Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We are so glad
you are here with us today. Glad to be here.
We are unpacking a story today that is, well,
it's a bit of a shapeshifter. It's a biography,
sure. But if you look at the source material
we have in front of us, it almost looks like
the file. on two completely different human beings.
Oh, it really does. I mean, it's uncanny. If
you were to take the documents from the first
half of this life, and you stack them against
the documents from the second half, you would
swear we were talking about two distinct people.
No question. One stack is just full of... Academic
transcripts, tenure tracks, Brooks Brothers suits
and, you know, high society Boston dinner parties.
Exactly. The whole nine yards of East Coast establishment
success. And the other stack is it's just robes,
incense, beads and these these really heavy discussions
about. planes of consciousness and serving God.
Right. And the fascinating thing, and this is
really why we're doing this deep dive, is that
these two lives were lived by the exact same
biological person. We're talking about the transformation
of Dr. Richard Alpert, the buttoned up Harvard
psychologist, into Ram Dass, the, you know, the
counterculture icon and spiritual teacher. And
I think for a lot of people listening, that name
Ram Dass rings a bell. Oh, for sure. Maybe they've
seen that square blue book, Be Here Now, on a
friend's coffee table. Yeah. Or maybe they just
know the name as a sort of vague cultural reference
to the 60s. Right. He has this massive cultural
footprint. You mentioned Be Here Now. That thing
sold two million copies. It's wild. Two million.
But what often gets lost in the haze of the 60s
is the actual trajectory. How do you get from
point A to point B? Exactly. Because this isn't
just a story about a guy who decided to change
careers. This is a story about someone who completely
dismantled his own identity brick by brick. And
that is really the mission for this deep dive,
isn't it? Yeah. We aren't just doing a history
lesson. We're using his life. as a kind of lens
to look at identity itself. Precisely. And looking
at our sources, which, I mean, they range from
his early academic work on anxiety. Which is
so ironic. Oh, we'll get to that. But yeah, from
that to the Harvard controversies, his pilgrimage
to India, and then all the way to his later writings
on stroke recovery, we're essentially looking
at a case study in human reinvention. Yeah. We
want to understand how a tenure -track professor
became this... This bridge between Western intellect
and Eastern spirituality. And there are some
really heavy themes here that I think are super
relevant today. We're going to talk about success.
Specifically, why getting everything you ever
thought you wanted sometimes feels just awful.
The hollowness of it. We're going to talk about
service. And we are definitely going to talk
about aging and the body. Because his concept
of fierce grace is something I think everyone,
and I mean everyone, needs to hear. It's just
a profound insight into how to handle suffering.
But, you know, you can't really understand the
resolution without understanding the tension.
So we have to start at the beginning. Before
he was a guru, before the beard, before the robes,
he was living what you might call the gold star
life. Let's open that file then, the file on
Richard Alpert. Because this guy, he wasn't an
outsider looking in. He was the ultimate insider.
Oh, completely. Born in 1931 in Boston. And to
understand Richard Alpert, you really have to
understand the family dynamic. His father was
George Alpert. And this wasn't just some guy.
No, not at all. This was a man of immense prominence,
a super successful lawyer, a founder of Brandeis
University. And he eventually became the president
of the New Haven Railroad. Wow. So we're talking
about a high achieving, wealthy, upper middle
class Jewish family. The expectations must have
been just. sky high. They were stratospheric.
I mean, you can almost picture it. There was
a checklist of success and Richard was expected
to tick every single box. And for the first 30
years of his life, that is exactly what he did.
I'm looking at the education timeline in the
notes here, and it is relentless. It's one prestigious
institution after another. He goes to the Williston
Northampton School, graduates cum laude in 1948,
then he's off to Tufts for his B .A. Right. And
here's a little detail that really matters. His
father wanted him to go to medical school. Of
course. Of course. That was the crown jewel profession
for a bright Jewish boy in Boston at that time.
It was the path. But at Tufts. Albert pivots.
He switches to psychology. Which, to be fair,
is still a very respectable pivot. It's not like
he dropped out to join a circus or something.
No, not at all. It was still academic. It was
still serious. So he goes on to Wesleyan for
his master's in 1954. And this is where the networking,
you know, the academic old boys club really kicks
in. His mentor at Wesleyan is a man named David
McClelland. And McClelland sees something in
Albert, this intense drive, this intellect. And
he's the one who pushes him towards standard.
for his PhD. Stanford. So he's moving from the
Ivy League orbit of the East Coast all the way
out to the prestigious West Coast. And he just
crushes it. He earns his PhD from Stanford in
1957. But I want to pause for a second on his
PhD thesis because looking back on it now, it
is almost painfully ironic. Oh, I saw this. The
title is just, you can't make this stuff up.
Achievement anxiety. So just to get this straight.
The man who is frantically chasing degrees and
titles and his father's approval is writing his
doctoral dissertation on the anxiety caused by
the need to achieve. It is the absolute classic
academic trap of research is research. Right.
He was trying to intellectualize his own suffering.
He spent years writing this dense statistical
exploration of the anxiety produced by the need
to win, all while he was drowning in that exact
anxiety. It's like he was dissecting the bars
of the cage he was living in, but he couldn't
find the door. So he gets the Ph .D., he ticks
that box, he teaches at Stanford for a year,
he starts psychoanalysis, which, let's be honest,
was basically a requirement for a wealthy intellectual
in the 50s. What's part of the uniform. And then
he gets the call that changes his career trajectory,
at least for a while. The call to Harvard. His
old mentor, David McClellan, moves to Cambridge
to teach at Harvard and he pulls Alpert in with
him. This is 1958. Alpert lands a tenure track
position as an assistant clinical psychology
professor. And just for context, for you listening
who aren't in academia, landing a tenure track
job at Harvard before you even hit 30. That is
like being a first round draft pick into the
NBA. It is the absolute summit. It's the pinnacle.
And he wasn't just hiding in some basement lab.
The sources say he had appointments everywhere.
Like where? The social relations department,
the psychology department, the Graduate School
of Education. And on top of all that, he was
working as a therapist at the University Health
Service. He was everywhere. He was specializing
in human motivation and personality development.
He published a book called Identification and
Child Rearing. So by every single external metric
available in 1958 America, Richard Alpert had
won the game. He had won. He had the prestige.
He had the money. He drove a Mercedes Benz. He
flew his own airplane. He threw these lavish
dinner parties. He had the respect of his peers.
He had made it. But, and there's always a but,
in a story like this, what was actually going
on inside his head? Yeah. Because if you look
at his internal accounts, the picture is very,
very different. A disappointing hollowness. That
is the phrase that keeps coming up in his later
recollections. Despite all the accolades, despite
all the gold stars, he felt empty. There's a
specific anecdote from the sources about his
bar mitzvah that really stood out to me. It feels
like the root of this whole feeling. It really
is. He described standing there as a 13 -year
-old boy performing the ritual, you know, reading
the Hebrew, facing the congregation. It's supposed
to be this huge moment of spiritual initiation,
right? Becoming a man in the eyes of God. And
what did he feel? He said it was flat, absolutely
flat. He later said, and this is a quote, there
was a disappointing hollowness to the moment.
There was nothing, nothing, nothing in it for
my heart. Nothing in it for my heart. Wow, that
is just devastating for a kid. And he carried
that feeling, that sentiment straight into adulthood.
He identified as an atheist. He said he was inert
to religion. He didn't have one whiff of God,
as he put it. So religion was just another system.
Just another social structure, another set of
rules to follow. So you have this man at the
absolute top of the academic mountain looking
down and realizing the view doesn't make him
feel anything at all. He's structurally successful,
but he's spiritually starving. He's an expert
on human motivation who has no real motivation
himself other than maybe the fear of being found
out. It is a volatile combination. I mean, he
was... prime for a shake -up. And that shake
-up arrived in the form of a new colleague who
walked into the Center for Research and Personality.
Enter Timothy Leary. The famous, or, you know,
infamous Timothy Leary. Now, we need to strip
away the caricature for a second. We think of
Leary as this, like... counterculture jester.
The turn on, tune in, drop out guy. Exactly.
But in 1959, 1960, he was a serious academic.
He was a lecturer in clinical psychology at Harvard.
He had a very well regarded personality assessment
model. He wasn't wearing tie dye and flowers
in his hair yet. He was wearing a suit. Exactly.
Alpert and Leary started working together. They
were colleagues. They were friends. And in 1961,
after Alpert came back from a visiting professorship
at UC Berkeley, they decided to dive into a new
and let's say controversial area of research.
The Harvard projects. The Harvard psilocybin
project. They began investigating the therapeutic
and potential religious effects of hallucinogens,
primarily psilocybin from mushrooms and LSD -25.
OK, we have to pause and contextualize this for
a second, because today. If you hear professors
giving psychedelics to students, it sounds immediately
criminal. It sounds like a massive scandal. Right.
The alarm bells go off. But in the early 1960s,
this was completely legal. LSD and psilocybin
were not illegal substances yet. They were viewed
as these cutting -edge psychiatric tools. So
they were seen as medicine, potentially. Yes.
Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland, the company
that discovered LSD, was actually sending it
out to researchers, hoping they would find a
medical use for it, maybe curing alcoholism.
maybe treating schizophrenia. This was seen as
the frontier. So they weren't like hiding in
a basement. This was sanctioned Harvard University
research, at least at first. Correct. They founded
the International Federation for Internal Freedom,
or IFF, which is a mouthful. They were looking
at how these drugs affected the mind. And this
all culminated in one of the most famous studies
in the history of psychedelic research, the Good
Friday Experiment of 1962. I love this story.
It sounds like the plot of a movie. Tell us about
the setup. It was a controlled double -blind
experiment. Albert was assisting a graduate student
named Walter Ponke, and the goal was to test
a very specific hypothesis. Could psilocybin
reliably trigger a mystical experience in religiously
inclined people? So they aren't just testing
it on random people off the street. They are
specifically testing it on... Theology students.
Exactly. The perfect test group. They took 20
divinity students from Andover Newton Theological
School. Half of them were given a dose of psilocybin.
The other half were given a placebo. And it was
a good placebo, right? Not just a sugar pill.
A very clever one. They gave them nicotinic acid,
which is basically a high dose of niacin. It
makes your face flush and tingle and feel warm.
So they wanted the placebo group to feel something
so they wouldn't know immediately that they got
the dud. Smart. And the setting. This is the
best part. Marsh Chapel at Boston University
on Good Friday during the actual three hour Good
Friday service. I mean, talk about set and setting.
I can't make it up. You're taking theology students.
You're putting them in a church on the holiest
day of the Christian calendar. You're piping
in organ music and then you're adding a powerful
psychedelic compound. And what happened? What
were the results? The results were staggering.
The experimental group, the ones who got the
psilocybin, overwhelmingly reported profound
mystical experiences. Like what? What did they
say? They reported a sense of unity with the
divine, a transcendence of time and space, a
feeling of oneness with all things, a sense of
sacredness. It was statistically off the charts.
It was considered for a while the first real
scientific proof that mysticism could be catalyzed
by chemistry. But Harvard is a very conservative
institution. The administration could not have
been thrilled about theology students tripping
in a chapel. They were not thrilled. Not at all.
The controversy started to build There were questions
about the scientific rigor because, frankly,
Leary and Albert were participating in the drug
taking, too. Oh, yeah. They were breaking the
objective observer rule. They weren't just scientists
studying a phenomenon. They were becoming evangelists
for the experience. They were just studying the
drug. They were promoting the lifestyle that
came with it. Exactly. And the rumors started
flying around campus. They had a very clear agreement
with the university that they would not give
these drugs to undergraduate students, only graduate
students. But, you know. The boundaries were
getting very, very blurry. And that leads directly
to the dismissal. 1963. A watershed moment in
his life. They were both formally fired from
Harvard. And the reasons are very specific in
the record. Leary was dismissed for basically
abandoning his post. He was skipping classes,
leaving Cambridge without permission. But Albert.
He was fired for allegedly giving psilocybin
to an undergraduate student. Which was the one
rule he absolutely could not break. He broke
the pact. And the significance of this cannot
be overstated. This severed Richard Alpert's
tie to the establishment. He was no longer Professor
Alpert of Harvard. He was an outcast. He was
a drug guy. He lost the tenure. He lost the prestige.
He lost that whole identity. He essentially fell
off the ladder of success that he had been so
desperately climbing his entire life. It was
a complete and total break. So the safety net
is gone. The academic career is over. Where do
you go when Harvard kicks you out? Well, if you
have wealthy, supportive patrons, you go to Millbrook,
New York. The Hitchcock Estate. This part of
the story always feels so cinematic to me, like
a scene out of a 60s film. It is. In 1963, Peggy
Hitchcock, who was an heir to the Mellon fortune,
arranged for her brother, Billy, to rent this
massive 64 -room estate in Millbrook to Leary
and Albert's group. Wow. They set up a communal
living situation there, and they renamed their
organization the Castalia Foundation. Castalia.
That's a reference to Herman Hess, isn't it?
Yes, from the glass bead game. Castaglio was
this sort of utopian intellectual colony in the
book dedicated to the life of the mind. And it
shows you how they viewed themselves. They didn't
see themselves as a bunch of dropout junkies.
They saw themselves as an elite avant -garde
group exploring the very frontiers of human consciousness.
So what were they doing at Millbrook? Was it
just a nonstop party? From the outside, maybe
it looked like a party, but their state of objective
was very serious. They were conducting group
LSD sessions. They were practicing meditation,
yoga. They were trying to map the territory of
the mind. They were actively seeking a permanent
route to higher consciousness. They wanted to
stay in that Good Friday state forever. Exactly.
But this is where Alpert starts to hit a wall.
And I think this is a really important insight
for you listening, especially today with all
the talk about microdosing and biohacking. and
using substances for personal growth. The problem
of coming down. Gravity. Mental gravity. They
could take the drug and they would go up. They'd
have these profound, ego -dissolving unity experiences.
They would feel one with the universe. They'd
feel like they understood the secrets of the
cosmos. But... The drug wears off. The drug always
wears off. You know, it's the Monday morning
problem. Yeah. Albert would have this incredible
revelation of universal love. on a Saturday afternoon,
and by Tuesday morning, he was just depressed,
anxious, neurotic Richard Alpert again. He realized
that the chemicals provided the experience of
the destination, but they didn't provide the
transformation of the traveler. That's a really
great way to put it. The experience versus the
transformation. He said he felt like he was crashing
the party. He could get in the door, but he wasn't
allowed to stay. He was still Richard Alpert
when the LSD wore off. He was still dealing with
all his neuroses, his depression, his hollowness.
So the chemicals were like a sneak peek, a movie
trailer, but they weren't the actual film. Exactly.
And that dissatisfaction, that feeling of, is
this all there is, is what pushed him to look
elsewhere. If chemistry couldn't sustain the
high, if Western science couldn't fix him, maybe
he needed to look east. So in 1967, he leaves
the estate, he leaves the U .S., and he goes
to India. The classic journey to the east. Yeah.
But this is important. He didn't go as a devotee
initially. He wasn't going to find God. No. No.
He was still a Western psychologist at heart.
He was still a skeptic. He was searching for
a map. He wanted to find someone who understood
how the mind worked better than he did. And he
travels around for a bit. And eventually he meets
this guy named Bhagavan Das. Describe Bhagavan
Das for us because the visual contrast here is
just hilarious to me. Oh, it's incredible. Albert
is this, you know, 36 -year -old former Harvard
professor, probably wearing Western clothes,
carrying luggage totally out of his element.
And Bhagavan Das is this tall, young American,
maybe 23, with long dreadlocks. Barefoot, carrying
a one -stringed instrument, just living completely
in the moment. Total hippie. The ear hippie.
And Bhagavan Das becomes his guide. He leads
Albert barefoot through the country. And eventually
he leads him up into the foothills of the Himalayas
to this tiny ashram to meet his guru. Neem Karoli
Baba. Known to his followers as Maharaji. And
this meeting, I mean, this is the pivot point
of the entire life we are discussing. It's the
axis on which the whole story turns. I want to
focus on one specific story from this first meeting
because I think it perfectly defines the clash
between the Western mind and the Eastern spirit.
The LSD test. It's a fascinating, almost mythological
moment. So Albert is there at the ashram. He's
skeptical. He just sees this old man wrapped
in a plaid blanket, sitting on a wooden tucket,
surrounded by a few followers. And Albert has
something in his pocket. He does. He has a stash
of what he called white lightning LSD. This wasn't,
you know, some blotter acid made in a bathtub.
This was high grade laboratory LSD from the Sandoz
days. The good stuff. The very good stuff. And
Albert is curious. He wants to know what this
guru, this man who is supposedly in love. It's
almost like a challenge, isn't it? Let's see
if your meditation is stronger than my chemistry.
It's exactly that. He explains it to Maharaj
Ji as a medicine from the West. The guru asks
for it. Now, we need to talk dosage here because
this is key. A standard heavy trip, the kind
that makes the walls melt. Is maybe 100 to 150
micrograms. Okay, got it. 150 is heavy dose.
Albert Hansen, a vial containing 915 micrograms.
Wait, what? 915. 915. It is a massive, massive
dose. It is roughly nine times a standard heavy
dose. That is a dose that would shatter most
people's reality for 12, maybe 24 hours. You
wouldn't be able to speak. You wouldn't know
your own name. So Alpert hands it over, probably
terrified that he's about to like kill this old
man or send him into a permanent psychosis. He's
watching him like a hawk. Maharajji takes the
pills, swallows them, and Alpert just waits.
He waits for the eyes to dilate. He waits for
the trembling. He waits for the guru to start
talking to the trees. Nothing happens. What do
you mean nothing? Zero. No psychotropic effect
whatsoever. Maharaji just sat there twinkling.
He talked to people. He laughed. He ate. He didn't
go crazy. He didn't hallucinate. He just looked
at Albert with this little smile. Did Albert
think he faked it? Like maybe he palmed the pills
and threw them over his shoulder? He suspected
it initially, but later on, other disciples confirmed
that they saw him swallow them. The lesson that
Maharaji offered him was profound. He told Albert
that it was possible to be in that state, the
state that the LSD mimics permanently. What did
he say, exactly? He said something to the effect
of, You can take the medicine, and it allows
you to visit Christ, but you can only stay for
two hours. Wow. He told Albert that through meditation
and spiritual practice, you can live in that
place. You don't need the car to visit. You can
build a house there. He said something like,
the medicine is good, but it is not necessary
for one who is already there. That must have
just completely destroyed Albert's entire worldview.
Shattered it. He thought he possessed the ultimate
power in that little pill, and this guru just
shrugged it off like it was an aspirin. It humbled
him completely. It broke the last of his Western
scientific arrogance. He just surrendered. He
realized that this illiterate old man in a blanket
knew something fundamental about the human mind
that Harvard and Stanford and Timothy Leary had
no clue about. So he stays. He studies yoga,
meditation, devotion. And this is when Richard
Alpert dies, metaphorically speaking. And Ram
Dass is born. Maharaj gave him that name. Ram
Dass means servant of God or more specifically
servant of Ram who is a Hindu deity. But the
translation servant of God is the one he always
used. This marks the death of the professor and
the birth of the teacher. He spent about six
months there just soaking it all up. And then
he had to come back. He returned to the US in
late 1968 or early 69. But he wasn't coming back
to a university. He was coming back to a counterculture
that was starting to kind of burn out. Right.
The summer of love was over. The 70s were looming.
Altamont was on the horizon. Exactly. The initial
beautiful optimism of the hippie movement was
fading. Hard drugs were moving in. People were
confused. They had blown their minds open with
acid, but they didn't know how to put the pieces
back together. They were lost. And Ram Dass walks
in with a manual. He goes to the Lama Foundation
in Taos, New Mexico, this countercultural commune
up in the mountains. And he has this stack of
papers with him that he called From Bindu to
Ojas. That title. Definitely not a bestseller.
No. It sounds like, I don't know, a Swedish medical
textbook. But the community there, they helped
him. They edited it. They illustrated it. And
we have to mention the design. Those famous,
intricate, psychedelic line drawings. The brown
paper bag style cover. It looked like an artifact.
It didn't look like a book you'd buy at a normal
bookstore. Exactly. And in 1971, they published
it as Be Here Now. And it just explodes. It becomes
the Bible of the counterculture. As we said,
it sold two million copies. You have to understand
why it worked so well. It wasn't just another
book about Hinduism. Ram Dass was a translator.
What do you mean by a translator? Well, he was
a Harvard psychologist. He understood the Western
mind with all its anxieties and neuroses. He
could take these ancient esoteric Eastern concepts,
karma, dharma, ego, chakras, and explain them
using the language of Western psychology. He
could say, here is your ego, here is your neurosis,
and here's how this practice of meditation directly
addresses that. So he built a bridge. He made
it safe for an intellectual to talk about God.
Precisely. Before this, if you were a Western
intellectual, spirituality was seen as this fuzzy,
anti -intellectual superstition. Ram Dass made
it psychological. He made it accessible. I saw
in the notes that the cultural impact was just
massive. Steve Jobs mentioned it. Steve Jobs
credited Be Here Now as a major influence on
his life and his philosophy. George Harrison
wrote a song called Be Here Now. That was on
his 1973 album. I had no idea. And the phrase
itself just entered the lexicon. Before this
book, Be Here Now was not a common saying. Now
it's almost a cliche of mindfulness, but Ram
Dass is the one who planted that flag in the
cultural consciousness. Now, usually when someone
writes a book that sells two million copies,
the next part of the story involves a yacht,
a mansion in Malibu, and eventually a tax scandal.
Usually, yes. And this is where the servant of
God part really comes into play. He didn't keep
the money. The sources are very, very clear on
this. Really? None of it? He set up the copyright
so that all the proceeds went to the Lama family.
and later to the Hanuman Foundation, which he
started. Throughout his life, his royalties and
his teaching fees, which were substantial, I
mean, estimated between $100 ,000 to $800 ,000
annually at his peak, all went to charity. He
didn't keep it. He wasn't living large. No, he
lived on a very modest stipend. He walked the
walk. He wasn't building an empire for himself.
He was funding service projects. Which transitions
us perfectly to the next phase of his life. If
the first phase was achievement and the second
was exploration, this third phase is very clearly
service. Seva, that's the Sanskrit word for selfless
service. And Maharaj Ji's core instruction to
him wasn't go meditate in a cave for the rest
of your life. It was love everyone, serve everyone,
and remember God. The serve everyone part was
key. So it wasn't just about personal enlightenment
or feeling good. It was about karma yoga, the
yoga of action in the world. Exactly. In 1974,
he founded the Hanuman Foundation. And through
that, he started the Prison Ashram Project. What
was the Prison Ashram? It was about bringing
spirituality into prisons. He corresponded with
literally thousands of prisoners. He sent books.
He treated them not as criminals, but as trapped
souls who could use their time for profound spiritual
growth. He famously said that a prison cell is
a perfect monastery if you use it right. That
is such a radical shift in perspective. And then
there was the SIVA Foundation, which is still
going strong today. A huge one. Co -founded in
1978 with Dr. Larry Brilliant and the activist
Wavy Gravy. Their main focus was on eliminating
curable blindness in places like India and Nepal
and other developing countries. And this is what
strikes me. This is such nuts and bolts practical
work. This isn't just sending good vibes to the
world. This is organizing cataract surgeries.
This is public health logistics. And that refutes
the common critique that the whole new age movement
is just navel gazing and narcissistic. Ram Dass
argued that helping others is a powerful method
of working on yourself. How so? He said if you
are serving soup to a homeless person and you
feel superior to them, you know, I'm the great
helper, you are the helpless one, then your ego
is still in the way. Service becomes a mirror
for your own stuff. He also tackled the one topic
that Western culture tries desperately to ignore,
death. The conscious dying movement. He collaborated
with the famous Dr. Elizabeth Kubler -Ross. The
woman who defined the five stages of grief. The
very one. Ram Dass began teaching these workshops
on conscious aging and dying. He helped create
the Living Dying Project, which was the first
residential facility in the U .S. designed for
people to die consciously. What does that actually
mean? To die consciously? Well, in the West,
we tend to view death as a medical failure. We
hide it away in hospitals. We sedate it. We fight
it until the bitter end. Rondas argued that death
is a natural transition. It's a spiritual opportunity,
a final letting go of the body and the ego. He
wanted to create a space where people could approach
that moment with awareness, without fear, surrounded
by love and support rather than just buzzing
machines and panic. It's a beautiful concept.
And it's also a little bit of foreshadowing,
isn't it? Yeah. Because for a guy who spent decades
teaching about how to handle suffering and how
to handle the failing of the body. The universe
decided to give him a very, very personal final
exam. The stroke. Let's go to 1997. Ram Dass
is in his late 60s at this point. He's 66. It
was February 1997. And the irony here is just
so deep. He had just started seriously exploring
his Jewish roots again for the first time since
that hollow bar mitzvah. He was feeling healthy.
He was writing a book. And then just boom. A
massive hemorrhagic stroke. It was catastrophic.
What was the physical fallout from that? It left
him paralyzed on the right side of his body.
He was wheelchair -bound for the rest of his
life. But the cruelest part of it, for a man
like Ram Dass, was the effect it had on his speech.
Expressive aphasia. Yes, expressive aphasia.
And what this means is that his intellect was
fully intact. He could understand everything
you were saying. His mind was as sharp as ever.
But he couldn't find the words to respond. The
connection between the thought and the mouth
was just... broken. For a man whose entire career,
from Harvard lecturer to spiritual teacher, was
based on talking, that seems almost like a cosmic
joke. It does. And initially, he really struggled.
He was deeply depressed. He questioned his faith.
He said he railed at his guru, Amar Rajji, asking,
why did you do this to me? I've spent my life
serving, and this is my reward. But he didn't
stay in that place of self -pity. He reframed
it. This is where that concept of fierce grace
comes in. Fierce grace. Let's unpack that phrase.
It sounds like a contradiction. He argued that
the stroke was a gift. It was grace, but it was
wrapped in very, very rough sandpaper. It was
fierce. How on earth was it a gift? It forced
him to slow down. It forced him to stop traveling
constantly. It forced him to be silent. And most
importantly, it forced him to be dependent on
other people. It completely destroyed that helper
identity he built. Exactly. He couldn't be the
big, strong guru helping the poor, sad student
anymore. Now he needed help to go to the bathroom.
He needed help to eat. He said it burned away
the last remnants of his spiritual ego. Wow.
And he had this great quote about it. He said,
the strength was giving me lessons. Death is
the biggest change we'll face. So we need to
practice change. That is a level of acceptance
that is just. Yeah. It's hard to comprehend,
to look at your own paralysis and say, this is
practice. This is a lesson. It changed his teaching
style, too. He had to learn to speak again, but
it was very slow. There would be these long,
long silences between words. But people who attended
his talks said the silence was just as powerful
as the words. He became a living example of how
to exist in a broken body with a whole spirit.
He wrote a book about this experience called
Still Here. He did. And I love the addendum to
that. In 2013, when he was in his 80s, he admitted
that his earlier writings on old age, the ones
written before the stroke, were naive. Really?
He called himself out? Yes. He basically said,
you know, I thought I understood aging, but now
that I'm actually here, now that I'm paralyzed
and in constant pain, it's much, much harder
than I thought. I just love that honesty. He
never claimed to be a finished product. He was
always still learning. I want to touch on his
personal life a bit more because for a long time,
the guru image can seem sort of asexual or distant.
But he opened up about his sexuality later in
life. He did. In the 1990s, he discussed being
bisexual. But in true Ram Dass fashion, he didn't
like the labels. He said it isn't gay or not
gay. It's just awareness. He refused to be boxed
in by any social categories. He saw sexuality
as just another costume we wear, another part
of the human play. And then there was the surprise
son. This story is just wild. It is straight
out of a movie. At age 78, Ram Dass finds out
he's a father. A man named Peter Reichard, who
was 53 years old at the time, took a DNA test
and it came back a match. And it turns out that
way back when Albert was 24 and teaching at Stanford,
during that brief period he was trying to be
a normal academic, he had a relationship with
a history major named Karen Saum. And he never
knew she got pregnant. Never had a clue. So suddenly,
in his late 70s, paralyzed, living on Maui, he
becomes a father and a grandfather overnight.
How did he react to that? Did he deny it or push
it away? No, by all accounts, he embraced it
with total joy. He didn't hide it. He welcomed
Peter and his family into his life. He just saw
it as another unexpected form of grace, another
role to play in the drama, Father. So let's look
at the final years. After the stroke, he moved
to Maui, right? Yes. After a nearly fatal illness
while visiting India in 2004, he physically couldn't
handle the long travel anymore. He settled in
Maui. And since he couldn't go to the world,
the world came to him. He hosted retreats there
right up until the end. And did he ever patch
things up with Timothy Leary? I know they had
a pretty serious falling out back in the day.
They did. In 1974, Ram Dass had actually publicly
denounced Leary. You know, Leary was being very
chaotic, getting arrested, becoming this media
figure. And Ram Dass felt it was damaging the
serious spiritual work. But they did reconcile.
When was that? In 1983 at a Harvard reunion of
all places. You're kidding. The reunion of the
fired professors. Exactly. And they stayed connected
after that. Before Leary died of cancer in 1996,
they reunited. There's a wonderful documentary
called Dying to Know that chronicles this. Oh,
I'll have to watch that. It's a beautiful closing
of the circle. You see these two bad boys of
Harvard coming back together at the very end
of their lives. One chose the path of the rebel.
The other chose the path of the saint. But you
could see they still loved each other. Rumdust
passed away pretty recently, didn't he? Yes.
December 22, 2019, he was 88 years old. He died
peacefully at his home in Maui. Leaving behind
just a man. massive legacy. The Love Serve Remember
Foundation is still going. He has all these later
books like Polishing the Mirror and Walking Each
Other Home. And I would argue a permanently changed
Western consciousness. He really was a pioneer.
He made yoga and meditation accessible. He made
the idea of spiritual seeking acceptable for
a skeptical Western intellectual. He proved you
didn't have to check your brain at the door to
open your heart. So let's zoom out here at the
end. We've gone from the high achieving, anxious
Richard Albert to the psychedelic explorer to
the devout Ram Dass to the stroke survivor. What
is this? So what? Why does this story matter
to someone listening today who might not be a
hippie or a yogi? I think Ram Dass represents
the ultimate capacity for human reinvention.
We so often feel stuck in our identities. We
say, I am a lawyer, or I am a failure, or I am
an anxious person, I am the responsible one.
We think these things are solid, like they're
carved in stone. But Ram Dass' life shows that
they're really just costumes. Exactly. They're
roles you're playing, and you can take them off.
Richard Alpert took off the suit and tie, and
then Ram Dass had to take off the robes of the
helper when he had a stroke. But the core awareness
underneath it all remained. And that concept
of walking each other home. It's such a beautiful
idea. It's one of his most famous quotes. We
are all just walking each other home. It reframes
all human interaction, doesn't it? It's not a
competition. It's not a transaction. It's a shared
journey. We are all just souls in these bodies
helping each other get back to that place of
unity. It really raises a final provocative thought
for us to leave you with. It does. I mean, think
about Richard Alpert. Here was a man who needed
every credential, every degree, every bit of
external validation just to feel okay. And he
had to become nobody. He had to lose the title,
lose the job, and eventually even lose his fluent
speech to finally find peace. So the question
for all of us is? The question is, what credentials,
what identities, what gold stars are you holding
on to right now? And could it be that those very
things that you are clinging to so tightly are
the things keeping you from being truly here
now? That is something to chew on. Thank you
so much for listening to this deep dive into
the life of Ram Dass. We'll see you next time.
Be here now.