(Baba Ram Dass) June 8, 2026: Ram Dass' full lecture interview from "The Congress of Planetary Initiative for the World We Choose" in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1983.
Who is "God," Ram Dass? The Monad (Gnosticism), Brahman (Vedas), Maha Brahma (Buddhism), Brahma (Hinduism)? We need to make a distinction between the lesser personality many call "God" (the Demiurge or "Fabricator") and that all-encompassing reality behind the illusion (Brahman), which in the West may be called the Monad (One).
Remember: Be Here Now (Ram Dass)
In this interview, Ram Dass (formerly Harvard's Dr. Richard Alpert) presents his viewpoints regarding the state of the world and what we can do. He skillfully weaves his way through his perspectives on personal responsibility, American media, and spiritual practice.
The Love Serve Remember Foundation is dedicated to preserving and continuing the teachings of Ram Dass and his love guru, Neem Karoli Baba.
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(After Skool) It's all perfect by Ram Dass (formerly Prof. Richard Alpert, Ph.D., Harvard University)
RAM DASS ("God's Servant or Slave") was born Richard Alpert on April 6, 1931 and lived until December 22, 2019) [1]. He became a hippie and is also known as Baba ["Father"] Ram Dass. He was an American spiritual teacher, guru of modern yoga [2], academic psychologist, and writer of Be Here Now, his best-selling [3] 1971 book, which has been described by as "seminal" [4, 5, 6].
With the help of his scandalous but loving sex guru Neem Karoli Baba, he helped popularize Eastern spirituality and yoga in the West [7]. He authored or co-authored a dozen more books on spirituality over the next four decades, including Grist for the Mill (1977), How Can I Help? (1985), and Polishing the Mirror (2013).
Once when he was teaching with his long hair, beard, and linen garments, someone in the crowd asked him why he dressed like a guru from India when he was really a Jew from the U.S. Without missing a beat, his retort was, "I'm only Jewish on my parents' side." Ha ha ha, exactly!
We are born into a faith, and it's usually rammed down our throats before we have a chance to do anything but swallow. And most of us won't question it. But some of us vomit it up, leave or examine, sometimes even come back to it later.
Harvard professors Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert (cool squares rounding out)
However, it seems the job and duty of any human to question it, test it, attempt to validate it, argue against it, learn from it, grow from it, reject it all together, or make peace with it. There's a world of spirituality out there to explore. We usually need a floor, a ground, by which to test things. And almost all major religions have a mystic component or sect. That's a place to start.
Parents, what am I to do but follow my heart?
But question we must, and explore we will, and find? That remains to be seen. We are on a spiritual quest. And maybe the whole rest of the world can't be. But if Americans can't, what the F are you calling yourself an "American" for? Life, liberty, and the PURSUIT of happiness is all you were promised -- and you're not even going to pursue it? Truth means nothing? Just taking sides? Just being controlled by your government, schools, and parents, the "powers that be"? Pathetic. Human up, and get searching.
Ram Dass was personally and professionally associated with hippie Dr. Timothy Leary at Harvard University in the early 1960s. Then known as Richard Alpert, he conducted research with Leary on the therapeutic effects of psychedelic drugs.
In addition, Alpert assisted Harvard Divinity School graduate student Walter Pahnke in his 1962 "Good Friday Experiment" with theology students, the first controlled, double-blind study of drugs and the mystical experience [8, 9].
While legal at the time (and not yet criminalized), their research was controversial and led to Dr. Leary's and Dr. Alpert's firing from Harvard in 1963.
In 1967, Alpert traveled to India and became "Ram Dass," a disciple of Hindu Guru Neem Karoli Baba, who gave him the name Ram Dass, meaning "Servant of Ram," but usually rendered simply as "Servant of God" for Western audiences.
In the following years, he co-founded the charitable organizations Seva Foundation and Hanuman Foundation. From the 1970s to the 1990s, he traveled extensively, giving talks and retreats and holding fundraisers for charitable causes.
In 1997, he had a stroke, which left him with paralysis and expressive aphasia which would be better characterized as "fluent, anomic-like with hesitations and word finding difficulties at the conversational level with grossly intact auditory comprehension for high level, low-context information" [10, 11].
He eventually grew to interpret this event as an act of grace, learning to speak again and continuing to teach and write books. After becoming seriously ill during a trip to India in 2004, he gave up traveling and moved to Maui, Hawaii, where he hosted annual retreats with other spiritual teachers until his death in 2019. More
*Acid was called "LSD-25," referring to a standard dosage of 25 micrograms (mcg, μg) because it is very potent per tab or tablet (blot, dot, drop, etc.). This would make three double tabs about 150 mcg. But ask Riley or see Sidney Cohen (1959), "The therapeutic potential of LSD-25," A Pharmacologic Approach to the Study of the Mind, p. 251–258.
(Soul Continuum) MELBOURNE, Australia. Who is this genius with an Alan Watts' level of ability to explain transcendental and transpersonal, more Eastern than Western concepts like this? And is he being interviewed by a child? "Out of the mouths of babes" is the famous saying.
Commentary
Time is an illusion. This was said. What was meant? For one thing, time is relative to location. On other planes of existence (and there are at least 31major ones the Buddha talked about), time is different.
Things tend to last much longer there in those worlds. One can see that on the animal plane, life is even more brief than on the human plane. But the average lifespan on the human plane varies, contracting down to a few decades (Decadent Age or Kali Yuga), expanding to 80,000 years (Golden Age or Satya Yuga).
At this time in the repeating cycle (samsara), time is very short. When it was 80K years long, it was very short. So it is possible, not likely but possible, to notice the radical impermanence of all things.
That's the funny thing about time, both to be an illusion and something that contracts and expands. When is now?
We can speak of an "eternal now," not "eternal" in the sense of everlasting. It is eternal in the sense of being ever-present.
Time does not move, as the speaker shows, going from the past to the present to the future. That is how the mind is ordering it, making sense of it. (There's causality, with everything arising from sets of causes and conditions. And when science detects retrocausality, what are we to make of that? How can anything that happens now or in the future ever affect the past? It can. It does. It always has.
This may sound abstract even though scientists have evidence for it, so to make it more tangible and relatable, we ask: Could you imagine being a retrosexual? (What the heck's that? It's a person who only dates people s/he has dated before, in other words, somebody who from now on only redates). Hey, they exist! Some are trans. Anyway, apart from the retrocausality in quantum physics, there is social retrocausality we see all the time if we ever bothered to notice. Everyday practically something that happens today changes the meaning of something that happened in the past. In the past, things were like this. Now they're like this. What we do a lot today changes what it means when it was done in the past. In the past it meant something, but since the "past" really only exists in our heads, that's what changing. What we're thinking changes. Past, future, they're not even real in an ultimate sense. In a conventional sense, they're very real. Better pay attention. We have to consider them, but what are we considering other than changing illusions?
The order of events may be that way, but actually it is always "NOW." We abandon the now to ruminate about the past or to worry about the future, losing the safety and potential of the ever-present.
Semi-Buddhist Eckhart Tolle, who became famous as the author of The Power of Now and through his business partner Oprah, was often asked: "How many nows are there?"
His mind would loop in disbelief about this question because of its astonishingly wrong assumptions. There aren't many "nows." There's only this now. Now is all the time. This is all there has ever been.
We can imagine a future (but when can we imagine it?) We can daydream about a better past. (But when can we do that?) There's only one answer to when anything happens or can happen.
Where and when do we have power? Where and when can we ever make a choice? When do we suffer or find bliss?
We'll lay it out, space it out, after the fact, for sure, but as we live it, when is it?
What was American guru and former Harvard professor Ram Dass (Dr. Richard Alpert) talking about when he named his classic book, condensing his Indian love-guru (Neem Karoli Baba) and other gurus' message? He distilled all of their messages down to one and the same message: "Be here now."
Mahayana Buddhism, particularly Zen, being heavily influenced by Taoism, is all about being rather than doing (karma, action). But where to be? When should we be mindful, when should we be present?
What? Be. Where? Here. When? Natch. Naturally, that is now.
I remember when I first learned how to meditate [by being mindful of] my breath some time in 1990, during my university years.
Back then, meditation was not as well known. The Beat Generation’s Zen trend in the 1960s had died out with disco in the 1970s.
Barnes and Noble had maybe only a few shelves in a single bookcase labeled with “Eastern Philosophy” that covered all Eastern religions, including Buddhism.
Ram Das’s cryptic book Be Here Now was the only book I had read prior to reading my World Religions book, which included a chapter on Buddhism for a class I took.
Be Here Now (Ram Dass for Neem Karoli Baba)
It was different in the early 1990s. There wasn’t a World Wide Web, Google, or even a digital Yahoo. We didn’t have Idiot or Dummy books back then. While there were books out there, you really had to explore a subculture, and you had to know someone in order to know what the subcultures were and where to find them.
Luckily, I had a friend who was into Zen, and he was considering becoming a Catholic priest at the time. He recently transferred from UC Berkeley, not far from San Francisco, which might be called the subculture mecca of the United States, certainly for the "weird" things like meditation. I asked him to teach me. I thought it would be good for me to learn from him.
He agreed and came over to my apartment one night to teach me a lesson I would never forget. I remember we were sitting on the floor of the living room during the lesson. I was thinking about TV’s depiction of meditation and what should be happening. Then I said, “Should I light a candle?” He said, “If you want to, you can.”
“Should I light an incense stick?”
Mindfulness of Breathing, Four Elements Meditation
“If you want to, you can. You can have representations of the Four Elements.”
He explained it to me, but I did not really know what he meant, so I lit a candle and an incense stick to fit my world view of what "meditation" should be like. Before we started, he gave me a little bit of a lesson on the story of the Buddha and how he became enlightened.
He then told me some things about the sitting posture and to press my tongue against the roof of my mouth and to swallow a lot in a natural way. “They say it is good for you,” he said.
Then he taught me how to count my breaths “Zen style.” I would silently and inwardly count the exhales of my breaths one by one until I got up to ten. Then I would count backwards back down to zero. Then up to ten again, and then back to zero. I would repeat these cycles until it was time to stop. If I lost my count, I would just start all over again from “one.”
After our session was over, he left and that was more or less “The Lesson.” After that, I do not know why, but I continued with this practice and other forms of meditation almost every day, more or less for the rest of my life (with some exceptions of course).
Twenty years later, in 2010, I visited Ulpathkanda, Hantanna (Spring Hill Monastery) near Kandy, Sri Lanka, where I was able to use the Internet for the first time in a very long time. I sometimes joked about how I was doing an “Internet retreat” from my full-time life as a forest monk in Na-uyana.
Nevertheless, I was still at a high mountainous jungle forest monastery. I looked up my old friend, my meditation instructor, on the Internet. When we were in college together, he had changed his major from philosophy to whatever one needs to become a Spanish teacher.
It looked as though he had really lived the Spanish lifestyle and moved all over the globe to Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries. The Internet kept track of all the different countries he lived in. It is true that “Big Brother is watching,” just like George Orwell warned, so I could now watch with an Internet connection.
After all of that globetrotting, he settled down in a Connecticut town not too far from where he originally taught me how to meditate. I picked up the monastery phone, dialed the phone card codes, then I dialed his number. The phone rang, and a woman’s voice answered the phone. “Hello?”
“Hello, my name is Bhikkhu Subhūti, and I was wondering if a Brett [J.] lives here?”
“Yes, he does.”
“May I speak with him please?”
“Uh, okay,” she said in a cautious voice to the stranger on the phone. Perhaps I was a telemarketer to her. They did not know what to expect. There were muffled voices coming through the phone’s speaker, then eventually the phone was passed to Brett.
“Hello, this is Brett.”
I instantly recognized his voice, which had stayed the same all these years.
Hello, this is Bhikkhu Subhuti (Jeremy Glick)
“Hello, this is Bhikkhu Subhūti. You once knew me as Jeremy Glick from Central. Do you remember me?” (Central is a shorthand name for Central Connecticut State University).
“Yes, I remember you, Jeremy.”
I continued, “A long time ago, you came over my place and taught me how to meditate and how to count my breaths. With a few exceptions, I practiced nearly every day, and my practice grew and grew, and eventually I decided to become a Buddhist monk in 2001. Now my name is ‘Bhikkhu Subhūti.’ I looked you up on the Internet so I could call you and say, ‘Thank you.’”
There was a long pause. It was five or six seconds of delay before he spoke, so it seemed long. He finally broke the silence and said, “You know, we never know what will happen to the seeds we have planted long ago.”
I did not expect him to still be a teacher of mine, but those were words of wisdom. We caught up on some old times. He was indeed a Spanish teacher and married a woman from Spain. His brother, who was an electrical engineer, quit the industry and now counts caribou in Alaska for a living.
I told him that I never went into teaching, which was expected at college, so I became a computer programmer instead for about six years before leaving all that behind me.
Times have changed and so did the both of us. I told him that I had my brother make me a Facebook account (with two friends), and although as a schoolteacher he was against Facebook, he thought I might be able use it to do something worthwhile for other people. I did not do much with social networks until last year, but I kept his thoughts in mind.
We talked some more and then we parted. If you ever have a chance to thank someone who has affected your life, I highly recommend it. Often, we do not think we make a difference, but we do, positively and, unfortunately, negatively. We always plant seeds in ourselves and others. Some germinate, while others do not.
Sometimes we believe they are trivial sprouts, but some can grow into towering redwoods. It can change a whole person’s destiny. So always plant happy seeds because, “We never know what will happen to the seeds we have planted long ago.”
(Baba Ram Dass) Let's spend an evening with gurus Ram Dass (former Harvard hippie Dr. Richard Alpert, Ph.D.) and Oprah's spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle (author of The Power of Now), as these two [Hindu-style] teachers engage in an open conversation about spiritual "awakening" [by which they seem to equate Advaita Vedanta principles or samadhi states with actual permanent liberation] and the transformation of consciousness.
[The Buddha taught that samma samadhi, "right concentration or stillness," while very beneficial and leading to saintly qualities is not nearly enough for the attainment of actual awakening (bodhi) and liberation (nirvana). It may seem a fine distinction, but the Buddha's whole reason for teaching was to establish the Dharma in the world that had been lost for thousands of years or much long, in spite of the fact that we had the Vedas and Brahmanism and Indian teachers all of that time. If those things had been enough to bring people to enlightenment, he would have had no reason to establish "right view" and a "path of purification" that leads to a real/permanent state of moksha or "liberation." While Hinduism literally uses the exact same words -- nirvana, moksha, samadhi,karma, and the like, they mean very different things in the Teachings of the historical Buddha. Mahayana Buddhism, on the other hand, seems to have bought into the Hindu definitions and acts as a kind of popular sect of Hinduism more than as a form of Buddhism. But the average person will never know this without studying it deeply. Indeed, other religions have "salvation" and "liberation," but it is only because they are defining those words differently. From an Early Buddhist standpoint, the terms are being misapplied to impermanent states, to forms of rebirth in heaven or in the company of Brahma, as if one would stay there forever and therefore be free of samsara when someone was actually still fully immersed in the problem the Buddha found a final solution to.]
Host Tami Simon (Sounds True) referees (or mediates the conversation). Filmed in Maui, Hawaii, on October 28, 2011, posted on May 19, 2014.
People don't see it: Alan Watts on life's [Mahayana-Hindu] secret awakening
(T&H - Inspiration & Motivation) Dec. 27, 2021: Here is a brief, inspirational, and profound speech on life's illusions and secret awakening by Alan Watts. Original audio sourced from: Alan Watts - The Works. Speaker: Alan Watts, "Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is," Alan Watts (1915–1973). #AlanWatts#TheSecret#T&HInspiration
ABOUT: The Love Serve Remember Foundation is dedicated to preserving and continuing the teachings of Ram Dass and his guru Neem Karoli Baba.
Website: ramdass.org. Instagram: babaramdass, Facebook: babaramdass, Twitter: babaramdass.
Ah, the hippies and free love movement were renewed on Freak Street in old Kathmandu
Passover Seder in Kathmandu, Nepal, incorporated Buddhist and Jewish traditions
American JewBu (E. Sigalow)
(Forward) Buddhists are Jews? Wait a minute, Jews are Buddhists and they play bluegrass music? There is an old phenomenon from at least the 1960s in the U.S. (see The Jew in the Lotus) and the 1st century B.C.E. in Palestine (see Jesus Lived in India), when Jews born into Judaism (raised in a very secular way, often with a phobia about too orthodox and strict an interpretation of this Semitic school, given that many Middle Eastern and North African peoples are Semites, not just German Ashkenazi Jews and other Palestinians in the geopolitical but otherwise nonexistent "Middle" East) sought spirituality and like the Buddha and Jesus sought it in the mystic East.
Many Jews former beat poets love Zen Buddhism
The lure of India for young people on a spiritual quest is hard to underestimate. It is very old. Sure, Judaism has its own form of mysticism (just the same way regular Islam has mystical Sufism), but Kabbalah is creepy and more European-occultism than the magic and mystery of ancient India and its neighbor Esoteric Buddhist Tibet.
Jewish? Do I look Jewish? I'm All Religions
Ram Dass (formerly Harvard's Dr. Richard Alpert, Ph.D., who almost singlehandedly started the Sixties along with Howard Bloom, who claims he did singlehandedly start them), famously said, when asked if he was Jewish (because he dressed and wore his hair like his groovy Hindu "love guru" Neem Karoli Baba), "I'm only Jewish on my parents' side."
Prince Siddhartha (Gandhara)
Prince Siddhartha was born in Scythia (Saka) in ancient Gandhara, in the northwest frontier of proto-India; he traveled east on a quest for spiritual enlightenment.
King Jesus (humble Yeshua the Nazarene) was born either in pharaoh's Egypt or a small Podunk town known as Nazareth in Palestine (popularly sold to us as "Israel," which is located in North Africa, although this is obscured by ages of propaganda that forces the imagination to ignore that what is called "Israel" today is all on the African continent and in ancient times may have extended throughout Kush and Ethiopia, which at that time included Eritrea, in Kemet).
Foreskin's Lament (Shalom Auslander)
The Man will lie to us and separate us, pit Jew (Chosen) against Christian (Gentile) and play the ultimate victim with everyone against the self-isolating, exclusionary Jews. The work of Shalom Auslander is eye-opening in this regard. Eric Dubay (ericdubay.com and at bitchute.com) says the world has historically hated "the Jews" and not for nothing. They have been thrown out of country after country, leading to the saying "wandering Jew." This is blamed on the God of the Jews, who is punishing them for their sinfulness (lit. "missing the mark") and wickedness (evil) and most of all their kvetching (murmuring which really means bellyaching and endless complaining). The God just won't stand for it.
Our troubles did not begin in...
But will Buddhists be pitted against the Jews? If Jews behave the same way they have in other countries, sure. But just look at Thailand and other places with secret Jewish enclaves as they set up businesses, network, try to form monopolies that would be illegal elsewhere, keep others out of certain industries, and clean up all with government help and protection.
Every country wants a piece of the financial pie. And Jews, particularly the secular ones, are like the Jains in India, a tiny fraction of the population with disproportionate wealth and influence for their numbers.
Why? The religious rules they do not personally practice, but the very rules that made their community prosper, is the answer. Moses had a DMT vision (using Syrian Rue and seeing the burning bush) and said behave this way. Mahavira had a vision and said practice ahimsa, that is, abstain from doing any kind of harm (such as farming, soldiering, ranching, butchering, etc.), leaving only a few businesses to undertake, namely, banking and jewelry dealing. Remind you of any other small religious group?
(FOX 2 St. Louis) Passover Seder (a kind of Last Supper) is observed by Jews on the 15th day of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar. A local family invited FOX 2's crew into their home to show their [largely German Ashkenazi Jewish] beliefs and traditions.
ABOUT: St. Louis News channel FOX 2 covers news, weather, and sports in Missouri and Illinois. Read more about this story or see the latest update: FOX2Now.com. Social media: YouTube: fox2now
The Jew in the Lotus: What does Judaism have to do with Buddhism?
The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet's Re-Discovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India is a famous book by Rodger Kamenetz published in 1995. It has a 4.5 out of 5 stars after 247 ratings.
While accompanying eight high-spirited Jewish delegates to Dharamsala, India, for a historic Buddhist–Jewish dialogue with the 14th Dalai Lama, poet Rodger Kamenetz comes to understand the convergence of Buddhist and Jewish thought.
Along the way he encounters Ram Dass (former Jewish Harvard professor Dr. Richard Alpert, who got fired because of LSD then went tripping around India as a hippie and became a cultural icon after he met and became devoted to Hindu love guru Neem Karoli Baba in India) and Hollywood actor Richard Gere, and dialogues with leading rabbis and Jewish thinkers, including Zalman Schacter, Yitz and Blue Greenberg, and a host of religious and disaffected Jews and JuBus (Jewish-Buddhists).
This amazing journey through Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism and Judaism leads Kamenetz to a renewed appreciation of his living Jewish roots. The Jew in the Lotus
Text by Sheldon S., Shauna Schwartz, Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly 2024; video by FOX 2 St. Louis; April 5, 2023; main video by Forward, April 10, 2023; author Rodger Kamenetz (amazon.com)
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