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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