"I'm only Jewish on my parents' side" (RD)

Don Lattin (Lucid News, 1/4/23); Dhr. Seven, Pat Macpherson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

I used to be Dr. Dick Alpert at Harvard U then I took LSD with Dr. Timothy Leary.

What did the Buddha discover?

This essay is part of the Lucid News “God on Psychedelics” Project, reported and written by veteran religion journalist Don Lattin. To read the complete series, visit the home page.

Judaism and Christianity each [in addition to their boring temple and church sermon-services on Saturdays and Sundays] have centuries-old mystical paths [for directly experiencing the divine].

But since the 1960s, and in the current psychedelic revival, countless North American psychonauts ["mind-explorers"] have turned to Buddhism, Hinduism, or shamanism to understand their sudden awareness of divine reality.

He's right. This sacred text's full of mystic trips!

In the next few installments of “God on Psychedelics,” we’ll hear from two scholars — Rabbi Art Green and the Reverend John Mabry, both of whom have thought deeply and written extensively about Jewish and Christian mysticism.

How do they view a spiritual revival fueled by psychedelic drugs [entheogens] and sacred plant medicines?

"Jesus" was a mushroom cult

Will these revelatory glimpses of transcendence, unitive awareness, and divine love inspire seekers to take another look at the mystical traditions hidden within their ancestral [Abrahamic] faiths?

But before turning to the rabbi and the reverend, let’s first consider a more familiar name in the pantheon of psychedelic spiritualists.

That would be Dr. Richard Alpert, Ph.D., a Jewish psychology professor fired from his post at Harvard University in 1963 for giving psychedelic drugs to undergraduates.

Ram Dass (Harvard University's Dr. Richard Alpert): "I'm only Jewish on my parents' side."

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The Psychedelic Experience; A Manual

In 1964, Dr. Alpert co-authored an influential psychedelic guidebook with Harvard colleagues Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Ralph Metzner that was based on the Vajrayana Buddhist Tibetan Book of the Dead.

In the late 1960s, Dr. Alpert went on a celebrated pilgrimage to India, became the disciple of a Hindu guru [Neem Karoli Baba], and took the name "Ram Dass" ["slave of Ram/God"].

Dr. Alpert was a master of one-liners, including the quip [which he seems to have borrowed without credit from Buddhist writer Stephen Levine]:

“I’m only Jewish on my parents’ side.”

Dr. Leary and Dr. Alpert were encouraged to interpret their psychedelic experience through Eastern mysticism by two earlier psychedelic pioneers, the British writer Aldous Huxley and his friend and mentor Gerald Heard, an Anglo-Irish philosopher and mystic.

Shiva and the Buddha are very different.

Huxley and Heard were deeply influenced by two modern Indian spiritual movements — Vedanta and Theosophy [the "Buddhist lite" creation of Russian Madame Blavatsky and American Colonel Henry Olcott], along with the spiritualist writings of Dr. William James, the so-called “father of American psychology.”

DMT [the Spirit Molecule] researcher Rick Strassman argues that many of today’s psychedelic scientists and other psychonauts are biased toward a “unitive-mystical” model that is more in line with Eastern mystical traditions like Buddhism or Hinduism. More

• The Richard Alpert in Ram Dass (Rachel Wahba, The Blogs | timesofisrael.com)
• The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Jack Kornfield (#300) - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
• Ram Dass's Jewish Legacy - Ayin Press