Ram dass who is he

Events led him to a twinkly, old man wrapped in a blanket: Neem Karoli Baba, who was called Maharajji, or great king, by his followers. The experience caused a spiritual upheaval in Alpert, who forever after considered Maharajji his guru. It was Maharajji who gave Alpert the name Ram Dass, or servant of God, and added the prefix Baba, a term of respect meaning father. In , Maharajji told him to return to the United States.

Soon as many as people were showing up to chant with him. Ram Dass hit the lecture circuit, his presentation a mix of pithy wisdom and humour, often expressed in the same sentence.

It has had more than three dozen printings, with sales exceeding 2 million. Any trip you want to take leads to the SAME place. By the s, Ram Dass had a change of mind and image. He shaved off the beard but left a neatly trimmed mustache. He tried to drop his Indian name — he no longer wanted to be a cult figure — but his publisher vetoed the idea. Ram Dass said that he had never intended to be a guru and that Harvard had been right to throw him out.

He continued to turn out books and recordings, however. He started or helped start foundations to promote his charities, to help prisoners and to spread his message of spiritual equanimity.

He made sure his books and tapes were reasonably priced. The old orthodoxies slipped away. He said other religions, including the Judaism that he had rejected as a young man, were as valid as the Eastern ones. In a interview with the website Gay Today , Ram Dass said he had always been primarily homosexual, despite earlier statements that he was bisexual.

He said he had had thousands of clandestine homosexual encounters. For Ram Dass, God existed in everyone. The soul contains love, compassion, wisdom, peace and joy, but most people identify with the mind. Speak for yourself. But go to the spiritual heart, and there will be a doorway to the next plane of consciousness: soul land. My guru 2 once called me over after I threw a plate of food at a Westerner at the ashram. Is something the matter?

It made me feel good in my heart. Feed them. Love everybody. Well, along those lines, your belief is that the universe is unfolding perfectly. So how do we, as human beings, make sense of that perfection given the impending awful catastrophe of something like climate change? Humans can have consciousness on two planes. How many people do you have to impress? But the soul has in it the witness, and it witnesses our whole incarnation.

The soul watches the game without judgment. Ah, Christ. But your intellect will keep you on track! I sense that you are in your spiritual work. You are a soul. Your baby is a soul. Your wife is a soul. The reader is a soul. The editor is a soul. I am a soul. The guru looks for you. From when I was a teenager until I found Maharaji, I was homosexual in my head.

In high school, prep school, I was attracted to men. That tendency shaped my life. Owsley — you know Owsley? Yeah, he was a sound engineer for the Grateful Dead. I was hanging around backstage, and he took a tab of acid and put it on my tongue. Then a girl had a tab of acid, and Owsley shepherded us to the dance floor.

Ms Mandel recalled how he talked about speaking with a dying woman who complained that death was very boring. I had not thought of that before.

Ram Dass was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Boston, Massachusetts. His father was president of a railroad company. Ram Dass wrote that he came from "a Jewish anxiety-ridden high-achieving tradition". In , he earned a degree in psychology at Tuft's College and his doctorate at Stanford University in He began teaching and researching psychology at Harvard in During that time, as he would later describe, he lived in an apartment full of antiques, drove a Mercedes-Benz, owned a Cessna plane and vacationed in the Caribbean.

Leary helped popularise s counter-culture under the motto "turn on, tune in, drop out". Leary was researching the effects of psilocybin, the compound responsible for the hallucinogenic properties of some mushrooms. Leary gave Ram Dass his first taste of psilocybin at a party. Ram Dass wrote of his first experience: "The rug crawled and the pictures smiled, all of which delighted me.

The two began experimenting on the therapeutic uses of the compound, until , when both were fired from Harvard - Ram Dass because he gave LSD to an undergraduate student and Leary for shirking his teaching duties. Recreational LSD use became illegal in the US in as other studies suggested the chemical could cause dangerous psychotic reactions. Ram Dass began looking for alternative ways to reach enlightenment and journeyed to India, where he studied under the guru Neem Karoli Baba, also known as Maharaj-ji.

Ram Dass gave the guru a high dose of LSD, but he showed no reaction, which led Ram Dass to believe that the higher state of consciousness Maharaj-ji had achieved could not be changed by drugs. Maharaj-ji gave Ram Dass his name - which means servant of God in Hindi - and taught him Hindu principles, meditation and yoga. Ram Dass returned to the US in , at the request of Maharaj-ji, wearing white robes, bearded and barefoot.

Some of Ram Dass' most popular quotes.