In retrospect, it’s interesting to see that, from the very beginning of my relationship with Maharajji, he was guiding me toward the spiritual path of service. It is now clear why I wasn’t able to hear him. Service lacks glamour as a path. It lacks romance. I wanted esoteric teachings, secret mantras, mystical initiations, meditations in Himalayan caves. I was really fascinated by what Trungpa Rinpoche called “spiritual materialism.”
Also, the difficulty I was facing in accepting service as a path to liberation revolved around my attitude toward life itself. It really wasn’t until the midseventies, over fifteen years after I had consciously begun my spiritual journey, that I acknowledged how deeply caught I had become in my aversion to human incarnation, to the psychophysical world of existence. As a result of my various practices, I was able to move in and out of planes of reality in which I experienced rapture, bliss, and equanimity. I had become addicted to these planes and was remaining aloof from life.
Taking a human birth still seemed like an error—a monstrous error! I was obviously too pure to belong among all these rascals and brigands who were caught in greed and hatred, sloth, agitation, and doubt. The “earth plane” appeared to be little more than an ocean of suffering, best avoided. So to choose a path that led me into or through the world seemed very unappealing.
Seeing the strength of this aversion, I was finally awakened to the distinction between getting “high” and becoming “free.” I knew how to get high, which involves overriding or pushing away the world. But under those conditions I wasn’t free. And I saw that what I really wanted was freedom, not just another high. Highs are part of the world of polarities. What goes up comes down. The deeper requirement would be to be at peace and happy whether high or low, whether in the world or out of it.
To fulfill this requirement, I would have to face my aversion to incarnation squarely. After all, my incarnation was my karma made manifest. As such, my life was my curriculum. It presented me at every moment with one or another of my attractions or aversions. Only when I could deal with the unfolding of my unique karma without getting lost in identification with my attractions or aversions would I be free. While setting aside worldly concerns had helped me become rooted in another plane, thus giving me some measure of spiritual perspective, I couldn’t stay there indefinitely. As the yogis say, “There is no place to stand.”
In addition, I had to admit that the path of renunciation and austerity wasn’t really working. Through it, I was getting new clarity and depth, but I wasn’t becoming free—just more uptight. Acknowledging all of these fascinations, aversions, and frustrations finally opened my mind enough to hear how Maharajji had been guiding me. I recalled that the day after I met him, we were together again. He was sitting on a stone wall. When I came before him, he looked at me quizzically and asked, “You know Gandhi?”
“I didn’t know him personally, but I know of him,” I said. And I added, “He was a great saint.” (I used the word saint, which has a far less specialized meaning in India than in the West. In India, it means “a very good or saintly person.”)
“Yes!” Maharajji said. “You be like Gandhi.”
“I’d like to be,” I said. Then he hit me on the head and laughed. The hit was less than a clout but definitely more than a tap. Perhaps he was realigning my neural pathways. Perhaps setting a thought form in motion, perhaps who knows what!
Over the years I read a great deal about Mahatma Gandhi. I found Gandhi to be an extraordinary blend of the appreciation of the inner life and superlative social action. He was able to integrate inner spiritual work, sensitivity to the suffering of the poor and disenfranchised, and masterful use of skillful political means to bring about social change.
The most brilliant example, to my mind, of the coming together of all the strands of compassion in Gandhi was the salt march. You may recall that the British had become increasingly repressive and greedy regarding their India colony. They had even imposed an intolerable tax on salt and required people to purchase salt at highly inflated prices through government channels, even though salt was readily available cheaply through Indian salt mines. The Indians, being hardworking dwellers in the semitropics, needed salt. About 20 percent of the income of poor Indians would be required—just for salt.
Officials from the Congress party, of which Gandhi was the moral force and political strategist, came to him and requested a plan of opposition to the British. Gandhi said he’d have to meditate upon the matter. Again and again, week after week, the party leaders returned to Gandhi’s ashram, but it was only after several months, when the officials had become thoroughly irritated with what looked like Gandhi’s stalling techniques, that a plan became clear to him. He explained his simple strategy to them. Then he picked up his staff and started walking toward the sea. He walked for twenty-four days and two hundred miles, and along the way thousands joined him. On the evening of the day they finally arrived at the edge of the ocean, he led the group in prayer. In the morning he bathed in the water. Then, coming up the beach to an area where there was a natural salt deposit from the ocean, he reached down and picked up a handful of salt. By this simple act he defied the British Empire, for, in effect, he was mining his own salt. Within a month, 100,000 people had followed his example and were in jail for breaking the law. And the momentum grew and grew. Gandhi had found such a simple form of peaceful civil disobedience, a form that the most uneducated Indian could understand, through which he was able to unleash a vast human moral power to throw off the oppressor.
I didn’t see much similarity between Gandhi and myself. I acquired steel-rimmed spectacles like those Gandhi wore, but I saw that I really couldn’t imitate him. I wasn’t about to spin my own cloth or live on a diet of goat’s milk and almonds, or travel around dressed in a loincloth. I was a Westerner living with an entirely different set of experiences and opportunities. It would take me some time to understand at a deeper level what Maharajji had meant by the injunction “Be like Gandhi.” All I recognized was that it had something to do with participating in the human condition.
Also during my first visit to India, in 1967, I was told that Maharajji had given me the name Ram Dass. I had no idea what it meant since I understood neither Hindi nor Hindu mythology. So I asked naively, “Is that good?” And I was assured that it was very good. It was translated to me as “Servant of God.”
It turned out that Ram Dass is another name for the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman, about whom I also knew nothing. Before meeting Maharajji, I had not been at all attracted to Hinduism. Quite the contrary! It seemed rather gauche, with its bad calendar art, fluorescently lit temples, and huge throngs of devotees pushing and screaming. The rather austere quiet of the Buddhism I encountered in India seemed far more sane and appealing.
When I met my guru, it was certainly not the Hindu setting in which I met him that was so appealing to me. It was his presence, his love, his compassion, and his wisdom that touched me in a way that no human being had ever touched me before. Yet I did meet him at a Hindu temple in which the central deity was the monkey god Hanuman. It seemed paradoxical that a being in whom I felt such infinite wisdom was in some way connected to a monkey god. Indeed, it rather embarrassed me. Finally I dealt with it in my mind by concluding that my guru was way beyond monkey gods and such but supported such idolatry for the benefit of the simple folk who lived in the region.
During that first winter, I was alone a great deal. When I was not doing my practices or study and was bored, I found myself sitting before the statue of Hanuman. The humor of my predicament did not escape me. After attaining a Ph.D. at Stanford and serving as a professor at Harvard, here I was sitting at the feet of a painted marble monkey. I was sure that if my old colleagues could see me, beaded and bearded, worshiping a monkey, they would undoubtedly conclude that the psychedelic chemicals I had experimented with had pushed me over the edge. And I wasn’t at all certain that they wouldn’t be right. But it didn’t matter. I felt that I was finding in the Hindu lineage the purifications and practices that I needed in order to integrate the various planes of consciousness that had up to this time remained so separate from one another.
Part of these practices involved reading more deeply in Hindu literature. In the course of these readings, I came across a list of nine aspects of devotion to God. For example, one could relate to God as mother to child, as in the case of Mary to Jesus. Or the relationship could be as child to father, as Jehovah is often portrayed. Or as lover and beloved, as in the case of Krishna and Radha. And there in the list was that relationship to God of servant to master, as exemplified by Hanuman and Ram. I was reminded of Paul’s injunction in the New Testament to “be confirmed in love through service.” Well and good that I was named after Hanuman; at that time I still could not see service as in any way connected to my liberation.
During that first winter in India, when I was wrestling with all this confusion, a wonderful new Indian friend, K. K. Sah, brought me an English-translation copy of the Ramayana, a book that he promised would help me understand Hanuman. It was a folk version written by the poet Tulsidas. The great epic poem the Ramayana is a bible for millions of people in India. The people hear it recited, study it, name their children after its characters, and model their lives on the teachings contained in its stories. In fact, in 1989, when the Ramayana was broadcast on television for a half hour each Sunday morning throughout India, everyone just stopped to watch it. Even the trains and buses stopped as the drivers refused to drive until they had seen the latest installment. It was a difficult book for me initially because it is so lushly devotional, with page after page of adulation for one character or another. Tulsidas was clearly an ecstatic and was writing for the eyes and hearts of believers. But I plugged away at it and finally began to find out just who this monkey was.
Basically, the story, like most bibles, is about the battle between good and evil. Ram is an incarnation of God who compassionately takes birth in order to rid the universe of the rakshashas (demons) led by Ravana, the very egotistical demon king who has ten heads and twenty arms. At one point Ram, his wife, Sita, and his devoted brother Lakshman are living in the jungle as hermits. Ravana, true to his demon nature of lust and greed, steals Sita away by cleverly diverting Ram’s and Lakshman’s attention with a wild deer chase. Ravana magically flies with Sita through the air to his stronghold in Sri Lanka, where he imprisons her and threatens her with death unless she accepts his advances.
Ram and Lakshman then set out to find Sita. In this they are aided by the monkey and bear tribes. Among the monkeys, Hanuman is the most pure in his devotion to Ram and Ram’s cause. As a result of his single-minded devotion, Hanuman is blessed with extraordinary powers, which he uses in carrying out the mission Ram has assigned him. It is Hanuman who, after leaping across the ocean, finally finds Sita. And, throughout the remainder of the story, Hanuman again and again performs extraordinary feats in helping Ram to be victorious in his battle against evil and in his efforts to bring Sita back and to uphold Dharma (the Truth). Hanuman is characterized as a wise and rascally monkey whose joy is found in serving Ram. He is so close to Ram, serving him so intimately, that he is known as the “breath of Ram.”
For several years after being named after Hanuman, I kept pictures of my guru and Hanuman around. I was getting to like the idea of being a servant of God, although I still had no idea what it meant for me.
In 1971, during my second trip to India, Maharajji once again cryptically gave me the message about service. At one point I asked him how I could become enlightened. Maharajji said, “Serve everyone.” The answer was hardly the one that I had expected, so I assumed something had gotten lost in translation. At the next opportunity I tried a different tack and asked him how I could know God. He replied, “Feed everyone.” In my snobbish, elitist view, service was a lesser vehicle than meditation and the more esoteric spiritual practices of which I’d read. Instead of the kind of practices the “big people” did, I was being encouraged only to feed and serve people.
Maharajji also encouraged me to study the Bhagavad Gita. In 1974 I went to the Arizona desert to meditate and study the Gita in preparation for teaching a course at the opening of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. I pored through nine translations of the Gita and came to appreciate its incredible profundity as a spiritual treatise. While the Gita gives important instruction about the inner practices for the transformation of the mind and the heart, its major thrust is the path of selfless service (nish kam karma yoga).
In the dialogue in the Gita, Krishna (the voice of absolute wisdom) instructs Arjuna (the seeker) to do his duty in the world but dedicate the fruits of his actions to God. Arjuna is enjoined to become an instrument of Dharma. As such he would not lay claim to either his actions or their outcome. Indeed, he would perform his duty as impeccably as possible as an offering to the higher spirit. Through such one-pointedness in his acts in the world, he would come to God or union. Thus the name karma yoga, coming to union through living out one’s karma. Another way of saying this would be that one makes one’s karma (the situation in which one finds oneself as a result of past actions) into one’s dharma (the word dharma means the path to liberation, as well as the liberating truth itself). To be liberated is not to leave the world, but to remain in the world and not be identified with it.
This instruction to consecrate all one’s acts as a way of approaching God is the message of many spiritual teachers and religious traditions. For example, in Mahayana Buddhism, it is said: “The way is not one of running away from the world, but of overcoming it through growing knowledge (prajna), through active love (maitri) toward one’s fellow beings, through inner participation in the joys and sufferings of others (karuna, mudita) and equanimity with regard to one’s own weal and woe (upekha).”
Eventually all Maharajji’s messages started to get through to me: “Be like Gandhi.… Your name is Ram Dass [Hanuman].… Do your duty in the world as a way of serving God.… Feed everyone.… Serve everyone.” Maharajji was telling me, whether I liked it or not, that my path was karma yoga, and that the specific actions were to be those of service.
I have described these stages of my own spiritual journey in some detail because as I look at what has influenced my attempts to relieve suffering in others, I see that the journey toward freedom remains a key impetus. That may sound harsh or self-centered, but perhaps if I say that my yearning for freedom is altruistically based, that it is motivated by the bodhisattva’s seeking of enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, it sounds better. And it is true that the spiritual motivation has in it the objective of relieving suffering for all beings, since we are all interconnected, or even a unity. Still, there is a selfish component to sadhana (spiritual practice). Even Gandhi, who espoused selfless service, when acclaimed for his actions in helping a village said, “I didn’t do it for them. I did it for my own sadhana.”
Selfless service cannot come out of a denial of a personal motivation and objective. Even though you really care about others and want to help them, your spiritual journey is your own, determined by your unique karma. It is only at the conclusion of the journey that, as Ramakrishna says, you throw into the fire both the thorn (attachments) removed from your foot and the thorn (spiritual practice) you used to remove the other thorn. Only then, when, as Gandhi says, the surrender to God is complete, does true selfless service emerge. Because, of course, at that point you have seen through the mind-generated nature of the idea of “self” itself, and even the personal desire for enlightenment has fallen away.
When I acknowledged that karma yoga was my path, I looked about to see which service to perform. Wouldn’t appropriate service in some way be connected with the facts of my incarnation: that I was born in this particular body, to this family, in this socioeconomic class, in this country, in this ecosystem, at this time in history? What was my work with the other incarnates? How was I involved with their suffering?
As I re-viewed my life since meeting Maharajji, I realized that in fact I was already serving in this way. I was writing books and giving lectures, and these were apparently helping others.
Thousands of people have told me how one of my books (usually it’s Be Here Now) has changed their lives. The ones I meet all seem to be relatively happy about the way it’s changed their lives, even though I meet them in surprisingly disparate roles in society. One is now a Jesuit priest, one I met in the prison in Denpasar, Bali, and another is a guard. There is an industrialist, a mother of five, a judge, and a dealer of grass. There is a rock singer, an actor, a student, and a street hustler. A Hindu boy in India told me his grandfather reads Be Here Now. There’s an old Hawaiian and a young Tibetan monk, spiritual teachers, rabbis, a mortician, doctors, and some of the homeless. The list goes on and on. Recently I met a Western woman who had become a Buddhist nun. She was quiet, had humor in her eyes, and was vibrant with life force. She bowed and said, “I just want to thank you. When I was at my lowest in the States I read one of your books and it turned my life around. And all these years I’ve been deepening my practice and sending you blessings for having helped me.”
I know that it sounds disgustingly ego-y to be describing adulation of myself and reciting such a list, but it doesn’t feel that way inside. Because I don’t feel that I really wrote any of those books, thus I do not experience these people as speaking to me, personally. The way the books came to be was that at one point Hari Das, who was the yogi Maharajji had instructed to teach me yoga, wrote on his slate (he was maun, or silent), “Maharajji has just given his ashirbad for your book.” “What is ashirbad?” I wanted to know, “and what book?”
Hari Das explained that ashirbad means “blessing,” and that it was for whatever book I wrote. So when Be Here Now, after a journey of publisher rejections, finally came into being and touched millions of people, all I personally felt was gracefully used by Maharajji to reassure so many hearts that the intuitive truths we know are indeed real, even if all the world acts as if they aren’t. He was giving them a booster shot of faith with his book, which he had let me write.
But he has never fully convinced me that I am really an author. They are his books, from which I, along with the readers, reap the fruits. The fruits for each person are obviously different. The books confront me with people’s appreciation, with fame and respect, they provide some economic support for me and for causes in which I believe, as well as helping me to understand more deeply what I know by writing about it. All of these things are blessings if you are not attached to or needful of them. But if you are attached to any of them, then the fruits of authorship become a hot flame of purification. And that fire is another kind of grace. I’ve been burned a number of times by that fire too.
The number of opportunities to relieve suffering is as great as the number of sufferings themselves. How then can I decide which sufferings get my attention and which don’t? Which letters get a phone call? Which needy nonprofit organizations do I perform benefits for? Which teachings should I take? How, indeed, do I live a life of service? Such decisions cannot be based solely on rational considerations. I recognize that my actions are based on intuition and the existential situation in which I find myself, which for each of us is unique.
So, in the seventies, as I looked at what specific actions my karma yoga would embrace, I saw that what I had to offer others was what I had gleaned from my spiritual training. I felt others had preempted the world of helping with regard to physical suffering: others were better cooks, had been trained as nurses or medical technicians, were skilled in designing wells, chemical toilets, solar heating, or forest usage, were shrewd in traversing the byways of bureaucracy and politics, could fight injustice in the courts, express their compassion with epidemiological curves and computers, or plan and execute an act of civil disobedience better than I.
What I could do was keep focusing on the ignorance that lies at the very root of suffering. Again and again, in one way or another, I could enunciate the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths about suffering and its end. That is, I could serve as a spiritual friend or teacher and share practices that could help others see their own suffering for what it was, dependent upon their own mind states. Once seeing this linkage, they could begin to change their mind states in a way that would free them from suffering.
Of course, the only people who would even acknowledge the relevance of such help would be people who wanted to awaken. As Gurdjieff pointed out, “We are caught in the prison of the mind. If we are to escape we must recognize that we are in prison. If we think we are free, then no escape is possible.” So the population that I would serve was defined by their conscious intention to become free.
During those years I think I felt that without the leverage created by the desire to awaken in another person, helping that person to escape one suffering just seemed to make space for the next suffering to appear. It seemed endless or, at least, went on until the person started to awaken. Once this began to happen, a person learned to use his or her suffering as grist for the mill for further awakening, thus, ultimately, becoming free from suffering itself. But, until then, there seemed to be a certain futility in helping an unawakened person.
Now, as I look back at those attitudes, I see how rooted in fear they were. I was afraid of the massive unawakened suffering of the world. I was afraid that if I opened myself to it, I would drown. To protect myself, I needed the boundary definition that “I work only with people who want to awaken.” I felt pity for others, and I was willing to help from a distance with a donation of money or even time, but, basically, I had no direct business with the suffering mass of humanity.
The fear I was experiencing was strikingly exemplified in the second or third meeting of a class on compassionate action that had been convened at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. The class was jointly sponsored by the cathedral, the Seva Foundation, the Open Center, and radio station WBAI. There were, perhaps, two hundred of us who had come together to engage the issue of homelessness. We had all agreed that during the course we would each in one way or another help alleviate the plight of homeless folks in the city. Some of us volunteered to cook and serve in soup kitchens; some to monitor overnight shelters in church basements; some to lobby against unfair housing practices such as warehousing empty apartments, or legislation that unfairly benefited the real estate developers; some to work on the streets with mental patients who had gotten lost between the bureaucratic cracks; some to help the men and women living on the streets to unify, organize, and stage demonstrations to bring attention to their plight. We were to keep diaries of our experiences and share the entries at an open microphone at each class, so that we could increase our collective awareness of the ways in which we were both the problem and the solution in the ever-worsening homelessness situation.
One woman explained that she had chosen to work in a shelter or a soup kitchen (I don’t recall which), but that her diary entry did not involve that activity. Rather she wanted to share an experience she had had right outside her apartment building. She explained that during the past many months, as she left her apartment to go either to the bus or to the store, she would pass the same man begging at the corner of her street. He had a paper coffee cup with a few coins in it, which he would jiggle as each person went by. The woman reported that sometimes she would put a quarter in the cup and sometimes she wouldn’t. After telling us this, she smiled in some embarrassment and admitted that she had evolved a sort of budget for her giving to him—$2.50 per week. She said that she regularly spread the giving of the money out over the week.
“As a result of this course,” she said, “I realized that, though I gave him money, I had never really acknowledged his existence as a fellow human being. When I examined why that was, I saw that I was afraid. But what was I afraid of? I wasn’t afraid that he was going to rape me or anything like that. I wasn’t even afraid he might take my purse. After all, we had been passing each other regularly all this time. “No,” she said, “what I was afraid of was that, if I opened up to him, he’d end up living in my apartment.”
In the discussion that followed the reflective and empathetic silence her remark elicited in the group, we saw the abstract issue involved. We were afraid of our own hearts’ caring. We were afraid that, if we truly opened our hearts to the suffering of the people around us, we would be unable to set limits.
During the seventies, when I defined my service as only relevant for those wishing to awaken, I, along with some friends, started the Hanuman Foundation, an organization that would serve as an umbrella for various spiritual service projects. The two major projects begun at that time were the Prison-Ashram Project and the Dying Project.
Why those two projects? Partly, because those two populations were available to me. After I had been thrown out of Harvard for psychedelic research, society was hardly about to trust me with its children or any of the movers and shakers in the power structure. I guess people figured I couldn’t do a great deal of damage to the prison population or the dying.
We had received so many letters from inmates in various federal and state prisons who wanted to use their “time” in a way that would help their spiritual development. The Prison-Ashram Project was designed to offer that population spiritual support and guidance through books, lectures, workshops, pen pal clubs, and so on. The project, under the leadership of Bo and Sita Lozoff, served many, many inmates through these vehicles.
As a result of my study of Tibetan Buddhism, particularly the Bardo Thodol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead, I had recognized that the state of one’s consciousness at the moment of the death of the body is spiritually crucial. Our society not only doesn’t focus on that moment but goes out of its way to deny the whole matter of death. The Dying Project was an attempt to address this issue by focusing on death and dying from a spiritual point of view. Stephen Levine, later joined by his wife, Ondrea, carried this project to incredible heights of compassionate service through books, tapes, workshops, and telephone and personal visits. And Dale Borglum, at one point, created the Dying Center in New Mexico.
Both of these projects, you can see, were initially focused exclusively for people—inmates on the one hand and people with terminal illnesses on the other—who wished to use their karmic predicament as a spiritual practice to help them awaken. These projects were, in their early days, not relevant to either the general prison population or the general dying population. Later, when I was no longer directly connected with the projects, they broadened their mandates considerably.
Reflecting on that period and the times from the early sixties up to then, I see that I and many of my associates were often impatient with other people’s suffering. We had found in Eastern literature excellent maps of human consciousness, maps that spelled out the cause of suffering. We felt that we had “seen through” suffering, and we were impatient with those who hadn’t.
This attitude made me very selective about those to whom I made myself available. For example, I had learned over the years the folly of visiting Person A at the behest of Person B. Unless Person A truly wanted to visit with me, I had no real license to ask that we work together to awaken out of suffering. Without that license, our time together would often degenerate into a rather superficial hanging out that, while perhaps “nice,” felt minimally useful. In some instances I would attempt to use power to force awakening. But you can’t really do that to other people. You might make them “high” for a moment or two, but unless they are “ready,” whatever that might mean, it won’t last. So over the years, having had many such experiences, I became very tough about whom I would work with and whom I would not.
When I think about it, however, I realize that I have been approached so many times by people who said that they were interested in spiritual growth. They said all the right things, but, when we got down to it, they really didn’t want to let go of their personality dramas. I slowly learned that you have to listen to more than the words in assessing what another person is really asking.
While I kept my distance from most people’s life dramas, when I found people who truly yearned to awaken, I was only too delighted to put up with whatever personality or physical “stuff” they might have. Often I would find myself reactive to them, and we would together work happily with my “stuff” as well.
I have a friend, Kelly Niles, who is a quadriplegic. He cannot speak—he only makes sounds—but with help he can communicate through an electronic alphabet board. Kelly is thirty-one and has been like this since an accident when he was eleven.
Initially it was very difficult for me to be with Kelly without reacting to his predicament. He was often caught in anger and self-pity, and in his presence I found myself masking my own pity, sadness, guilt, and anger about his body. So my visits with him all had a slight edge of hysteria. But over time, as I got to know Kell better and better, and shared my reactions openly, our relationship changed. I noticed his infirmity less and less. I began to be with the consciousness behind his melodrama; a beautiful, delightful, and wise being was there—someone with whom I could look at all the sufferings; his and mine, Kell with his crippled body and frustrated sex life; me with my uptight mind and all my “problems.” And, as a result of this work together, Kell felt heard by me, and I felt heard by him. Now we have moments of great peace and joy together. The relationship has been healing to both of us.
Just how extraordinary Kell’s inner being is was demonstrated when I invited him to introduce me at a lecture I was giving in Santa Rosa to healers of one stripe or another. The audience was noisily greeting one another, but when Kell was wheeled onto the stage, his body contorted, saliva coming from his mouth, everything stopped. The audience didn’t know what was happening. Then Kell started with his alphabet board and said simply, “R.D. says we are not our bodies. Amen!” It was the best one-liner I could imagine—complete as it was with humor, wisdom, pathos, and faith. The audience dissolved into heartful applause. That was the Kelly Niles I was able to know and treasure as a friend once I had left my reactivity behind.