Channeling RD

What would RD do?

That's been the recurring question lately.

“RD” is shorthand for spiritual teacher and author Ram Dass. It was the name his Maui support team called him when they spoke to him, or about him.

People whose identities grow larger than life sometimes need shorthand aliases to remind them of the difference between their public persona – like a separate entity with superpowers – and the flawed little human still living inside it.

After a hemorrhagic stroke nearly killed him in 1997. the man who was born Richard Alpert in Boston in 1931, was left partially paralyzed in a wheelchair, with expressive aphasia showing his speech. The stroke happened on Maui, and made him unable to leave the island for the rest of his life. A prisoner of paradise, you might say.

For the next two decades he continued his career, writing, teaching and guiding followers around the world. One of his themes in the later years was death and dying, which he described as “taking off a tight shoe.” His mind was still quick, his humor still sharp, his eyes still twinkled. It just took a while for the words to come out of his mouth.

Turning misfortune into a blessings was one of his spiritual talents, if not a form of magic.

It was a blessing for me, at least. As the entertainment and features editor of The Maui News, Ram Dass was on my beat. When he'd write a new book, or be the subject of a new documentary, or lead this celebration or that gathering, his people would call me to do the interview.

There were a lot of interviews. As the years went on, I was even invited out to his gorgeous home on the island's untamed north shore a few times.

His aphasia made phone interviews especially challenging. I'd ask a question, but in the long pause that followed, it was hard to tell if he was finished answering. It called for slowing down my own mind. Way down.

Concluding one of the phoners, I fell into the platitudes people always showered on him, thanking him for making the conversation so enjoyable.

There was a silence at the other end of the line, before he answered.

“It takes two … to tango,” he said.

“Fierce Grace” was the label given to his post-stroke condition in a wonderful 2001 documentary by Mickey Lemle. It was the first of a spate of documentaries chronicling Ram Dass' evolution from affluent son of George Alpert, – a successful Boston lawyer, railroad tycoon and founder of Brandeis University – to a ragtag would-be Eastern shaman easily mistaken for a hippie in the cultural blossoming known as The Sixties.

With his comfortable Jewish upbringing, a great mind and Type A ambition, by the early '60s Richard Alpert was a rising star in Harvard's psychology department. His possessions included a Cessna airplane, a Triumph motorcycle, a Mercedes-Benz sports car and a sailboat. Preferring the nickname Dick, he was a natural poster boy for a magazine ad campaign of those times titled “What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?”

Decades before he would come out as gay, he described himself as a “successful bachelor professor.” He would have achieved even more glory on that path, had he not chosen to start experimenting with fellow Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary with hallucinogenic substances, including one that would become known as LSD.

He lost his job at Harvard. He lost his career as a psychologist. He lost his identity as Richard Alpert. He went to India.

And when he came home to America, he was Baba Ram Dass.

His father called him “Bubba Rum Dum.”

The elder Alpert liked the cool Harvard version of his son better than the bearded one in the white robe with flowers in his long hair cavorting with hippies in meadows.

George and Dick had a prickly relationship until it fell to Ram Dass, as the unmarried son, to care for his father in his dying days. Things remained a little prickly, even then.

I once mentioned to Ram Dass that he was a great advocate for unconditional love, but there was still an edge when he spoke about George.

Ah, yes, he acknowledged. Unconditional love, or falling in love with the young woman at the supermarket cash register, is easier with strangers. When it's someone you're close to, it's challenging. Resentments surface. Power struggles happen. Contempt gnaws like a rat around the comforting edges of familiarity.

Ram Dass died Dec. 22, 2019. I was thousands of miles away at the time, caught up in my own drama. But the guy I had come to think of as my buddy, the guru, has been making announced visits lately in the movie theater of my memories.

He shows up in my dreams, and in waking moments, too. Photos of us are scattered through the years on my Facebook page. Usually the photos are two-shots, arms over shoulders, grinning like a couple of kindergartners at the camera. His smile radiates holy joy, mine by his side is just happy to be there. 

Excerpts of our conversations are stored like CDs on dusty shelves in my memory bins, retrievable on a moment's notice word for word.

One Monday morning I joined the entourage that brought RD to Kamaole Beach in Kihei for his weekly swim. The waters are calm on that side of the island, it's usually sunny. The ocean bottom is flat and sandy, and the beach park is equipped with a special wheelchair with huge yellow plastic wheels to roll through the sand to the water's edge.

His beach days were festive occasions, like mini-Indian festivals, with some devotees tossing flower petals in the air. He always had lots of helpers around to see to his needs. Others in the group had made pilgrimages from spots around the planet to be in his presence.

I had come that day to ask if he would participate in a movie project I was working on with co-producers Tom Vendetti and Robert Stone. It was to be a lyrical documentary about Maui's volcano, Haleakala. It was titled “The Quietest Place on Earth,” based on research by a sound engineer taking readings in the crater. The movie would be about the mountain, but also about its silence.

Sitting there on the sand, him in his wheelchair, both of us in board shorts, it was Maui's version of a Hollywood power lunch at the Polo Lounge.

When I told him the concept – the part about the silence – his eyes lit up like a blazing fireplace. His face broke into a smile even bigger than usual. He agreed to do it on the spot.

“The Quietest Place on Earth” went on to show on hundreds of PBS stations across the U.S., and affiliates around the world. Its title proved prophetic. It marked one of the last screen appearances not only for Ram Dass, but also for interview subjects W.S. Merwin, Paul Horn and producer Bob Stone, far too early.

On the beach in Kihei that morning, Ram Dass sat on his plastic throne between those big yellow clown car wheels. He smiled benevolently as one devotee after another crouched by his side, sharing a few moments.

One woman sat with him for a long time, their hands locked, gazing into each other's eyes, wordlessly.

When she got up, I took her place.

“She's dying,” Ram Dass confided to me, by way of explaining their wordless exchange. Her audience with him may have been the last item on her bucket list.

“Aren't we all,” I answered, for a moment reversing our roles. 

He nodded. When he expressed those sorts of sentiments, they were holy lessons of life's impermanence. When I said them, it sounded more like Jack Nicholson in “The Departed.”

Richard Alpert became Ram Dass, sitting at the feet of Neem Karoli Baba on that fateful trip to India in 1967. Neem Karoli Baba gave him the name Ram Dass, Servant of God. Ram Dass, in turn, would forever after refer to his teacher as Maharaj-ji.

On their first encounter, the Westerner realized the Eastern yogi could see not into the depths of his soul, but into his psyche as well. Maharaj-ji told the astonished Alpert things about himself he alone knew, including his darkest, most shameful secrets.

Maharaj-ji accepted it all, making no judgements. His unconditional love was more total and sweeping and absolute than anything the Harvard psychologist had ever seen before.

Ram Dass was gobsmacked, and would spend the rest of his life trying to fulfill Maharaj-ji's faith in him. Bringing Eastern teachings to Western minds, his emphasis was on empathy and compassion.

But the part about change was cool, too.

At least one documentary pointed out that his life was spent becoming Ram Dass.

Change was the only constant. Life was always a process of becoming. Freeing yourself from judgment was the trick – granted, a whole lot easier said than done – that could set you free.

Good and bad? No such things, just the judgments we make.They are just points along the trail, one liable to turn into the other, right before your astonished eyes.

In the '60s, politics, philosophy, psychology and spiritual matters intertwined. For that matter, it was all but impossible to find the line between psychedelic revelations and religion.

Ram Dass' seminal book from those times was “Be Here Now.” Maybe the greatest title ever written.

Thinking globally, acting locally was among the topics covered. It set the agenda for a generation that would be given the unfortunate label baby boomers. Echoes of those times still linger a half-century later, long past the point where we finally figured out what we were going to do when we grew up.

In 2017, I spent a wonderful afternoon in Ram Dass' living room. A large portrait of Mahaj-ji looked down on us benevolently as I interviewed him and his guests for an upcoming Maui “Sing Out for Sight” benefit concert for the SEVA Foundation.

His houseguests were Dr. Larry Brilliant and his wife, Girija. They too had been pilgrims to India in 1967, and became fellow disciples of Maharaj-ji. Larry Brilliant, just out of medical school, went on to become a preeminent epidemiologist. Chances are you saw him interviewed during the pandemic. He was a go-to guy for all the networks.

The SEVA Foundation was a group the three of them founded, to provide low-cost cataract surgery to thousands of patients in third-world countries.

Joan Baez and Jackson Browne headlined the concert, which also featured an appearance by Hana resident Kris Kristofferson. The event was also a tribute to Ram Dass; since he couldn't travel, they brought it to him. 

For all the celebratory high notes hit on stage, it was hard to escape the darker political undertones everyone was feeling. We were a few months into the first Trump presidency, and things were already feeling scary.

Talking to Ram Dass that afternoon, he observed that the new guy in the White House – he wouldn't pay him the respect of remembering Trump's name – “was having a horrible incarnation.”

I'm not so sure.

Do rules of karma apply to cold-blooded reptiles?

Eastern thought takes the form of teaching. Western thought takes the form of products.

In the West, rather than absorbing the masters' teachings, we'd rather turn the teachers into rock stars. And “rebrand” their simple messages. 

Almost 60 years since it was first published, Ram Dass's advice to “Be Here Now” has been repackaged into the $1.3 billion mindfulness industry. 

His father would have been proud.

But I'm still not convinced RD got our current president right.

I think the Lizard King is having the time of his life.

As for the rest of us, being here now will have to suffice.