He had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage several years earlier, and his voice was shaky. Writing in the counterculture magazine High Times, Krassner stated that Ram Dass “now admits that he made up the story he told American seekers about the time he gave his guru in India three tablets of LSD and nothing happened.”
In 2001, Paul Krassner, another sixties icon and old friend of Ram Dass, seemed to confirm McKenna’s doubts about Ram Dass’s story. “I saw outrageous shenanigans,” McKenna said. He conjectured that Maharajji, wanting to impress his American devotee, pretended to consume the LSD through sleight of hand. The gurus McKenna met in his travels in the East were certainly capable of such trickery. He questioned whether anyone, no matter how enlightened, would be unaffected by 915 micrograms of LSD. This message corroborated the overarching theme of Be Here Now, that spiritual practices such as meditation and yoga can induce the same powerful mystical states as psychedelics but in a more stable, permanent fashion.īack to Terence McKenna. LSD didn’t affect Maharajji, Ram Dass implied, because the guru already had such a profoundly mystical outlook. “All day long I’m there,” Ram Dass wrote, “and every now and then he twinkles at me and nothing-nothing happens!” When Maharajji asked Ram Dass for “medicine,” Ram Dass gave him three pills, each containing 305 micrograms of LSD, a very strong dose. If you didn’t watch him, he’d just disappear into the jungle or leave his body.” Maharajji was so enlightened, Ram Dass wrote, that “he’s not identified with the world as most of us identify with it. Maharajji, a guru whom Ram Dass met in India in 1967 and who gave him his new name. McKenna said he doubted a famous anecdote in Be Here Now involving Neem Karoli, a.k.a. It begins in 1999 when I interviewed psychedelic explorer Terence McKenna in New York City. To commemorate the man, I’ll tell a little tale about him. And Ram Dass kept popping up in conversations at a symposium at Esalen, the spiritual retreat center, that I attended a few weeks ago. Last year, I kept thinking “be here now” when I was on a silent Buddhist retreat. Bald and bearded, dressed in a luminous white robe, he enthralled us young seekers with his funny, cool schtick. In the mid-1970s I heard Ram Dass riff on this message in a packed auditorium at the University of Colorado. In the early 1970s I read his bestseller Be Here Now, which argued that enlightenment consists of just, well, being here now. Born Richard Alpert, Ram Dass has drifted in and out of my life since my youth. Baba Ram Dass, the Harvard psychology professor turned guru, who convinced me and others in my generation to chase enlightenment, is dead.
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