WHO WAS RAM DASS?
By Peter Cooperdock
(This was a writing class exercise at the Orion Environmental Writing Workshop held at the Omega Institute this past June. The Omega Institute’s library is named after Ram Das. The author’s group was led by Francisco Cantu aka Paco.)
Paco gives us instructions to wander the area, observe, and ask questions about what we see. We may see a tree, a bird, some shadow that stimulates some thought. “Bring them back and we’ll talk about them. ‘You may ask, who is Ram Dass?’”
I feel a jolt go through me. How can anyone not know Ram Dass? He’s part of the fabric of my youth, like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones; Martin Luther King or Robert F. Kennedy. Then I think of all those statues to white men in cities and towns whom few know. The first time I walked the courtyard outside the statehouse in Concord, NH, I saw statues of white men looking so important. Daniel Webster I knew, but General Stark I did not. Later I found out he was a Revolutionary War hero who uttered the phrase from which the New Hampshire state motto devolved: ‘Live Free or Die.’
Ram Dass evolved out of Richard Albert, who with Timothy Leary, promoted psychedelics as a way to enhance and expand consciousness. Diverging from Leary, he emigrated to India, found a Guru and learned non-chemical means to his goals. He returned to the US to promote his experiences which were tangential to the hopes and desires of many middle-class youth. His previous expulsion from Harvard University kept him newsworthy, so his return expounding meditation and Eastern Philosophy filtered through the limited media options of the times, making their way to me.
My mother discovered she was still pregnant several months after mis-carrying my twin sister. Medical complications before my birth led to a lengthy hospital visit, difficult birth, and extended mother-child separation. The ordeal led to extraordinary affection by my mother, supplanting my father as primary benefactor of his wife’s attention. Hostility percolated which was poured upon an unsuspecting and undeserving child. A young boy floated in a stew of marital conflict. A vision of self grew through the lens of fractured glass.
As a sixteen-year-old suburbanite, I was entranced by the energetic outflow of change that flooded the country. Encapsulated in an amorphously shaped social sphere of family, relatives, school, and work in West Seneca, NY, a rapidly growing suburb of Buffalo, I endured the constraints of a life I did not understand. I witnessed Civil Rights conflicts, youthful rebellion, and war under the tutelage of Walter Cronkite, correspondent for CBS evening news. What was witnessed there was not adding up with what was witnessed in my own little world.
My Eastern European heritage led to Catholic schools and immersion in the faith. By age eleven, too many inconsistencies between teachings and actions had become apparent. Coupled with discomfort with parental oversight and sibling rivalries, my sphere of interaction was shrinking. The constant support of confusion snipped any ability to carry out basic social interactions and fertilized a harvest of loneliness. There had to be a better place to be.
A few years before, in a bizarre moment of paternal acknowledgement, my father gave me a library book about nautical mysteries. Unsurprisingly, books had become the refuge I turned to. This book was filled with the unexplained mysteries of the sea, strange sightings, the Bermuda Triangle, ships disappearing without a trace. It was amazing! I returned to the library for more…and more…and more. Until I found Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and the Yogi who had operations so he could touch his tongue to his forehead; the Yogi who was brought out each day, since his legs had atrophied in the Lotus position, to slowly move his head to follow the Sun which had long ago burned his retina rending him blind; the Yogi who could stop his heartbeat for minutes at a time.
I moved onto books on Eastern Philosophy, Yoga, Meditation, and control of emotions. Spock was coursing the Galaxy in control of his emotions, withstanding insults and jabs at character with few relapses. It was a desirable model and Ram Dass was in the know. Somewhere I found his address. I wrote him a letter. I explained my hopes and dreams. Sixty years hence, I can only vaguely comprehend what might have been said. I have less an idea of what I expected.
A few months later, a large box arrived addressed to me. From Ram Dass. I have no memory of any familial reaction to this package. I brought it to my room. I opened it up. There were many items within. A large book, perhaps 10 inches square, with printed brown paper bound with rope through three punch holes, made the bulk of the contents. On the cover were the words: BE HERE NOW by Ram Dass. A vinyl record lay beneath the book. A long string of beads, some posters, and a handwritten letter signed by Ram Dass.
I read the book, and, although I remember nothing specific from it, I believe its message is ingrained within. I tried listening to the record once. Filled with what I now know are chants, my brothers made me turn it off. I don’t recall objecting too strongly. The other items were too embarrassing to display in my bedroom, being of his Guru and other Indian mystics. I had little context for understanding their meaning.
The box was later thrown out by my mother, along with anything else I may have left behind, once it was apparent I was not going to return there to live. On a visit in my twenties, I inquired about the box and other items and was told, with some defensiveness, that they weren’t going to keep our stuff, the ‘our’ included my brothers, forever. It really was okay. It followed the lesson in impermanence. The moment had passed, and there was no way or reason for it to return.
There may have been an entreaty to join Ram Dass in his letter. I can’t recall but those things happened. I was too emotionally numbed to think of such radical independent action anyway. However, that box did something different than perhaps its intent, but realistically more important than any direct message. The box pierced the bubble within which my misery resided. An external force, a name from the sphere of the other, of the beyond, a being that was known by others but of whom I had heard, broached the barrier of my existence and gave me an orifice to somewhere else, out there.
A string had been sent through the opening and attached itself to me. A string was secured that pulled me through, guided me along, gave me direction. Once clear of the bubble, I could look around and see opportunities and adjust my grip, pulling myself along at times; not just being pulled. Ram Dass, by showing compassion for a lonely boy in a suburban stalemate, threw a life line of comprehension and possibility which I’ve followed ever since.
2023