Is he a servant of God or just a nice psychologist from Harvard who
took onetoo many doses of LSD? "I'm really an upwardly mobile,
exploitative guy on a power trip, and somebody from PSYCHOLOGY TODAY is
interviewing me in my house in Marin County with my Mercedes out back.
[Those images of me] are all true and they're all false."
It's none other than Ram Dass, who received his name ("Servant of
God") from a spiritual guru he found in the Himalayas in the late 1960s.
Born Richard Alpert, he was fired by Harvard in 1963, along with Timothy
Leary, for conducting experiments with psychedelic chemicals. His 1971
book, Be Here Now, chronicling the use of mind-expanding drugs, Hinduism,
and meditation, was a best-seller.
Now, at 60, Ram Dass is not simply an older--and balder--symbol of
the Sixties: He works as a counselor for the dying, has established a
volunteer organization to aid refugees in Guatemala and the blind in
India, and is a popular figure on the lecture circuit. From college
campuses to retreats for Fortune 500 executives, he talks about death,
compassionate social action, our ties to the environment, and what it
means to be conscious.
Owen Lipstein for PT: You have the most formal and academic
background in psychology. You served as a professor of psychology at
Harvard in the 1960s. But you resigned--why?
RD: The field was defined very narrowly then. The psychology I
studied at Stanford saw humans as ambulatory variables. Psychology was
what was measurable in publicly reproducible ways. That ruled out
introspection. It ruled out naturalistic experience,. At Harvard I
started to bring those back in. But that wasn't considered science any
longer. Now it is again.
PT: What's changed?
RD: Before, inner experience was considered irrelevant, an
artifact. Western psychology had very little to say about the mind. It
had a lot to say about the brain, about response behavior. What I did
from 9 to 5 at Harvard had nothing to do with what happened to me after
five o'clock; my depressions, my fantasies were irrelevant to what I was
able to measure.
Psychology then was almost totally built on pathology. You were
either sick or not sick. You were never healthy. You could go from
negative to zero; you could never go positive. People like [Abraham]
Maslow and [Carl] Jung and [Carl) Rogers saw the positive side. But the
minute you get to the positive side, you're at the edge of mysticism, the
edge of what Maslow called the "self-actualized person." These are the
realms in which you don't have hard empirical data to support your
theory. You are dignifying humanity with more potential than just
pathology or lack of pathology, but you are losing the science of
it.
PT: When did this start for you?
RD: When I took psilocybin in 1961, that changed the meaning of
psychology to me. There was a major ground reversal. After that,
psychology just seemed like a relative reality, rather than absolutely
real. The minute you see this kind of monolithic value system is just
another one, it loses its power over you. It lost its position as the
first way of knowing. I'm still a psychologist in that I can think in
terms of personal dynamics and defense mechanisms and psychosexual stages
of development, but that's not the uppermost matrix against which I see
the world. It's interesting the same way Newtonian physics is interesting
in relation to Einsteinian physics.
Tim [Leary] and I wrote an article in the Harvard Review in 1962 or
'63 called "The Politics of Consciousness," about who controls whose
consciousness, about which reality is the reality. That's when all the
institutions started to be up for grabs. That's when individuals started
feeling they didn't have to look up to existing social institutions.
Psychology and psychiatry are among them. Psychology lost its position as
the first way of knowing.
PT: What is the larger picture and how did you discover what that
might be?
RD: I want to give you one little association before I answer that
question. I was spending time the other day with Joanna Macy, an
extraordinary woman who teaches systems analysis. She's also a Buddhist,
very involved in ecology, and she's been a social activist for years. She
tells the story that she went to a therapist when she started to
experience sadness at the implications of what was happeng to the Earth.
She felt great sadness for the effects it could have on the children of
her children, and so on. The therapist insisted on treating it as a
personal problem of hers. Therapists themselves have not dealt with the
grief as a member of the species, the emotional reaction to the horror of
the uncertain of the future. It is a new thing in history.
That's one of the issues people are up against now. They are asking
for a way of being at home in the universe, which involves their social,
economic, and political structures. Put another way, there is a truth in
the universe and when the meanderings of mind get too far afield from it,
people reject it. It doesn't feed them.
The basic issue humans have is how to deal with the fact that they
ended up getting trapped in their separateness. They were born in a
unitive consciousness and then they were trained to be separate, to be
"somebody," to identify with their "somebodyness." Then they're trapped
in this like a prison and they can't get out.
Tags:
academic background,
artifact,
Buddhism,
college campuses,
fortune 500,
himalayas,
hinduism,
inner experience,
lecture circuit,
marin county,
power trip,
psychedelic chemicals,
ram dass,
richard alpert,
servant of god,
spiritual guru,
spirituality,
Suffering,
volunteer organization,
volunteerism,
western psychology
