Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert ; 6 April 1931) is an American spiritual teacher, former academic and clinical psychologist, and author of the 1971 seminal book Be Here Now. He was known for his personal and professional relationship with Timothy Leary at Harvard University in the early 1960s, for his trip to India and his relationship with Hindu teacher Neem Karoli Baba, and to found the charity organization Seva Foundation and the Hanuman Foundation. He continues to teach through his website.
Video Ram Dass
Youth and education
Richard Alpert was born to a Jewish family in Newton, Massachusetts. His father, George Alpert, is a lawyer in Boston, president of New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, co-founder of Brandeis University and Albert Einstein Medical College, and a major fund-raiser for Jewish causes. Although Alpert owns a bar mitzvah, he is "let down by his essential void". He considered himself an atheist and did not embrace any religion during his early life, describing himself as "living with religion." I do not have a single God smell until I take psychedelics. "
Alpert attended Williston Northampton School, graduating in 1948 as part of the Cum Laude Association. He then went on to receive a Bachelor of Arts degree from Tufts University, a master's degree from Wesleyan University, and a doctorate (all in psychology) from Stanford University. His father wanted him to go to medical school, but while at Tufts he decided he wanted to study psychology. Alpert's mentor at Wesleyan, David McClelland, then recommended Alpert to Stanford, where he began his PhD studies in the early 1950s. Alpert wrote his doctoral thesis on "performance anxiety." After receiving a PhD, Alpert taught at Stanford for a year and started psychoanalysis.
Maps Ram Dass
Harvard professor and research
Professor and Harvard researchMcClelland moved to Cambridge to teach at Harvard University, and helped Alpert receive a tenure-track position there in 1958 as an assistant professor of clinical psychology. Alpert works with the Department of Social Affairs, the Department of Psychology, the Graduate School of Education, and the Health Office, where he is a therapist. He specializes in human motivation and personality development, and publishes his first book Child Identification and Care .
Perhaps the most important thing is the work he does with his close friend and associate Timothy Leary, a professor of clinical psychology at the university. Alpert and Leary have met through McClelland, who leads the Personality Research Center where Alpert and Leary do research. Alpert is McClelland's representative in the lab. Upon returning from a visiting professorship at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961, Alpert devoted himself to joining Leary in experiments with and intensive research for the effects of hallucinogenic drug therapies such as psilocybin, LSD-25, and other psychedelic chemicals, through Their Harvard Psilocybin Project. In addition, Alpert helped graduate Harvard Divinity School graduate Walter Pahnke in the "Good Friday Experiment" of 1962 with theology students, the first controlled study, double blindness to medicine and mystical experience.
Alpert and Leary founded the Nonprofit International Federation of Internal Freedom (IFIF) in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to conduct studies on the use of religious psychedelic drugs, and both on the board of directors. Leary and Alpert was officially dismissed from Harvard in 1963. According to Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey, Leary was dismissed because he left Cambridge and class without permission or notification, and Alpert for allegedly giving psilocybin to an undergraduate.
Millbrook and psychedelic counterculture (1963-1967)
In 1963 Alpert, Leary, and their followers moved to Hitchcock Estate in Millbrook, New York, after the IFIF New York City branch director and Mellon's heiress Peggy Hitchcock arranged for his brother Billy to rent the land to IFIF. Alpert and Leary immediately formed a communal group with former members of the Psilocybin Project on the estate (commonly known as "Millbrook"), and IFIF was later dissolved and renamed the Castalia Foundation (after intellectual colonies in Herman Hesse The Glass Bead Game). The core group at Millbrook, whose journal is Psychedelic Review , seeks to grow divinity in everyone. At Millbrook, they experimented with psychedelics and often participated in group LSD sessions, searching for a permanent route to higher consciousness. The Castalia Foundation organizes a weekend retreat on a plantation where people pay for non-medicated psychedelic experiences, through meditation, yoga, and group therapy sessions.
Alpert and Leary went on to help the author of the book entitled Psychedelic Experience with Ralph Metzner, based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead , and published in 1964. Alpert co-authored LSD with Sidney Cohen and Lawrence Schiller in 1966.
In 1967 Alpert gave a lecture in the League to the Spiritual Discovery center in Greenwich Village.
Spirit search and change name
In 1967 Alpert went to India where he met and traveled with American spiritual seeker Bhagavan Das, and finally met the man who would become his teacher, Neem Karoli Baba, in Kainchi ashram, which Alpert called "Maharaj-ji". It was Maharaj-ji who gave Alpert the name "Ram Dass", meaning "servant of God", referring to the incarnation of God as Ram or Lord Rama. Alpert also corresponded with the Indian spiritual guru, Meher Baba, and called Baba in several of his books.
Be Here Now
After Alpert returned to America as Ram Dass, he lived in the Old Foundation in Taos, New Mexico, as a guest. Ram Dass has helped Steve Durkee (Nooruddeen Durkee) and Barbara Durkee (Asha Greer or Asha von Briesen) co-founded a counter-cultural spiritual community in 1967, and he has an ashram dedicated to Ram Dass teachers. During Ram Dass's visit, he presented a script he wrote, titled From Bindu to Ojas . The community edited, illustrated, and laid the text, eventually becoming a bestseller when it was published under the name Be Here Now in 1971. The 416 page manual for conscious creatures was published by the Lama Foundation, as a benefit of Ram Dass for community. Be Here Now contains Ram Dass's story of his spiritual journey, as well as the recommended spiritual techniques and quotations. The results of the book helped prop up the Yayasan Lama for several years, after they donated book copyright and half the proceeds to the Hanuman Foundation in Taos.
Living/Dying Foundation and Projects
During the 1970s, Ram Dass focused on teaching, writing, and working with foundations. He founded the Hanuman Foundation, an educational and nonprofit organization that started the Prison-Ashram Project (now known as Human Right Foundation), in 1974. The Hanuman Foundation focuses on the spiritual welfare of the community through education, media and community service programs. He founded the Seva Foundation by joining health care workers to treat the blind in India, Nepal, and developing countries. Founded in 1978 with public health leader Larry Brilliant and humanitarian activist, Wavy Gravy, has become an international health organization.
In the early 1970s, Ram Dass taught workshops about conscious and dying aging throughout the United States. Elisabeth KÃÆ'¼bler-Ross is one of her students. Ram Dass helped create the Dead Project with its Executive Director Dale Borglum, whom he met in India. At the time, Borglum was also the Executive Director of the Hanuman Foundation. The Living/Dying Project, based in Marin, California beginning in 1986, was originally named Dying Center and is located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Dying Center is the first residential facility in the US where people come to die consciously.
Yayasan Cinta Melayani Remat is organized to preserve and continue the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba and Ram Dass. Ram Dass also serves on the faculty of the Metta Institute where he provides training on the caring and loving care of the dying.
During his life since the commencement of the Hanuman Foundation, Ram Dass has given all his book royalties and profits from teaching to other foundations and charities. The approximate amount of income he gives each year ranges from $ 100,000 to $ 800,000.
Next life
At age 60, Ram Dass began exploring Judaism seriously for the first time. "My belief is that I was not born into Judaism by coincidence, so I need to find a way to respect that", he said. "From a Hindu perspective, you are born as what you need to handle, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, you have it."
Leary and Ram Dass, who had grown apart after Ram Dass lashed out at Leary in a 1974 press conference, reconciled in 1983 at Harvard (at a reunion for the 20th anniversary of their controversial dismissal from the Harvard faculty), and reunited before Leary's death in May 1996.
In February 1997, Ram Dass suffered a stroke that made him suffer from expressive aphasia, which he interpreted as an act of grace. He states, "That stroke gives me a lesson, and I realize it's a powerful gift... Death is the biggest change we'll face, so we need to practice change." She lives in Maui and has not left the Hawaiian Islands since 2004, when she nearly died of infection following her trip to India. However, he continues to make public appearances and speak in small places; he held a retreat on Maui; and he continues to teach via the live webcast. When asked if she could sum up her life message, she replied, "I help others as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people... for me, that's the purpose of the game in progress. " Ram Dass was awarded the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award in August 1991.
In 2003, Wayne Dyer published a request for donations for Ram Dass support due to his declining health following a stroke in 1997, "Now it's our turn... Ram Dass's body can no longer endure the rigors of the journey.He has come to Maui, where I live and writing, I often talk to her and am often drowned by tears in her beautiful 73 year old eyes when she apologizes for not being ready for her own elderly health care - for what she now feels as a burden to others she still intends to write and teach, but without a trip - we can now come to him Maui is healing - Maui is where Ram Dass wants to stay for now! He is currently living at home in Maui, which he does not own and is currently in danger of losing. asking you all to help buy this house and set up a financial foundation to take care of this man who has collected begi tu lot of money to ensure the future of many others To live what Ram Dass has done with his actions, please be generous and prom pt - no one is more worthy of our love and financial support. "
In 2013, Ram Dass released a memoir and a summary of his teaching, Polishing the Mirror: The Way of Living from Your Spiritual Heart . In an interview about the book, at the age of 82, he said that his earlier reflections on facing old age and death now seemed naive to him. He said, partly: "Now, I'm in my 80's... Now, I'm getting older, I'm near death, I'm getting closer to the end... Now, I'm really ready to face the music around me."
Personal life
In the 1990s, Ram Dass discussed his bisexuality while avoiding the label. He stated, "I've started to talk more about being bisexual, getting involved with men and women," and adding to his opinion that being gay is "not gay, and it's not un-gay, and that's okay-it's just consciousness. "At 78, Ram Dass learned that he had fathered a 24-year-old boy, at Stanford during a brief affair with a history major named Karen Saum, and that he was now a grandfather. The fact was revealed when his son Peter Reichard, a 53-year-old banker in North Carolina, took DNA tests after learning of her mother's doubts about Peter's legacy.
Ram Dass is a vegetarian.
Working
Books
- Identification and Parenting (with R. Sears and L. Rau) (1962) Stanford University Press
- Psychedelic Experience: A Guide Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (with Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner) (1964) ISBNÃ, 0-8065-1652-6
- LSD (with Sidney Cohen) (1966) ISBNÃ, 0-453-00120-3
- Be Here Now or Remember, Be Here Now (1971) ISBN: 0-517-54305-2
- Make Your Own Existence (1973)
- The Only Dance There Is (1974) ISBNÃ, 0-385-08413-7
- Grist for the Mill (with Stephen Levine) (1977) ISBNÃ, 0-89087-499-9
- Journey of Awakening: A Meditator's Guidebook (1978) ISBN 0-553-28572-6
- Miracle of Love: The Story of Neem Karoli Baba (1978) ISBN: 0-525-47611-3
- How can I help? Stories and Reflections about the Services (with Paul Gorman) (1985) ISBNÃ, 0-394-72947-1
- Compassionate in Action: Establishing Service Paths (with Mirabai Bush) (1991) ISBN: 0-517-57635-X
- Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying (2000) ISBNÃ, 1-57322-871-0
- The Way to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita (2004) ISBNÃ, 1-4000-5403-6
- Be Love Now (with Rameshwar Das) (2010) ISBNÃ, 1-84604-291-7
- Mirroring Mirrors: Life From Your Spiritual Heart (with Rameshwar Das) (2013) ISBNÃ, 1-60407-967-3
Recording
- Psychedelic Experience: A Guide Based on Tibetan Dead Book (with Timotius Leary & Ralph Metzner) (1966) (republished on CD in 2003 by Folkways)
- Here We Are All , 3-LP recorded directly in Vancouver, BC in the summer of 1969.
- Love Serve Remember (1973), a collection of six teaching books, data, and spiritual songs (Yayasan ZBS) (released in MP3 format, 2008)
- Cosmix (2008), an enhanced video of expressive Ram Dass CDs mixed with Down-under DJ Australia and Kriece singers, was released in Waveform Records.
Movies
- Heart Changes , a 1991 documentary performed by Ram Dass and displayed at many PBS stations. It is examined to take social action as a meditation act. Directed by Eric Taylor.
- Ecstatic States , interviews were filmed in 1996 on VHS, by Wiseone Edutainment Pty - Run Time: 80 minutes.
- Ram Dass, Fierce Grace , a 2001 biographical documentary about Ram Dass directed by Micky Lemle. Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember, a short 2010 film directed by V. Owen Bush, included in the Be Here Now Enhanced Edition eBook.
- Know Once: Ram Dass & amp; Timothy Leary , multiple double documentary Ram Dass and Timothy Leary. Ram Dass, Going Home , a documentary portrait of Ram Dass 2017 in his last years, directed by Derek Peck.
Reference
External links
- Official website . The site also contains information about "Love Serve Remembering Foundation".
- Seva Foundation (Organization founded by Ram Dass)
- The Living/Dying Project (the result of the Hanuman foundation, created by Ram Dass)
- Ram Dass, Fierce Grace on IMDb
- Works by or about Ram Dass in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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