Ram Dass

THE GNOSIS INTERVIEW

EVERY GENERATION produces certain individuals whose lives and destinies seem emblematic of the time as a whole. Few have exemplified the spiritual evolution of our age as concretely as Richard Alpert, Ph.D., or Ram Dass.

Alpert began his career conventionally enough, as a psychologist at Harvard University, where he met Timothy Leary' He and Leary began to experiment with psychedelics in the early 1960s, at a time when the materials were legal and were the subject of much research. Along with Leary and their colleague Ralph Metzner, Alpert did much to popularize psychedelics in the early 1960s, and was eventually thrown out of Harvard for his efforts. In 1967, his search led him to a trip to India, where he met his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, with whom he remained intermittently, for the next five years.

One famous story involves a couple of occasions when Alpert gave his guru LSD. The first time, Alpert later recounted, Baba took 900 micrograms of very pure LSD over four times the normal dose. "He allowed me to stay for an hour," Alpert later recalled, "-and nothing happened. Nothing." The second time, Baba took 1200 micrograms - and again nothing happened. Baba's verdict on the drug was "LSD is good for the world, but not spiritual . . . . LSD is not the true samadhi (state of meditative unity)."

In the past 20 years, Alpert, having taken the name "Ram Dass," or "servant of God," has become a celebrated figure on the New Age circuit, and has written several books, including Be Here Now, Grist for the Mill, The Only Dance There Is, and Miracle of Love, a collection of reminiscences of his guru. He also has started a number of charitable organizations, including the Hanuman Foundation and the Seva Foundation.

We decided to interview Ram Dass not only as one of the pioneers of contemporary psychedelic, but as a dedicated follower-of a spiritual path. We met with him in July 1992, when he was living in Mar-in County, California. At the time he had just returned from a convention of the International Transpersonal Association that had been organized in Prague, Czechoslovakia, by the Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, himself a well-known LSD researcher:

We found Ram Dass living in a small, sunny carriage house that was full of books and sacred objects ranging from a large picture of his guru to a Shiva lingam to an Orthodox Christian icon. He came across as warm, engaging, and natural, though we detected traces of weariness in his face.

Richard Smoley: You and Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner have been referred to as the "Johnny Appleseeds of acid." And you did a lot to disseminate LSD and awareness of psychedelics in the early '60s. Looking back on this from a perspective of 30 years, how do you see the fruit of your labor? What sort of results have you seen, and how do you feel about it?

Ram Dass: First of all, I downplay our role a little more than the way you presented it. Psychedelic research was going on well before we began, and certainly there were a lot of people who did as much or more research. The issue for us was whether or not psychedelics would stay as a research tool within a scientific, academic environment, or whether it would go out into the culture. Tim Leary and I wrote an article in the Harvard Review in 1962, I believe, called "The Politics of Consciousness," in which we said we were very reluctant to have anyone control human consciousness or the means whereby one could experiment with one's consciousness. It seemed too paternalistic to us. We were very aware of how psychiatry had controlled the perception of these chemicals in the United States, and treated them as psychotomimetic, while in Mexico and other places historically, things like the teotnanicatl mushroom, the "flesh of the gods," were considered religious sacraments for transcendent experience.

In some ways I feel that what happened in the '60s with psychedelics is more profound than we yet realize, that it did something very profound culturally. It's like a mushroom explosion-to use a double entendre-and its impact just keeps going. I say that because in the early '60s, when I was on the lecture circuit talking on psychedelics, I would tell stories about my experiences with altered states of consciousness and shifts of reality and so on, and at that time my audiences would be 15-25 years old; they all had flowers, wore white, and smiled a lot. That was the flower children period. And now, 30 years later, I can tell the same story in Des Moines or Kansas or Minneapolis to an audience that is straight in the sense that they haven't used marijuana, they haven't read Eastern mysticism, and they're nodding. That nod tells me something about how certain ways of seeing reality mainstreamed into the culture over 30 years. And it seems to me that this change has to do with the relative nature of reality.

What I notice now is that a lot of the way of seeing reality has shifted in the culture, so I can sit down with a fifteen-year-old now or somebody even in college, and in a very short time we can be hearing each other very clearly across planes of reality. For me, that is a sign that the culture doesn't have a lock on reality the way it did in the early '60s. So in a sense I feel that what Einstein did to Newton, this did to the way reality was looked at in this society. That's pretty messianic and that's overstating the case, but I saw that this undercut the verticality of institutions, contributing to the civil rights movement, the sexual freedom movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, all of which were possible because these monolithic vertical structures were seen through. It empowered individuals. It's like anarchy. And that's in part why it's so frightening to the society.

Smoley: Psychedelics can be very destabilizing both for individual and collective consciousness, and there are points at which destabilization is helpful and points at which it's not. Today it feels as if things are tottering for society as a whole. Do you see our present social destabilization as being healthy? You went to Prague recently and saw Czechoslovakia totter; it probably fell apart while you were there.

Ram Dass: In fact my lecture in Prague was entitled "Riding the Waves of Change," which is saying when there is this kind of wild enough, the setting wasn't supportive, or your preparation, the set, wasn't right, but there's some way in which as your reality started to dissolve, you got very frightened, and your fear can make you go like this (tightens up). And if the experience isn't powerful enough, your this will succeed, and you'll be left like this towards life. On the other hand, if it overrides you and you indeed die at that moment, in other words, let go of the control mechanisms for seeing reality, a moment later you see it all with eyes of innocence. And then there's no destabilization at all, you've come into another harmony with reality. So it goes the other way than you would have expected.

Smoley: That's interesting, because I heard someone say the exact opposite thing a few days ago, someone who's had a fair amount of experience with these materials [cf. Myron Stolaroff's article in this issue]. He said sometimes people take a very high dose and go out into the ionosphere or wherever without necessarily coping with the personal issues that they need to get through. It becomes an escape rather than a transcendence.

Ram Dass: We're not saying opposite things; we're saying them from two different places. I'm keeping psychedelics primarily as a sacramental chemical, for a profoundly spiritual transformation. I'm not interested in it particularly for psychotherapeutic uses, for coping, adaptive, psychodynamic uses. I would rather change the root essence of the being, and then let them figure out what to do about change, politically, economically, ecologically, socially, the choice is - and it's not your choice, really, it's your karma, your evolution - whether you're going to freak, freeze, try to hold on, become fundamentalist, ultranationalist, violent, ethnic, prejudiced, etc. or you're going to say, "Wow! Here we go. Let's ride this wave," and change is seen as a creative opportunity.

Then the question is, how big a change can you handle? And the funny thing about psychedelics is that a little destabilization is worse than a lot, because if you go out far enough so that you psychologically die in the process, then it's profoundly transformative. Otherwise it leaves you with a certain dread and fear and psychological instability, because there's always a place you pushed back. Either the chemical wasn't strong, their psychology. Psychology just doesn't interest me that much, considering I'm trained as one, it's just personality, it's not worth lionizing or reifying so much.

There are some researchers who are just getting licensed by the DEA, the National Institutes of Health, and so on to do an MDMA study with terminally ill cancer patients. Now I've worked a lot with cancer patients, and I've worked a lot with psychedelics, so I was a consultant to this thing. It was a double-blind study, it was all the stuff you do in science, and I said, "You can do it, but you're basically trivializing the use of this chemical, and the society is making it safe for itself not to upset its apple cart." I'm much more of a revolutionary; let's pick up the pieces rather than building it bit by bit. That was part of our problem at Harvard-

Jay Kinney: So would you have a more positive feeling about somebody doing Ecstasy and going to a rave and dancing all night if they were perceiving that in a tribal, spiritual context, than somebody who was given Ecstasy by his psychiatrist and told, "Here, do this with your wife and this will be a healing experience for your neuroses"?

Ram Dass: Well, I think if a husband and wife take Ecstasy together, that's great. I don't like giving something to somebody; I like being with somebody in the process. I don't like the alienation that comes from the doctor-patient or experimenter-subject relationship. So I would have a resistance to that.

In terms of going to things like a Grateful Dead concert or a rave, it's tricky. It can go either way. To me the deepest experiences come in a quiet atmosphere or in nature. Because of the unpredictability of the atmosphere in social situations, you have to keep up a certain kind of defensive structure that keeps you from going as deep as you could. So I find those not optimum conditions, and most people seem to plateau very quickly on the kind of experiences they have. They don't go as deep as they could. I don't have anything against it; I don't think it's wrong morally, but I don't think it's necessarily the optimum setting.

The first time we took LSD, having used psilocybin for a year, a year and a half, I remembered Tim didn't talk for five days, and I thought we'd lost him. And I said to everybody, "Don't touch this stuff; this may be too much, because Tim isn't back." And when he came back, it was like "wow!" It was so powerful, the way we were using it, it literally shattered the perceptions of all your realities. I think what happens almost immediately afterwards is that society figures out how to socialize it so that ego is maintained, whether it's the individual ego or the communal or societal or family ego. And then you figure out the dosage so you can be safe. And it's that very safety that is the trivialization of it. I've watched everybody I know learn how to socialize it so they could stay the same.

Smoley: A lot of what we've been talking about is breaking down the ego in some manner -

Ram Dass: Better to say "putting the ego in perspective," because I don't think it's breaking it down, it's breaking down its total control, that's all it's doing. It's putting it in a different place.

Smoley: Yet this isn't always clear. Because there are times when these materials seem to put the ego in its place, and you learn the servant isn't the boss. But other times it doesn't seem to work that way. In fact there's a lot of talk about "killing the ego." It brings up the whole question of what is instructive and what is destructive.

Ram Dass: When control gets threatened, the structure of the ego is so interwoven with that control that the structure of the ego itself gets threatened. And I think that's a very real and interesting question. Since the structure of ego is so much a process of culture, the idea of stepping aside from it and coming back to it and seeing it for what it is is extremely attractive to me.

There are two kinds of bad trips: one is on the way out and one is on the way back. On the way out, the bad trip is when you see it all dissolving and your identity with your ego is so threatened that you black out orpass out or go into a psychotic episode or flip out. That's the first danger. The other one is when you get out and you're free and you're seeing it all relatively and you're seeing the ego as play, you're seeing the dance of it. Then you start to reenter and you see what you've created for yourself and you see the box, the prison cell you're going back into, and you don't want to go and you go like this (covers head with hands). And those are the people who want to keep escaping outward rather coming back and saying, "Well, I've got a lot of work to do to clean up my act," and let their lives change as a result of what they've seen. There's the image of going up on the mountain and seeing the village you've lived in all your life and the paths you took, and you come back down and you've got the memory of the top of the mountain to affect your behavior.

Smoley: Your own personal path seems to have taken a lot of twists and turns of its own. You started as a psychologist working with psychedelics; eventually you went to India and studied with Neem Karoli Baba. This leads me to wonder how you see psychedelics as a path. Do you see them as a door opener to meditative work, or do you see them as a path in their own right?

Ram Dass: I see them as a door opener and a catalyst and a facilitator; I don't see them as a full path. And Neem Karoli Baba, after he took acid the second time, said to me, "Your yoga is useful. It would allow you to come in and have the darshan [vision] of Christ, but you can only stay for two hours and then you've got to leave. It would be better to become Christ than visit him, but your medicine won't do that, because it's not the true samadhi."

Smoley: That's a really crucial point. It's often implied that there's a true experience and a not-so-true experience. Is that a legitimate distinction?

Ram Dass: Well, this is really awfully subtle stuff, because it's like the difference between the plane of consciousness that is the experience of emptiness and emptiness itself. In emptiness you transcend dualism. It's neither empty nor full, it's just - ah! While in the experience of emptiness, there is still an experiencer and that which is experienced. And I often think that psychedelics provide an astral analogue, something that's almost like emptiness, but it's still within dualism somehow.

On the other hand, with psychedelics I have experienced what I noted as "stream entry" in southern Buddhist terminology, which is going into a nirvanic state for a moment, where you go beyond dualism, and then coming back. When I described that experience, without saying it was psychedelically induced, to various Theravadin masters in Burma and India and Thailand, they all corroborated that it was stream entry. But when I said it was psychedelically induced, only one of the masters said, "Well, it's still stream entry." The others said, "Oh well, then it's not." It's really hard to separate out people's prejudices about how you got there versus where you got. So because of my own experiences, I'm a little reluctant to make the case too strongly that it's only an astral analogue. At the same moment, I don't see anybody who has used it as a full path, because I don't see any fully realized beings in the West that got there through psychedelics. For me, you know the tree by its fruits, because I sure know people who have taken a lot of acid.

The other part of it is that with psychedelics you chemically override the habit patterns that make up your conceptual reality. But they're still there. You have to come back to those things and work with them. And what you come back with is a perception of the way in which you're trapped. And that's useful for your work. In that sense it's a practice. When you're doing deep meditative practice, you're taking your patterns almost one at a time as they come up and seeing the arising, the existing, and the falling away of them, you're seeing the transitory nature, you're seeing there's no "I" behind it all, you're slowly working with each one. It's by doing the daily work rather than just getting the big perception from overhead; it involves more patience. Gurdjieff said there are different ways of doing this journey, and he talks about the way of the sly man, which is really psychedelics.

Smoley: He does mention a pill . . .

Ram Dass: A pill, exactly. And the way I felt about it in India was that it might be a way, but we didn't know enough about how to use it. We couldn't read the maps. And I went to India to find map readers. And when my guru took it the second time, he said, "Oh, these were known about thousands of years ago, but people have forgotten how to use themyou've got to fast, you've got to do yoga." And I thought, "Well, probably it is a method, but we still don't know how to use it; we're still perceptually coming at it from the wrong place."

Kinney: Some people also say that the point of it is the discipline along the way, and that a shortcut to that state is missing the point.

Ram Dass: I don't agree at all. The end state is the end state, however you get there. And if you can use drugs to get there, I think it'd be wonderful. I can't; I just don't know how to do it, and I find that all these different methods I use are useful. To me, the end point's the end point. I think the concept of a path is a hype that we use as long as we have an ego. As long as there's somebody taking it, there's a path, and at the end of it you see that there was no path, or that path, pilgrim, and goal were one and the same thing, and nothing happened. Those are the paradoxes you have to deal with.

Smoley: Roger Walsh wrote an interesting paper on this question. His point was that, as you say, the state is the state; on the other hand, the discipline may enable you to take what you've learned from that state and bring it into daily life. Would you say that's valid?

Ram Dass: I would say that there are two things: one is the discipline of how you get into the clear awareness, and the other is the discipline to apply it. He's talking about the discipline to apply it, and he's implying that the discipline to get there gives you the discipline to apply it. Unless you're doing karma yoga, which is applying it as a way of getting there, it isn't the same thing; these are two different things. I think there's probably a correlation between the amount of discipline you have to develop to get there by the .methods of vipassana [insight meditation] or something like that. Yet one of the problems with vipassana is that these people seem incapable of living life after having done this intensive amount of meditation practice. So I can't really make that kind of generalization either. Unless the way you're getting there is a karma yoga technique, or a technique like Tantra, which works with the data of the senses, I don't think that either of them are going to help you very much in application.

Smoley: What do you mean by karma yoga?

Ram Dass: Well, it's really a combination of paths; it has a bhakti or devotional component to it; it has a dhyana or meditative component to it; it's enunciated most extensively in the Bhagavad Gita. The term "karma yoga" is used two different ways: one is that it has to do with service as a path to union. Basically I'm out of a lineage of karma yoga, because my name means "servant of God" -Ram Dass-and that's Hanuman, which in the Ramayana is a monkey who lives only to serve God. This is service in the first sense of karma yoga. Like when I said to my guru, "How will I know God?", he said, "Feed people and serve people."

The other, the broader sense, is that your karma becomes your dharma [work]. You take the nature of what is given, like my father is old, he needs my help, so my helping my father becomes my yoga. And how I change his pad and so on - that's all my vehicle for being with God or getting to God. So in karma yoga, you take the existing things: If you're old and dying, that's your karma. If you're young and horny, that's your karma. If you're big and powerful, that's your karma; whichever chakra you're stuck in, that's your karma. That's the broadest sense of the term.

Smoley: Where do psychedelics fit in with meditation? Should you stop doing one when you start the other?

Ram Dass: I do a lot of meditation; for many years now, twenty years now, I've done various forms of meditation, most recently Dzogchen,* but prior to that Theravadin vipassana and Zen. Every two years or so, I've taken a psychedelic to ascertain what it still has to teach me. Because there are ways in which you can con most methods. It's the same thing as what I said about socializing them. You can do them so that they don't do you. So not only do I do psychedelics, but I'll shift methods at times in order to learn the same thing. I might get really clear in my meditative practice and then go into a devotional practice and notice that my heart is really constricted, which I was never noticing in meditative practice, because the teacher's heart was constricted.

That's one way of using psychedelics, as a kind of check-back. And I have a dual motive, because I also feel I'm a lineageholder in psychedeliaand I have to check back because I realize that set is such an important component of the psychedelic experience. As I keep working on myself over the years, my set, where I'm starting from, the launching pad, is different than it was a few years ago. I found that if I kept taking LSD every month, I'd plateau, I'd get the same experience over and over again, and I'd get bored with it all. But if I wait a few years, I'm in a different place and the experience has something new to tell me. The amount that's new it's telling me now is pretty minuscule; I think if I never took a strong psychedelic again, it would be OK. I will still do it, all things being equal, but I don't feel like I'm learning something that new anymore.

Now the other way of using psychedelics is like using marijuana to meditate. My feeling is that it is counterproductive in quieting the mind, because the fascination with phenomena gets so great that it gets a little hard to go into the deeper places of meditation, where I think the real payoff is. Now if you're doing devotional meditative practice, like visualizations, then marijuana and hashish can be very useful, and that's used by millions of sadhus [virtuous ones] in India and Afghanistan, Sufis and so on, to facilitate devotional practices. I think if you're doing dhyana meditation, though, I don't think it's indicated.

Kinney: When you say "devotional practices," you mean something that's emotion based?

Ram Dass: Emotion-based. It starts out in a very dualistic way with the lover and the beloved. It's like foreplay. Then it builds up and up until you get to the moment where you merge with the beloved, Most bhaktis don't want to do that; they just want to stay at that edge, at just the preorgasmic moment, and keeping that ecstasy, or that almost ecstasy, all the time.

Kinney: Why do most traditional spiritual teachers, and that includes the Buddhists, put down psychedelics and counsel against using drugs at all?

Ram Dass: I asked Neem Karoli Baba, "Should I ever take this stuff again?" And he said, "If you're in a quiet place, and you're alone, and you're feeling much peace, and your mind is turned towards God, it could be useful." That was it. And that's an interesting set of criteria. And he's my spiritual guide, so that seems OK for me.

What I've experienced is that many teachers are basically afraid of it. There's a kind of party line that's passed on, but I notice in certain lineages, like the Kagyu or Nyingma lineages in Tibetan Buddhism, with people like TrungpaRinpoche, there's nothing about it being bad to take psychedelics. But when you get to some of the deeper practices in any tradition, then it gets so subtle and so sensitive that you can just weaken it all by diffusing it with too many games. I think there is a time when you go into one practice deeply, when that's got to be your practice. When I go to Burma and I sit in vipassana, I don't take pictures of my guru and do devotional stuff; I put all of that away and do the thing fully. And I think that's more the level they're talking about. If you're going to do our method, do our method. Because it worked for me and my teachers, and it'll work for you if you don't screw around. I think that's more in the spirit in which they're saying that.

Kinney: You mentioned that when you were first on the lecture circuit, you found audiences of people aged 15-25 all dressed in white. It's my perception that many people that are still interested in these areas are the same people 25 years later.

Ram Dass: Although I'll tell you what I see now: I never get invited to colleges, but I get invited to high schools. And just in the same way that the Grateful Dead came back, and they're getting bigger audiences than they ever got in the ' 70s, I feel that there are these pendulum swings in the culture, and that the '80s and their preoccupation with individualism got to such an extreme that it reawakened people toward compassion or unity or understanding. That sensitized them to the '60s, which in the '70s and '80s had been considered a failing of the society.

I'm generalizing from very little data, but I keep seeing from newspaper articles that acid use is up in high schools, and I think, "Aha! What do you know?" Not cocaine, and not heroin, but acid. Alcohol's up alsounfortunately; it's not a very good psychedelic. The '80s were a period when the reaction of the society was so violent to what happened. Because the anti-Vietnam movement, for example, brought into question the basic structure of the system, and it scared people enough, as they're being scared now, that we went way over into fundamentalism and ultranationalism and the Reagan-Bush era. And the question is if you come back, but with all this new instability, whether it'll push it back out there, or whether it'll be addressed differently. I'm saying to people in effect, "Let's use the consciousness we've developed to respond to these conditions in a nonfundamentalist way, in a more spacious way."

There is a group growing old with me that is a little disillusioned because when they first took psychedelics they all felt that the whole world was going to change. There was a complete nalvete and an idealism in us that was not borne out. We thought that all the social institutions would just collapse before love. But I find the '90s exciting, in the same way the '60s were exciting, in their instability; I find that a very creative moment in a society. It feels like things can happen again. There's an opening, there's a window of opportunity. That's why I work with dying people so much, because in a moment of dying there's an opening, there's a window of opportunity for incredible spiritual awakening. And it may be in a moment when the society is dying that there is a window of opportunity. I'm playing with that edge by listening and tuning to it.

Kinney: Circling back to your comment about reports of acid use increasing in high schools again: it's possible to look at that in a positive light, but I'm also thinking that much of the anti-drug impetus of the '80s was energized by parents having to deal with their kids getting stoned every day in ninth grade and not being motivated to do homework and so on.

Ram Dass: I think there were real problems. I think psychedelics can be terribly misused and hard on the society and escapist; I think they're perfectly capable of being escapist. And I think they're widely used that way. It's a vehicle that's very powerful, and I really have always argued for licensing, for education, but to have it available in a sacramental way. Because I think the society needs those dealing with something this powerful, it's just like an automobile, you can't just give somebody a key and say, "Go drive." So that's where I have a sense of licensing. I also feel that young people are busy developing ego structure and that that's not a good time for psychedelics. I say in my lectures that it's important to become somebody before you become nobody. Because if you're going to be nobody, you'd better be somebody first so you've got someplace to come back to after you experience your nobodiness. And a lot of what happened to the kids that take a lot of psychedelics early is that they don't develop pseudopods that break out of it to look back on it. These are very rare in our society, and they could socialize it as areligious ororacular experience, like they do in a lot of other societies. But the misuse is extensive.

I study things like crack and coke; they're not psychedelics, but the ways they're used and why they're used those ways are very interesting to me. It's very clear that a crack user in an inner city is using it for quite a different reason - on some levels -than a coke user in the upper middle classes in Marin. Crack users are in a social situation where there's a ceiling on opportunity; there is really a tremendous amount of racism and oppression, and conditions are very harsh. They're dealing with a social structure that is shitting upon them, basically, and they're stuck in it. It's no different than being under communism or something like that for them. On the other hand, the coke users in Marin are experiencing the failure of the myths of success in the society. They did everything and they won, and it's not enough. They feel the emptiness of it. That emptiness is still the emptiness of wanting more; it's still part of the "more is better" kind of thing. So though I see these as motivationally different at most levels, at some levels it's still escape.

Smoley: You mentioned earlier that the control of consciousness is somehow illegitimate. But you also talk about licensing. Let's say you're a public policy adviser: what is a rational, sensible policy on psychedelics, drugs, and similar things?

Ram Dass: First of all, to me it's clear that when something is real, when you try to repress it or suppress it, it doesn't work. All it does is bring in a whole other set of conditions, like the black market. Yet when you're the somebodiness; as I say, you don't know your ZIP code. They don't have their act together, and the result is that they're floating for twenty, 30 years, and they may or may not settle in this lifetime.

I'm very spacious about this kind of thing, because I've seen people spend time in catatonic stupors in mental hospitals as a result of drugs, and later they turn out to be more effective as human beings, more alive to the moment, than people that went through Harvard and came out summa cum laude. Even with my relatives, whose kids got doped and started to fall apart, and the parents put them in a treatment program, because they freaked because the kid wasn't going anywhere. And I understood the parents' fear, but when I looked at the parents' own lives, I thought, what is it they're trying to do? They're trying to justify their own lives, which has a completely dysfunctional mythology connected with it. And if the kid says, "I don't want to play the game," is that health or is it sickness? Are you asking them to be initiated into a pathological system?

So coming back to your question of what would be a reasonable policy, I would say that there are a couple of tracks. The first is the research track with therapy - with the dying, with alcoholism, with behavior change programs. We did one in the Concord Reformatory. We never got a chance to finish the project, but it was clear that with a prisoner who can stand back from his own game as a loser in prison with all the other losers, and can see his game, there's a better chance he can see how to play a winning game. He might be a better criminal, I don't know -it doesn't say which way it'll go, but he'll at least change his behavior.

That track is clear: you can do it through any of the bureaucratic licensing boards, as it's being done now, just open it up a bit more. There were many, many psychotherapists and professors at Harvard and Stanford and all who said, "MDMA as a vehicle for marriage therapy is excellent." And the government was just too frightened. But the names there were mainstream enough so that they couldn't just walk away from it; Lester Grinspoon's a professor at Harvard Medical School, after all. So I think that is changing and it will change,. and it's just slow. But I would suggest that it go on in that way, just open it up a little more and stay within the therapeutic framework, although how they do the sessions and all has got to be pretty well thought out. They can't impose too rigid a structure; science has got to be real science and not phony scientism.

But the more interesting track is the spiritual one, the profoundly transformational one, the one of creative reperception of the society by standing outside of it. What kind of institution do you use for that? It could be some kind of educational initiative experience, like Outward Bound, where you train staff and people can go through this experience if they're ready. Then you listen because what our society did was it threw out the elders. So I think this could be like training elders in society; it would be like an initiation rite in later life.

Kinney: This is slightly off the drug topic, but it's relevant to the magazine and to us personally. That is the question of God as One - "Allah is One," or the Western monotheistic conception, or the polytheistic one in Hinduism, beyond that the Vedantic One again, and then the Void or emptiness; you're familiar with each of those ways of looking at it, and I'm wondering how you fit those perspectives together.

Ram Dass: If you just consider planes of consciousness, and planes where you go up through dualism, up through the astral-causal planes in Hinduism, there are a lot of ways to describe these different planes or mansions, in the Hasidic tradition . . .

Kinney: Or stations in Sufism ....

Ram Dass: Yeah, or the lokas [realms]. This is very simplistic, but everything on one side of a line is form, subtle or gross. And the One, the concept of the One, is subtle but it's on the form side - the concept of the One. When you're in the One, there's nothing, because there's not two or one; you're on the other side of the thing. In other words, the art is to go into and then come from the One into the many. You get all the rays coming out from the One that are the different aspects or names or traits of God or whatever you want to call it. Each one is a different aspect of the One, but they're coming down through individual karmic differences, they're coming down the mountain, and then they're coming down to different places on the mountain. But at the top of the mountain, there's only One, and when you go into that One, it's zero.

I spend much time now doing Dzogchen, where there's a resting in awareness like an ocean, in which the phenomena or the dualistic world arises like waves in the ocean and then goes back into the ocean. Like the bird singing outside-you hear it and then it goes back in, all of your thoughts, perceptions, all of it, they just keep coming up and taking you back.

On the spiritual path, at first you're very much standing in one plane and looking at all the other planes from a certain place, from being separate and somebody. For a long time I was a renunciate, which was pushing away "these" for "those." And then I finally saw that they all had to be simultaneous. So it's empty and it's form and it's the many and it's the One, and I integrate it because it's all here all the time. And the integration is in the moment; the minute you go into the systems, each system is looking at it from one plane to which the others are relative.

Smoley: You've obviously done a lot of guru yoga in your time...

Ram Dass: That's my basic technique: guru kripa - grace of the guru.

Smoley: A lot of gurus have come to the United States, with problematic results. I'm wondering what the problem is with the guru trip in America. Is it legitimate here? How does it fit in with the society and its needs?

Ram Dass: Well, first of all, the question is, who comes and why they come, if you're talking about Easterners that come to the West. I mean, people like my guru I can't imagine coming to the West or being in the least bit interested in coming to the West. It would just be irrelevant, unless he was going to the hell realms to serve or something like that. It wasn't like, "Ooh, I can get to the West!" So whoever comes to the West is somewhat selected already.

Most Easterners that have come up through the ranks, that weren't born fully enlightened, have primarily lived in renunciate environments, where women and men are separated and so forth. And they're hardly prepared for the gushing dakinis [goddesses] falling all over them in America, and the sexual freedom and all that stuff.

I've got one delightful image to share with you. I gave a lecture last January on Judaism and spirituality at the University of Judaism in Beverly Hills, a Conservative Jewish center. To prepare for it, I took some books with me when I went for two months to the South Pacific, to an island in French Polynesia. And here were all these barebreasted women going by as I was reading Orthodox Jewish texts, which say women must be segregated. The most extremely Orthodox rehhe in Israel says, "If men and women pray together, God doesn't hear their prayers." Now you say that sounds horrible from one level, but as I went into it, I understood that because the power of sexual attraction is so strong, your mind isn't onepointed anymore, so you can't do the piercing quality that's necessary. So they segregate, not out of prejudice, but because the method doesn't work otherwise.

So I think it's partly that people who come here want something and are not immune to the material world; they are not free of attachment. I don't think real gurus, in my sense of gurus, free beings, come to America. Not in recent times; I think Swami Ram Tirth might have been one back in the '20s. But otherwise, I don't think any of them are, including Vivekananda, who was a really great guy and did a lot of great work, but he wasn't Ramakrishna. I think teachers point the way, and gurus are the way. They're mirrors showing you where you aren't, because they're not holding anywhere. And all the years I was with my guru, I couldn't find him. Icould be with something, but I couldn't find him. I could only find him as I find me. So I think the West uses the word "guru" in a very sloppy way.

The relation between a guru and a chela [disciple] is something special. I remember I was traveling with Muktananda, taking him around the world on a tour, and when we got back to his ashram, he gave me a throne next to his throne and this whole shtick. And people came up to me and said, "Muktananda's your guru; he's never treated anybody like this."And I said, "I don't know what I can do. I've already got a guru." And they'd say, "He was the beginning guru, but this is the real guru." And I'd say, "Look, Muktananda's got a Mercedes, he's got jewels, he's got everything; sure, why not? I get a better deal here than I get from an old guy with a blanket falling off him in the mountains. But it's not a choice I can rationally make. It's something that goes on at a deeper level. I can't get rid of him, there's no way I can get rid of him." I don't think people in the West really understand that. Just like they divorce in the West, and in India it's funeral pyre time. So I think that the West doesn't have a real concept of the guru.

The reason so many gurus manifest in a place is that there's a supporting environment for them. But the ultimate wisdom is in everybody. And a lot of people around here would manifest as gurus if there was respect for wisdom, if there was a supportive system, but you take Anandamayi Ma, she'd go through her cartwheels and all, and in this country they'd tranquilize her instead of realizing that she's one of the greatest women saints of all time. There were two years when she was a complete madwoman, but they have a category for it in India; they call them masts or God-intoxicates and they treat them with great reverence. In this country that certainly wouldn't happen.

Kinney: She might get a talk show.

Ram Dass: (Laughs) So you've got to realize that there's not a supportive setting here for a real being to manifest fully in this environment yet.

Smoley: A lot of what you said points to the fact that there isn't much place for spirituality in our society, despite an enormous amount of religious feeling. Where do you see spirituality going in this society in the future?

Ram Dass: What happened was that in most of the Western religions, the exoteric rituals became available and the esoteric ones became almost completely lost, or became available only to a very few-the Gnostic quality in Christianity, the Kabbalah in Judaism. Now I think it's turning around. I was in India when a group of thirteen rabbis went to be with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, and he said, "Make your esoteric more available. That's why your people are all leaving, and all the Jews are becoming Buddhists, because the esoteric's more available there." That's where the spiritual essence is, where an individual can become a realized being. Most Western religions have been for people whose karma is very thick; they're not going to get free in this life anyway, so let's at least keep them from creating a lot of bad kanna. So it's more like a purification process than a realization process.

What's happening now is goaded by the influence of Eastern availability of these things. The Western traditions are starting to say, "Look, we've had this all along," and are making it available. So they're starting to do that, with the incredible Buddhist web that's developing in this country, and with people like David Steindl-Rast starting to be respected and honored and listened to, which is like the Thomas Merton voice coming back through in Christianity, and Zalman Schachter and Reconstructionist Judaism, which is much more far-out and mystical, and Sufism in Islam.

My sense is that the conditions are starting to be available in this society for spirituality, for direct experience, which is what the Buddha kept emphasizing: have the experience yourself. Whereas in exoteric religions, it's always someone else who had the experience; Christ had the experience, but you can't experience it; how presumptuous! So I feel that the Eastern influx has produced a healthy reaction in the West, and we're coming at it from a lot of different ways. We're coming at it from the Twelve-Step Program, because the Eleventh Step is basically a spiritual step, and it leads people, right off into psychedelics or meditation or whatever. And there's the whole business of stress reduction through meditation - it's sneaking in in socially acceptable ways.

Religions are honoring the esoteric component and making it a little more available, and there's also the fact that so many people have had psychedelic experiences. And then there are a lot of things that force spirituality. In a way technology forces spiritual awakening; people say television takes your consciousness and keeps it at a certain level, but it also burns out certain kinds of melodramas; you can only go so far and then you're bored and then something else happens. There's a thing in India called viragya, the falling away of worldly stuff, and there's a certain way in which the boob tube helps you do that; even though people get totally trapped, they're being processed through something.

Kinney: There's that song, "Do It Till You're Sick of It."

Ram Dass: That's exactly the process. Often when people come to me and say, "I want to do spiritual practice," and I hear the power of their desire, I say "Go back and live life some more, and come back in five or ten years, when you might be ready or you're older, or when your passions have quieted down a bit." But I feel the failure of the myths in this society is part of what opens the spiritual door. Just as the bomb had an interesting effect on people, in the sense of "Get it now, because it might not last," the ecological imminence is having an interesting effect. As the implications of it all, deforestation and the depletion of the ozone layer and all that, and as the instability of the North-South, rich-poor thing becomes more publicized through the media and more part of the collective consciousness, it's as if the relevance of death forces a spiritual awakening.

I'd go into San Quentin, to Death Row, and there would be these 34 guys on Death Row who all felt like saints. They were reading the Bible and Alan Watts and they all wanted to know God and they were spiritual -except for a couple, who were busy writing petitions. Then the Supreme Court stopped the death sentence in California, and they were all put on mainline. And when I went to visit them again, the same guys were in cells with motorcycle pictures and chains and naked girls, because it was a situational high on Death Row. Death forced the awakening for them. But the minute that was taken away as a stimulus, then they were back in the attractiveness of the world. They suddenly weren't concerned with the hereafter or the moment of death or what happens to them.

Smoley: I have a question about your personal situation. You've become a spiritual celebrity; you're very well known.

Ram Dass: The Prague newspaper referred to me as "the first New Age superstar.

(Laughs) That nauseated me!

Smoley: Well, as the first New Age superstar, you obviously have to present a public image of Ram Dass. How do you retain some sense of personal authenticity in the midst of all that and prevent some kind of self-image from becoming the boss?

Ram Dass: There are a number of things that I do. First of all, I use that all as my spiritual practice. So the whole issue of fame, of projections of other people's minds, becomes the stuff I work with. In my meditation I process it, I watch my reactions, I watch where 1 get caught, it all becomes grist for my mill of spiritual work; that's one thing. The second thing is that my style is to publicly share my private life. Which keeps me from having these different worlds, where one becomes less and less real all the time, and then you're grabbing at the private life because it's the only way you can connect with reality. I'm much more available in the public world about all my warts and all my sexual stuff and everything, I mean, you can have it all, because who needs it? I don't need it.

The third thing is that I surround myself with people who bust me all the time. The people around me are very strong people, like Jai, my colleague who does all the tour arranging; he's as deeply spiritually committed as I am, and we both want to be free, we don't want to win in a world that's empty. So we see the part we're playing; we'll play it, but if I get caught in it, or he gets caught in it, the contract we have with one another is if we're both not caught at the same moment, we'll help each other get straight. In most of the things I'm connected with, I have that contract with people. That's part of what I use also.

And even though he died in '73, the presence of my guru in my consciousness, the reality of that relationship, is so powerful to me that it puts the rest in perspective. One day he and I were sitting there in Delhi, and in the distance you could see Indira Gandhi or somebody going through with elephants and Jeeps and generals. And my guru was lying on his wooden cot with his blanket falling off and he said, "Look at all that, and it's just a worldly king!" Or he'd say about politics, "Why are you getting so upset? They're just adolescents playing." Because of my relationship with him, I keep a certain perspective that allows me to play in those fields without being caught.