Portrait of Ram Dass taken by the late Mark Thompson

Baba Ram Dass, aka Richard Alpert, the gay author of the important New Age bible “Be Here Now,” died on Sunday at his home on Maui, Hawaii. He was 88, the New York Times reported.

Alpert, a Ph.D teacher at Stanford, is perhaps best known for his association with Timothy Leary, whom he met teaching psychology and education at Harvard. Leary had researched the mind-altering psilocybin in some mushrooms at the University of California and continued his research at Harvard. Psychiatrists were clinically interested in psychedelic drugs such as LSD as aids for mental illnesses such as schizophrenia while the Pentagon was interested in weaponizing the hallucinogen to incapacitate the enemy.

Leary was interested in mind-expansion and, The Times reported, “invited some friends — including Mr. Alpert and the poet Allen Ginsberg — to his house in Newton, Mass., on March 5, 1961, a Saturday. In his kitchen, he distributed 10-milligram doses of psilocybin. After taking his, Mr. Alpert recalled, he felt supreme calm, then panic, then exaltation. He believed he had met his own soul. He said he realized then that ‘it was O.K. to be me.’”

Two years later, in May 1963, Leary and Alpert were fired — Alpert for giving drugs to an undergraduate and Leary for abandoning his classes, per The Times. The two subsequently moved into a 64-room mansion on a 2,500-acre, provided by Gulf Oil heiress Peggy Mellon Hitchcock, a volunteer LSD research subject, which became a psychedelic commune.

But tensions surface between Leary and Alpert over the latter’s expressed bisexuality.

From the New York Times:

In 1967, Alpert left for India where he met Neem Karoli Baba, known as Maharajji to his followers. A spiritual encounter resulted in Alpert taking Maharajji as his guru and Maharajji dubbing Alpert “Ram Dass,” which means servant of God. Dass also was gifted with the prefix “Baba,” which respectfully means “father.”

Maharajji sent Ram Dass home in 1968, where he subsequently moved into a cabin on a New Hampshire estate owned by his father. Hundreds of people showed up to follow him and he soon went on tour, espousing wisdom such as: “Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.” he said in one talk.

In 1971, Ram Dass published “Be Here Now,” a reflection on his own personal journey and a “how-to” on how to create a spiritual life: “Cookbook for a Sacred Life: A Manual for Conscious Being.” It was the must-read book for the countercultural movement and New Age aspirants. The rest of his life was devoted to helping people, especially shifting the fear of dying into a spiritual journey.

Ram Dass also continued to evolve, shaving his guru beard in the 1980s, and conceding that his “400 LSD trips had not been nearly as enlightening as his drugless spiritual epiphanies,” The Times reported, though he took a drug trip or two once a year “for old time’s sake.”

Ram Dass officially came out the 1990s. Here’s an excerpt from his interview (hat tip to The Bach Book) with the late Mark Thompson, former editor at The Advocate and author of several books, including the 1995 anthology Gay Soul: Finding the Heart of Gay Spirit and Nature.Thompson also photographed a portrait of Ram Dass, which he took on tour with other notable souls.

From Mark Thompson:

“If eyes are the windows to one’s soul, then Ram Dass’ are shatterproof. At first, they are all you notice, suspended in space, lambent and unflinching, a world unto themselves, until slowly the surrounding features assemble. It’s like watching a portrait by a sidewalk artist take shape: first the eyes, and then, in a few deft strokes, the rest of the face is drawn.

The face itself is generous and kind, inset with permanent lines of amusement. But it’s the liquescent, penetrating gaze of the man that so clearly impresses, momentarily jolting me out of superficial pleasantry. We finish our handshake, and I renew my introduction. Ram Dass nods jovially. I try to feel reassured despite my nervousness.

It’s this quality of being stripped so clean, so zero to the bone—a vast but potent emptiness that Ram Dass reveals with one effortless look—that leaves me unnerved. I’ve come to his front door armed with questions and theories, a lifetime of assumptions left intact. With uncanny ability, he absorbs my projections and hands them back to me. The interviewer, in the end, must answer to himself.

I’ve long considered Ram Dass a wise gay elder, a conferral that comes as a surprise not only to Ram Dass but to others as well. While the author, speaker, and spiritual activist has made no attempt to hide his homosexual past — it is discussed at random, usually in passing, among the pages of his seven books — the fact that he is gay is not commonly known. And while he counts among his followers many who are gay, he has left little imprint on the gay community itself.

“Gay sexual autobiography,” he quietly muses to himself after we’ve settled down to talk. We’re sitting in a high-ceilinged room that has one wall covered with shelves holding hundreds of tapes of his lectures. A bowl of figs and other fruit sits on a small table between us. He continues to reflect while fingering his mala beads; the raucous laughter of children in a nearby schoolyard fills the silence. It’s almost as if he’s flipping through the various tapes in his head containing past life experience. Finally, he looks up smiling. “It’s interesting,” says Ram Dass. “I’ve never been interviewed about this topic, so this is fun for me.”

I’m surprised to hear this but, of course, allow its truth. After all, much of Ram Dass’ life for the past thirty years has been about unloading the weight of personal history, chucking away and burning in the bright, pure flame of spiritual enlightenment all that is not needed. Sexual identity has undoubtedly been part of that consumed baggage. Judging from the spartan, business-like trappings of his home Ram Dass seems to need or want very little these days other than the opportunity to perform compassionate service in the world.

When asked anything about his personal life, he casually mentions a longtime male relationship: “We’ve had a very close and dear friendship for fifteen years,” he says. “We don ’t define it, and its extremely satisfying to me as a fellow human being.

….

The human fate of suffering — on both the physical and spiritual planes – is the one universal condition that Ram Dass seems most apt to address. Suffering is “grist for the mill” (to borrow the title of his classic 1977 work), the propellant of conscious awakening if one only employs it as such. Sexual needs of whatever persuasion and material wants, such as fame and fortune, are fueled by the personality-possessed “me” part of our minds. Desire creates suffering and keeps our innermost selves from finding life’s ultimate fulfillment: the state of being at one with God. Given this quintessential Eastern view of life, I can understand Ram Dass’ objections to labeling people based on their sexual predilections. Gay or straight—what’s the difference if we are meant to transcend attachment?

Still, as appealing as this philosophy may sound, we live in a Western world deeply entrenched in its prejudices and roles, a you-are-what-you-own attitude. Modern gay identity has been spun out of those elements, but some of us cling to the belief that there remains an inexplicable mystery about our being that exists far beneath the constructed surfaces. According to Ram Dass, the answer lies in examining the clinging itself.

….

In Compassion in Action you freely relate past homosexual experiences, something you have not often done. Have you been uncomfortable in talking about being gay? When did you first know?

I had a late latency, and not until I was fifteen years old did I start to really become sexually awakened. Up until then I hadn’t differentiated, I had no labels; I was just so floored by sex. By the time I was seventeen, I started to have relations with boys and realized I enjoyed that. But it was still within the category of teenage folly. You see, I grew up at a time when homosexuality was far deeper in the closet than it is now. I became engaged to be married when I was in college in Boston, but then I started to go out cruising. I’d picked up people or get into sexual encounters with men in parks and bathrooms. So I was confused. Later, when I moved to California to do postgraduate work at Stanford, I started to get more involved in gay life in San Francisco. I’ve only roughly estimated, sometimes to just blow people’s minds, but I’m sure I’ve had thousands of sexual encounters. It was often two a night. Then I returned east to be a professor at Harvard and continued to have this incredible sexual activity. But I always had a woman as a front to go to faculty dinners and things like that.

As many did, and continue to do, you were leading a double life.

My life was completely duplicitous for thirty years. I had an apartment and would have guys in overnight, but I didn’t live with anybody and didn’t make any real liaisons. I gained a reputation at the health service for how sensitive I was to people with gay problems. The psychiatrists kept referring all the homosexual cases to me, but they had no conception of who I really was. This was 1958 until 1963, the year I got thrown out of Harvard.

That’s a famous incident. What really happened?

Tim Leary and I and a lot of friends had one of these big community houses. We got into a situation where Harvard started to get so freaked about the drugs we were using that they asked us to stop doing our research using any undergraduates. We could use graduate students, or outside populace, but we couldn’t use undergraduates because it was too risky. But I had all these relationships with young men whom I really wanted to turn on with. And it had nothing to do with our research; it was my personal life, so I went ahead. It turned out there was another student who was very jealous of this, an editor of the campus newspaper, and he created a huge expose.

So it was gay eros and not LSD that got you thrown out of Harvard.

It was a combination of all those things. In a way, LSD had given me the license to be what I am. It looked at me inside and out and said what you are is okay. And that gave me a license to start to say I didn’t want to hide anymore. The American Association of University Professors wanted to defend me, but I realized that that would just be such a mess–the hell with it! I wasn’t interested in going back to Harvard anyway; I was too far on the drugs. I wanted to go on that trip much, much more.

Most gay men, particularly of that time, have had to deal with overwhelming emotions of guilt and shame. How did you cope with your feelings of internalized homophobia?

The guilt was toward all sex in life. There was no differentiation because nobody even thought about homosexuality in my upbringing. So after that, I didn’t feel called upon to define myself in any way at all. I mean, why define myself? I can fill many roles in life. So I didn’t join “being gay,” I didn’t become a clubbie within the gay community–I just wasn’t drawn to it. Instead, I became very involved in consciousness and spiritual work.

There was a moment when there were four of us making this pilgrimage around southern India in a Volkswagen microbus. One of the fellows in the car was an extremely attractive young man, and one night he and I ended up having a sexual affair together. The next day we sat down in front of my guru, whom I knew knew everything, even though I’d never discussed this kind of thing with him. He looked at me and he looked at this guy, and then he said to me, “You’re giving him your best teaching,” I thought, OK, if you say so. I’ll buy that. But then he said we shouldn’t have any more sex and we didn’t.

There was a long period which I really saw my homosexuality as deeply pathological. I was growing up in the zeitgeist of Western psychology. I had been trained as a Freudian therapist in the analytical institute—and that’s the way it looked. Men and women were made to go together; and everything else seemed like something had gotten fucked up somewhere along the way. I saw my mother as a prime contender of that because she had taken my power. She was such a deep love for me. The reason my puberty was so late was because I kept trying to stay a child to stay in intimate relationship with her. It was clear that if I became a man, she’d reject me. And so I got fatter and fatter, eating everything. she gave me as my form of intimacy with her. At one point in prep school, where I was horny all the time, I hugged her and got an erection. She pushed me away and said there’s milk and cookies downstairs.

This is a more common dynamic between gay men and their moms than would be supposed.

Oh, I understand! So, I ended up having a hard time in my relations with women, in getting my own pleasure. The women that I ended up having sex with were women who were quite aggressive, who really demanded it of me. I mean, they were just scratchers and yellers. I got to the point where I would take huge amounts of acid and look at these slide pictures of women to try to see where my fear was because I saw that there was a block where I just turned off women.

As you were growing up, what was your relationship with your father like?

I was sort of an appreciator of him. He was a very successful and upwardly mobile person, so he didn’t have too much time for the family. He was a somewhat remote figure. When he was around, we did a lot of things together but I never felt he heard me.

In Compassion in Action you state: “As the result of being a Jew, I felt that I had been imbued with three things: first, the sense that behind and within the multiplicity of forms there is One, seamless and radiant, and that loving that One, with all my being, is a path. Second, a love and respect for knowledge as a path to wisdom. And the third great gift I felt I had received was an awareness of suffering and the compassion that arises with that awareness.” I’d like to know how being gay has also shaped your spiritual journey. What gifts have been endowed to you from that?

As a result of being caught with another fellow in prep school, I was completely ostracized – nobody would speak to me for about a year. I’d walk into a room and all the kids would stop speaking. I couldn’t tell my parents, so it cast me way back inside myself; it drove me inward.

That deepened, first of all, the quality of my compassion toward other human beings who are ostracized. But I also think it served me in good stead later on when I started experimenting with psychedelics. I have always felt like I was an outsider.

The added burden was that I had small genitals, and in this society that is a major crime. I was ostracized a lot for that, too. I was laughed at, and I’m sure it affected my behavior a great deal because it was the double whammy of not only being gay but having this feeling of deficiency. But–after I had done a lot of deep work with psychedelics, genital sexuality wasn’t a dominant issue. The areas of my gratification had shifted. It didn’t matter to me that much.

….

Rather than discuss ideas and theories let’s talk about something that is very real in the lives of gay men–the issue of being wounded. I have talked with hundreds of gay men over the years, and not one has escaped being ostracized, or being called a “sissy” or a “faggot, ” or having some other kind of deeply wounding experience.

I would say that’s true. But being “wounded” refers to the personality–not to the soul. I’d say I’ve been deeply wounded in my personality. Absolutely, deeply wounded. And I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over it. I still feel wounded by it. I still feel unwelcome in this culture. Because I live among so many straight populations, I’ve started to talk more about being bisexual, being involved with men as well as women. Most of the audiences with whom I do that are people who already love me so much they couldn’t care if I turned into a frog. Allen Ginsberg, who’s an old friend, goes and confronts people with his gayness. I don’t see any reason to do that—it’s not my trip. I never deny it, but I don’t push it because it’s not part of my active identity.

You’ve been more open in recent years. Why the candor now?

I trust myself more. Before, the candor would have been a bid to try to seduce people, to get young men to come near me. Like as an initiation or something like that—come up and see my holy pictures! I don’t think I trusted myself because I think my desires were so strong.

….

Like many gay men, I’ve been caught up in thinking about death alot these days because of AIDS. But that aside, it seems to me there’s still an enormous amount of suffering around being gay in such an intensely homophobic culture.

I think there is, too. But for gay men, the work is to work on their own minds. They may be doing social protest, or be part of the Radical Faeries, or whatever, but let them do it from a place where they understand that it’s all work on themselves. Because as long as their minds are the way they are, they’re going to keep suffering. Ostracism and the judgment of the culture feed on very deep inadequacies in the individual that they’re still clinging to in the mind, and these judgments play upon them. They resonate with those thoughts that are not quite excoriated, extirpated, expiated.

Do you think gay men have a special role to play in society today, a role that would encompass special aptitudes for compassion, empathy, and insight? And, if you do, then what is your advice for actualizing that potential in the world?

When you read the obituaries, you become aware that an extraordinarily disproportionate amount of beauty brought into the culture was created by gay people. But how to interpret that? I would be hard-pressed to say that those qualities aren’t available in everybody, but the cultural roles everybody found themselves in made it easier for gay men to express themselves in this way. It’s like, the Jews became moneylenders because they weren’t allowed to do anything else. People who have identified either androgynously or in a way not as male in the cultural sense of maleness have accessible to them qualities of creativity and sensitivity and appreciation that they would be well to capitalize upon and use. You’ve got to stand back far enough to see the stages of transformation in a culture. If you watch the women’s movement, for instance, you see it go through many stages: from a kind of militant, male identification in which women want what the man has, to then finding themselves having lost something that they wanted because they were so busy getting something else, until finally you start to see women who are not imitating outward strength but are really developing inner strength as beings. At that point, they’re more willing to accept differences and celebrate them rather than to deny them.

….

There are many spiritual seekers to be found within the gay community, of course.

Oh, many. The predicament is that the deeper your spiritual practice, the more you are aware that everybody is androgynous. That’s why when you say “gay soul” there’s something in me that grabs, since I don’t think of souls as either male or female. I think souls have karma that determines the way they manifest, gay or straight, female or male. But I don’t think souls themselves have any sexual identity at all.

I agree that AIDS has opened a lot of hearts and minds. Still, gay men have built a culture based largely on desire–the commercialization of sex and physical attractiveness. The gay sensibility is very Dionysian. So how do we learn to strike a new balance Is pursuit of sexual fulfillment really antithetical to spiritual enlightenment? Can both exist harmoniously?

There’s a sequence: You grow up very invested in the physical and the psychological. Then you feel the finiteness of those things. And then you awaken through some process only to realize you’ve been trapped. After that, there’s a tendency to go into a kind of renunciative fervor to get into the place where you feel at one with the universe and spirit. That often creates what are called horny celibates—it’s a certain kind of rejection of the physical/psychological plane.

But in a still later stage you realize that the aversion is keeping you from being free—and you want to be free, not just high. So you start to come back into who you are, passionate and nonattached. You are fully in life, joyfully participating — sex is a celebration. It’s all wonderful, and at the same moment, it’s all empty. That’s a very evolved stage of spiritual maturation. I don’t find the gay community as a group very spiritually ripe or eager to go beyond. I think they’re too caught up enjoying the power and the desire systems. In some ways it feels like a certain kind of hell realm to me because it’s not going to be enough.

How do we move out of that? How can being gay be used as “grist for the mill” of inner development?

Only when you have gone through your rebellion against the culture for cutting you out of the juice, then getting the juice, having what you want, and seeing that that is just another state. Once you get a partner, a bed without hiding, and freedom to walk down the street holding hands, then what are you going to do? But you can’t shortcut the process. If somebody wants a Cadillac, you can’t say, “Don’t have it,” because they’ll be busy not having the Cadillac, and they’re not gonna get free. They’ll be somebody without a Cadillac.

One of the deepest issues plaguing gay men is inner-directed hate. People can go out and march in gay pride parades all they want, but that still doesn’t mean they’ve dealt with low self-esteem or their own internalized homophobia.

There are corrupting psychological correlates to being gay in our society—I’m not necessarily saying of being gay, but of being gay in our society. There’s tremendous frustration, self-hatred, and fear that’s rooted in power issues—a good coating of masochism. Those things color the way a movement proceeds. You can make those things into icons to be worshipped. I mean, there’s a lot of masochism expressed in the gay community. There are clubs for it.

….

In your own life, what fears and areas of resistance are you particularly aware of right now?

Gee, that’s tricky. There are some bizarre ones, like trying to be at peace with the emptiness of it all. I would say trying to continually let go of models about existence into the richness of the moment. I still cling to somebody doing something, going somewhere. But I don’t cling very much to it. I can see this correlated with gayness at some level. I have a tremendous perfectionistic streak in me about myself. And because I don’t live up to it, I have a tremendous judgment of others as being not perfect enough. I find that a very unappealing quality, and I have to work with it. I’m horrified by my imperfections because I so want to be free. But I think that’s a cop-out. I’m very fierce, at times, and the fierceness isn’t coming necessarily out of love; it’s coming out of judgment, out of my own pain.

How does your perfectionism correlate with your being gay?

That perfectionistic quality is very deep in many gay people I know. I think it comes from unworthiness and inadequacy, a sense of wanting to be perfect so that you can be loved enough. If I do something perfectly, I can love myself. I get the gold star. And that’s hard when you’re a human: you just can’t do things perfectly enough.

You know, this conversation has brought to the surface in me a lot of uncooked stuff that I haven’t fully integrated into my being—things I’ve just put into little compartments in my head.

Like what, for instance?

Different stages of life, different attitudes toward the gay community. Talking about these issues with someone who has given them as much thought as you gives me something to work on. I mean, what have I got to learn here? What have I got to learn about my own prejudices? I just took a course last year on hidden racism from a Latino man who was showing me my own oppression, my own subtle racism. I’m probably imprinted so deeply from my generation that I don’t know if I will ever get out of thinking that gayness is a pathology. Even though I’m delighted that other people don’t, and I would like not to, it’s so deep in me.

I experience being gay as a wonderful blessing, an opportunity—anything but a pathology. But I’ve come of age during a different time than you. I’m making my assumptions with a different set of cultural references in hand. People who have defined themselves as gay are at a point in their collective journey where they don’t need to throw the definition away, but rather keep evolving it.

I would say that if gay people who read this are willing to really sit down and examine their own minds in a systematic way, they may experience the freedom to take more delight in life and in their gay expression of it. And they will see that who they are isn’t gay, and it’s not not-gay, and it’s not anything—it’s just awareness. I really challenge them to make that exploration on their own before they write the script of their lives in stone too much. Because if they have picked up a book that’s called Gay Soul, they’re asking for it. And if they’re asking for it, they should be able to get it. Somebody should say, “Look, don’t get trapped in that. Get on with it.” There’s no need to label yourself at all.”