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No living person has had a greater ongoing impact on the spirituality of the boomer generation than Baba Ram Dass, aka Richard Alpert. His wisdom, courage, and dedication to service have provided a beacon for millions searching for new paradigms of understanding.
On February 19, 1997, Ram Dass suffered a massive stroke in his left cerebral hemisphere. This caused extensive right-side paralysis, expressive aphasia, and other ongoing health problems.
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© Kathleen Murphy
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But on the weekend of March 30, 2002, when the writer of this article
attended the Prophets Conference in Monterey, California, Baba Ram Dass
was there to speak along with people like Barbara Marx Hubbard and Gregg
Braden.
Wearing a new hat, this proud, vital, intelligent master, now wheelchair
bound, shared his newfound wisdom about aging and how his own disabilities
have given him the experiences he needed to further transcend this Earth
and make a deeper and more profound connection with God.
"I realized if I had my identity
connected with the future, this stroke would have been very hard... very
hard... because now I am a "strokee.""
Ram Dass spoke of surrender, letting go of the future, letting go
of the past living in the truth of the moment rather than living up to the
words he'd said previously or the roles he'd previously lived. His words
came out very slowly and deliberately, the spaces between the words
penetrating as deeply as the words themselves. The crowd listened to this
man who had been their inspiration for decades with a reverence reserved
for saints.
"If I am a Soul, then I can see you as
Souls... Wow... You see yourselves as your incarnations, you as a Soul
took this incarnation to learn something, to learn something about
suffering, and about Love...
"In the East, life is preparation for death, so you might as well get
ready for change. A death which you will aim for, in which you will be
fully present in the moment. Bye-bye, incarnation. Present in the moment.
That's the key in death, it's the key in life. Giving up time... giving up
space."
Ram Dass made the distinction of "Soul communication"
versus "ego communication." He spoke of his visit to a small
village in India and his return to New York City. Although the villagers
in India faced economic deprivation, with people dying on the streets, Ram
Dass observed that in spite of their hardships they knew that they were
Souls. They treated each other as Souls. They had God in their daily life.
But when he returned to New York, there in the midst of what, compared to
the Indian village, was economic prosperity on a huge scale the people did
not treat each other as Souls.
"When I find that when I don't like
somebody or something, I'm really criticizing God. I'm saying that if I
were God I would do it differently than that."
According to Ram Dass, everyone is a Soul who is taking an
incarnation. We miss our Soulness because we're so busy responding to our
incarnations.
He interpreted his stroke as grace for his Soul.
He recalled how, when he was once visiting an AIDS patient, he was giving
himself ego points for doing such good works, taking his time to visit the
dying. Then he suddenly had the realization of what he was doing, and
caught himself. At that point, he looked in the bed and saw another Soul,
rather than a dying AIDS patient having a rough incarnation. He was able
to separate the being from the incarnation, and he realized that the tough
time that the incarnation was having was going to cause that Soul to move
closer to God.
In a crucial turning point in his talk, Ram Dass noted that old age for a
Soul is different than old age for an ego. Old age for him, he said, is
bound to produce some "juicy changes," and he anticipates death
to be the ultimate trip. As you move into "old age," if you are
to experience the nature of your Soul, you have to surrender your thoughts
to your intuition you have to surrender your righteousness. And the
greatest surrender is to the moment. The deeper you surrender to the
moment, the closer you get to the experience of God.
Life, he said, could be looked at as divided into three parts: the ego,
the Soul, and God. It's like three concentric circles, nested within each
other. The ego is the first, the Soul is the second, and God is the third.
When we're younger, the ego tends to predominate. We're building our
futures and we're building from our past.
As we get older, the Soul becomes more dominant. The future and past are
less important. This is one of the reasons that older people tend to have
memory lapses, Ram Dass tells us. The Soul is more prevalent, but the
memory is more focused on ego concerns, which are less important at this
stage of life. Older people, he said, have more of a need for Soul contact
with other beings rather than for ego-based relationships.
"If you've surrendered your ego and
you're sure you've done it, you can have your ego back, because the ego is
a plaything of the Soul; because the Soul makes the ego, just as God makes
the Soul. These three levels are three planes of consciousness.
"You and I meet in circle number three God. Wouldn't it be better to
meet there in bodies like this? ... The game is to play the game of Life
but do it as God. ... It's possible for you to identify as circle number
three and number two, and your ego games will fly."
Ram Dass finished his talk to a standing ovation. The room emptied,
but a small group gathered around him. He talked with each person
individually. Actually, he shared his Soul with each person. I got the
idea that he was truly there to love us. And to give us the opportunity to
love him.
I remember the feeling as his eyes penetrated mine and mine his, and my
heart expanded to greet him in his space before he left the room.
As I write these words, my Soul is recreating the moment of that meeting.
My heart is opening and my Soul is once again communing with Ram Dass on
the invisible planes.
And I know I had met Ram Dass in the space of forever, where God can only
meet God in a body. As he rolled away in his wheelchair, I remembered his
comment regarding the AIDS patient: "It's only an incarnation." 
Ram Dass:
www.RamDasstapes.org
Wynn Free
may be contacted at: www.wynfree.com
Photo by Kathleen Murphy: Ram Dass at the
Neem Karoli Baba Ashram, Taos,
NM, Sept. 2000
For full information on conferences where Ram Dass
often participates, please see :
The Prophets Conference
www.greatmystery.org
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