The night before Ram Dass passed away, I was waking up every 30 minutes. Expanding my perception through the large partition separating his study (where I lay on the narrow couch) and the bedroom, I watched the seconds between short, ragged breaths swirling through his sleep apnea machine. I counted.
Four years later, I still don’t understand why I was chosen to watch over him that night. I was at the bottom of the pecking order of caregivers when it came to things directly related to Ram Dass’s body. I wasn’t big enough or strong enough to transfer him from the bed to the wheelchair or from the wheelchair to the recliner by myself. I was too new to adjust my schedule or coordinate with my doctor. and was too unaccustomed to provide intellectual consolation in the rare moments when he wanted to speak. I met him 10 months ago and his voice was stuck in my head for only 3 years. There were people at home on Maui who had known him for more than 30 years.
Although I had no formal medical training before arriving, I had spent three weeks volunteering at a hospice facility in anticipation of coming to the island. Most of it involved moving Kleenex around and changing the amount of light in an empty room. Several times I sat with dying people. I saw their eyes closed and felt the heaviness of the room, the sense that something was happening or about to happen, and I was overwhelmed. I scanned their faces for signs of pain, fear, bliss, and transcendence. The temporary fog of opioids made it impossible to read. No one writhed in pain. No one was laughing.
However, for some reason, it cheered me up as I was close to death. That weight seemed very important to my spiritual growth. I imagined myself providing comfort to the dying through my presence, overcoming my own fear of leaving life behind in the process.
During my time with Ram Dass, I was constantly torn between self-righteousness and self-pity. One day I have a grandiose fantasy that I am the heir to his estate and am responsible for scattering his ashes, and the next day I have a fantasy that everyone in the house hates. I imagined that it was. myself. Parents called it the classroom or the fire, the place of purifying work, the path to enlightenment.
My own job mostly consists of handling the various chores, whether cleaning or not, necessary to maintain a six-bedroom cliffside home with a pool, guesthouse, and two-acre garden. was. Chefs were assigned to take turns with a team of cleaners to clean, wash and cook critical areas. I ended up doing a lot of the rest, like sorting the recycling, washing the dishes, and replacing the screen door that had cat scratches on it. He had three other caregivers at home, and I was given a decent salary, plus my own room, food, and shared use of the truck. I was an employee, and most days, for better or worse, the house felt like family.
Still, this was the second time I had been asked to spend the night in the study. It was generally recognized as an act of intense devotion. It’s about accepting a terrifying night’s sleep, facing the prospect of dying on a couch that smells like cat urine, with Ram Dass watching. As much as I hated it, I was there to take care of the guy until it was determined that he needed care.
Most of the decisions were made by a woman affectionately known as Dassi Ma, a 70-something missing Catholic firecracker from Philadelphia. Dassi Ma was Ram Dass’s primary caretaker, and although she no longer did the more strenuous physical labor, she still had more control over what he got and when than Ram Dass himself. He was 88 years old, but his health was steadily deteriorating due to a number of problems, including chronic infections. In February 2019, when I moved to Maui to live near him, he almost died the night I arrived. He got back on his feet, surprising everyone but himself. “It wasn’t the right time,” he remembers saying calmly, neither relieved nor disappointed. Now he has developed an infection again and his ribs appeared to have cracked while being transferred to his wheelchair.
Ram Dass’s life is the subject of multiple documentaries, an autobiography, and a documentary in the works starring Ben Sinclair of “High Maintenance.” He was born Richard Alpert in 1931 into a wealthy family in Boston. His pedigree is impressive: he earned a PhD in psychology from Stanford University, was on the tenure track at Harvard University, and was a visiting professor at Berkeley University. In 1963, after completing five years at Harvard University (most of which was spent researching psychedelics with fellow psychologist Timothy Leary), he was fired for giving psilocybin mushrooms to his undergraduate students. Ta.
He bounced around for several years, often taking obscene amounts of mind-altering substances with Leary at his friend Peggy Hitchcock’s Hudson Valley mansion. In 1967, like many other Westerners at the time, he traveled to India in search of exotic answers to his life’s biggest questions. He was disillusioned with the psychedelic world, which seemed to be mechanically defined by highs and lows. In India, he met a Californian hippie named Kermit Riggs, and followed him to a village called Kainchi in the Himalayan foothills to meet Riggs’ guru.
The Guru was a stocky old man named Neem Karoli Baba. Eventually, the smitten Alpert was reincarnated as Ram Dass, or, loosely speaking, “Servant of God.” Later that year he returned to America, arriving at the airport wearing a white robe and a long shaggy beard, and began his career as a spiritual teacher. From 1967 until his death, most of what he said was about his experiences with Neem Karoli Baba, whom he called Maharaj (the “Great King”), and the spiritual beliefs that grew out of those experiences. was.
One of his main ports of call was death and dying. In 1981, he co-founded the Dying Center in Santa Fe. The organization describes itself as “the first place specifically established to assist residents and guide them toward a conscious death.” The center effectively sought dying people who wanted to use their own death to enlighten them spiritually, and staff who wanted to use the deaths of others to accomplish the same thing. Even before the Dying Center was inaugurated, Ram Dass was lecturing on the spirituality of death, its place in the natural order, and the starkly contrasting ways in which he believed death was perceived in the East. Ta. His teachings were rooted in a particular vision of metaphysical reality informed by his guru and the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Broadly speaking, he believed in non-dualism and the existence of an unchanging, absolute being, the Hindu Brahman (which Ram Dass more often referred to as God, the Divine, or Oneness). , believed that all material reality originates from it. That reality included a soul (something like Hinduism). atmanBy their very nature, they are trapped in the illusion of separation from God, repeating the cycle of birth, suffering, death, and reincarnation until they remember their true nature as part of Oneness, that is, until they become enlightened. Masu.
Death can be an important moment to remember this non-duality, as when the “veil of separation” was at its thinnest. In his 1971 book Be Here Now, which has sold over 2 million copies worldwide, Ram Dass summarized his thoughts as follows: . . There is no fear of death, because / there is no death / it is just a change / an illusion. ”
He often spoke to crowds who feared death, repeating that he had “no fear of death.” He sat with people on their deathbeds and taught them about the power of “leaving the body” and how the dying person could know where they are in the process of reincarnation and do what they can to escape from it. We regularly discussed our efforts to “quiet ourselves.” His stories were sometimes graphic – people died prematurely or in great suffering – but they were always tinged with lightness and humor.
Perhaps the most memorable statement about Ram Dass’ death came not from his own heart, but from a woman named Pat Rodegast. She claimed to have been guided by a spirit named Emmanuel from 1969 until her death in 2012. Rodegast worked as her secretary and raised their children. Then, as she practiced Transcendental Meditation, she began to see a light that evolved into what she calls telepathic auditory guidance. Some of her guidelines are contained in her three books published in the 80s and 90s, two of which have forewords by Ram Dass. I did. Ram Dass said that when he asked Emmanuel what he should tell people about death, Emmanuel replied that death was “absolutely safe” and “like taking off a tight shoe.” .
I first encountered Ram Dass’s voice in 2016. I was 27 years old and living in New York, in a building in Chinatown that rattled every time an empty box truck drove down the street. Every morning I tumble down his five sticky flights of stairs, one of his lectures lingers deep in my ears, his unique blend of scientific knowledge and spiritual mysticism carries me all over town. He took me to.
He ranges from psychological concepts like attachment theory and childhood trauma to arcane things like Emmanuel’s Messages and the astral plane, pausing for a moment to ask listeners if they really, really “hear this.” There was a habit. Although he seemed to build on the insights of thinkers such as Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the psychiatrist who revolutionized end-of-life care in America, he He also talked about Eiji’s secret words. I devoured it all and felt my spiritual life deepening exponentially each day. Thanks to his lectures, I became more sociable, anti-capitalist, more curious, and definitely more self-loving.
This was my second rodeo with spirituality. As a child, I had strict Protestant teachings forced upon me like a burden. In Kansas City, Missouri, I was surrounded by an atmosphere of creationism, tent revival, and anti-abortion beliefs. I remember standing on a busy street when I was six years old and holding a sign that read, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, God.” I still remember it.
