Ram Dass and the Turn
The Teaching
Here I was, a Harvard professor, exploring the edges of human consciousness, having published, having achieved, having all the things the culture told me would make me happy. And I was desperately, painfully unhappy. I had been to my analyst for fifteen years. I had taken every drug. I had every credential the West can issue. And none of it had touched what was underneath.
Then Maharaj-ji looked at me, and I felt the love of my mother, who had died, and he said things about my life he could not possibly have known, and I cried for two days. And what he said to me, finally, was: just love everyone and tell the truth.
That was the turn. Not because anything happened to me, but because I saw what had always been there.
Commentary
The transformation of Richard Alpert into Ram Dass is one of the most important biographical events in the late twentieth-century encounter between Western civilization and the Eastern wisdom traditions. It matters not because Ram Dass was an extraordinary person, though he was, but because of who he was when the encounter happened. He was the credentialed apex of the Western model: Harvard, social standing, professional success, material comfort, intellectual sophistication, every box checked. And he discovered that the model was hollow at its center.
Going East and meeting Neem Karoli Baba was not, in the structural sense, a personal event. It was the body politic producing exactly the kind of antibody McKenna described, in real time, on a generational scale. The most credentialed version of Western values had to be inhabited fully and then seen through from inside, and someone had to carry the seeing back. Ram Dass became, in the decade that followed, the most visible bridge between Eastern teaching and Western lives. Be Here Now sold millions of copies and was passed hand to hand on college campuses for thirty years. The wisdom traditions entered the Western mainstream substantially through this single channel.
What Maharaj-ji actually gave Ram Dass was simpler than any of the doctrines that came along for the ride. Just love everyone and tell the truth. The instruction is small enough to fit on a postcard and large enough to consume a life. The hero's return, in this case, was a man who had gone to the credentialed center of the West and brought back a sentence that the credentialed center could not produce on its own.