Weekend Recommendation #14

Ram Dass

One of the consequences of the 1960s and the counter-culture was the bridge between East and West. Fifty years later, one manifestation of this is that there are some 7,000 yoga studios in the United States today. It is estimated that some 35 million Americans have or are yoga practitioners. It is hard to find the number of yoga studios that existed in 1970 in the U.S., but it was most likely in the dozens up to a few hundred.

When I took my first yoga class in 1969 it was at a YMCA, followed a year later by taking a course from an East Indian Yogi near the campus of the University of Chicago.

Yoga fully crossed into the counter-culture when Swami Satchidananda opened the Woodstock Festival in 1969.

A more widespread phenomenon of the late 1960s of course, was the use of psychedelic drugs. [There were probably a lot more people at Woodstock on acid that practiced yoga.] The prime advocate for LSD of course, was Timothy Leary. While Tim traveled the world proselytizing “Turn On. Tune In. Drop Out” his fellow Harvard Psych professor Richard Alpert journeyed to India and came back as Ram Dass.

Ram Dass then spent the rest of his life, until his death in 2019, spreading the message of enlightenment in the West. His first book truly changed my life. “Be Here Now” taught me about mantras, chanting, and meditation and described Ram Dass’s experiences in India. I ended up backpacking overland to India in the early 1970s as a consequence of reading this book.

Here was one of the two primary advocates of psychedelics showing me that there were spiritual practices beyond the psychedelic experience. I was not alone. Everywhere I went in India, and Nepal were Americans who had read “Be Here Now” It was that iconic.

Ram Dass is on my mind as I just finished two books. The first was his last book, “Becoming Nobody” which I would highly recommend in audio format as you get to hear Ram Dass talk, which is what he did for 40 years. The other book is a novel about the early days of Leary and Alpert by T.C. Boyle called “Outside Looking In”

If you are a meditator, a yoga practitioner or a user of psychedelics and you have not read or listened to any Ram Dass, please use this as an impetus to do so. You will thank me.

Here is a lot more about Ram Dass.