The Interview

The Interview It was in my third week as Ram Dass' caretaker that Donna Sorenson showed up at the San Francisco Body and Soul Conference to interview him for a feature story in the New York Times. The Body and Soul Conference is a traveling spiritual circus sponsored by Omega Institute and New Age Journal. It moves from city to city entertaining the groovy masses, but instead of elephants, acrobats, and clowns, it features healers, holy men, and anyone with a self-help product or service to sell. The conference was a welcome deviation from the mundane routine I had settled into as caretaker at Ram Dass’ house. Wake up, do my own thing until I heard him ring his bell, then help him get up and to the bathroom, showered and groomed. Then back to the bedroom to dress, then to the kitchen to make, serve and clean up breakfast while Ram Dass read the paper. The rest of the day was spent doing not much. Ram Dass would sit in his wheelchair in his office, reading or looking out the window, or entertaining occasional guests and supplicants, while I hung out in the background, working on my computer, watching videos, chatting with friends on the phone. Occasionally, I would bundle Ram Dass into the BMW for a trip to the doctor, but mostly we just hung around the house until evening, filled with dinner in front of the TV, before giving Ram Dass his meds, and reversing the morning process of bathing and dressing and putting him to bed. Because of Ram Dass’ post-stroke difficulty speaking, this daily routine was conducted with close to no chatting between us. The lack of communication was beginning to make me feel like an emotionally starved housewife in a loveless marriage, who keeps the house nice and puts food on the table, without ever a compliment on her new blouse or a query how her day was. Of course, I wasn't Ram Dass’ wife, I was his caretaker, but I didn't come to California to take a job, I came for the chance to deepen my relationship with him. Thus, I was glad to pack up Ram Dass and all his accessories and drive down to the Hyatt Regency, just south of San Francisco airport. The Hyatt was an immense domestic oasis amid the desert of urban sprawl on the outskirts of San Francisco, a haven for itinerant businessmen who preferred the convenience of staying close to the airport over finding real lodgings closer to the city. Likewise, the Hyatt was equipped to host the hundreds of pilgrims who traveled from around the country to sit en masse at the feet of Ram Dass and fellow New Age luminaries and drink up the distilled wisdom of the day.

Ram Dass had two separate agendas planned during the conference. One was to do his by now routine post-stroke public shtick. Namely, to roll out in his wheelchair and amaze and delight his legion of followers by still being alive despite his close brush with death and lasting dysfunction. The other agenda was to be interviewed by Donna Sorenson for the article in the Times. The article, a cover story in the Sunday Magazine section, was part of a coordinated multimedia celebration of Ram Dass to occur in May. Both the article and a feature length documentary were to be released just ahead of Ram Dass’ long awaited new book Still Here. Ram Dass had been working on the book for a couple of years and was in the home stretch when he had his stroke. Since the book is an investigation of the challenges and opportunities of old age, Ram Dass’ collapse was a brilliant stroke of luck, so to speak. What better way to conclude such a book than to drive his aging body and brain into the abyss of a cerebral vascular accident, then return triumphantly to tell about it. This was a magnificent trick, but not an easy one. It called first for Ram Dass to survive the stroke, which was no sure thing for quite a while, then to recover from the massive damage of the stroke well enough to finish the book. Ram Dass’ publisher had hedged their bets by importing a ghost writer to finish the book, in case due to death or disability Ram Dass was unable to do so himself. After many months, Ram Dass returned to cognitive competence to find that his book had been significantly re-written while he had been off counting brain cells and struggling to regain his health. He was like a battered king returning from the crusades to find that his underlings had thought him lost and reshaped the kingdom according to their own vision. Now Ram Dass was back, rather the worse for wear, but fighting to regain his creative kingdom, spending many hours undoing much of the work of the ghost writer before the book was fit to print. The article in the Times was particularly significant because it marked the end of a twodecade feud between Ram Dass and the Times, initiated by an excessively critical article written about him. Donna was an accomplished journalist, who had written one of the first mainstream articles about Ram Dass back in the mid-seventies when he was newly returned from India. According to her, she got the idea for the current article totally by accident. She had wanted to hear Ram Dass when he spoke at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City last September, but the show was sold out, so she applied for a press pass. But press passes weren't that easy to

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come by either; the organizers wanted to know what publication she was working for. The New York Times Sunday Magazine, she lied, and was consequently given a pass. The show in New York was amazing, both by Donna's and my own estimation. 900 New York devotees of Ram Dass crowded into the cathedral to witness Ram Dass’ return from the abyss of his stroke. Ram Dass had a large following in the city and they had all fretted and anguished as he lay at death's door and then as he struggled for more than 2 years to recover his faculties. In keeping with the ambience of the cathedral in which it was held, the performance was structured like religious gatherings of many traditions and ages before. There was a cantor to lead the congregation in religious chants, then a rabbi to give the sermon. That's how it's done in my own Jewish experience, but it is likewise with a Baptist preacher and the choir, or in the Hindu tradition that Ram Dass was inspired by. Ram Dass was the rabbi that night and his old friend Krishna Das was the cantor. Ram Dass met Krishna Das in India at the feet of their guru, Neem Karoli Baba. Krishna Das was formerly Jeffrey Kagel from Brooklyn, and he had eventually returned to the New York from India to make a career performing modern renderings of the ancient Hindu devotional chants he learned there. He had a large following of his own in the city and it was his people who had brought together the show at the cathedral. The performance began with Krishna Das and his band playing traditional Indian instruments while they led the audience in call and reply chanting. I had seen Krishna Das perform several times already at the weeklong retreat of Ram Dass and friends at Omega Institute the previous week in upstate New York. As far as I could tell, he has one trick that he plays over and over again, but that no one tires of because it works brilliantly every time he pulls it. He starts off with a short, simple Hindu chant, which he sings at a very slow easy tempo, pausing after each line to allow the audience to sing it back to him. He stays at one tempo for quite a while, until everyone knows the chant without problem. Then, he picks up the tempo a notch. The audience sings back and forth with him at the new pace with greater energy and enthusiasm for a good while, then he picks up the tempo even further. This continues, step by step, the same chant sung at increasingly rapid tempo, the energy in the room building and building, until everyone is dancing and clapping and going wild, faster and faster, until you can't believe it can go any higher, but it does, and it's just a trick to get everyone over the edge, but it works every time, the crowd just goes completely nuts.

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Then suddenly he stops. The silence that ensues is as deafening as the cacophony that preceded it. Everyone's head and heart is spinning like kids who have just gotten off an enormous roller coaster and their body and blood can't believe they are on solid ground again, not hurtling madly through space. Phew. Then Krishna Das starts another slow simple chant and gradually ramps it up to insane frenzy all over again. Finally, Krishna Das is done for real. The audience is limp and wrung out, completely open, completely present. The cantor has done his job, now it's time for the rabbi to go to work. What a contrast, too. So much sound and fury, now the audience turns their attention to an old tongue-tied man in a wheelchair. See, the thing about Ram Dass now is that he can still think brilliantly, but he can't talk. The stroke has devastated the language centers of his brain; many of his words are missing. It's like words are now longer Ram Dass’ first language. He's like an immigrant, right off the boat, trying to make himself understood in a language he barely knows. Like an immigrant, he can either stick to learned phrases, repeated by rote, or he can rummage among his limited vocabulary to come up with something new. That's what Ram Dass does on stage. He works to express his wisdom using the scrambled hodge-podge of words still at his disposal. He'll start a sentence and then get stuck on a word and just hang there. He'll furrow his brow and grope for the word he wants, his face will light up as he almost finds it, but no, that's not it, look for something else. It takes a lot of patience and concentration to listen to this strange presentation. This isn't the old Ram Dass, who used to be so glib and articulate. While he's stuck looking for a word, you sit there wondering how messed up he really is. Is there anything left of the old Ram Dass? Is this old man in the wheelchair just a sweet nostalgic remnant of the visionary truth teller we used to know? Is he saying anything coherent at all? Then Ram Dass gets unstuck and says something amazing. Suddenly, all doubts of his competency are dispelled. He makes you work to receive what he has to share, but then he richly rewards the effort. He is no longer glib, now every thought expressed is a jewel. He can't afford to waste words; he has to express himself as succinctly and essentially as possible. It's like all he can manage is the distilled essence of all his years of wisdom. Worth waiting for, I'd say. Donna was so blown away by Ram Dass’ presentation that she decided she should earn her press pass and actually write an article about him. But not for the New York Times, this was worth pitching to the New Yorker.

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When I met Donna at the conference in California, I asked her about her journalistic accomplishments. I had learned a lot about freelance journalism during my relationship with my recent ex, Lisa, as she worked to be a writer, so I was interested to hear about Donna's background. One of the legacies of my shared life with Lisa was I developed the habit of reading the New Yorker. I used to think that all the New Yorker was good for was the cartoons and the movie reviews. I thought you had to live in Manhattan to read the rest. But during my year living with Lisa, I discovered the New Yorker as a repository of consistently excellent journalism: many happy hours were spent languishing on the couch or ensconced in the bathroom, soaking up the latest issue. I became such an avid reader of Lisa's New Yorker subscription that after we broke up, I paid actual money to get my own subscription, and I've been reading it faithfully ever since. So when I asked Donna whom she had written for I was hoping that her resume would include a relatively recent piece in the New Yorker, and I could then impress her by commenting on it knowledgeably. What a good way to get in her good graces by showing familiarity with her writing. But Donna didn't take my bait right away. She replied with dismissive modesty that she had written for almost everyone. The implication was that she was so widely published that she couldn't begin to enumerate the countless magazine she had appeared in. Had she written for the New Yorker, I inquired, still hoping that I had read something of hers? No, she replied in a suddenly deflated and pained tone. She had written for everything except the New Yorker. I could hear the unmistakable annoyance in her voice. Her exclusion from the New Yorker was the one deficit in her sterling resume and I had managed to expose this painful professional flaw within ten minutes of meeting her. I was just trying to complement her, really. In fact, Donna had originally offered her intended Ram Dass story to the New Yorker. She pulled some strings to get a meeting with a senior editor at the magazine and pitched him the story. The editor replied that he liked her work and would like to publish something of hers someday. He just didn't think that the readers of the New Yorker would be interested in the whole Ram Dass thing. Thank you very much for stopping by. Thus thwarted, Donna took her story to the New York Times, who hired her on the spot to do the story. The Times wasn't the New Yorker, but a gig was a gig, and thus did Donna show up at the Body and Soul Conference to interview Ram Dass at length.

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Ram Dass and I arrived at the Hyatt Regency on the first night of the conference, just in time to find our rooms and have some dinner before Dean Ornish gave the opening presentation. I had the impression the Dean was some kind of extremist food fanatic, and was thus prepared to ridicule and jeer, but he turned out to be a meticulous scientist who never made a claim without backing it up with endless studies and supportive data. His basic claim was that a low-fat diet, combined with exercise and stress management is good for you. Hardly an extremist position. In his talk he presented extensive research showing such a regime was good for one's physical heart, then he did a little deft up-leveling and suggested that cultivating love towards oneself and others was good for one's spiritual heart. When the presentation was over, it was pretty late, and clearly time to get Ram Dass up to his room and to bed, especially as Ram Dass was scheduled to deliver the conference's keynote address first thing the next morning. Unfortunately, getting Ram Dass through the lobby to the elevators turned out to be harder than getting him down had been. Not because he was in a wheelchair, mind you. Because he was Ram Dass. The crowd hadn't noticed him coming in, but they sure noticed him on the way out, and we were deluged by numerous old friends, groupies, and devotees who wanted to greet and be blessed by the blessed one. There is of course an ancient tradition of having a personal exchange with a holy being. In Hinduism, it's called Darshan. You offer greetings, sometimes gifts, to the guru, maybe you touch their feet or bow before them. The guru blesses you by receiving what you offer and sharing a little of their grace in return. Ram Dass himself spent years at the feet of his guru in India when he was younger. Now he was the revered beloved elder and it was inevitable that the people who had loved hearing stories of his devotion to his guru would be drawn to cast Ram Dass in the same role. Ram Dass displayed mixed feeling about being cast in the role of holy relic. As he has discussed many times, his childhood psychology predisposed him to subordinate himself to people of power, whether it was his father, the railroad magnate; Tim Leary, the charismatic psychedelic visionary; Neem Karoli Baba, his guru; or the many rich and powerful men from whom he solicited donations on behalf of the SEVA Foundation. Ram Dass was always the sidekick, the protégé, the disciple, the supplicant. Thus, he felt markedly uncomfortable to have somehow lived long enough to become the mentor, the sage, the master. On the other hand, like it or not, Ram Dass had grown into the role of elder. For more than forty years he has been exploring the frontiers of human consciousness, through psychology,

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through psychedelics, through spirituality, through service. Now, pushing seventy, he has out-lived almost all of his mentors and teachers, and same time he has spawned countless students and devotees of his own through his writings, his lectures, and the unfolding of his life in the public eye. It might not suit his psychology to be treated with reverence and devotion, but he was otherwise perfectly suited for the role. It would be like if you grew old and plump and jolly and liked to give presents to good little boys and girls around Christmas. You might not feel like it, but what choice would you have but to say Ho, ho, ho. I don't mean to say that Ram Dass didn't like being adored by crowds of people wherever he went. I mean to say part of him didn't like it and part of him loved it. The part of him that was the skeptical, rational scientist hated all those dewy, doe-eyed devotees fawning over him, doting on his every word, his every gesture, their hearts full of love and their heads full of nothing. On the other hand, Ram Dass had spent decades teaching that the best way to touch the divine was to hold all the world in your heart with as much love as possible. He had preached loving and practiced loving for so long. He hadn't invested in Social Security, he had invested in the power of love and his karmic return was that he had become an irresistible object of love and adoration for the countless seekers who made pilgrimage to stand before him. I was constantly touched and moved by the wave of devotional energy that enveloped Ram Dass, especially at events that brought out his tribe, like the Body and Soul Conference. But it was intense, too. People would cough up their hearts and souls and entrails and lay them in Ram Dass’ wheelchair-bound lap. For example, this one young, excessively earnest man who intercepted Ram Dass as we left the conference hall that night. As I said, I was trying to get Ram Dass back to his room and to bed, but Ram Dass considered connecting individually with the devoted as much a part of his job as lecturing the masses. Consequently, if he had any energy at all, he was always willing to stop and commune with the public. So, Ram Dass hit the brakes and invited this fellow to speak. The guy apologized for taking any time, but he wanted to show Ram Dass something. He handed Ram Dass an autographed copy of Be Here Now, Ram Dass’ own book, his own autograph. The book, the kid explained, had been his mother's, who had been inspired by Ram Dass and the book to leave her husband and child to run off in search of higher truths. His mom had recently committed suicide and her prized copy of Be Here Now was found on the night table beside her.

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Can you imagine that? What would you do if some earnest kid came to honor you for inspiring his mother to abandon him and embark on a path that led to her death? Ram Dass did what he often did in such cases, which was to put his one good hand on his heart and look up into the kid’s eyes with a look of unconditional love and kindness, just holding that look while the kid soaked it up like a dipsomaniac at an open bar. And that was all the kid wanted, far as I could tell. Not to blame Ram Dass or to praise him or to get him to re-autograph the book 25 years later or to ask anything of him except to hear his story in honor of his dead mother. Intense. And that guy was just one of the many who crowded around Ram Dass as I wheeled him slowly towards the refuge of the waiting hotel elevator. So close and yet so far. We had almost succeeded in rowing through the ocean of earnest little fishes, when we got snagged by a big fish who was just as eager to have a nibble of Ram Dass’ time. It was Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of many books on using mindfulness techniques as cure for physical ailments. Jon was a regular on the New Age road circuit, one of Ram Dass’ fellow headliners at the Body and Soul conference. He realized Ram Dass might be ready for bed but he wanted him to meet with Dean Ornish. This was the difference between Ram Dass’ little devotees and his big devotees. The little ones brought small gifts, like books, photos, crafts, fruit, tapes, snacks. The big guys sometimes gave material gifts too, albeit of significantly greater cost, but their favorite offering to Ram Dass was health care professionals. I saw it time and again in my seven weeks with Ram Dass. Dharma luminaries and New Age honchos of various lineages, persuasions and ilks showing up at Ram Dass’ door with a wellness-intentioned health care professional in tow. Some times it was a meditation teacher offering a yoga instructor, sometimes a workshop leader presenting a shaman, or maybe a best selling pop psychologist with his favorite acupuncturist. They were all just being polite, I suppose. It certainly wouldn't do to show up to visit a beloved sick person without some sort of gift. So here was Jon Kabat-Zinn blocking our path to the elevator wanting to give Ram Dass the gift of Dean Ornish. Surely, Dean could recommend a diet for Ram Dass that would conduce to optimal health and well-being. The trouble with giving health care as a gift is that rather than getting to play with the gift, if it were some gadget or toy, the gift gets to play with you. And if you don't like the gift, don't want to play its games, you can't pass it on to someone else or stuff it in the closet until next time the

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giver comes to visit. No, when you get health care for a gift, you are expected not only to embrace the required therapy or regime but ideally you should get better enough so the giver can feel they made a difference in your convalescence. It's not that Ram Dass didn't want to get better; it's just that recovering from a stroke is a very slow incremental process, not very amenable to magical nostrums and miracle cures. In the case of Dean Ornish, it was probably true that a good strict diet would benefit Ram Dass’ health, but it was just as true that Ram Dass didn't have much interest in adhering to a strict diet. It was bad enough he could barely walk, had difficulty speaking, couldn't use his right arm at all, couldn't engage in so many of the activities he enjoyed before the stroke. Eating was one of the few sports that Ram Dass could still partake of. All it takes is one good hand with a fork in it, a mouth full of teeth, a functioning appetite and digestive track, and a ready assortment of tasty food objects. Fortunately, Dean proved himself again to be remarkably astute, not your run of the mill New Age self-promoter. He met with Ram Dass, chatted for a while, then finally announced that he wouldn't recommend any sort of diet for Ram Dass because he knew that Ram Dass had no interest in following a diet. How true, yet how refreshing to have the diet man admit it in advance. We sure dodged a low-salt, low-calorie bullet there. The next morning, Ram Dass rang his bell early summoning me to get him up and washed and dressed and breakfasted in advance of his morning address in the main conference hall. The hall was immense and full to capacity with polite hordes eager to gobble up whatever Ram Dass had to share. I assumed Ram Dass would be serving his usual post-stroke fare: I had a stroke, I nearly died, but, surprise, I'm still here. But Ram Dass had been doing the still here shtick for more than half a year now and since the San Francisco crowd had already heard it a few times, apparently he figured it was time to add a new wrinkle to the fabric, a new song to his play list. Usually, Ram Dass follows up I'm still here with a long riff on the stroke as grace from his guru. Not a catastrophe, but an opportunity to experience new lessons, to investigate interesting uncharted terrain. A gift from God, nothing to complain about. That's what I was used to hearing but this time Ram Dass deviated from the it’s perfect just the way it is routine. Instead, he admitted what an ordeal his recuperation had been, and how for quite a while his predicament had not seemed perfect just the way it was, that he had been lost in doubt and despair, that his faith that his guru would always protect him had been so shaken that he

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had his picture removed from the altar at his hospital bedside. He couldn't stand to look at his guru's face smiling lovingly at him despite his devastated physical condition. This new twist in the story certainly made it more interesting. Instead of I had a stroke, but no big deal, the new story was I had a stroke, it was a big deal, but I managed to regain my faith and learn to live and love again. Admitting his loss of faith made Ram Dass seem more human and vulnerable and consequently more heroic and inspirational in the long run. I sat in the back of the packed conference hall listening to Ram Dass enthrall the audience; a master storyteller working the crowd. He’s been telling the tale of his personal journey for more than 30 years, but he keeps people coming back with the promise of something new that they didn't hear last time. This isn't the movies, this is theater: the show is similar but never the same twice. Actually, I was only partly listening to Ram Dass gives his mesmerizing keynote address. Earlier that morning, Ram Dass and I had discussed his decision to talk about his loss of faith. It was one of my favorite parts of being his caretaker and companion: being actively involved in his creative process. Giving my feedback and opinion, helping him compensate for damaged parts of his mental processes. Helping him get his body around was OK, but helping him get his ideas across was what really turned me on. Thus, by the time Ram Dass was on stage, I had already done my part and instead I turned my attention to my own creative process. From the start of my job caretaking Ram Dass, I recognized that this was a potentially great story wanting to be told, not just me writing stories about the tiny events of my personal life, but a retelling of the time-honored classic, the lion in winter, a portrait of the artist as an old man, a chance to get an inside scoop on the man who introduced psychedelics and spirituality to a generation of America, now in probably the final chapter of his long and peregrinatious life. Recognizing this as a great story to be able to tell, I also realized that it needed more attention than I usually brought to my literary efforts. There was no way I was going to remember all the interesting twist and turns of my travels with Ram Dass unless I wrote things down as I went. Thus, from the start, whenever I had spare time, I got in the habit of writing down little snapshots of what was happening lately. The only thing was, when Ram Dass and I were on the road, the only spare time I had was when he was engaged on stage. After I got Ram Dass situated, made sure he had everything he needed, I'd then settle down in an inconspicuous spot, boot up my

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handy notebook computer and write and write and write, even as I kept one eye on him in case he needed me, and one ear on him in case he said anything new and unexpected. That's what I did during Ram Dass’ keynote address. The hall was so full that I was only able to find a suitable seat way, way in the back, near a socket to plug into, with a water cooler to occasionally quench my thirst on one side and a woman sitting on the other drinking up Ram Dass’ presentation with rapt attention despite the distance. When I started as Ram Dass’ caretaker, I was told that he didn't like it when people around him finished his sentences for him. He felt that struggling to find his missing words was good exercise for his damaged brain, just like struggling to walk with a walker was better exercise for his damaged limbs than always being schlepped around in a wheelchair. At first, I followed this rule to the letter, and would let Ram Dass struggle indefinitely until he found the word he wanted or gave up. Eventually, though, I learned that leaving him to his own fragile mental devices wasn't always the appropriate strategy. Just as he sometimes wanted the exercise of struggling to walk and other times wanted the expediency of being wheeled, likewise it was sometimes best to let him grope to find the right word, or any word, and other times, he was glad to have me gently suggest the word he was likely looking for. This was particularly the case when Ram Dass talked in public. I often knew the word Ram Dass was looking for because it was the same one he had used the last time he had told the same story, and the time before that, and the time before that. Sometimes Ram Dass would be content rummaging endlessly for a word, but other times he would look over to me and I would softly call out the word so he could continue with his talk. This interactive dynamic worked smoothly in more intimate venues, but it didn't work at all at the Body and Soul Conference, given I was so far away from Ram Dass on the stage that I doubt I could have thrown a baseball from where I was sitting and reached him. I did it anyway though, just out of habit. Call out the word, I mean, not throw a baseball. Ram Dass got to the part of his talk where he describes his inability to find words by saying that his ideas are still intact but that the dressing room where he cloaks his ideas in words has been bombed out. Except he couldn't spit out the words “dressing room.” He just sat there searching in his mental dressing room for the words “dressing room,” as I sat far away typing my own stories, until out of habit I said “dressing room” in my usual soft tone of voice, just a moment before Ram Dass found the words on his own.

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I didn't mean anything by saying “dressing room” just before Ram Dass did. Certainly Ram Dass didn't hear me, it was only a coincidence that I said it ahead of him. I knew that, but the woman sitting next to me didn't. Out of the corner of my eye, I could feel her looking oddly at me and wondering how I had guessed that dressing room was what Ram Dass was about to say. Strange guy sitting typing persistently on a computer, attention split between the screen and Ram Dass’ unfolding presentation, knowing what he was about to say. Very weird. I thought this was funny, picturing how this looked through her eyes, so I kept doing it. Ram Dass often compares the way words pop up in his mind to the way they call out the numbers at a Bingo parlor. Except this time, he couldn't think of the word Bingo. All he said was it's like, like... and got stuck. He kept mouthing the sound “Buh” and drawing the rectangular shape of a bingo card in the air with his good hand. Impossible to guess what he was about to say, unless you had heard him talk about bingo many times before. Watching the woman slyly out of the corner of my eye, I said bingo, once again just before Ram Dass finally got on track and said bingo himself. This was way too weird for the woman. Dressing room? Bingo??? What the hell was going on? Ram Dass couldn't find an obscure word, then the guy in the back of the room with the computer says the word and as if by magic, then Ram Dass would. What kind of magic? What was the computer for? Was it connected to some implant in Ram Dass’ brain? Was Ram Dass really still here or was this just some hi-tech animatronic simulation being operated by some silicone valley geek-wizard hiding in the back of the room. At his death, Tim Leary wanted to have his head frozen until technology advanced enough to get him a new body. Maybe Ram Dass was having his body operated by computer until we were able to get him a new brain. Very strange. When Ram Dass finished his talk, I dashed to the podium and wheeled him off stage through the ocean of grateful dazzled devotees and fans. By the time we had inched halfway through the crowd, the mystified woman who sat beside me came up and exclaimed with surprise, “Oh, I see, you work for Ram Dass!” “Sure,” I replied. “How did you think I was doing that? Magic?” Having concluded his public speaking duties, Ram Dass turned his attention to the interview with Donna Sorenson. Donna met Ram Dass for room service lunch along with me and Ram Dass’ secretary Marlene and a couple of other folks. Donna tagged along with us for the next two days with alternating periods of focused interview time and general Ram Dass activities, like a filmed

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discussion with New Age singer Robbie Gass and Omega Institute founder Stephan Rechtenshaff for some offbeat holistic health cable network. As I mentioned, Donna was a serious and practiced writer and journalist, but she was also a long time admirer of Ram Dass. Thus, even as she asked him all her prepared questions about his stroke and his new book and the like, she also took the opportunity to get Ram Dass’ darshan, to tell him her problems and get his advice and guidance, like I’d witnessed so many times during my time with Ram Dass in New York and California. The problem Donna placed at Ram Dass’ wise and quasi-holy feet was the recent conduct of her 15-year-old daughter, Janie. Donna had been bringing Janie up by herself since her divorce years ago, and Janie had been acting out rather egregiously of late. Despite her young age, she had taken to hanging out with a bad crowd, engaging in serious recreational drug use, leaving her diaphragm lying around for Donna to discover, piercing her body, both ornamentally and in acts of self-destructive mutilation. Donna told Ram Dass all this in hopes of winning his sympathy and getting the benefit of his wise council. It was obvious that her daughter’s behavior was very distressing to her and she was at the end of her rope in trying to deal with her effectively and constructively. Ram Dass tried to give Donna a little practical advice concerning relating in firm but compassionate ways to troubled teenagers, which Donna consistently responded to by explaining the utter intractability and impossibility of implementing any constructive suggestion. Eventually, Ram Dass switched gears and began encouraging Donna to shift levels, to see her predicament with her daughter as part of the cosmic dance, to play her role as troubled mother with all her heart, but to see it same time as only a role, not the end of the world, just a single page in the never ending drama we are all acting out. Donna would have no part in such up-leveling, though. It was obvious, even to me, that she was way too identified and stuck in her role to step back and look at it as just part of the everpassing show. Her attachment to her situation reminded me of the trouble Ram Dass got in several years ago when, in the midst of one of his cross-country speaking tours, he addressed a question about the value of Alcoholics Anonymous as a spiritual path. Ram Dass bent over backwards to praise the contribution of AA to many people’s lives, but he also pointed out the dangerous tendency of its members to become attached to their newfound identities as struggling alcoholics, and thus to have trouble eventually seeing through and moving beyond that identification. To me

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this was a valid point with no disrespect meant towards AA or its members. All methods, no matter how useful, must ultimately be transcended. Like Ram Dass likes to say: you use a thorn to remove a thorn, then you throw them both away. That’s how Ram Dass saw it, but there was a fierce backlash to his comments by a great number of people. How dare he criticize AA, it had saved their lives, how could he suggest they give it up, that it wasn’t useful? He wasn’t suggesting that at all, of course. Just that clinging to any identification can eventually become a hindrance. Likewise was Donna resistant to hearing Ram Dass’ advice not to get stuck in identification with her role as harried mother struggling with difficult daughter. It wasn’t the identification that was problematic, it was her stuckness around it. The level on which the identification was happening was so real to her that she was blinded to the level where it was all just energy flowing, or the level where it was a bunch of friends playing a game together, or the level where it was just God telling him/herself a joke, or the level where it was just nothing unfolding into nothing unfolding into nothing. Donna’s identification was so blinding that not only couldn’t she switch her perspective to other less vexing levels, but she couldn’t even understand what Ram Dass was talking about. I found this ignorance unbelievable given that Ram Dass talks about moving between different levels of consciousness all the time. It is the essence of his dharma model, as far as I’m concerned. That we exist on multiple levels of consciousness, each of which is relevant from its own point of view, and that integrity consists of acting on each level in a way that honors all levels. How could Donna be a long-time follower of Ram Dass’ and not know about multiple levels of consciousness? How could she be a trained journalist and interviewer and not have boned up on his core message? What did she think Ram Dass did for a living, nothing but play with beads, sing songs, and bow down to monkeys? Having no success up-leveling, Ram Dass moved closer to earth and tried an anthropological approach. He observed that in traditional cultures, it was common for youths to be initiated into adulthood by rituals involving risk-taking involving mind-altering plants. He suggested that Donna’s daughter was instinctively acting out similar ritual risk taking and that the bad boys she was consorting with were acting like the ancient priest administering the psychoactive plants. On hearing this explanation, I couldn’t resist interrupting to point out that if the bad boys were acting as priest to initiate Janie through risk-taking behavior, then clearly Ram Dass was the

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high priest of this faux religion, since he was the cultural originator of giving psychotropics to American youths to accelerate their spiritual journey. From a discursive point of view, this was an interesting and amusing construction, but it suddenly occurred to me that on a more mundane level, it was potentially quite dangerous. I realized that I had invited Ram Dass to admit to the person interviewing him for a major article in the New York Times that he was the root cause of the problems that were threatening her daughter’s well-being and causing her so much worry and grief. Realizing this, I grew suddenly worried that we might be goading Donna into resenting Ram Dass, perhaps resulting in yet another derogatory article about him in the Times. Ram Dass and I were making good points on one level, but I worried that we were not acting in a way that honored all levels. Ram Dass, though, showed no signs of sharing my concerns. Instead, he appeared to find my observation very amusing and repeated it to Donna: “That’s right,” he told her, “the boys are the priests, and I am the high priest.” Ram Dass’ apparent obliviousness to the necessity of encouraging Donna to write a positive article about him continued throughout this and subsequent interview sessions. Ram Dass seemed bent on telling Donna every story that came into his head, regardless of whether it reflected well on him and his cohorts or not. He told Donna all about the painful protracted lawsuit that nearly destroyed the SEVA Foundation and virtually ended his participation with them. He told her all about the still ongoing unpleasant power struggle that resulted in him firing his long-time manager and protégé Jai. Each time Ram Dass would start to tell one of these stories, I’d interrupt and ask “Are you sure you want to tell this story, RD?” I had learned that part of my job as caretaker was to help Ram Dass set boundaries for himself in areas where the damage to his brain impaired normal inhibition and prudence. Actually, to be honest, I was never really sure whether Ram Dass’ sometimes scandalous lack of inhibition was a consequence of his stroke or just a long-standing part of his personal style. On the one hand, Ram Dass did have certain boundary problems that were clearly stroke induced. For example, he had almost entirely lost his internal sense of time. He couldn’t instinctively tell a minute from an hour from a day from a month from a year. Once at home in Tiburon, UPS came to the door needing a signature on a parcel. Ram Dass rolled over in his wheelchair and the deliveryman made polite small talk about Ram Dass and his stroke. “How long ago had the stroke

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occurred?” he inquired. “Two…” Ram Dass began, followed by a long pause as he scrunched up his face, trying to decide two what? Days? Months? Years? He simply didn’t know what the words meant except by trying to recall what they used to mean to him before his stroke. It was like a blind person trying to recall the colors of the rainbow. “Two months,” he finally erroneously declared. The UPS man was quite impressed that Ram Dass was doing so well despite having had a major stroke only two months ago. Little did he realize that Ram Dass’ time estimate was proof of his ongoing disability, not of his rapid recovery. Likewise, when Ram Dass spoke in public, he showed not the slightest instinctive sense of time. At the Ram Dass and Friends workshop at Omega Institute in upstate New York, Ram Dass was asked how long he wanted to speak on the opening night. He said he only wanted to smile and wave and speak briefly, maybe for five minutes at most. The evening’s schedule was thrown way off when he instead spoke for an hour and a half. I eventually learned to compensate for Ram Dass’ lack of time sense. When we would arrive at a public talk, I would quiz the organizer about how long they had allotted for Ram Dass to speak. Then I’d ask how they would feel if he went significantly overtime. Was there a deadline by which they needed to be done or would it be fine if he went on as long as he wanted? Having ascertained these parameters, I would then discretely signal Ram Dass when it was time to wrap up. Thus, I considered the possibility that as well as having lost sense of the boundaries of time, Ram Dass had also lost sense of the boundaries of propriety. On the other hand, Ram Dass had always, always, been a risk-taking rascal. He often said that one should live life as whole-heartedly as possible and accept the inevitability of now and then falling on one's face in the process. It was all grist for the mill, as one of his book titles proclaimed. Living freely, risking screwing up, enjoying it all, learning from it all, this was the cosmic dance of life that Ram Dass recommended and practiced in his own life. There are numbers of stories over the years of Ram Dass getting in trouble for having said more than he should have. Thus, I wasn’t sure what combination of old Ram Dass and new Ram Dass was conspiring to tell Donna every damned and damnable detail of his private life. The most I could do when in doubt was to politely interrupt, asking Ram Dass if he was sure he wanted to tell Donna THAT story? I asked that several times as he was beginning to launch into another tale that ordinary prudence would suggest he’d have been better off not telling a reporter, but in each case he would assure me that he wanted to tell all.

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On the morning of the last day of the conference, Ram Dass observed to me that he had told Donna everything he could think of, except about the pot. I was glad to hear that Ram Dass was capable of exercising some discretion. No need to tell Donna about how important getting stoned was in his everyday life. “That’s OK,” I reassured him. “You don’t have to tell her everything.” “No, no,” he corrected me. “I want to tell her about it.” Before Ram Dass had a chance to meet with Donna again, he had a second appearance to make in front of the public at the conference. An hour and a half had been slotted before lunch entitled “Meditation with Ram Dass.” At the appointed hour, I wheeled Ram Dass on to the stage of a medium-sized room, where he sat quietly while the seats filled with devoted ones eager to spend more time with him. I remember attending a public talk of Ram Dass’ in Seattle some time in the early nineties. The talk was part of a multi-city tour the likes of which Ram Dass engaged in every few years as part of his role as spiritual gadfly and guru. I read about Ram Dass coming to town in the local hippie weekly and bought my ticket at a new age book and crystal shop. Since seats were general admission only, I arrived way early to wait in line in hopes of getting the best possible seat. I waited in line for hours surrounded by other spiritual seekers and dharma groupies, all of us reeking of wheatgrass and sincerity, passing the time spouting wise platitudes to anyone willing to listen or just standing by quietly feeling groovy. After such a long patient wait, we were finally admitted inside and I found a seat near the front where I settled in to await Ram Dass. So much waiting was no problem for a spiritual guy like me. Just another opportunity to meditate, that’s how I looked at it. A chance to bask in all the energy in the room, let it flow through me like a serene river surging and merging endlessly with the great ocean. Who needs Ram Dass, I thought from the depths of my spacious abiding? I was having a powerful spiritual experience just basking in infinite emptiness, just waiting, waiting without needing anything to be other than it already was. Still I had come to see and hear Ram Dass and finally he appeared on stage. But he didn’t get started right away. He took his seat and settled in a bit, but he never quite settled all the way in. He’d settle a bit, then rouse himself to adjust something on the podium: the flowers, the glass of water, his beads, while we all sat waiting, pretending to want nothing, but heck he was about to begin any moment wasn’t he, we had waited long enough, hadn’t we?

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Ram Dass kept delaying and it finally dawned on me that all his not beginning energy was part of the show. It was a clever ploy to expose our postures of patience, to reveal how our expectations sooner or later interfered with the ability to simply be in the moment. That was Ram Dass’ gimmick years before he was broken by the stroke. I later found out it was a regular part of his performance to tease his audience by not meeting expectations of what a public talk should look like. But his wordless delay back then probably didn’t last more than ten minutes, before he began his talk, even though it felt like forever. This time, it really was forever. I’m not kidding: this time Ram Dass never ever began. He didn’t fidget and arrange things. He just sat in his wheelchair quietly waiting. Waiting for the straggler to wander in probably. That’s the way guided meditations usually run. You arrive on time and then get a head start meditating while the teacher holds off beginning his instruction until everyone is ready. That’s what it looked like this time, too. Ram Dass didn’t even look like he was meditating. Just waiting quietly. And the full-house audience waited too. Waited and waited. Waited for a guided meditation that never came. Not out loud anyway. Ram Dass sat there for an hour and a half and never said a word. He just sat there saying nothing, doing nothing, not even meditating, just surfing the silence, as he like to call it. The schedule said Meditation with Ram Dass, after all. What were people expecting: a show? After lunch, Ram Dass told Donna about the pot. It had become an inevitable part of Ram Dass’ post-stroke public talks to mention the role of medicinal marijuana as part of his therapeutic regime. He’d mention how smoking pot helped him with chronic pain and with the stiffness and spasticity in his paralyzed limbs. “And not to mention the side-effects,” he’d triumphantly declare, wagging his eyebrows like Groucho Marx while the audience laughed knowingly at the irony of it all. That was Ram Dass’ public position: that he was the beneficiary of the cosmic good fortune of living in a state that allowed marijuana use by the appropriately afflicted. That was true, but, as he explained to Donna, it wasn’t the whole story. The whole story was that Ram Dass has always smoked pot, from his hippie youth in the sixties up to his current post-stroke dotage in his sixties, and that its intoxicating potency was not merely an amusing side-effect but was the main reason that he smoked it.

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This admission, of course, was the height of dharmic heresy, and Donna vigorously protested it. It is a fundamental doctrine of spirituality in the West that mind-altering drugs can often serve as an initial catalyst to spiritual investigation, but inevitably turn out to be limited and unproductive, eventually to be left behind by the devoted seeker, who moves on to the more profoundly transformative practices of perennial traditions such as yoga and meditation. This was the story Ram Dass had told in Be Here Now: how he had used hallucinogens while a radical professor at Harvard, but had given them up, had gone beyond their limits, and had discovered true transcendental possibilities at the feet of his guru in India, in the austere quiet of multi-month meditation retreats in Burma, at the bedside of dying AIDS patients in San Francisco. Now he was going out of his way to tell Donna that he had never left mind-altering drugs behind at all. Throughout all he had done since the sixties, getting high had been a regular and essential component of his personal process of growth and creativity. Donna, having followed Ram Dass’ inspiration and example for decades, was shocked and stunned by this druggy revelation. Drugs were bad, that was what she had been telling her wayward daughter. Or at least they were of limited value and not worth the risks involved in their use. And here was the wise, revered sage announcing that au contraire drugs were good, not to be left behind as one of the follies of youth but an important and vital part of his spiritual repertoire. Donna did not yield easily to Ram Dass’ sudden reversal of three decades of tradition. Instead, she argued tooth and nail, heart and soul, trying to convince Ram Dass that he was mistaken, he didn’t really mean it, pot wasn’t good, necessary, or useful; it was obviously and inarguably bad, harmful and worthless. Inarguable to Donna, but not to Ram Dass. He knew better than she how he felt about drug use and he gently but relentlessly refuted her every argument. He told her that getting high was an essential part of his creative process and it always had been. Not so, Donna protested. What about Ram Dass’ incredibly inspiring keynote address, just the other evening? He was high for that, Ram Dass explained. What about the concert at St. John the Divine in New York City? High for that too, Ram Dass told her. Ram Dass went on to say that he had been stoned for every public talk he had ever given, for every article and book he had ever written. Donna was utterly dumbfounded, as if Columbus had just announced that the world was flat all along, that he had only pretend it was round to please Queen Isabella.

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The truth was that Ram Dass had played with not getting high at various times over the years but never for long because he truly found it a vital part of his process. It was illegal though, especially for a public figure like him, famous for his advocacy of drugs. So Ram Dass had let his statements repudiating drugs stand and had become much more discreet in his personal habits. He had no interest in being a martyr in the idiotic war on drugs that our country has been waging for so long. It was the advent of medicinal marijuana in California that had encouraged Ram Dass to come out of the pharmaceutical closet. Pot smoking might still be illegal for most of us, but not for him. Now that the heat was off, he felt obligated to speak up for the virtues of getting high, to offer himself as a public spokesman in the fight to legalize pot, not just for medicinal purposes, but for recreational and spiritual use as well. Ram Dass made a concerted effort to explain the spiritual benefit of marijuana to Donna. He said smoking pot lubricated the transition between levels. Donna had no idea what Ram Dass meant by this. He once again explained that reality existed on many levels and that integration consisted of being able to function on each level in a way that respected all levels. There was a tendency for people to get fixated on certain levels and to neglect or ignore others. An integrated person was able to move freely from level to level like a devoted parent going from bedroom to bedroom tucking in all their beloved children. For Ram Dass to give an inspired lecture, he explained, he had to move freely between levels, he needed to ground his ideas in the nitty-gritty reality of the material and social planes, but he also needed to be constantly up-leveling, to be able to switch levels at will, so to reveal to his audience the divine that is part of even the most mundane experiences. Ram Dass invited Donna to appreciate that before the keynote address he had smoked a single joint and as a result a thousand people had gotten high. I pointed out how similar that was to something Jesus would have done and wondered whether that was the secret to His miracles. He ate one loaf and one fish before his sermon and the whole crowd went away feeling satisfied. I threatened to start cultish rumors if Ram Dass didn’t watch his step. Ram Dass went on for quite a while trying to get Donna to understand the value of skilful drug use as part of his process, but Donna remained steadfastly unconvinced. She was too invested in her position that drug use was wrong and bad. She needed it to be wrong and bad in order rescue her daughter from the direction her life was going in. Thus, she clung to her point of view, stuck on

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one level at the expense of another, until Ram Dass was forced to take more direct action to make his point. As he patiently explained himself to Donna, he reached with his good hand into his shirt pocket and pulled out a big fat joint that I had dutifully rolled for him that morning. As part of his post-stroke recovery, Ram Dass had taught himself to hold a box of matches between his knees, strike a match, and light a joint with just one hand. Thus did he light the joint in the midst of his discussion with Donna, take a few thoughtful tokes and then pass it over to me. The regular invitation to get stoned was a constant opportunity and challenge in my job as Ram Dass’ caretaker and companion. When I first took the job, I got high whenever offered, but that turned out to be nearly all the time, which was way too often for a delicate soul like me. It was important for me to demonstrate that I had nothing against Ram Dass and his friends getting stoned but it was also important for me to maintain a certain degree of functionality in order to perform my job. Thus, in time, I learned to pace myself. To decide when it was OK to get stoned along with everyone else, or when it was better to just say no. Like when we were at the Mark Hotel in New York City prior to Ram Dass’ talk at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Mickey Lemle, the documentary filmmaker, wanted to film the talk as one of the centerpieces of the movie he was making about Ram Dass. As background material, he wanted to show Ram Dass traveling in his wheelchair from his hotel to the cathedral. Thus he was scheduled to show up at the hotel just before we left in order to film Ram Dass and me taking the elevator to the lobby out of the hotel, hailing a cab, and making our way uptown to the show. As was Ram Dass’ habit, he passed around a joint of lecture grade pot just before it was time to go. I wanted to get high for the show, but I reflected that I had no previous experience getting Ram Dass in and out of a cab in New York City, nor in finding and getting setup at the cathedral, all of which would be a challenge in the best of circumstances, let alone high as a kite while being filmed for a national audience. Consequently, on that occasion, I refrained from getting stoned until Ram Dass was safely delivered on stage and the cameras where no longer focused in my direction. I knew better than to get high on that occasion, just as I knew better than to say no when Ram Dass handed the joint to me in front of Donna. I was fascinated to watch Ram Dass work on Donna, the reporter from the NY Times. He had gone way out of his way to reveal his pot smoking habit to her and he had been patiently, persistently chipping away at her initial dismay in response to this revelation. Realize it or not, Donna was functioning on many levels at once: dispassionate

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reporter interviewing a subject, spiritual pilgrim sitting at the feet of a revered teacher, protective mother defending her child, just to name the obvious ones. Ram Dass was clever and skilful enough to address himself to all those parts of Donna at the same time. He had lit and smoked the joint in such a casual, nonchalant manner. No big deal, just a few friends relaxing enjoying a good discussion. I took the joint in that friendly spirit and by and by passed it back to him a few hits shorter than it had been when I received it. Ram Dass took another casual hit and then passed the joint on to Donna, passing the pipe like tribal elders at a powwow, like captains of industry smoking cigars while discussing world events after dinner at the club. Donna took the joint from Ram Dass and paused to figure out what to do with it. It all depended on what level she was responding from. Certainly the protective mother wasn’t going to engage in exactly the behavior she had been admonishing her wayward daughter to avoid. But same time, here was her hero and long-time teacher extolling the virtues of pot smoking and offering her an opportunity to see for herself. And here was Ram Dass, her interview subject, giving her a scoop on the true story of his hidden relationship to pot, who knows what more he would reveal if she egged him on by following him down the rabbit hole like Alice B. Toklas heading for Wonderland. After a palpable pause, Donna shrugged and said what the heck. It wasn’t like she’d never smoked pot before, she informed us. Maybe President Bill never inhaled, but she would, she could, and she did. The discussion between Ram Dass and Donna went on for quite a while longer after that. Indeed, it grew more lively and colorful, influenced by the chemicals coursing through our collective blood and brains. The funny thing about this situation—one of many funny things given the state we were all in—was that Donna tried to pretend that nothing had changed, that she was still standing on steady sturdy dry land defending her position that drug use had no positive benefit as part of spiritual or philosophical investigation. Ram Dass continued to debate this with her but I finally interrupted to point out the increasingly ludicrous paradox of her position. Didn’t she notice, I finally interjected, that the conversation had gotten much more interesting since we had all gotten high? Wasn’t it obvious based on her own direct immediate experience that Ram Dass was right, that pot could be used skillfully to enhance investigation into profound issues such as this? No, no, she insisted, and

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returned without qualm to her argument, despite all evidence to the contrary. I was surprised at her obdurate clinging, her willingness to stick to her guns even after they had been beaten into ploughshares. She reminded me ever so much of the proverbial cynic who continues to deny the validity of hypnosis even after he has been running around the room flapping his arms and clucking like a chicken for the last half-hour. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice was wont to say. Switching parables for a moment, I invite you to recall what happened to Pinocchio when he went to live in the land where everyone had fun all the time and never had to go to school. That’s right, he turned into a donkey. The same thing happened to Donna as a minor side effect of smoking pot with Ram Dass. OK, she didn’t exactly turn into a donkey, but she did miss her plane back home to LA. Just like stoners everywhere, she got so caught up in the present moment that she plum lost track of the time and by the time she noticed, it was way to late to catch her flight. Nothing to do but what any pothead would in such circumstances: laugh, shrug, then go get something to eat. Thus had Ram Dass kidnapped Donna. Co-opted her into his movie, as we used to say in hippie days. Whatever Donna had planned when her interview time with Ram Dass was over became suddenly irrelevant. There was no after. There was just the now. The experiment, or in this case the interview, was out of the box. It was following its own unfolding now, not the preconceived agendas that had spawned it. Ram Dass assured Donna that there was no need to worry about having missed her flight back to LA. We would gladly take her to San Francisco airport on our way back home. Not right away, though. We had to go to a party first. Surely, Donna wouldn’t mind tagging along. So, with Donna in tow, we packed up the hotel room, all of Ram Dass’ medical paraphernalia and luggage and wheelchaired out of the Hyatt to the car, saying goodbye to the Body and Soul Conference and headed up the freeway into San Francisco. The party we had to attend was a 50th birthday bash for a wealthy spiritual philanthropist whom Ram Dass was of course close friends with. We got to the city well in advance of the party time, so Ram Dass directed us on a surprise detour to visit Wavy Gravy in Berkeley. His inspiration in this detour turned out to be a stray suggestion I had made during the discussion about what Donna could do to help straighten out her difficult daughter. Ram Dass had been trying to think of what resources might be available, and I reminded him that Wavy ran an innovative summer camp in the country that taught circus skills to rich suburban kids and at-risk inner-city

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youths. Ram Dass rightly countered that Wavy’s camp was for kids younger than Donna’s daughter, but I suggested that Wavy might know of other programs that could be appropriate for someone in Janie’s predicament. I didn’t mean anything by the suggestion, really. I generally tried to keep quiet throughout the interview unless I had something useful to contribute, so I had piped in about Wavy just as a useful sounding excuse to have something to say. Thus, I was quite surprised when Ram Dass asked me if I knew the way to the Hog Farm, Wavy’s commune in Berkeley, and I was even more surprised when I was able to find the address in my address book left over from a one-time visit many years before. When we pulled up outside the Hog Farm, Ram Dass announced that it was too much work for him to get out of the car and up and through the many steps, walks and gates that led to the rambling old building that housed the commune since its birth in the psychedelic sixties. Instead, he would wait in the BMW while Donna and I went in to find Wavy and ask his counsel concerning Janie. I followed Ram Dass’ instructions as a matter of course and Donna tagged along, swept forward out of appreciation for Ram Dass’ intervention in her problems and because it was Ram Dass’ movie now, not hers anymore. Donna and I made our way through the gate like two shy children on Halloween, trick-ortreating in a strange neighborhood while our dad waited patiently for us in the car. The interior of the house was an amazing throwback to the sixties, festooned with decades of trippy memorabilia and dirty dishes, while hippies of all ages sprawled about grooving on the Wow and relaxing in the present moment. We explained our quest to one lost and found soul: that Ram Dass had sent us to ask Wavy’s advice on how to deal with a troubled child. Wavy’s wife, Jahanara, eventually materialized, apparently used to strange quests and requests such as this. She did her best to come up with a suggestion or two and Donna did her best to act appreciative. I then pointed out to Jah that Ram Dass was actually outside in the car and she was invited to come out to greet him, if she felt so inclined. Jah declined, saying that advice was her department, while visiting was Wavy’s. She was sure he’d be glad to say hi to Ram Dass. He’d be out shortly. We went back to the car and Wavy wobbled out after a moderate interval. This was Wavy Gravy, the man, not the ice cream flavor. Long-time hippie clown and political activist, Wavy has managed to grow old in such a way that he no longer needs to dress up to be a clown. His hair

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springs out around his balding head in a long and wild and bushy crown, like Bozo on acid. His face has waxed fat over the years, surrounding his perpetually stoned eyes; his big bulbous nose sits above his perpetually child-like goofy grin, laughing at a lifetime of jokes and pranks still swirling in his head. His large Santa-like belly was clad in acres of tie-die and he carried himself with a laid-back swagger that suggested there was nothing more fun in the world than being him. Wavy greet Ram Dass warmly, two ancient relics of an earlier, crazier era. Ram Dass responded instinctively by pulling out another joint, lighting up and offering it to Wavy. It occurred to Wavy, though, that it was no longer the sixties, that it was instead the very late nineties and he explained that his neighbors were extremely disapproving of him smoking pot on public streets outside of the walls of the Hog Farm. I didn’t want to see prudence get in the way of being part of a Wavy-Ram Dass pot fest, so I suggested that Wavy should join Ram Dass in the car and maybe that would be OK. Wavy didn’t need much encouragement, and the four of us reversed the normal circus routine: a bunch of clowns all piled into a too small car, instead of piling out of it. It was way small, too. Both Ram Dass and Wavy were good-sized men to start with and both have grown fairly stout over the years. The two of them fit rather snuggly in the front seats of the BWM, leaving the tiny back seats for Donna and me to jam ourselves into. We then slammed all the doors, closed all the windows, turned up the tape deck and filled the car with pot smoke, while Ram Dass and Wavy rafted down a river of reminiscences and twisted pontification, with Donna and me squashed and agog in the back like the audience at the world’s smallest, most compact sixties revival. How’s your interview coming now? I wondered silently in Donna’s direction. This wasn’t what she had in mind when she arrived with notebook in hand, a proper professional journalist, to interview Ram Dass for the New York Times. How had she ended up here, run off and joined the circus, stoned, lost, out of control, the story had taken over, taken on a life of its own. Just like in the sixties, the babies were driving the bus, except the babies had gotten old and large, while the bus had gotten so small as to barely hold the four of us. I turned to Donna and saw her amazed, confused, delighted to have lost control, forgetting for a while her responsibilities as a mother, as a journalist, as an adult. “This doesn’t look much like a New York Times article anymore, does it?” I asked her slyly. “It’s getting to look much more like one of those long pieces in the New Yorker.”

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The birthday party for the philanthropist was rather an anticlimax after our adventures jammed into the smoke and music filled BMW with Wavy and Ram Dass. Ram Dass went back to being a public icon, on his best behavior in front of all the rich folks, and Donna went back to being a grown-up. I went back to doing my caretaker act: sizing up the scene in advance, deciding what combination of wheelchair and walker and group assistance were best to get Ram Dass out of the car, down the walk, up the stairs, into the house and situated in a place where everyone could take a peek at him. Ram Dass often said in his public talks that by attending cocktail parties from the perspective of being stuck in a wheelchair, the main thing he got to see was see was how many assholes there were at cocktail parties. After the party, Ram Dass kept his promise to Donna, and we dropped her off at the Oakland airport to return to LA. In the following weeks, she called Ram Dass at home once or twice with a couple of follow up questions and news of her daughter’s ongoing misadventures, but basically the interview was over. We told tales to the crew at home about having successfully hijacked Donna and everyone speculated wildly about what kind of story she would eventually write, how she would distill the enormous overflow of information and experience into a 3,000 words article for the New York Times. I wondered whether she would let the article spill out of the box, let it be what it had become, instead of what it was supposed to have been. Ram Dass had given Donna so much more than she had asked for. What was she going to do with it? He had answered her preconceived questions, but then he went beyond and beyond and beyond. He told her everything there was to tell about himself, not just the stuff that reporters deserve to know about public figures, but all the hidden stuff that normal people only tell their best friends, their therapists, or their attorneys. Then Ram Dass went beyond merely telling about himself, and managed in addition to get Donna to go there with him. Got her to let go of who she was, who she thought she was, and become part of his world for a while. Not just hearing what it was like to be confined to a wheelchair, but to participate in negotiating all the obstacles and impediments that the rest of us take so effortlessly for granted. Not just discussing his role as elder, sage, mentor, but engaged her from within those roles, offering her advice and guidance from level after level, and trying to show her the freedom and flexibility that comes from being able to fluidly switch between levels in order to experience reality in an integrated manner.

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And not just discussing pot smoking as part of his life and as a potential part of one's spiritual process. Instead, Ram Dass took Donna there. Just like in the sixties, he had managed to turn the tables, to obliterate the boundary between the subject and the object, between the experiment and the experimenter. This was vintage Ram Dass, slyly enticing a serious journalist to abandon her professional distance and objectivity and dive into the experience with him, just as he had with so many in the LSD days, getting them to join him in psychotropic investigation, regardless of the reservations they may have had initially. This is Ram Dass’ special gift, I believe. The ability to function as cosmic maitre d', to welcome arriving guests, make them feel comfortable, show them to their table to await their meal. Ram Dass was the consummate psychotropic salesman. He didn’t just help interested customers find the mind-altering experience they were shopping for. He drew out interest where they were unaware it existed in the first place. After all, I rather doubt Donna had the slightest intention of getting high when she came to interview Ram Dass. She only came to find out what was going on with him, just to gather information to write an article for a magazine. But Ram Dass performed like a master martial artist. He took Donna’s forwarded momentum and turned it around to throw her for a loop. He didn’t let her stand at the edge of the pool, safe and dry, asking preconceived questions about swimming. He pulled into the water, let her learn about swimming by flailing about while she got the hang of it. He made it safe, not by letting her stay on the edge, but by being there beside her in the drink, an experienced and steady companion to make it OK to take risks. A friend asked me once whether I thought Ram Dass was someone of outstanding cultural significance; whether eventually there would be statues erected in his honor, buildings named after him, postage stamps issued featuring his smiling face? Of course, that’s impossible to know in advance, but I think it depends on how well the products do that Ram Dass sold to the American public. In the 60’s, Ram Dass was instrumental in introducing consciousness-altering plants and chemicals to America’s youth, thus ushering the psychedelic and the higher consciousness movements in this country. Then, in the 70’s, Ram Dass introduced meditation, yoga and other practices of eastern religion to us, thus facilitating the synthesis of east-west spirituality in America. Whether these contributions turn out to have lasting significance is hard to judge from our vantage point at the turn of the millennium. Certainly, the consciousness raising revolution that the Woodstock Generation hoped for appears not to have lived up to our hippie hopes. But the

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transformative impact of East-West synthesis continues to simmer and swell, extending its influence further and further into unexpected corners of our cultural consciousness. It remains to be seen whether the inertia of the status quo is so great as to absorb these changes without itself being significantly changed in the process. Or whether the seeds Ram Dass has helped sow will continue to grow and spread until the pre-existing landscape is changed forever and for good. In that case, perhaps we’ll see a statue or a postage stamp of the sly, psychedelic salesman yet. Donna’s article finally appeared in the New York Times Sunday magazine section more than six months after she interviewed Ram Dass at the Body and Soul Conference in San Francisco. I had been waiting with patient curiosity to see any signs whether her unexpected immersion at Ram Dass’ wily instigation would be reflected in the article. Would she write the straight-forward article that she planned to write in the first place, or the much more unbound, non-linear story necessary to honor where she’d been? Turns out, Donna wrote the straight story. She covered all the standard bases that every post-stroke article about Ram Dass hits on. She did mention that Ram Dass had smoked a joint in his hotel room at the Body and Soul conference, and that as well as medical benefits, he told her that smoking pot provides him beneficial perspective on his illness. She admitted to being startled to hear this, in contrast to his public statements about leaving drugs behind on the spiritual path. But that’s where she left it. She stood fast in her role as detached journalist, she gave the impression that she stayed dry but not high at the edge of the pool, while Ram Dass came out of the closet and admitted to being an amphibian. Maybe the adventures with Ram Dass changed her in some significant way that she deemed inappropriate to touch on in her article. Maybe she’s saving the bigger juicier story for her maiden article in the New Yorker. Except it’s been a whole other year since the Times article and no sign of her in the New Yorker yet. Maybe the seeds Ram Dass planted in Donna that weekend in San Francisco sprouted only briefly before inhospitable conditions caused them to wither and die. Or maybe they continue to grow within in her, slowly spreading like the seeds Ram Dass has tossed on so many hearts and minds over the last three decades. Maybe Ram Dass’ influence will open Donna up and change her for the better, help her become aware of the many levels of consciousness we all function on, help her achieve integration by learning to act on each level in a way that honors all levels.

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Hard to say which vision is more likely. Changes such as that can be subtle and sometimes a long time coming. I don’t know myself, but I’m advance-ordering my Ram Dass commemorative postage stamp, just in case.

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