In honor of my first spiritual teacher, Ram Dass, who passed away on December 22, 2019, I am republishing this piece I wrote after my last personal visit to him, at his home in Maui in 2011. With a few minor edits, I am republishing this piece I wrote after my last personal visit to him, at his home in Maui in 2011.
It was 1997. I was visiting Neem Karoli Baba’s ashram in Vrindaban, India when I learned that my old friend and spiritual teacher, Ram Dass, had suffered a serious, possibly life-threatening stroke. It was strange to hear such news in that very place, which had taken me more than 20 years to visit since I first heard Ram Dass’s wonderful stories about Maharaj Ji in the mid-1970s. (“Maharaji” is the less formal and emotional honorific title used by Neem Karoli Baba’s followers.)
In a shamefully narcissistic way, one of my first thoughts was about me. Because of all he had done in the area of death and dying, I had always assumed that if the time came for me to find myself lying on my deathbed somewhere, I would ask Ram Dass to come and sit with me through the process and everything would be fine. It never occurred to me that he was 22 years older than me, and barring some unforeseen tragedy, he would likely die before me. I was a bit shocked by what should have been a clear revelation, and I felt orphaned. Now, 22 years later (coincidentally) it has happened, and thanks to his teachings and his ease with death and dying, I believe I was properly prepared by his extraordinary example. He had been teetering on the other side several times in the past year, so he had been given ample warning of the approaching end, and yet, just days before his death, he was still chanting kirtans with his fellow devotees and friends, celebrating the wonders of the great mysteries of God, Being, and Existence itself.
Woody Allen once said, “I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Ram Dass has outdone Woody, because not only did he repeatedly say he wasn’t afraid of death, he wanted to be there! Having devoted much of his life to sitting with people and helping them through their final transition, and having dedicated his life to mastering the art of being fully present in every moment of experience, good or bad (i.e., being here now), what moment is more important and interesting to any of us than our final exhalation? (Yes, birth is there, too, but we’ve all been there, done that.) Ram Dass was fond of telling the story of the great Indian sage of the early 20th century, Ramana Maharshi, who was surrounded by his weeping followers as he lay dying, begging, “Don’t go, sir, please don’t go.” “‘Don’t be a fool,’ Ramana replied; ‘Where am I going?’” The message was the same: that who we are, beyond the temporal adventures of body and mind, is that which is always here now, the eternal presence of existence itself, unencumbered by a fleeting life in a body, unencumbered by the extreme importance we attach to our fleeting little lives in the face of the infinite. Our true nature is that which does not come and go. This whole hall of mirrors, this collection of fragile, fleeting identities that supposedly reside within the mortal core, is nothing more than Maya, the great dance of the soul and play, much sound and fury that signifies nothing, and which ends before any of us can master it.
Back to my original article: Ram Dass demonstrated through his stroke experience what it means to act on one’s words. After a period of intense suffering—which he said was of no use to any of his decades of meditation and spiritual practice; and was no match for the pain he was enduring—he finally did. From rehashing a terrifying, painful, and horrific event that completely changed his life forever, to what he would later refer to as “Extreme Grace” (which also became the title of a great movie about his ordeal).
The teaching he provided is that all circumstances—whether good or bad from our perspective—can be seen, felt, and even known by the grace of God, if one is willing to bear them in that light and learn from them rather than simply complain and be the unfortunate victim of a terrible turn of events in one’s life.
Of course, because Ram Dass was a spiritual hero to thousands of people, he had no choice; he could not wallow in his reality for long, or act as if God and his spiritual teacher had suddenly disappeared from the universe! If God is real and present—no matter what happens—one must learn to accept all experiences as a blessing from God, some more severe than others, perhaps the most severe of which is death itself.
But for most of us, how can having a stroke, being paralyzed on one side, or initially losing the ability to speak, be a blessing from God? If such a thing happened to me, I know that I would be very angry with God, asking questions like, “What about playing the guitar and piano? Or riding a bike? I mean, I know how to move and dance!”
This brings to mind Rabbi Harold Kushner’s famous question: “Where is God when bad things happen to good people?” The answer to this question, according to the mystics among us, is always the same: God is present, and he can’t be anywhere else, because the “one eternal, all-encompassing source of all existence” can’t be in a brothel in Thailand while you’re being robbed in New York City. No, as Thich Nhat Hanh might say, God is the thief and the robbed (and the Thai prostitute). Given the daily state of our own lives, as well as the headlines from around the world that bombard us every morning, if any of us assume we sense God’s presence, that presence is somehow unaffected by the actual events that occur. Good things that happen don’t mean God is here, and bad things don’t mean God has left the building. God is the animating force, the all-encompassing intelligence in which all experience takes place. Tibetan Buddhists call this the cognitive vacuum. Not very spiritually romantic for the devotional religious types, but perhaps accurate.
I had a Skype video session with Ram Dass a few years ago, a service called “Heart to Heart” that he made available to subscribers to his website. My plan in setting up the conversation was to ask for his blessing before I went on a book tour to promote my book, The Ninety-Ninth Monkey, a memoir that included my history with him in the first and last chapters, forming a symmetrical framework for the entire work. Despite having pestered him repeatedly the previous year, he ultimately chose not to endorse the back cover of my book. So now, if I couldn’t get his synopsis, I felt I at least needed his blessing. He paused when I asked him, closed his eyes to search for his answer, then looked directly into the camera, pointed his finger, and said very quietly, “You have my blessing”—a long pause—“as long as you tell the truth.” This gave my little mind a lot to think about! Did he mean that I hadn’t told the truth in the book? Had I somehow misrepresented him in my story? What did he mean? I didn’t ask him, and instead of trying to figure out his answer, I lived, as Rilke said, “inside the question.” As I traveled the country on my book tour, the question became my personal Zen koan every time I went on stage.
And I think I told the truth. Mostly.
He also gave me some valuable advice: “If you go on a book tour as a person of taste, to sell books,” he said, “it’s very painful. But if you treat each event as a gathering of souls, you can have a meaningful evening together.” I took it to heart, brought my guitar, and ended up singing and chanting with people in bookstores all over the country, and I think the souls were touched. My souls were touched.
Aside from that Skype call, I hadn’t seen Ram Dass for some time. Since I was visiting Maui, less than ten minutes from his home, I asked him for some time, and he was gracious enough to host me at his beautiful home overlooking the ocean. His living room features a very large shrine, decorated with flowers, pictures, and holy relics, honoring his spiritual teacher and many other saints from various religious traditions. Although he can swim in his pool and walk a little with a walker, he is confined to a wheelchair most of the time and is supposed to remain so for the rest of his life. Yet he not only does not complain, but he seems to have managed to reach a state of happiness and contentment more than ever! This is evident both from my presence in the room with him and from his general conversations about his recovery in the years following his stroke.
I first met Ram Dass in 1975 at the age of twenty-three, when I was emerging as a spiritual seeker, full of longing and penetrating questions, desperate for answers and guidance. Ram Dass was larger than life, quickly gaining worldwide fame as a countercultural hero and teacher to millions, and the author of what became the pivotal spiritual guide for those turbulent times, Be Here Now. He had returned from India wearing the trappings of that culture—a white robe, beads, long, wild hair, and beard. But even in his most casual American attire, he exuded a powerful, loving presence that was tangible, deep, and real. I vividly remember the intensity and significance of our first meeting. He would often do an exercise with new students that involved sitting across from each other, face to face, with the instruction, “Anything that comes to mind that you don’t want to share with me, share it with me.” It was amazing for me to witness and later reveal a wide range of usually private psychological material—shameful secrets, things I was embarrassed about, etc.—and to feel the unconditional love pouring from his eyes as he silently listened to everything that came out of me in what amounted to a kind of liberating confession. The exercise continued until I reached my limit, my line in the sand, where certain things were too horrific to say out loud, and I didn’t, and he didn’t ask me to.
And I never did that for him. In a way, I never completed that exercise.
I probably should have used this visit to Maui to pick up where we left off some 35 years ago when we first played that game, but this time I was determined to emerge as an “adult.” I wanted to approach my old spiritual teacher and not as George Bernard Shaw called him, “a bundle of grievances and diseases.” I didn’t want to receive him as a needy spiritual seeker full of problems and questions looking for someone to give me answers. Rather, I wanted no particular agenda other than to pay my respects, human to human, to an old friend and mentor, recognizing that I did not know if we would meet again in this life. (Ram Dass had never left Maui, and this was my first visit there in nearly 25 years.)
I didn’t want to come empty-handed, but I couldn’t find anything physical to bring him. It was all just “stuff.” I had gathered several small gifts from around our house to bring him, but my wife, Shari, had rejected every one of them. Then, in Maui, a few days before our meeting, someone had brought a tall, exotic Hawaiian flower, and I thought one of them, like a single rose, would be a beautiful gift. I had it in water for a couple of days, but the morning I was driving to meet Ram Dass, I discovered that the flower was turning brown and wilting. I guess that would have been special, but I wanted fresh flowers, and it was too late to find a florist. As I was driving to his house, I passed a field of wildflowers, stopped, and plucked a beautiful fuchsia flower from a thorny stem. I spent some time on the side of the road, scraping off all the thorns with my thumb until I felt confident that I could hand it to him without risking stabbing him with a fork. At the same time, I recall a story Ram Dass used to tell about his early days in India when he was struggling to find the perfect gift for Maharaji. He finally settled on a beautiful blanket, because Maharaji only wore blankets, and Ram Dass carried the blanket with him throughout his travels, he was thinking how wonderful it was to offer this sign of his great love for his beloved guru, and how special he felt as the giver of this perfect gift. But, when he finally sat before his guru and presented him with the blanket, Maharaji picked it up by the edges of one corner with two fingers, lifted it like a dead mouse, turned around, and offered it to another devotee as a gift. He then turned to Ram Dass and asked, “Did I do the right thing?” Ram Dass replied, “Excellent.” At that moment, he realized how much his ego had taken over the blanket; it was not a “clean” gift as such, and Maharaji had held it up like that to indicate that. I examined myself carefully, but as far as I could tell, the gift of flowers I had given was clean. I loved that I picked it wild, not at the store, and that I had removed the thorns to protect his hands. So when he came into the living room to see me, I rose to greet him, hugged him, and offered him the flower. He held it in his hand for a while, feeling it, silently contemplating it. He continued to do so throughout our hour-long conversation. Because I decided to go to him without wanting anything, the result was that our encounters remained mostly “chatter,” in stark contrast to the original, soul-lifting, life-changing connection we had had more than three decades earlier. But several times we fell into silence, staring at each other, and I later concluded that it didn’t matter what we talked about. Whatever connection or transmission was meant to happen would happen anyway, beyond words. I suppose this applies to every interaction we have with everyone, but rightly or wrongly, I give my relationship with Ram Dass more weight and importance than some others, despite his frequent reminders in the early days that the bus driver or your Aunt Gertrude might be Buddha. At one point, after one of those silences, he said, “You’re doing well; you were just talking nonsense.” This puzzled me for a while, then I remembered that when I was pestering him to endorse Monkey No. 99 and he wouldn’t respond to any of my emails, each time I wrote him I started with a bigger apology: “I don’t mean to be annoying, please forgive me, maybe you didn’t get my email,” etc., then I sent him a snail mail on top of all that until I finally got him to agree to at least read my manuscript, but when the printing deadline approached and I didn’t see any response from him, I pestered him one last time, and my apology escalated to, “I know you hate me and think I should rot in hell forever, but please know our deadline is next week.”
Finally, he replied, “If you go to hell, I will miss you. Namaste, Ram Dass.” I laughed a lot! At the same time, I felt frustrated. Because I now realize that he chose not to endorse my book, it wasn’t simply because my requests were ignored in a pile of mail. So he was probably referring to my “rot in hell” routine when he said that I used to speak “out of frame.” Although I had undoubtedly been swinging on frame many times before. Now, as I sat across from him in Maui, talking about this and that, he suddenly said, without warning, “You should let something else, or someone else, write through you, instead of writing through your ego.” I felt a bit defensive because I hadn’t posted in months for this very reason; as an ego, I simply knew I didn’t have much to say or offer, and yet nothing else wanted to come through me. In response to Ram Dass’ suggestion, I said, “Well, I’m usually very dense when it comes to subtle energies or other dimensions.” He replied, “Well, your ego is dense inside and out, but your soul is not.”
This brought the conversation to a halt, and we fell into a bit of silence. Who knows? Maybe this is what I sound like when I allow someone else to write through me! I always imagined it would sound more like, “Blessings to all my children who come seeking union with their loved ones.” Maybe I’m a channel for Shecky Greene rather than St. Germaine. (If I had a choice, I would have chosen Kerouac.)
When the famous Brazilian healer, João de Deus (John of God), first came to the United States, I hopped on a plane to Atlanta to meet him. About two thousand of us, all dressed in nearly identical white yoga clothes, had the opportunity to walk alongside him briefly, while he was supposedly inhabited by a variety of “entities,” the spirits of deceased doctors. Through an interpreter, he quickly directed each person either to the healing room to receive psychosurgery from the intangible guides who hovered around them, or to the meditation room to sit quietly in the energy that permeated the space and was palpable even to a detached and skeptical cynic like me. After people walked away one by one in rapid succession, as I approached him the interpreter stopped me in my tracks, pointed his finger, and said firmly, “Hey, he wants to see you in Brazil.” I continued, thinking to myself, I traveled to Atlanta to see him, why should I go to Brazil? I’m here now! Besides, how do I know that if I go to Brazil he won’t say, “I want to see you in Atlanta?” But I decided to return the next day, and again I was one of two thousand new (and some repeat) visitors. Again I saw person after person walk by him in half a second, beckoning him into the healing room or the meditation room. And again as I came in front of him the interpreter stopped me and said, “He’s waiting for you in Brazil!” Needless to say, this gave me food for thought, but I never went.
I had heard that Ram Dass had gone to Brazil to visit João’s famous healing center, known as Casa, and he had very good things to say about it. He compared the loving, heart-opening atmosphere he discovered there to the feelings he had previously only experienced at his guru’s ashram in India, even though he had never received any physical healing from the stroke symptoms that had prompted his visit. I told him my story of meeting John of God and receiving repeated advice to go to Brazil. Since Ram Dass had had such a positive experience there, I asked him if he thought it was worth my while to make the trip. After a short thought, he replied, “Given your situation, I don’t think it would do you any good,” and we both burst out laughing; this was quite obvious to me! I have a reputation for going to places like this to prove that they are not for me. I have a reputation to uphold as the 99th monkey, who never gets what he wants. (It’s a crappy job, and you wouldn’t want to be like me.)
[Oh, and a 2019 update on John of God: He was recently sentenced to prison after dozens of women trolled him with the #meToo hashtag after he was released from treatment with a long list of sexual assault charges dating back years.]
Earlier in our conversation, Ram Dass and I were talking about his stroke and his physical condition, and as his left hand pointed to the paralyzed right side of his body, he made a dismissive gesture and said, “Only my body,” then pointed to his heart and added, “Not me.” Of course, some might argue that this is just cognitive dissonance—that once you’ve lost half of your body, it’s better to be your heart and soul, not your failing body. I also realized that if I were to share any of my struggles with him, I wouldn’t be able to talk about my aching knees, my lower back, or the osteoporosis in my big toes.
It was clear that he had arrived at a happy place in his consciousness, stroke or not, having experienced the contentment, joy, and absence of conflict that he enjoyed moment by moment. The wheelchair and the state of his body were irrelevant to his core self-identity as “loving consciousness,” a term from his book Be Love Now. The new title, nearly 40 years later, ups the ante from simply being here now to being love now. I think they are interconnected, and yet they arise together; if you are truly and fully present in the here and now, love is the inevitable outcome. Conversely, if you are truly “be love,” you will find yourself in the here and now. But the one-word change in the title points the reader in a very different direction, giving one’s journey a somewhat softer focus, in a way, more in the direction of kindness and less preoccupied with whether one is truly present or not. As I got up to leave, he turned his bike around behind me and pointed me toward the altar. As I stood before him, he gently handed me the flower, and I understood that I was going to offer it, which I did, and I placed it gently. My fuchsia wildflower, free of thorns, was accepted, and my offering was accepted. The flower reminded me of the time I saw Ram Dass many years after his stroke. He was making his first trip to Taos, New Mexico, to Neem Karoli Baba’s ashram there, for a “Bhandra” celebration (in memory of Mahasamadhi Maharajji, when he passed away from this earth, which occurred in 1973). It was his first public appearance in many years. There were hundreds of people eager to greet him in person, if only for a few moments. I didn’t want to add to what I imagined might be more than he could handle, or more than he needed, so instead I opted to enter a small meditation room at the back of the ashram, away from the hustle and bustle.
There were only one or two other people in the room. Just five minutes after I closed my eyes to meditate, I heard the door open, looked up, and someone was wheeling Ram Dass into the room in a wheelchair. Feeling excited and privileged, I closed my eyes to enjoy this intimate meditation with my guru sitting right next to me. Some time passed, and we looked at each other and stared into each other’s eyes for long moments. Then, as the assistant began to wheel him out, Ram Dass looked up and commented aloud, in his still limited speech at the time, “Everyone, like a flower.” It seemed like his comment on our silent interaction.
He left the room and I burst into tears, through that poetic remark I realized that he was seeing the “flower part” of me, a precious, pure, untainted natural place within me that I had long forgotten but was still there somewhere. I knew I was not special. Everybody said. What would it be like, to go through life and see everyone as if I were looking at a beautiful, flawless flower?
Our farewells in Maui were less dramatic. I asked him if he still practiced spiritual practices, and he looked at me as if I were speaking Greek and asked, “Spiritual practices?” I said, “You know, spiritual practices; do you remember them?” He replied, “I just spent time with Maharaj Ji.” When you live in the presence, certainty, and awareness of “being loved now,” you no longer have to do anything to find or nurture that love. I leaned over and kissed his bald head and said, “I love you,” and walked away and never looked back; Right before I walked out the door, he shouted, “I love you too,” and of course, I didn’t believe him, got in the car and immediately thought I’d acted like an idiot, wasted a valuable opportunity to ask deep questions, and imagined that he probably thought I was an idiot. And I’m still acting weird.
But that’s just my way, and I got over it. Meanwhile, I have some gardening to do if I want this flower to bloom.
