram dass by arimoore

Ram Dass (1933 – )

Formerly Richard Alpert, Ram Dass was born into a wealthy and educated American family.

After obtaining his Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford he became a spiritual seeker. He traveled to India and found a personal guru. The guide eventually renamed him Ram Dass (teacher), which in fact he was to become.

Since the 1960’s Ram Dass has lectured across North America and authored several highly readable books that look at issues of comparative religion and the mystic quest.

Synchronicity and the miraculous are all quite real for Ram Dass, who argues that the Western mind is too linear, pragmatic and judgmental to appreciate these phenomena.

For Ram Dass, that which in India might be construed as spiritual vision is routinely designated by Westerners as mere imagination or hallucination.

Writing in a kind of 1970’s, flower-power style, Ram Dass contributes to the arguably misguided notion that the Orient is more ‘spiritual’ than the Occident. This shortcoming aside, his work is not without considerable merit.

Ram Dass says his brother lived in a psychiatric hospital, rigidly believing that his particular way of seeing the world was the only way. What differentiates the sane from the insane, Ram Dass implies, is that the former can consider other viewpoints while the latter cannot.

Concerning the idea of reincarnation, he suggests that it

doesn’t have to be linear…it may well be in terms of past, present, and future all being here simultaneously. There are many ways of thinking about the fifth dimension of infinite repetition and changes (Ram Dass, The Only Dance There Is, New York: Anchor Books, 1974, p. 143).

Noted for his honesty, Ram Dass once wrote in Yoga Journal that loving one’s enemies, as Jesus Christ taught, is easy to fake but not always easy to do.

After suffering a stroke in the 1990’s, Ram Dass still held public engagements. He says that his condition has brought him closer to God.

In a 2003 Toronto Star article he remarks that while most people his age are still trying to be youthful, he sits by the window and contemplates the Divine.

Today his influence lives on through the many lives he touched during his remarkable journey. On this travelerseeker testifies:

Ram Dass is an amazing person. I had the honor of meeting him many years ago at a metaphysical conference where he was signing books. Got the book, his signature and a hug…will never forget it or him!

On the Web:

• Despite his advocacy of what we now know are harmful psychedelic drugs, a young Richard Alpert makes some interesting observations about learned behavior, opinions and identities:
  

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