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A Ten Year Ten~Year Perspective A TEN YEAR TEN~YEAR PERSPECTIVE Richard Alpert/Ram Dass Adapted from a talk given August 7.1982 on the occasion of the Tenth Annual Conference of the Association for Trans­ personal Psychology, held at Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove , California. I tried to think about the last 10 years, but I can hardly remember yesterday. When that first started to happen, I wondered if I was taking too many drugs, but then I noticed remembering that when I needed something in memory it was there, and the so I started to trust this state of not thinking at all-just kind last of an empty mind out of which something comes and you ten just get to trust it. The predicament is that, as you let go of years personal history, each moment becomes richer and more thick with meaning. Both future and past start to lose their power. You can have plans and memories, but they don't seem to have the same pull. A couple of years ago I found I had been moving memorabilia with me everywhere I went. It's those things one would keep in an attic or cellar. Mine were in boxes and I would pay the parcel service to move them every time I *The author, also known as Ram Dass, was first published in the Journal, 1970,2 & 1971, I, with an article based on his lectures at the Menninger Foundation. Subsequent Journal articles include: Ram Dass lecture at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center: Part I (1973, I); Part II (1973,2); Advice to a psychotherapist (1975, I): Freeing the mind (1976, 2); On lay monasticism (with Brother David Steindl-Rast, 1977,2). He is also known through his books which include Be Here Now (1972); The Only Dance There Is (1974); Grist for the Mill (1976); Journey of Awakening (1977); Miracle of Love (1979). Copyright © 1982Hanuman Foundation (a non-profit, tax-exempt organi­ zation), The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1982, Vol, 14, No.2 171 would move. When you're a wandering 'Sadhu' with a whole parcel fleet behind you, it's quite a trip. I noticed that I never opened the boxes. I just kept adding to them, assum­ ing that the time would come when I would run out of the present moment, in which case I could revel in the past. But I was getting to be able to be fulfilled in the present moment by less and less until I could just sit in an empty room and be happy. But I had old love letters and important memorabilia of the 60's and things one must hold onto-pictures of people I'd never see again, my Bar Mitzvah certificate that said I was a man. Not things to be taken lightly! At first I decided to throw them away, but I found myself during the night going out to the garbage pail because I burning couldn't bear to get rid of one picture. So I decided to have a personal big fire and burn them all. And I did. I started out laughing, history but by the second day it was really starting to get to me. My guru had said, "It's good to burn bodies because then the beings don't keep wanting to come back to them." So I thought it was good to burn that personal history. But it turned out someone was doing a movie of me those few days, so it's all on film. It's like microfilming one's history except it's his film, not mine, so now my Karma is his and I'm free. I don't ever have to look at it again. David McClelland, who was my boss at Harvard (he actu­ ally fired me and we've remained good friends over the not years), is convinced I haven't changed at all. This is ex­ changing] tremely discouraging since he's a social psychologist. I've changing been working all these years trying to change, and he says, "You're the same as you always were." I figure, "What does he know?" But I have changed, inside, although I'm not an enlightened being. Perhaps I am at some level, but I'm not fully consciously an enlightened being. I'm actually sort of a mouth for a process that many of us are sharing. A year ago I was 50 years old. I've always gone to motels on my birthday because I don't like that kind of hysterical fun that people usually have at calendar celebrations. But this time was my 50th birthday and I wanted to see if there was something to realty enjoy and learn. So I called some people and had three parties, one on television in New York with a big birthday cake. But no matter how I milked it, I couldn't quite feel that I was any age. I have a 50-year-old body, a 1931model decaying perfectly lawfully, and so I was really celebrating the age of my vehicle. Yet, on one plane, I'm hundreds of thousands of years old. Or else I'm newly born. You can take your choice. It feels like all and everything. 172 The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1982, Vol. 14, No.2 Ten years ago I was very caught in specialness, I was what I now would call a "phony holy." I was busy trying to be high for me and everybody else. I assumed that everybody wanted me to be high all the time so I would prepare my­ self to be high in front of everybody. There's a certain way you are when you're high. You smile a lot, you're very benevolent - it's the holy man role. I took all the parts of me that didn't fit into that role and shoved them under the rug so that I could be who everybody wanted me to be. I wanted to be that, too. I really wanted to be Ram Dass. You see, I had what was called vertical schizophrenia. I even had a name to go with each of my personalities, Dick personalities Alpert and Ram Dass. Ram Dass would sit in front of a and group of people and look out and maybe just love everybody identities and wanted nothing. Dick Alpert was counting the house. Worse than that, Dick Alpert was impersonating Ram Dass. Somebody would come up and say, "Oh, Ram Dass, thank you for your writings!" and I'd hear Ram Dass say, "Wouldn't you like to come up and see my holy pictures?" Well, that may seem funny to you, but what I felt was just a tremendous amount of hypocrisy, being What everybody wanted me to be. You see, what happened was that the spiritual identity played right into my hands psychologi­ cally. Psychologically there were whole parts of my being that I was afraid of and didn't accept. I had a justification for getting rid of them by becoming holy, and I was using my spiritual journey psychodynamically in order to get free of things that I couldn't acknowledge in myself. But after a while I began to feel as if I was standing on sand. I had to live with my own horror, and the predicament was that I was trying to live in the projection that other people were creating for me. But every now and then I had to be alone, and when I was alone I'd go into very deep depressions which I hid. My theory was that if I did my Sadhana hard enough, if I meditated deeply enough, if I opened my heart in devotional from practices wide enough, all that unacknowledged stuff would dualism go away. But it didn't, and it has taken me years to under­ to stand what the teaching was in all of this. I was busy going non­ from the two into the one . from dualism into noo­ dualism dualism, from the multiplicity into unity. All yogic tech­ niques are designed for that purpose; Yoga means union. I could huff and puff in pranayam, control my breath to go into a trance state, and in that trance state all of Dick Alpert would be gone completely. But I always came down again, and down had a pejorative connotation for me. I kept want- A Ten- Year Perspective 173 ing to get high. I didn't want to come down. But I indeed did keep coming down, even with Yoga techniques. Now in the course of the years I've developed a lot of very strange friends, and one of them is a being named Emanuel. He is interesting because he doesn't have a body. He's a being on another plane and he speaks through a woman on this plane. Some might have a difficult time accepting my friend Emanuel, saying they have no prejudices about color, sex, or religion. But bodies ... somehow if somebody doesn't have a body, you immediately don't know that you want to accept them. But that's not a problem for me because he's my friend and the way I figure it, I'll take my teachings anywhere I can get them. Emanuel had a teaching. One of the things he said to a us was, "You are here because you chose to be here be­ teacher cause this is a learning place. Each lifetime is a wonderful without opportunity to expand your consciousness and to move a closer, ever closer, to your oneness with God.
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