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Bringing asana (postures), chanting, meditation, and breath awareness together offers a clear path for enhancing health, well-being, and spiritual growth. Sadhana Yoga Hudson shares the rich history, philosophy, and teachings of the yoga tradition to students and teachers alike.
Focus of the Month
be here now, a manual for conscious being
by Ram Dass, distributed by The Crown Publishing Group
Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert, was an American teacher, psychologist and author. His journey from social science to LSD experimentation to Eastern spirituality is quite epic, and his best-known book, Be Here Now, influenced seekers worldwide. I was one of them.
Alpert was a professor at Harvard and a colleague of Timothy Leary. Their explorations of human consciousness, in collaboration with Ralph Metzner, Aldous Huxley and Allen Ginsberg, led them to pursue intensive experimentation with psilocybin (LSD). Out of this research came two books, The Psychedelic Experience (based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead) and LSD. Obviously, all this was quite controversial and Alpert and Leary became personae non-grata and were unceremoniously booted from Harvard in 1963.
It’s the sixties, and Richard is kicking around, experimenting with mushrooms and LSD, and inevitably travels to India. His experiences are too numerous to recount here, but in a nutshell, he meets his guru, Neem Karoli Baba and Alpert is transformed into Ram Dass, or Baba Ram Dass (meaning servant of God).
In 1974, Ram Dass created the Hanuman Foundation, a non-profit foundation meant to embody the spirit of service. The foundation developed the Prison-Ashram project, (now called the Human Kindness Foundation), directed by Bo and Sita Lozoff, which helps inmates grow spiritually during their incarceration, and The Dying Project, (now the Living/Dying Project), conceived with the late Stephen Levine, which helped many bring awareness and compassion to the encounter with death.
I’ve carried my copy of Be Here Now around since the seventies, when it was published. It’s taped together now with duct tape, and still reads like an acid trip. You can open it anywhere and fall right into some amazing teaching. In order to read it, you have to turn it in different directions, there are drawings and different typefaces, and revelations that go across two facing pages. It’s playful and fun. The book relies heavily on Buddhist wisdom and Hindu philosophy, replete with god and goddess tales.
On February 19th, 1997, Ram Dass suffered a near-fatal stroke, which left him paralyzed on the right side of his body, with expressive aphasia limiting his ability to speak, along with other challenging ailments. These after-effects changed his life, but he did resume teaching and shared his wisdom and love with so many people.
Ram Dass died on Sunday, December 22, 2019, in his home in Maui. He was 88. Thank you for your curiosity, your trail-blazing spirit and your tireless service, dear soul. Rest in peace.
