The Monkfish Reader #5A | Ram Dass

We come and go, geographically and through life and death. But we stay together in the spirit. We’re just getting to appreciate who we are. What a joyous, light, spacious quality. How free. We’re incarnations, and we are having the fun of lila [the Sanskrit word for “delight”], the play of forms. It’s the dance of keeping it together, recognizing the formless and the form. We can keep it together all at once. We can keep our earthly game together. Just call in and give a few dollars to make our time here together feel right on every level. Okay?

Let’s keep it all together. Keep the joy of it. Keep the humor of the big cosmic joke, that we can play in forms and yet know that we’re formless.

Lex Hixon: Thank you…. Now, since Ram Dass is here with us for a while, and since I’m an incorrigible intellectual, I’m going to ask him this big question about theism and nontheism. Do you feel that there is a personal God, or is there just pure consciousness? Would you start by letting us hear something about your attitude toward God as it developed in your autobiography?

Ram Dass: I have a suspicion that intellect—which you’re so fond of, Lex—will never be satisfied because God hasn’t deemed it necessary to be comprehensible to the rational mind. My historical trip may not shed much light other than being similar for many people to their own trips.

Initially, as a Jew, I was Bar Mitzvahed, confirmed, and went to temple for holidays and occasionally on Friday night or Saturday morning. My conception of God was mainly that of a grandfatherly figure with a great deal of power who was judgmental and supportive but to be feared. Every now and then, I’d get a little feeling, in the psalms or the songs, of some of the softer or more loving aspects of God, but that was downplayed in my tradition of Judaism.

The kind of Judaism I was involved with just didn’t feed me. That’s all I would say, right? I don’t think I ever put down the Jewish concept of God. My involvement with temple was mostly to please my family and for sentimental reasons and a strong identity with Jewish emotionality and love of learning. I still felt that strong identity. That’s all.

Lex Hixon: What happened to your practice of Judaism when you went to college?

Ram Dass: In college, I became very involved with the Quakers. I went to Quaker meetings, and while the inner voice never prompted me to stand up and speak, I could identify with that concept of looking inward. That was the quality I saw in the Quaker tradition and later found in meditation.

Dave McLellan and his wife Mary took me to my first meeting. Dave was later my boss at Harvard. He was the head of the department of social relations, and was one of the leading Quakers in the country. He was a super scientist too, and there didn’t seem to be any contradiction for him. I was a computer programmer-type scientist, dealing with statistics and methodology and teaching courses in them. Also, I was teaching Freud, as a trainee in the Psychoanalytic Institute in California, and I was being analyzed. I saw everything spiritual and religious as sublimated sexuality. I treated the patients that came to see me who talked about God as having a neurosis! I have a lot of karma to work out for that.

Lex Hixon: From your present perspective of knowing about Kundalini energy, don’t you still see an intimate connection between sexuality and spirituality?

Ram Dass: There is a connection. But it is only a part of the way in which the energy of the universe manifests through a human being.

Lex Hixon: It’s interesting that since our Judeo-Christian tradition is theistic, a lot of us who have been turned off or, as you say, not fed by those religions, are reawakening to spirituality through the East in nontheistic traditions. After we have immersed ourselves in them, we seem to be able to come back and appreciate our theistic traditions.

Ram Dass: Because the heart wasn’t flowing enough. See, a lot of people move toward very dry techniques. And then they feel that they are limited, because their heart only opens when they’re playing with their dog, or when they’re with their husband or wife, but not in relation to the spirit. Then they go back into a flow.

Lex Hixon: In Buddhism, it seems that what they call compassion, which might be better translated as a sense of solidarity with beings, seems to have that heart-chakra function, as the devotional prayer does in a theistic tradition.

Ram Dass: Buddhist meditation teachers who seem so absolutely exquisitely impersonal, when they get around to the metta [loving kindness], their meditations turn into these very lush bhaktis [devotional worshipping], in terms of the love for all suffering, sentient beings. So it sneaks in everywhere. And my feeling is that to come to God fully, one must come with heart and head. If you are pushing away anything, if it’s a personal concept of God, or an impersonal concept of God, you will be losing out. Ultimately, we have to find the way through in every method.

Lex Hixon: To me, there is a problem when people talk about the theistic approach as being a rung of a ladder that you climb up beyond, because it seems to put a hierarchy there, where theism is on a more primitive level, and if you see beyond it, then you see the forms of God dissolve and disappear. But for St. Francis, or for Mother Teresa, the Christ was not dissolving and disappearing.

Ram Dass: I understand that. But I like to conceive of it much more as a circle, where you go through dualism into a non-dualistic relationship to God, and then you come back to functioning in dualism, seeing God everywhere, but recognizing that you and God are in a relationship that isn’t seeable or knowable, but is only “be-able.” In other words, I see that both of them exist simultaneously. It’s not a hierarchy. It’s merely a temporal ordering, okay?

Lex Hixon: Let’s continue now, from the scientific phase of your biography.

Ram Dass: I got into drugs—or, as I prefer to call them, psychedelic chemicals—because science wasn’t feeding me any more than my brand of Judaism had fed me. Science was feeding my intellect, but I was feeling cut off from the world, and very dry and empty.

I had experienced marijuana, but it hadn’t ever broken through my intellectual barriers because my defenses were very strong. But the first time I took psilocybin I was catapulted out of my space, and experienced another level of relationship to the universe. That changed the whole meaning of my existence, but after I tried unsuccessfully to stay in that space, for six years, I was led to the next thing.

Lex Hixon: Do you think that the psychedelic space was just as limiting in retrospect as the conventional Jewish space or the conventional scientific space?

Ram Dass: It took me an awful lot closer to transcending my own model of myself than anything else. There were moments in the High Holidays, like hearing the Kol Nidre, that were transcendent in Judaism. Science could have taken me beyond my mind if I’d been a real disciplined scholar doing problem solving like an Einstein.

Lex Hixon: But you don’t really have to go all the way to Einstein. It seems that science does get some people high, to use that terminology?

Ram Dass: It takes the discipline of problem-solving. It takes someone who stays with the problem until they are eating straw. They have to be so deep into solving their problem that their one- pointedness allows them to pierce a barrier of consciousness.

Lex Hixon: Which is actually meditation, or yoga.

Ram Dass: That’s meditation in action, sure. Absolutely.

Lex Hixon: Do you think that if you had the good karma to meet your guru, Neem Karoli Baba, after just having experimented with marijuana, you would have been able to recognize him as well as you did after six years of psychedelics?

Ram Dass: Well, Lex, what you’re touching on now is something about social responsibility about drug usage in America and young people. I’ve got to do a very straight scene about that. My way through definitely involved the use of psychedelics. That doesn’t mean it’s useful or necessary for any other human being. Nor is it necessarily not useful or not necessary. I am not in a position to judge about another human being.

I’ve observed, in the past 10 or 15 years, that the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Tim Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Star Trek, and thousands of other vehicles have given us new models of reality existing simultaneously in the culture. This means that a young person already exists in a multiple-reality situation, which is the effect that psychedelics gave me. So the drugs already did it to the society, if you will. The individual already has a support system for his mind that allows for exploration. So what I’d say is that I haven’t recommended that anybody take drugs in years, because it doesn’t seem necessary any longer.

Lex Hixon: Can you talk about how you made the transition from the psychedelic space to a space of the guru and the divine in the form of Hanuman? These are new concepts that are so rich and yet so strange to our culture.

Ram Dass: My attraction to teachers has been intimately related to the powers that they manifested. That was the first sign to me of something going on. This was true of Maharaj-ji, who was my guru, Neem Karoli Baba, who immediately read my mind, and looked at me in a way that opened my heart in a moment.

It turned out that it was Maharaj-ji’s love that fed me. But I was initially attracted to the power. The power gave birth to the love, which drew me into the philosophy of the system, which allowed me to recognize that, ultimately, I would look right through my guru and I would find myself, and that when I looked through myself and my guru I would find God. And finally I would realize that the three of them turned out to be the same thing.

Lex Hixon: That’s a very rich statement. We’ll have to unpack that a little bit.

Ram Dass: I’ll tell you, from where I’m sitting, Maharaj-ji and Hanuman and Shiva are all the same being, just different forms of it. That’s about it! It’s a lineage of total love that has at its edge a certain kind of rascality or Tantric quality of playing with the elements for the purpose of purification. It isn’t the fierceness of Kali, but it has that edge to it of impersonal fierceness along with an incredible amount of love. It’s the loving of the love in another being. Because that love is the mirror of God, right in there.

I’m a power-tripper, and the biggest power trip I’ve ever seen is love. It’s like the third eye opening. Love is part of the prerequisite to see the forms that Krishna shows to Arjuna in the 11th chapter of the Bhagavad Gita. He opens his eye and lets him see the forms that are not seeable through the two eyes. That’s what you see “when thine eye be single,” as it says in the Aquarian Gospel.

Lex Hixon: Your path, as you said, is very much a path of the heart. The idea of being fed is the way you have discriminated for yourself about what has been right for you in your spiritual life. Now you can nourish a lot of seekers in our culture with a real feast. You’re in a position to serve up the truth to us. It’s like you’ve become a rabbi. You’ve gone full circle!

Ram Dass: Don’t tell the rabbis that. They won’t approve of that. Because I’m not kosher.

Lex Hixon: Well, you know, the idea of kosher is also expanding.