at the rose, we all interpreted it somewhat
differently but everybody recognized that it’s
not nothing. ”There was silence in the pro-
cession vehicle until the brother who thinks
he’s Christ finally says, “I guess mother sent
you a final message,” Ram Dass remembers.
“And everybody in the car, even the sisters-
in-law, agreed.”
A year later, Alpert was on pilgrimage in
India looking for someone who “knew.” He
was already annoyed from the grief, heat, and
too much hashish, when his friend insisted
they traverse a Himalayan Trail to meet a ma-
hatma. Richard recalls, “We come to this little
temple, and he’s crying, going to see his guru,
and I’m just like, ‘Let’s get this over with’.”
The mahatma, now known internation-
ally as Neem Karoli Baba, Maharaj-ji in the
honorofic and familiar, poked Richard in the
places it perturbed him. A borrowed car, his
bank account, he talked through a transla-
tor, “You were under the stars last night, you
were thinking about your mother, she died
last year. She got very big in the belly before
she died.” He leaned forward and in English
said, “Spleen!” Alpert’s imagination ignited
with CIA conspiracy theories and spy story-
lines, until he settled into the surrender.
Ram Dass relives the moment, “I just gave
up and he just stayed there looking at me,
and I felt this violent wrenching in my chest,
and I started to cry. It was like something
opened that was very ancient and closed, and
I started to sob and sob. I cried for about
two days, and don’t even know what it was
about. It was like I was home or something
like that, and they took care of me, and I
didn’t leave that place for five months.”
In this transformation period, Richard Alp-
ert with his well to-do family, fancy degrees,
cars, planes, and cellos died his own kind of
death. He offloaded the social conditioning
that spelled out success, and entered into the
cosmic soup. Much like a caterpillar’s body
being reduced to liquid, as it changes form.
The butterfly that flew out of the cocoon was
no longer Richard Alpert, but Ram Dass. A
counterculture icon, who is attributed with
cracking open consciousness in the West
through his epic, Be Here Now. The book
has sold more than two million copies, in in-
numerable printings and languages, over the
past 47 years. Each season a new generation
of college students, psychedelic explorers and
spiritual seekers discovers this compendium.
Within it he describes in detail, the metamor-
phosis from one reality to the next stating,
“It’s inevitable. It’s just happening. It’s got to
happen that way.” On page 8 of the book,
the Lama Foundation artists illustrate the
familiar mantra “Gate, Gate, Paragate, Para-
samgate, Bodhi Svaha!”
It’s through gaining expertise and insight
into these transmutations, that Ram Dass
has rejected the prevailing American ideal
that death is a failure of the medical com-
munity; that it is something to be sterilized,
secluded, and feared. Together with friends
Dale Borghlum, Ondrea Levine and the late
Stephen Levine, the Living/Dying Proj-
ect was born. A consortium of resources,
trainings, and retreats to teach the art of
conscious dying. These are ideas Ram Dass
has explored at length with legends in the
field like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Roshi Joan
Halifax, Wayne Dyer, and his old Harvard
cohort Timothy Leary. Upon Tim’s diagnosis
of metatasized cancer, he exclaimed, “You’ve
got to approach your dying, the way you
live your life, with curiosity, with hope, with
fascination, with courage and with the help
of friends. I am determined to give death a
better name --- or die trying.”
Of course, the light-hearted view is juxta-
posed with years of sitting at the bedside of
people dying from AIDS during the 1980s
epidemic, the unexpected wonderment of San
Quentin Death Row inmates, and the thou-
sands who have reached out for advice after
the loss of a loved one. On this journey he
has endeavored to see everyone he meets as a
“soul” and not the role they’re playing, or the
label they’ve been given (mother, father, gro-
cery store clerk, criminal, sick person, hospice
patient). Ram Dass reflects, “I’ve sat quietly
with many people who were dying amid the
often panicked, frightened, confused feelings
of their families. All I had to do was keep my
heart open and not get caught in my reactions
to the situation or deny them. I learned to cul-
tivate certain qualities: fearlessness and, most
importantly, love. I learned that when I could
bring a quietness, a feeling that everything
was happening was all right, we could come
to share a piece of intuitive wisdom behind
our egos’ fears and resistance. I learned to be a
loving rock to push against --- listening, giving
strength, awake and receptive.”Steve and Anita are one of those families
who reached out to Ram Dass for strength.
The couple had moved out of the city and
into the suburbs so their family could be safe.
A year later cops were causing a commotion
in and around the college field. Steve was
ushered through the stadium gates, up the
bleachers, and into the press box. Just a few
hours earlier he and his 11-year-old daughter
had exchanged “I love yous.” Now her body
was behind police tape. She had been mur-
dered, mid-day. Ram Dass wrote Steve and
Anita a letter. (Read the full letter online in
this story on LAYOGA.COM)
Om Gate Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate
Bodhi Svaha.
Now 87 years old, Ram Dass is approach-
ing his own pending “escape from central
jail” with his signature pioneering spirit. He
speaks matter-of-factly to a captive audience,
“The individual soul is the jivatman and the
big soul, the supreme soul is the atman. Jivat-
man is finite and conditioned, while atman is
infinite and eternal, the indestructible divine
existence. As a soul, I am part of the atman,
but also individual. I am identified with
my soul, yet I am still a separate entity. At
the end of my life, my soul will fully merge
with the atman and become one with it. The
next step is for me to dive into the ocean, to
become one with All.” These days he spends
some of his time preparing for the deep-dive.
He sits at his home in Maui, facing the Pacific
visualizing his own consciousness merging
with the infinite, like the individual waves
becoming absorbed by the vast ocean.
He quietly chants, “Om Gate Gate Para-
gate, Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha...” the man-
tra he intends to use as an astral GPS address,
for traversing this life into the next. It means
“Gone, Gone, Beyond, Gone Beyond Beyond,
Hail The Goer....!”
And Hail Ram Dass for always leading the
way.Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush’s book
Walking Each Other Home: Conversations
on Loving and Dying is available from
Sounds True: soundstrue.com.Learn more about Ram Dass and his work on
meditation and on dying at: ramdass.org.
Read a longer version of this story online at:
LAYOGA.COMIn this transformation period, Richard Alpert with his well to-do family,
fancy degrees, cars, planes, and cellos died his own kind of death.