CHAPTER 26

HOW CAN I HELP?

In December 1978, I had an opportunity to deepen my service and grow my compassion. Larry and Girija Brilliant, the satsang family members who were instrumental in smallpox eradication in India, invited me to Ann Arbor, where Larry was teaching public health at the University of Michigan. He and Girija wanted to start a nonprofit dedicated to alleviating suffering in the world.

Inspired by Maharaj-ji’s teachings about service, they chartered a new foundation called Seva. Seva, of course, is the Sanskrit word for selfless service. It also stands for Society for Epidemiology and Voluntary Assistance, though hardly anybody ever used the long version. They convened a circle of friends and colleagues to launch the nonprofit and serve as the founding board at a conference center near Ann Arbor called Waldenwoods.

A winter storm arrived on our heels, and we were snowed in for several days. I didn’t know many of the other people, and the blizzard gave us the time we needed to connect with one another.

We were a strange collection. There were doctors from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, along with Larry and Girija’s extended families from the Hog Farm commune and the Maharaj-ji satsang.

Across the table from me sat a doctor in a three-piece suit with an attaché case. Attaché Case, aka Dr. Steve Jones, stared in disbelief at my full beard and casual attire and at my neighbor, Wavy Gravy, aka Nobody’s Fool, the clown prince of the Hog Farm, sporting a red clown nose and a beanie with a propeller.

Also across the table was Dr. Nicole Grasset, a noted epidemiologist who had overseen the smallpox eradication push in Southeast Asia and had been Larry’s boss. Next to her sat an ophthalmologist from South India, Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy.

Dr. V., as everyone called him, was a devotee of the Indian saint and revolutionary, Sri Aurobindo. Dr. V. had founded Aravind Eye Hospital in the ancient temple town of Madurai, performing thousands of cataract surgeries every year, mostly for free. He appeared unassuming, but I felt an immediate spiritual connection.

The first order of business was to decide what suffering to tackle first. The first proposal was diarrhea, one of the biggest killers of children. Wavy spoke up, envisioning a fundraising campaign called “No Shit.” Nicole Grasset produced an alternate proposal for a “two-year blindness campaign in Nepal.”

Nicole had done her homework. Blindness in Nepal can be a death sentence because of the mountainous terrain; a person who goes blind has a life expectancy of less than two years. In Nepali, the term for blind person translates as “mouth without hands,” useless to a family surviving on the edge of subsistence. Larry and the Hog Farmers had gone trekking and seen the heart-wrenching consequences of blindness in Nepal. I knew nothing about blindness, but Nicole was a dynamic and persuasive advocate. We quickly agreed Seva’s first project would be to eliminate preventable blindness in Nepal.

My doctorate was in psychology, not medicine, and my efforts to alleviate the world’s problems were limited to charitable giving and attending antiwar or antinuclear protests. I was impressed we were going to take on such a huge and tangible problem.

I had no medical skills, but I did know how to fundraise. Before long, I was explaining cataract surgery at all my lectures. Along with telling Maharaj-ji stories, I began talking about Seva and blindness prevention. We estimated each Nepal eye operation would cost five dollars. In fundraising terms that was powerful: for the cost of a movie ticket, you could restore a person’s sight. Wavy took charge of “fun raising” for Seva. He gathered performers from among his rock musician friends to do benefit concerts around the country. The Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Joan Baez, David Crosby, and Dr. John all pitched in to perform in Seva’s Eyeball concerts. We raised a lot of money and had a lot of fun.

Seva called itself “a conspiracy of friends masquerading as a foundation.” From the beginning, the Seva circle was familial: we shared a lot, knew everything about one another, and made decisions together. We instituted regular circle sharing, which didn’t always go smoothly. Wavy Gravy helped keep things light with a pair of tacky clown glasses with Groucho Marx eyebrows. If anyone uttered the word “serious,” also known as “the S word,” the meeting came to a complete stop while the offender donned the funny glasses. We avoided taking ourselves too seriously, even as we addressed deep suffering. (Wavy and his wife, Jahanara, named their son Howdy Do-Good Gravy, although as soon as he was old enough, he changed it to Jordan.)

Larry was the first chairman of Seva’s board. He raised $10,000 from friends and satsang, and after he wrote an article about the new foundation in the Theosophical Society’s magazine Quest, readers contributed another $20,000. Larry got a grant from the World Health Organization to write a book about the smallpox program, and put that money into Seva too.

The following year, in December 1979, we met for the second time, at a retreat center in Marin, California. While the first meeting had happened in good faith, no one knew what would come next. This was it.

Larry had invited a young entrepreneur who arrived late. Steve Jobs was a few years into a tech start-up called Apple. Years before, Steve had read Be Here Now and, inspired by the book, made a pilgrimage to India. He arrived at Kainchi a short time after Maharaj-ji left his body. Steve had come to the Seva meeting straight from an Apple board meeting, still wearing his three-piece suit (he had not yet adopted his famous black T-shirt uniform). He’d gotten stuck in traffic in his new Mercedes.

Steve had contributed $5,000 to help the fledgling foundation get rolling. As he entered, the discussion turned to getting the word out about Seva. Steve thought the board was clueless about marketing and recommended using Apple’s marketing consultant. Although the gathering had begun as a convivial one, Steve, still stressed from his business meeting, grew abrasively insistent. Larry finally told him to cool it and walked him out. Steve cried for a while in the parking lot, then returned, apologized for his behavior, and left.

It was not the only early conflict in Seva. From the beginning, there were differing visions. The medical folks wanted simply to alleviate suffering. I and a few others wanted social service to also include spiritual practice to cultivate wisdom and compassion. Our view was, if we did not work on ourselves and teach others to do the same, our service would only contribute to more suffering.

This philosophical divergence became a core conflict within Seva, between what I came to call “the be-ers and the do-ers.” To me, Seva was a laboratory for spiritual social action. By performing seva as selfless service and not being attached to the results, as the Bhagavad Gita taught, people would evolve spiritually while helping.

By the third board meeting, the do-ers were burning out. Nepal’s bureaucracy was an endless hassle, an ingrained culture of influence and corruption that led to anger and frustration for those navigating it. “I’m confused,” I said. “I thought this was going to be about conscious service, service for the liberation of all beings. How we are doing it is as important as what we are doing. I’m not really interested in being part of just another do-good organization. I want to be part of a fresh statement for the world.”

I was spokesperson for the be-ers, and Nicole for the do-ers. I wanted the Nepal staff to work on themselves as well as cure blindness. Nicole was focused on helping blind people. Her public health approach leaned toward speed and efficiency. She was a smart, sophisticated, deeply committed medical professional. At one point, she asked, “Would you let a person be needlessly blind for one extra day?”

I replied, “Yes. There are worse things than being blind.” It took us a year to come back from that one statement. It ripped the organization apart. Others referred to our philosophical impasse as the Battle of the Titans.

Several times, I sought to leave the board. My approach relied on faith, trust, and openheartedness, not always a fit for administering an increasingly large nonprofit. But every time I thought about quitting, I came back to the fact that we were, in fact, doing something new. Seva was dedicated to relieving suffering from a spiritual angle and doing service as karma-yoga. The board members were all compassionate and dedicated. I could not elevate spiritual values over managerial efficiency—they had to work together.

It was an essential debate. I don’t think Nicole really understood my position at first, and I needed to appreciate the urgency of the frontline workers. We all had more work to do on ourselves.

We stayed in the fire together. Over the years, the self-awareness component, working on oneself spiritually while serving, has waxed and waned at Seva, depending on who is in command. But we all grew profoundly through that dialogue. I understand better how to serve and what alleviating suffering is about in myself and others. The do-ers understood that the point of view from which you serve, whether it truly comes from the heart, influences the outcome.

Everything we do to work on ourselves—going on retreat, meditating, opening our hearts, quieting our minds—transforms our being. However we serve, as a physiotherapist, or a bus driver, or a parent, is an expression of our being.

I use social action as a vehicle to work on myself and offer my being for the relief of others’ suffering. If I go to an antinuclear rally, it is an exercise of my own consciousness. When I work with a dying person, it is a manifestation of my own heart. Those actions keep feeding back to my awareness so that I become clearer, quieter, more present, more spacious. Gandhi said that any good you do in the marketplace will seem insignificant, but it’s still very important that you do it.

The less attached you are to your own desires, the more you can hear what other human beings need, and the less you project your own needs. Your response is more compassionate and appropriate to the need at hand. That doesn’t mean you don’t have desires. The paradoxical question is, how can we be fully engaged in life yet not be attached? Translating the inner work on ourselves into action is a subtle art!

Seva broke new ground in the world health arena by bringing together very different kinds of people and introducing cross-cultural service. It challenged institutions, like WHO and CDC and many NGOs, to deliver public health in ways that build indigenous capacity. Aravind Eye Hospital eventually set up an institute for international training. Its eye care model has been replicated all over Asia and Africa.

Seva was my deepest dive into social action. Although the spiritual component was often a small part of the overall effort, it contributed subtly to how the people doing the work engaged with service and how donors viewed Seva as a spiritually oriented service group. It’s still unusual in that respect.

I went on several multicity tours for Seva called “Spirit of Service,” staying in Days Inns and Motel 6s. One tour, in 1986, took in ninety cities and grossed over $650,000. Sometimes it got to be a grind. I’d be onstage, lecturing about eye operations, and I’d think, “God, what am I doing here?” The audience had come to hear about consciousness and love, and here I was discussing blindness prevention.

Not unexpectedly, climbing into the role of social activist brought up my emotional past. I heard myself echo my father raising money for Jewish refugee children. Dad played on people’s sympathies and guilt. He was good at it too. Was I doing anything different?

I hoped so. The point was to combine social action with the spiritual path, to challenge people to see the importance of working on themselves while helping others. My models were Hanuman and Gandhi serving God in the form of other people. Such service arises from spiritual roots, which was what people came to hear about.

Larry and Girija moved to Kathmandu for a year to study the incidence and causes of blindness in Nepal. They logged the data on an early Apple II computer donated by Steve Jobs. Seva started running eye camps in Nepal to test treatment strategies. Doctors trekked to mountain villages, set up camps, and treated the surrounding population. Western ophthalmologists volunteered to train Nepali physicians.

Dr. V. was intent on bringing Western technology and efficiency to Indian eye care. He wanted Aravind Eye Hospital, and Seva for that matter, to become a McDonald’s of eye care. He passionately believed sight-restoring surgery should be available to everyone. I traveled with Dr. V. in Nepal, bumping along in a jeep through Himalayan hinterlands to a Seva-sponsored eye camp. We watched cataract surgeries performed in a field tent. I saw villagers have their bandages removed and see for the first time in years. Their joy was a gift.

I knew definitively then my fundraising lecture marathons for Seva were worth it. The question I had asked myself—“What am I doing here?”—was answered in that eye surgery tent.

I was becoming better acquainted with my compassionate side. Hanuman, who serves God with such love, was insinuating himself into my very being. Was this why Maharaj-ji named me Ram Dass, the servant of Ram?

Dr. Venkataswamy embodied my ideal of seva. He represented the bridge between the spiritual and the medical arms of Seva Foundation. He appealed to the medical activists, and at the same time he was a devoted spiritual practitioner who was deeply surrendered to his guru. His aspiration to systematize eye care and replicate it worldwide came out of a true spiritual commitment. I’ve met a lot of doctors and public health people who are deeply altruistic. But Dr. V. embodied true seva on a level rarely seen.

I visited Dr. V. at Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai. From his origins in a South Indian village, Dr. V. had built an eye care empire. I saw how he treated his patients. Wearing an open-neck shirt, he was chatting with villagers with an easy familiarity. He talked and looked like them. He was already elderly but still doing delicate eye surgery. He used instruments made especially for his hands, which were twisted from rheumatoid arthritis.

Named for Dr. V.’s guru, Sri Aurobindo, Aravind Eye Hospital provides eye care on par with the world’s best. The financial model is Robin Hood. Well-off patients pay a premium for personalized care, and the paying customers support free treatment for thousands of villagers, brought in to the hospital by the busload. Aravind performs more cataract surgeries than any other institution in the world. Western ophthalmologists go to train in Madurai because they can do more surgeries there in a month than in a year in the US.

Dr. V. took me on an overnight pilgrimage to Sri Aurobindo’s ashram in Pondicherry. He suggested I meditate in Sri Aurobindo’s room. As I began to sink into the silence, I heard somebody behind me. I opened my eyes, looked around, and saw a sadhu smeared in ashes sitting cross-legged on the floor, an old, old baba. He was blessing me in some way. Then he dissolved just like a cloud in the sky. When I related the experience to Dr. V. and his friends, none of them seemed the least surprised.

Back in Madurai, Dr. V. sent me to visit the ancient Meenakshi Temple that occupies the center of the city. The temple is an ornately carved medieval compound teeming with devotees and priests offering incense and flowers. Dr. V.’s family is well known, and I was brought into the charged inner sanctum where they worship the Goddess. It was another reflection of the spiritual side of Aravind.

Dr. V.’s family were all involved in one aspect or another of the hospital. His sister and brother-in-law were ophthalmic surgeons, his nephew was the chief hospital administrator. Family members still work there, spanning multiple generations.

Partnering with Seva, Aravind brought intraocular lens implants to India and later to Nepal, an indigenous manufacturing capacity for Indian eyes that serves many other developing countries as well. Seva continues its support, and even after Dr. V.’s passing in 2006, Aravind maintains its profound spiritual roots.

I think my own attitude toward service was at first rooted in fear. I observed this with clarity at a service program I helped lead in the mid-1980s at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. Paul Gorman, my former WBAI-FM radio host, was now in charge of community programs and outreach at the great Episcopal cathedral. He invited me to teach a course in compassionate action.

Some two hundred people gathered, and we agreed to serve the homeless as part of the course. Some of us helped in shelters or soup kitchens; others worked with mental patients who had fallen through cracks; others organized street people to bring politicians’ awareness to their plight. We kept diaries and shared our experiences at an open microphone.

One woman reported on her interaction with a neighborhood homeless man. “I realized,” she said, “that though I gave him money, I had never really acknowledged his existence as a fellow human being. I was afraid. I was afraid that if I opened up to him, he’d end up living in my apartment.”

Her words captured exactly what I had been feeling. I’d been afraid to open my heart to the suffering of others because I feared I would be consumed, unable to set limits.

Over the years, as I have slowly opened to real love for my fellow beings, the connection between spiritual growth and relieving suffering has become clearer. By doing the inner work, I find my compassion deepens and my actions are more effective.

Paul and I wrote a book, How Can I Help? A few years later, sponsored again by Seva and the cathedral, we extended our focus on homelessness with an initiative called Home Aid. It included a retreat with Buddhist teachers and homeless activists, as well as an outreach program. In November 1988, we organized a Home Aid concert featuring David Crosby and Graham Nash, Carly Simon, Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon, Mickey Hart, Dr. John, and Sweet Honey in the Rock. Ben & Jerry’s donated gallons of ice cream, and actors and activists showed up too: Robin Williams, Willem Dafoe, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sarandon. We raised $50,000 to aid the homeless. I remember Robin Williams remarking on the harmonic connection among all living things.

At the same time, the AIDS epidemic was erupting in full force. A few years earlier, in 1983 or 1984, I’d heard from a guy who must have been one of the earliest cases. He had Kaposi’s sarcoma, the purple skin lesions that were an indicator of full-blown AIDS. I called Dr. Larry Brilliant to see if he knew about it. At that point, no one understood what the disease was or what caused it. There was no cure.

As the disease struck seemingly everywhere, a feeling of dread gripped the country. Within a few short years, as many as ten million people worldwide were infected with HIV. (AIDS has since killed more than thirty-nine million.) Early on, it was known as the “gay disease,” with all sorts of associated stigma, even within the gay community. People of color, who had less access to services than white people, were dying disproportionately. AIDS soon became a leading cause of death for women of childbearing age too. Everyone lived in fear of any lesion on the skin.

Given my own sexuality, I felt called to help. Half a dozen of my gay friends had AIDS, and there was a feeling of “There but for the grace of God go I.” At the hospice centers, I would sit at patients’ bedsides, holding their hands. We’d talk psychotherapy or spiritual stuff, but mostly I’d simply sit, offering my presence.

The fear around AIDS cut people off from the human contact they needed, so I touched and hugged people and helped other caregivers overcome their fear. I worked with dying patients in New York and Boston. I went on rounds in the AIDS program at San Francisco General Hospital, which was run by a friend of Larry Brilliant’s, Dr. Richard Fine. I also worked with the Zen Hospice Project, whose first director was Frank Ostaseski, a Buddhist teacher mentored by my old friend Stephen Levine. Zen Hospice had a healing center for AIDS, where I sat with patients and helped with group counseling. When I wasn’t traveling, I was there twice a week.

The AIDS work started me thinking more about Gandhi and karma-yoga. He famously said, “Work is worship.” My view of the nishkam karma-yoga of the Bhagavad Gita, working selflessly with no thought of gain, was still a bit removed until I got down in the trenches with AIDS. It was the first time I experienced death on that scale. Seeing the terrible progression of HIV as it tore apart people’s lives ripped open my heart too. I found myself committed on a more emotional level than before to help in whatever way I could.

I was with several patients as they died. In particular I remember one guy whose parents had rejected him. His finances were in ruins. He had sores all over his body. As I entered his room, I said something like, “How’s your incarnation doing?” He was very caught up in his immediate predicament, and I was upleveling it to many lifetimes. We both laughed, and I shared being stuck in my own incarnation. In that moment we were souls, witnessing our incarnations.

Throughout these many opportunities to enter into the world’s suffering—death, blindness, homelessness, disease—I tried to bring together the spiritual and action-oriented parts of my being. I’m sure I never succeeded entirely. This was far afield from what I had thought of as becoming a yogi. Maharaj-ji named me for Hanuman and told me to love everyone, serve everyone, and remember God. The key is always love.

It’s a delicate balance: wisdom and compassion, detachment and devotion. Those twin lessons from the battlefield of the Bhagavad Gita still apply. Detachment is giving up how it turns out, and devotion is surrendering into love. The practice is to keep an eye on both and maintain the balance.

Whenever I could, I attended retreats at Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, with Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg. I liked drawing from a wide variety of spiritual practices to keep the balance, and both Joseph and Sharon are wonderful teachers. So when they invited me to Burma in 1985 to study with their teacher, a senior Burmese monk named U Pandita, I quickly agreed.

We traveled to a monastery in Yangon (Rangoon) to meditate for three months. The days were simple and rigorous. The first meditation sitting began at 3:15 a.m. The rest of the day, until 11 p.m., I meditated in an alternating sequence: sitting an hour, then walking an hour. There was nothing to read, no conversation. I was allowed six interruptions: for a couple of meals, for a nap, for an evening teaching, for laundry, and for an interview with U Pandita. Sometimes, in the afternoons, Joseph and I surreptitiously exchanged chocolate M&M’s.

I felt like an amateur in the company of these big league meditators. Sharon got instruction in the practice of metta, or lovingkindness, while the rest of us focused simply on deepening our meditation. This was basic Buddhist practice: no Western embellishments or comforts, no talking, no mind games, just sitting. Like Theravadan Buddhism itself, it was bare-bones simplicity. I was trying to perfect meditation as a method.

It also deepened the fusion of Buddhism and bhakti yoga that remains a primary current in my practice and teaching. The combination of mind and heart, adapting the Buddhist insights of suffering, impermanence, nonself, with the practice of compassion, is a path we can relate to in the West. The dissatisfaction inherent in materialism, the constancy of change in our lives, and our identification with thinking—awareness of these qualities brings us into this moment. Compassion, the practice of seeing that others are the same as us, the heart of the wisdom of oneness—all contribute to our sense of interdependence and harmony.

Maharaj-ji instructed us to “bring your mind to one point and wait for grace.” The time in Burma with Joseph and Sharon increased my concentration and one-pointedness. I felt like I was cheating, because one-pointedness is a key to my bhakti practice. What Maharaj-ji said isn’t Buddhist doctrine, but it works for me. The state of being I associate with Maharaj-ji is my source of grace, unconditional love, and oneness. The language and concepts of Buddhism are different, but beyond language and concepts, beyond nama rupa (name and form), consciousness and love are the same. I can’t picture the Buddha and Maharaj-ji arguing.

In retrospect, at every point in my sadhana, Maharaj-ji has given me exactly the tools I need. Meditation quiets me and focuses my attention. Then, when I put my mind to Maharaj-ji, the intense concentration opens a doorway to him, to his no-form, to his unconditional love. The combination of Buddhist meditation and bhakti devotion is still my practice. Integrating Buddhist wisdom with the opening of the heart feels like a completion of both.

The early weeks of the meditation practice in Burma were extremely difficult. My head filled with thoughts of all kinds. By the end of two months, my mind began to quiet. I was filled with peace and joy.

And then a cable arrived at the monastery. It was from my stepmother, Phyllis. “I am sorry to disturb your meditation,” it read. “I am being operated on for cancer on Tuesday. I thought you should know. Love, Phyl.”