Becoming Nobody: The Key To Freedom And Happiness

Who you are is not what you do. Who you are is not who you think you are. Who you are is your inner being.

Welcome to Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's Pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you've ever had any awareness of yourself other than an ego, maybe as a soul or on some spiritual path, or looking for awakening in any way, this conversation is going to matter to you because it's with someone who was there at the beginning of the consciousness movement in the United States, a man named Rameshwar Das, who was good buddies with Ram Das, who may have heard of, otherwise known as Richard Alpert, who was a professor at Harvard of psychology, who got into LSD, and psilocybin with Timothy Leary back in the 60s, but ended up finding that a short-lived path to awakening and ended up going to India and meeting an incredible man who we're gonna hear a lot about today named Neem Karoli Baba. And as it turns out, Rameshwar here, who's joining us today on our podcast, was a student of Ram Dass back in the late 60s and then went to India as well and met with this incredible teacher Neem Karoli Baba. and it turns out you might have heard of this book called Be Here Now. Now we talk about mindfulness, yoga, consciousness, new age movement. These all stem from, I believe, this book which sold over 2 million copies. It was kind of a throwaway book. It was initially made in loose paperback and ended up being the calling card for generation that wanted to wake up. and we're so lucky to have Rameshwar here with us today. Rameshwar has recently died, but Rameshwar has been doing this stuff for 50 years and has done many projects as an artist, a photographer, environmentalist, a writer, and has really been there with Rameshwar writing a lot of his books, including Be Here Now, Be Love Now, which is a wonderful book, Polishing the Mirror, Love, Serve and Remember Recordings, audio recordings, and also this new book which we're going to talk about today, which is called Being Ram Dass, and this is an early copy. So welcome, welcome, Ramesh.

So nice to be with you.

Well, you know, am I right in saying that the general consciousness movement was really sort of catapulted by Ram Dass in that book we hear now back in the early 70s when it was published?

It certainly, was, as you say, kind of a calling card or maybe sort of the Backpacker's Bible for quite a while.

Yeah, I remember I had a copy and everybody who had a copy back in the '70s. It was like this underground book, but it's kind of a crazy book because it's all these pictures and symbols and stories. It's not the average book. It's a very differently put together book. But you were there with Ram Das putting that together back to the beginning, right?

Yeah, I didn't do that much work on the book itself. It started out as a pizza box that came from a crew of artists who took some of Ram Dass talks, early talks that had been transcribed and they were graphic artists and they basically turned it into the first graphic novel, except it was in a pizza box.

So, it's kind of fascinating. I think a lot right now is happening in this culture is this resurgence of the psychedelic culture. as a therapy for PTSD. And we've had Michael Pollan on the podcast, Tony Bosses. We've talked about these issues. And, you know, he wrote a book called how to change your mind. And, and that's one way is through psychedelics. But, and I think they have a role in, in Psychiatry and therapy and in Awakening. But what happened, it seems like back in the 60s was that, you know, no matter how much acid or how much mushrooms, Richard Alpert at the time took.

And he took a lot.

He took a lot. It didn't last and he kept waking up to reality that was kind of a downer. So he was always trying to get high and always coming down. And, well, that was the endemic problem.

With psychedelics was you came down.

Right.

So he's like, I'm out of here and he somehow got to India. Can you share a little about the story of him going to India? And there's a beautiful sort of description of how he was still his sort of, even though he was sort of long-haired and bearded and wore beads and a white robe, he was still so not in the moment. And he met this guy who kept saying to him, who was this Lama Surya Das, who was another kind of Westerner young kid. Somehow got it. And he kept saying to him, every time he was talking about what's coming next or what we're doing or the past or what is this or that, you're like, just be here now. Just be here now.

It wasn't Surya Das.

It was.

About 19 at the time, 19 year old surfer from Laguna Beach named Bob.

Bob Wundas. Yeah, okay, sorry, I got that wrong. Yeah.

There'S a lot of Dases. Das means servant. So basically we're all in the servant class.

Yeah, Ram Dass means servant of God, right? Ram is another word for God.

Yeah.

Yeah, Ram Dass thought he was going on a Buddhist pilgrimage with Bhagwan Das and walked around the Buddhist pilgrimage sites barefoot and begging for a while with an American Express card in his shoulder bag.

The only way to know.

At some point, Bhagavan Das said his visa had run out and he needed to go see his guru. And Ram Das was like, Guru Shmuro, I'm a Buddhist. So he didn't want to go. But Bhagavan Das needed to go, so they drove up to the... Sorry, that's my Audibon clock.

No, it's good.

You've got the real thing going. and they drove up to the foothills of the Himalayas and stopped at this little temple. And this old man in a blanket was sitting up in a little kind of a field, and there were people in white all around him. And Ram Das thought it was some kind of cult, and he really, he didn't want anything to do with it. And then Maharajji started, the old man was known as Maharajji, which is sort of an honorific that means great king. But you know, you're in a cab and Delhi and the cab driver says, oh Maharaj, where would you like to go?

Right. Everybody is very common.

Yeah.

And, but he told Ramdas, things that he clearly knew about him, about Ram Dass, that there was no way he could know. So Ram Dass was taken aback, to say the least. And then something happened which he wrote about originally in Be Here Now, and we went into more detail in this memoir. because he's really had, you know, he had the time to look back on it and understand what had happened a little better. And it was a major opening, not dissimilar to what had occurred with him when he first took psychedelics, but without drugs and with this completely other effect on him, which was that his spiritual heart opened. I mean, this deep part of himself really awakened.

Yeah, I mean, it was a beautiful story of how he, you know, was thinking about his mother who had recently died and was very, you know, deep in his particular unique thoughts about it. And somehow the guru knew all about it, even though he didn't actually tell him. and it made him realize that he could know everything about him. And what was really beautiful about it was that in that moment, even with all his flaws and his darkness and his demons and his mishugas, basically, that this guy, this big old chubby guy in a blanket sitting on a stool, just loved him unconditionally, completely and fully. despite all of his craziness. And I think that's sort of what we all want and seek. And we often think we get that from our parents, but usually we don't.

Yeah, Ramtha didn't get it from his parents, at least not in that level of it. And that was what opened him up, was that love. And I think at first that he really thought it was, you know, kind of the psychic powers that had you know, blown him away. But as time went on, he really realized it was that heart space that they had entered together.

Well, it sort of speaks to if that was really true, and let's assume it is, and the Rambus wasn't deluded or crazy, that sort of brings up a whole set of questions around, gee, you know, what is human consciousness? And how would one person know what another person's thinking or feeling or anything about their life or where they're going or what they're doing?

And.

It seems like there's another level of awakening or brain function or access to some plane of knowing that somehow these masters have acquired. And yet, despite all of that, the message from this guy, Neem Karoli Baba, who you and so many incredible people have been a student of, like, Daniel Goldman, who's a friend who's been on the podcast, was a student of his as well. And he wrote emotional intelligence. And Larry Brilliant is a doctor who ended up helping cure smallpox in India and worked for Google Foundation. And, you know, you've got Krishna Das, who's an incredible, you know, spiritual musician and does chanting and does amazing work all over the world. There's just so many and you who have actually come out of that, let's say, call it lineage, let's say.

Sort of a non-linear.

Yeah, it's sort of like a hodgepodge. And what was really amazing about reading about his teachings is that his message was so simple. It was basically love everybody, feed everybody, serve everybody. It was like, yeah, there was no big like, You know, treaties or sutra or big text or it was just very, very simple. And when you dive deep into all of that, what does that mean? And, you know, I think the love everybody, serve everybody, I think we often forget also it includes everybody includes you yourself.

Right?

Yeah. And usually the hardest one to love is yourself too.

Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about that and what that was and how that led to kind of the awakenings that a lot of you had and that Ram Dass had.

But being with him, I mean, he seemed very simple. And his conversations with people were so kind of ordinary, especially with the Indian devotees. And, you know, he was talking about people's kids and jobs and families and, you know, people, they'd come to him with illnesses and problems, and he would talk to them about them. But when you asked him, you know, something, what seemed to us to be the, the Deep esoteric stuff that we really wanted to know, like, uh, how do you meditate? And he would say, meditate like Christ. And that kind of, especially since probably about 50% of the Westerners around him were of Jewish background. So getting that one tossed your way was pretty interesting. And then somebody asked him, well, how did Christ meditate? and he said he lost himself in love.

So.

But you felt that kind of Love coming from him. It was as if he were radiating it all the time. And it was that. That space that he created around him. It was as if he was. in this field of love. And everybody around him felt it. I used to think it was sort of personal and that I was feeling it and it was my experience. But a couple of times I looked up and I realized that everybody around him was feeling this. And it was just, you know, quite remarkable. And that was as much the esoteric teaching as anything.

How did you and the others that were there become transformed by that love?

Well, he used to, mostly he would create distractions that would keep us lost in other stuff. Like the first time when I arrived there with Danny Gollman and Krishnananda. And the first thing he did was sit us down and feed us. and the food at the ashram was spicy potatoes and puris, which are deep fried flatbread fried in butter and ghee. And I was so out there. I mean, I was probably half out of my body. And I think I ate three huge piles of potatoes on it, filling a leaf plate and 17 puris. and it almost grounded me. But that was how the love came through. He fed people and that was the feed everyone part of it. And he would say things like first bojan, then bojan, when bojan is food and having a meal. And especially with the villagers around the temple where he was. That was such a gift to them to, you know, have plentiful food coming their way. Because it's a very poor area. And it was just, you know, this kind of vehicle for love. And we learned to, you know, some of the devotional practices, Krishnadas has been teaching people chanting and the Hanuman Chalisa, which is, you know, this 40 verses in Hindi, which we actually all learned, which is pretty astonishing for a bunch of Westerners who my Hindi is still mostly of the train and bus station variety. But we absorbed something that really was, changed all of our lives. It's very, and it's very hard to express what it was or what it is because it's still working. So in India, there's this, this idea of what's called Prasad about food, which has nothing to do with nutrition whatsoever. It's just a blessing that comes with the food. If, if a you get food from a temple or from a high being or a saint or somebody, then it carries the blessing or the love or whatever the vibe is from that being. And so in a sense, that was Maharaji's way of transmitting what he had to give.

So, yeah, in many cultures, food is the way we show love, but it's often with bad consequences.

Ramdas contrasted it with his Jewish mother also, which was different. Yeah. Because he got very fat as a kid, because he was like trying to please his mother all the time.

Exactly. and the other thing I wanted to sort of touch on was some extraordinary story that was in the book about how he brought a lot of acid with him. When Ram Dass went to India, he took a lot of acid and he gave it to Maharaji. He gave it to the teacher.

Yeah.

And tell us about what happened and the consequences.

First of all, I wasn't there. I'm not a first person witness for especially the first time. And he was carrying with him some very special LSD that had been made by Alsle Stanley, who was the kind of underground chemist on the West Coast and also the Grateful Dead's sound engineer. It was the purest LSD. It was usually known as white lightning.

Oh, wow. Okay.

And they were 300 milligram doses, which was kind of a pretty hefty dose for a grown person, which Ram Dass was.

So.

At some point, Maharaji said, You have some medicine? And Ram Das thought he had a headache or something. He said, I'm sorry, I don't have any aspirin or any of that. And he said, no, the yogi medicine.

The yogi medicine.

So Ram Das brought out the LSD, and he had, I think, four doses left of the white lightning. And Maharaji tossed them one at a time into his mouth.

Three doses. Four doses. Okay.

I think the first time was three doses. It was like 900 micrograms, which is enough to- For an elephant. Yeah, for an elephant or to send a grown man probably to the moon. And- Nothing happened. And Ram Dass was really, I mean, he was worried for starters because he thought, oh, this old man, this is way too much for somebody this age. You start somebody this age out with a small dose and see what happens. And nothing happened. Yeah, nothing happened. And then he went back to the States.

And so he just sat there and nothing happened. He's like, I don't feel anything and everything's good or did he say- He didn't say anything.

He just did nothing changed. And Ram Dass had, you know, he had guided trips for hundreds of people and taken hundreds of doses himself. And he knew what tripping looked like.

Yeah. Incredible. Did he talk to him about that or did he say, what are you experiencing or is there any conversation?

Well.

It wasn't that kind of conversation, but it was more of a just a demonstration that Maharaji was already there in some sense. He didn't need it. But when he went back to the States, Ram Dass had sort of doubts about it, because he'd been sitting a little bit off to the side and he thought maybe Maharaji had thrown it over his shoulder. and scammed him, you know?

Yeah, yeah, I scammed him.

So when he went back the next.

Time.

Maharaji asked him again, he said, you, gave me some medicine last time? And Ram Dass said, yeah. And he said, you, have any more? And he did. And this time he took four doses. The same thing. And he very consciously placed each one on his tongue and swallowed it. And he said, Can I have a little water with it? And I said, yeah. And then he said, Will it make me crazy? And Ram Das said, well, probably. And so Maharaji kind of goes under his blanket for some time. And then he comes up and he looks completely nuts. His eyes are rolling and his tongue is rolling around. And then he stopped and he was just totally putting him on. And nothing happened.

Yeah. Well, you know, it's fascinating when you tell that story, it reminds me of the conversation I had on this podcast with Michael Pollan, where he talked in his book about how to change your mind and the studies they've done on the brain with long-term meditators, you know, Tibetans who've been in a cave for nine years meditating and what happens. And there's a part of the brain that's called the default mode network, which is activated most of the time it's our ego that protects us from danger, that sort of gives us our sense of individual self that's separate from the world. But when you take psychedelics or you take these substances that sort of suppress that, it sort of makes the ego quiet down. And these drugs do suppress the default mode network.

Yeah.

But so does being enlightened. And what's really fantastic in the book is that there's this really wonderful distinction between the ego and the soul.

Yes.

So can you talk a little bit about that? Because if it's what you're saying is true, and I have no reason to doubt it, and he really didn't have any effect from the acid, it probably means he was already there in that state of lack of separateness. because when you take those drugs, they dissolve your ego, which means you feel connected and you understand that you're part of the overall Cosmos Universe, whatever you want to call it, and that that is, that's a very safe place to be. And it's full of love and connection and compassion and awareness. And if you're in that state all the time, you take the drugs that doesn't matter, right? You gave it to, like, a Tibetan monk who'd been in the cave for nine years, probably the same thing would have happened.

So, I think you just answered the question, Mark.

But for the rest of us, like a lot of us are sort of shortcutting into the psychedelic realm, I wonder if it's almost a sort of a backlash to this sort of mindfulness movement where we've all been trying to meditate and be mindful, but it's really hard to get out of the ego. Hi, everyone.

Hope you're enjoying the episode.

Before we continue, we have a quick message from Dr. Mark Hyman about his.

New company, Pharmacy, and their first product, the 10 Day Reset.

Hey, it's Dr. Hyman. Do you have FLC? What's FLC? It's when you feel like crap. It's a problem that so many people suffer from and often have no idea that it's not normal or that you can fix it. I mean, you know the feeling. It's when you're super sluggish, your digestion's off, you can't think clearly, or you have brain fog, or you just feel run down. Can you relate? I know most people can.

But the real question is what the.

Heck do we do about it? Well, I hate to break the news, but there's no magic bullet. FLC isn't caused by one single thing, so there's not one single solution. However, there is a systems-based approach, a way to tackle the multiple root factors that contribute to FLC. And I call that system the 10-day reset. The 10-day reset combines food, key lifestyle habits, and targeted supplements to address FLC straight on. It's a protocol that I've used. with thousands of my community members to help them get their health back on track. It's not a magic bullet, it's not a quick fix, it's a system that works. If you want to learn more and get your health back on track, click on the button below or visit getpharmacy.com that's getpharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y.com Now.

Back to this week's episode. So I guess I'd love to sort of go down the rabbit hole of how Ram Dass taught about the ego, and taught about the separate self and taught about then how to connect with the soul in a different way, which really is, in a sense, the message of Be Here Now, right? It's about dropping into just what is, right? How to be present for our lives, for relationships, for love, and how do we do that?

Well, first off, I don't know.

Come on, you wrote a whole book with him. This is Ram Dass's biography. You wrote it with him.

I can speculate the same way you're speculating, which is we're not talking about it from a place of being in it, which is different. And Maharaji always used to hold up a finger like that and say, sub ek, it's all one. Don't you understand? It's all one. And of course, we didn't particularly.

I understand that right.

I think the rather wonderful thing about Ram Dass is that he was on that journey toward oneness.

And.

Through kind of translating his own life experiences for everybody, he brought everybody along on the trip.

Yeah.

And I think that over time, over the time that I knew him, he transformed a lot and lost more of that separateness and became more of that kind of loving Beacon of awareness and compassion and love.

Yeah.

But it was through some of it was practice, some of it was through the stroke that almost took him out and really, you know, sent him into a deep depression for a while. Because he thought he really lost contact with Maharaji. He had lost his spiritual you know, path. And then it came back. And I would say those last 20 years of his life after the stroke, that a little more, he was more and more just going into that way he sometimes called the ocean of love.

Yeah.

Well, it's interesting when you kind of-.

You- could feel that.

When you follow his career, there's a wonderful documentary you can find anything on Netflix or one of the streaming services called Becoming Nobody. And it's this beautiful sort of story of his life. And there's an audio sort of recording of series of his lectures also called Becoming Nobody, which I encourage everybody to listen to. It's really just five hours, so it's not long, but it's really instead of it, it's a fascinating exploration because, you know, I think many spiritual teachers are like, well, I have it all together, you know, I'm enlightened and I'm, you know, I'm good. I'm here, like, on my pedestal teaching you. And, you know, that always smells to me. Like, for me, that always just smells rotten, and I don't believe it. Anyway. Yeah. So, listen, I know you're, you've got your, your crap and you're, you're messed up, and then you see all these. Yeah. And all the gurus are sleeping with this one, and they're stealing money from this one, and they're like, and they're caught up in the ego in this powerful way and they're pretending to be somebody, right? And what I love about Ram Dass is he just came back from India and he's like, I'm just an idiot like the rest of you. I'm just maybe asking more questions and I'm being more transparent about my neuroses and my stuff. and here's what I know and learned. And maybe you want to try it on. He didn't come from a place of real ego, it seemed like. Although I think he would kind of take on the role of ram doss, and he kind of identified with that a little bit. So he kind of got a little bit of an ego trap. But, you know, it was, it was, as you said, when he got the stroke, that really transformed him. And I was recently talking to your friend, and it's sort of cheered. chanted musician, Krishna Das. He was very funny. He was like, well, before a stroke, he kind of was a dick, you know, literally.

He was Dick Albert.

Yeah, he was kind of like a dick. And then he got, you know, he just sort of dropped into a different state of being when he couldn't no longer make love or, you know, play cello or do the things he really, you know, play golf or the things that really you know, made him feel good. And all of a sudden, you sort of. When you realize you're not your body. And I've been in this state where I've been really sick. Like, I've been in bed, you know, incapacitated for five, six months, not knowing if I was going to live or die weak and. And unable to really function. And it was like, okay, well, what am I? Am I my thoughts? Am I my emotions? Am I my body? Like, what am I? Because I was still there and I really couldn't function in any other level. My mind wasn't working, my body wasn't working. Emotionally, I wasn't sort of really there. But there was something else that was there that was what I think he's speaking to was this place where our soul kind of shows up. And can you talk about how we can all in this crazy culture we're in, the amount of divisiveness and conflict, fear and anxiety and thinking about the future. And, you know, how do we kind of come back to a place where we're not just buffeted around by the winds of all this chaos?

Well, as I say, I don't know. I do find meditation more interesting. and drugs these days, I'll tell you that. There was a wonderful Indian saint who you probably know of named Ramana Maharshi.

Yeah.

Who went through something like what you were talking about when he was like 17 and his father had just died. And he was just confronting death for the first time in his life. And his, he was staying with his uncle and he laid down on his uncle's, the floor of his study and thought about what it would be like to die. And to the extent that he kind of went into almost like rigor mortis and stopped his breath and then he went with that thought that exactly what you're saying of who am I now? you know, what, what is this? That's here still. And he came into that self that you're talking about, which is not the body self, not the body Consciousness. And that, that was, you know, I think the way that ramdas was able to convey something of that. And that was the experience that he had when he first took psilocybin. And then when he was with Maharaji and when he was practicing meditation and.

He.

In that first winter that he was in India staying in the ashram up in the Himalaya foothills, freezing his ass off and learning yoga and meditation. In that time, I think he really developed the practices that carried him through after that and, and that he helped give to other people. He taught me yoga and meditation when I first met him. Those practices sustained that soul place that and the relationship with the his Guru with Maharaji and that Guru thing, which is, you know, Ram Das acknowledged was so hard to get across in the West because it was, it was giving.

Up your power, right?

Yeah, exactly that. And that's, doesn't go over well for Westerns.

Western individualists where it's all about the I me, mine.

Yep.

Right.

And achievement. and you can't really achieve enlightenment because it's that becoming nobody, it's not becoming more somebody.

That's right. That's right.

So, but the other thing that I think that he allowed people to have on their spiritual journey and that he really communicated was humor. Yeah, you know, being able to laugh at yourself. And he was a real Storyteller. I think it was. maybe wavy gravy said he used to be master of the one-liner and now he's the master of the ocean liner. This was after his stroke.

Yeah.

He got very slowed down after the stroke, and he had almost complete aphasia for a while where he couldn't talk at all. And he slowly got it back and.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean it's a, it's, yeah, it's an interesting thing when you lose the identity that you are. I mean it's almost like, it's almost like he was asking for it in his karmic life in a way, because he kind of was wanting to get to that his whole life, right? Was to that egoless place, to the place of love. And it's hard to get there when, you know, you have desires and attachments and you have an identity and you're somebody and and he, with the stroke, all of a sudden, kind of was nobody again. He couldn't talk, he couldn't function, he couldn't do anything. You know, I don't wish that on anybody for a path of enlightenment, but, you know, he was able to transform that in a beautiful way for the last few decades of his life.

Yeah, I think that's one of the most inspiring aspects of what he did with the latter part of his life. and, you know, as, as, as I age, as a lot of my cohort are starting to, as Joan Halifax says, get to the head of the line, you know, that the ways that he dealt with getting old, aging, you know, disability and the fear of death.

Which.

I think that he helped a lot of people with and certainly helped me with.

And.

I had to confront that myself and my own life in different ways. Well, I was the first time I was out working with him on the Memoir in Maui and my daughter was killed here in East Hampton in a traffic accident. She was run over on her bike.

She was 14.

And I was destroyed. I don't think there's anything worse. I mean, I would much rather had been me.

Yeah, losing a child like that is the worst.

And when we heard that she hadn't made it out of the surgery at the trauma hospital, I looked at Ram Dass and said, she didn't get to finish her life. And he looked straight at me and said, Yes, she did. And in some way, I mean, that perspective of, and incarnation. This is this life. It's not, you know, you're still here in some sense. That presence took me out of my, not the pain of the situation, but my self-pity about it.

Yeah.

A little while.

For a little while, then it came back.

It was, you know, then I got on the plane and flew back east and went through all of the.

That's the roughest thing ever, I can imagine.

Yeah, yeah.

Maybe. So we're sort of this paradox of. Of ego and soul, right? We're ego and. Some level of other continuity of our being that isn't well talked about in the Western culture. And, you know, I think when are the moments when you feel most alive and connected and feel the love and joy and, you know, bliss and happiness? I mean, it's really comes down to love, doesn't it?

Yeah.

And I mean, one of the things I learned from my daughter's death is that that love doesn't die. And that presence and after Ram Dass died, I was with him when he passed and his presence was still there. I mean, after a while, we, you know, the body stayed for a while and then we took it off and he was cremated and and it's definitely different.

Yeah.

I mean, he said that before he died, the soul doesn't have a fear of dying.

Yeah.

Ego has a very pronounced fear of dying. The ego, this Incarnation is life and dying. The soul is infinite. So how does that. How does that inform our. Our approach to death? I mean, how is that. That idea? Because a lot of us in the west, you know, we. We think of an afterlife or we think of, you know, heaven or. There's like a different beliefs about it. In the Jewish tradition, we don't talk that much about it. But, you know, if it's something that's sort of an unknowable known, right? Like, we imagine it might be true, but we can't really know until we die.

Yeah, they say that when you take incarnation, there's this veil that comes down so you don't remember anything from your previous births. I mean, if you want to adopt that model of previous births.

Yeah. I mean, someone could say it's a nice story where you actually it's a story where you actually kind of can calm yourself down if you believe that there's a continuity to your soul and that there's reincarnation. So you maybe get to kind of not be so afraid, but Is that just a story or is there evidence?

Well, you know, one of the interesting things that Ram Dass did, and I think it started from when his mother had died. And he saw the denial and hypocrisy around her in the hospital before she died. And he was not with her when she left her body, but He really determined that the way we treat death and the way that we engage with death, he wanted to change that and it's certainly for himself. And he did and helped, he worked with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and who had that five stages of grief and denial model and Steven Levine, and they ran a hotline for people who are in terminal states, and he was very engaged with Joan Halifax and Stan Grof when they were giving acid to people who were dying. our mutual friend Tony Bossis has continued that research, which is now finally, you know, getting some resurgence.

Yeah.

And he sat with people during the AIDS epidemic who were dying. So he was with a lot of people around death, and I think it was really his experience out of that. work that brought him to a place where he saw death as a transformation rather than an end. And that was why he was not afraid of it. And he had this, he did a book with an astral entity named Emmanuel. I think there are a couple of quotes in the book about it, and Emmanuel said things like, death is absolutely safe.

It's hard to swallow.

Yeah, and leaving your body is like taking off a tight shoe. And, you know, not that those things necessarily are a comfort to us, especially if we're going through intense suffering.

But.

You can feel that shift in perspective. And there are stories, there's a story about Maharaji walking with a devotee, and he suddenly burst out laughing, and the devotee said, what's so funny? And he said, oh, so and so, this old ma just died. And the devotee said, Maharaji, you butcher, she was one of your great devotees. And he said, you want me to act like one of the puppets? So there's this, you know, perspective from the soul place that is different from where we're stuck in it, you know, incarnation in the meat.

Yeah.

So a lot of us are clearly stuck in our egos and sense of self and separateness and identity. I mean, even now it's even more striking that we are not even recognizing each other as humans first. We're recognizing each other as red or blue or white or black or... I mean, it's just Christian or Muslim. I mean, it's just the whole divisiveness and conflict in our world is just so at the other end of the extreme of the thinking that we're all one, right? That we're all the same or that we're all part of this big love soup. and I'm wondering, you know, what are the, some of your perspective knowing Ram Dass for years and having done these books with him, you know, what is your way of sort of explaining to people and how you sort of maybe channel Ram Dass for a minute? How would he explain to people, you know, the challenges of how the ego causes us to be unhappy and miserable? and how kind of building a relationship to our soul can help alleviate that suffering. I know it's a hard question.

I think I got to go back to the Buddha for that one, probably. I mean, the Buddhist, the triple gem.

Is.

Suffering in permanence and non-self and, you know, the suffering part of the suffering is not necessarily that you're in pain all the time, but that.

You.

Sometimes you don't get what you want, sometimes you do get what you want, and it morphs into something else that you don't like so much and. Even if you get what you want and you're enjoying it, it goes away because you're stuck in time and everything passes. So there's that aspect and that's the impermanence side of it, that everything goes away, including us, as near as I know, even when we can keep our lives going and stay healthy and all of that. It's still at some point, the lease is up.

Yeah.

We have to exit somehow, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nobody seems to get out alive that I've noticed.

Anyway, so the ego basically keeps us feeling miserable most of the time because it feels.

Well.

The Indian view of it is.

That it comes from our desire systems.

Yeah.

And that creates our reality. And Ram Dass, I think because of his understanding of psychology and the work that he'd done with psychedelics and, you know, his early psychology work was in child development and motivational psychology. And he really understood how, you know, we get attached to what we want and how that kind of creates our ego structure. And he, you know, ego structure was not like necessarily bad. Everybody needs to have a functioning ego or you don't function.

Right. Now to get your groceries and make dinner and go to work and pay.

Your taxes and remember your zip code.

Yeah. Exactly.

So there's that part of it, but that freedom from desire, which I think was also what the Buddha was talking about, I mean, the literal translation of Nirvana is I think burned out. In other words, you've taken care of all those desires on some level.

Yeah.

And Maharaji used to have a quote from the poet Kabir, this line, which I probably don't have correct. I think Krishnadas has a different version of it, which is, I walk through the marketplace and I'm neither a buyer nor a seller.

I'm neither a buyer or a seller, so you're a witness.

Or I'm neither wanting nor not wanting, I've heard it that way too. And that's that paradox. I mean, that same place of, you know, just being present in the moment. And that comes back to being here now.

Not longing for the future or the past or anything.

Yeah, it's that Ram Dass referred to it as time binding.

Time binding?

Yeah.

In other words, we get stuck in our expectations or our incriminations about the past.

Yeah.

And we're thinking about the past and.

We'Re thinking about the future and we're not actually experiencing the beauty and magic of what's happening. Right?

Yeah.

And I think, yeah, the only place happiness exists is in the moment.

Right? Well, that ties again back to that fear of death. And Ram Dass said from time to time, he said, when you really live in the moment, death is just another moment.

And it seems by the end of his life, he was really able to put that into place for him, right?

I think so. It felt that way. I mean, I've never been with anybody who had less fear of death.

Striking, yeah. I went through my, you know, sister's death and she was in massive denial about dying. She had two kids, she clearly didn't want to die and she was 57. It's sort of the opposite extreme of someone who's in such denial about death even until after the moment that they take their last breath and to enter it in a different way as a celebration, as a dance, as a, you know, chapter. And I've seen other people do it really quite differently. I've seen people really just beautifully die. And I think, you know, we, when we're stuck in our separateness and our self and our identity and our, you know, sort of narcissism, let's call it, it's very hard to see outside of this current reality and understand that we're maybe are part of something bigger and that, you know, that, that that kind of consciousness that, like, let's call higher self, lower self, right? The higher self is your soul and your lower self could be your ego. They're always there. And the question is, which one's talking?

Yeah.

Which one are you listening to? And whose direction are you taking? And, you know, I find myself battling with that all the time, you know, like, and I begin to, you know, try to develop an awareness of who's, who's having the conversation in my head. and I think for many of us, that's a really basic practice and that's where things like mindfulness, yoga, meditation, psychedelic can come in because they'll kind of give you a clue that, oh, there's another consciousness, the witness consciousness, let's call it, that actually can be present that doesn't have judgment, it doesn't have, you know, a need for things to be this way or that way, but this can kind of go, oh, you know, like, and just watch. And, and it's, it's a very, it's a very important skill to develop that we never even get taught and we don't know about and doesn't really get talked about that much. You're talking about mindfulness, being in the moment, being present, and then be here now. It's all great. But we're really talking about is developing a level of awareness.

Yeah.

And I think that's, you know, what Ron does talked about. as being a state of loving awareness, right?

That was how he described it in the latter part of his teaching, yeah. And I think that it was almost kind of a softening of those boundaries between the higher self, lower self place, so that he was living more fluidly between those two. and, you know, I once asked him about that witness place, which was sort of one of the practices that he spoke of, especially earlier on. And I said, so that's kind of the, the neutral Observer of, in mindfulness, right? And he said, no, he said, that's the soul that's coming from the soul. That's part of your soul.

It's your deeper being, the loving, loving awareness.

Well, the. The witness part, the awareness part.

Yes. It's coming from your soul.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He said that's a connection to your soul.

Yeah.

And that's.

Do you want to listen to that?

Yeah.

That soul is watching the Incarnation go by and. allowing your, you to love it all, including yourself, which is, you know, as we started out with, it's the toughest part to.

Yeah.

I mean, it's all a judging and, you know.

Yeah.

And the loving awareness to yourself and also to all of those around you. Right. How do you, how do you become in a state of that and, and, you know, there's no one way, right? I mean, psychedelics are a path, meditation, but it's almost bigger than that. Because, you know, I've known people who have meditated for 30 years. They're still crazy, neurotic, and, you know, yeah.

My wife still accuses me of being an asshole fairly regularly.

Well, there you go. And one of the fun things was I loved that I heard Ram Dass speak in the 1980s. I went to hear him talk and you know, he just said something really stuck in my mind. He said, look, you know, I'm screwed up like the rest of you, and I'm just friends with all my neuroses, and I know their names. And I, you know, I I see them coming, and I'm like, hey, I'm busy. Leave me alone. Like, I'm. Go away right now.

Go.

Go to go. Go bother somebody else. And then just sort of, like, become, you know, not grasping onto your. Onto your Consciousness in a way that. That you. are one with them. That's what you don't want to be one with, is identifying with your mind, your monkey mind, right?

Sometimes he talked about it in terms.

Of.

Distinguishing between roles and souls. Who you are is not what you do. Who you are is not who you think you are. who you are as your inner being, your soul. And, you know, it's. As you just said, it's very individual. Nobody. I can't tread on your path and you can't tread on mine. And we all have our own work to do, which I guess is.

Our.

Karma, which is entered into the Western lexicon with probably a little bit of confusion. Yeah, we definitely all have our own work to do.

Yeah, well, it's true. We're really, we're all in a sort of a dance of trying to just be more aware to wake up to, you know, be present. And I think, you know, in this moment where we're all in a kind of massive timeout, I always sort of joke and say, you know, I think humans were being so bad that God gave us a massive timeout and go to your room and think about what you've been doing and reevaluate your life.

And your in a way of enforced retreat.

Pretty much. It's like, all right, you're all going to a monastery. It's called your living room. And we've had to sort of look at ourselves differently. And we've seen some dark sides, but we've also seen some incredible life sides of people reimagining what their life should be and what they want to be doing. And I've talked to so many people who've, during this COVID craziness and also these sort of a people in the world are really looking at their values and what matters to them and what they want to be doing. And, you know, I wondered, you know, if Ram Dass were here today during COVID-19, what would be the teachings that he might share about how we can navigate all this?

Yeah, I wonder too.

Come on, you're supposed to channel Ram Dass right now.

No, I mean, for one thing, it's a really good time to do practice of whatever kind you are engaged in. whatever you have at hand or to learn, you know, tools for working on yourself and finding yourself, whether it's that self-inquiry from Ramana Maharshi or chanting or doing Mantra or doing yoga, you know, whatever one of my cousins says, whatever blows your skirt up, you know, it's. It's whatever works for you. But finding that what does work for you, what can help with that, finding your way into that witness place where you can see it, see yourself from a little bit outside of your ego self.

Yeah.

And, and those tools are more available now, I think, because of people like Ram Dass and Danny's emotional intelligence and you know, that's turned into social, emotional learning for school kids.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the toolbox is more available, I think, and I think it is thanks to the people who, you know, became Bridges for some of that work early on.

Yeah.

I mean, it was, it was interesting. He was sort of a unique character around dos because he was sort of this, you know, Jewish. gay guy from the 50s who bought into all the materialism and had a fancy plane and a car and a this and a that. And then I was like kind of living the high life as this Harvard professor, which I don't know how he afforded all that. I don't know, Harvard professor salary, but that's enough. Maybe it was selling acid on the side. I don't know.

That came later.

And then he, you know, hooked up with Timothy Leary and they started doing all these extraordinary experiments and got fired from Harvard. And it was, you know, he kind.

Of.

Really, you know, kind of was the point of the spear to sort of break through our sort of materialist culture. I mean, there'd been little bits of it that had come through earlier on before him, but it seems like he's showing up on the scene in America. with his Harvard credentials and his background. And so he couldn't be easily dismissed. He was very articulate, he was very funny, and he was very accessible. It also grew very organically. Like I think he, people just sort of got it and he was able to sort of bring some of the sort of vibration, let's call it, of Maharaji back to the United States, which people started to kind of glom onto. But he was really just a vehicle for it. He was a little screwed up himself, you know?

And I think he used to talk about himself. I mean, this dates me thoroughly as the Charlie McCarthy doll, which is the ventriloquist dummy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, he felt like he was to the extent that he could get out of the way that Maharaji, that place, that unlimited unconditional love could come through him, and it did. But I think the combination that, you know, gelled in him through his upbringing, you know, there's a story about him being when he was, you know.

Still.

An adolescent, he would MC family musical gatherings.

Okay.

And then he became a. A teacher and taught psychology. And then he started doing psychedelics and went around lecturing around the country about psychedelics. And then, you know, Maharaji took him over and made him the ventriloquist dummy for yoga and meditation. Yeah, but that. That, you know, Confluence of. incarnations that he had been through, I think made him a, you know, kind of unique vehicle for that time.

Yeah, I mean, too.

I think there, it's curious when we have run Retreats, there is a whole other generational, you know, kind of Cadre of, of young people who need this now.

Absolutely. I mean, you're seeing this mainstream. I mean, you've got Lululemon and yoga. It's like it's become a big industry. And, you know, meditation is kind of normalized in society. It's not this weird thing, you know, corporate executives do it, Silicon Valley leaders do it, sports teams do it. I mean, apparently how the Seattle Seahawks and the Chicago Bulls won so many games, right? And none of that was really in the culture back then, and the whole idea of mindfulness or presence or being here now or yog or meditation were all pretty new and they weren't really that prevalent in the sixties. I mean, I think you had the Beatles going to go see, uh, Maraji, which is another Maharaji Ma Risi Yeah, Marisi Maris, Iris Maiogia. that Tia and TM came on the scene. But there was very little of that. And I think the beautiful thing about what Ram Dass brought into the culture was sort of just the questions without the dogma. And I think there's so much dogma out there and so much rigidity around beliefs and this and that is the right way, this way and that way. And he was just sort of this sea of questions and curiosity and inquiry into the nature of things and the nature of our mind, the nature of our souls, the nature of happiness, the nature of love. And it sort of, we created an invitation for people to start thinking about that.

And.

Now more than ever, it just seems like this is the moment where this book, Being Ram Dass, something we should all pick up. Because I think within it, the stories and the teachings the lessons are so relevant now more than ever, as people are struggling or feeling fearful and anxious. And I'm so excited that you've brought this book to being, after his death, you guys were working on this for a long time.

Yeah, about 10 years, I think, all put together.

Yeah, yeah. So you kind of culminated, but here it is in this moment where everything is falling apart. It's a way to sort of maybe think about how to, you know, come back together with a different view.

I think that combination of wisdom and love is really very much needed now for all of us. And that is that coming together, I think, in at one point, B. The line is in, I think, be love now. And it said, love is the emotion of merging. And it's that coming together.

Emotion emerging. Yeah. That's right. I mean, that's absolutely right. I mean, it's really about those moments in life where you feel most alive and connected. It's when we lose, we lose our ego, we lose our sense of separateness when you're in love with somebody, when you're making love when you're watching a beautiful sunset, when you're having some type of deep experience. But there were very few people who brought this awareness. There were people like Elvis Huxley who were a little ahead of the game and Alan Watts who was way back then and Gary Snyder. There were a couple of characters but Ram Dass really had the sort of, he had the stage in a way that I think led to a lot of the good things that are happening now in our culture around mindfulness and mindfulness practices and sort of reassessing what we're doing. And I think, I don't know, I encourage everybody now to really pick up this book and check it out because without a bigger perspective, this is a very, very tough moment for people. And I just think, I think any last thoughts about why why do you think this book is important now for people?

Well, I think it's kind of a parable for our own journeys in that sense that, you know, you can find a way to go inside to get outside yourself. In that sense, you know, really, and find that heart space which Ram Dass described as feeling like just being home, you know, home in the heart.

Yeah, being home. Yeah, I think that's right. It's like being home is being more in your living in your soul than living in your ego.

Yeah.

That's good. Well, Ramesh, thank you so much for bringing this book to life. And it's available now everywhere you get your books. I encourage people to check it out. and it's just a beautiful story and it's a beautiful set of teachings. And I think, you know, his life was really kind of inspiration. I think, you know, it's particularly, unfortunately he had a stroke, but particularly because he had a stroke, it sort of kind of deepened in a way that I don't think it might have otherwise. So I'm really glad. I'm sorry he isn't around anymore. I would have loved to actually meet him and hang out with him.

Yeah, it'd be fun to see what he thought of it at this point.

Yeah, yeah, oh God, crazy times. well, thank you so much.

I think he's having fun.

Yeah, I'm sure.

Whatever.

Well, thank you so much for mesh. This has been a great conversation about things that really matter.

I've really enjoyed it, Mark. Thank you.

Everybody who's listened to this conversation, that you loved it, please share it with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you and subscribe to every year podcast, and we'll see you next time on the doctors farm.

I'm curious.