Ram Dass Now

I have been thinking about death a lot lately. My death. I close my eyes, and picture myself dying. When I “come to”, and see that I really am not dead, what is left is Love. Pure love.

In an instant, any one of us could perish. Well, our bodies could perish. This simple thought fills me with intense love for this very moment.

There was a time in my life when I thought I was dying. I wrote letters to those that were close to me, with a plan to hand them out in my last moments. There were a lot of strange things happening to me during this time, but there are two particularly vivid memories that I want to share. During this time, I often felt sharp pain rising up my spine. It scared me. Every time it happened, I was sure I was about to have a heart attack. I remember calling my brother in tears during one of these episodes, so afraid that my heart was taking its last beat. The other memory I have made the people I told about it look at me like I had gone crazy. There was this bush up the street from my house that looked like my hair, at least to me. I was positive that my hair was made of this bush. I thought that somehow, my hair had been taken over by the bush. The bush and my hair were the same. Needless to say, after conveying this and many other similar experiences (too many to write about right now) to people, I was told it may be best if I seek a therapist. A lot of people thought I was on drugs. No drugs. I also want to make note that even though I was very scared that I was going to die, during this time I was also feeling huge amounts of love for everything around me. More love than I had ever felt.

Instead of a therapist, I went and got CAT scans, MRI’s, EEG’s, EKG’s, you name it. I was sure they would find some terrible disease in me and tell me that I had one month left in this body. Nobody found anything. I was in “perfect health”. But I knew something was not right. I decided to go to an energy medicine specialist. She diagnosed me as having “heart fire”, too much energy buildup in my heart. I did acupuncture, took herbs, and the symptoms went away. This happened about 4 years ago. I have not thought about it deeply until recently. I now see it as much more. My kundalini was being awakened, which I took as a sign of a heart attack. I thought my body was going to die, but it was my ego that was getting close to death. I thought my hair was a bush, but I was really merging into the One.

The thing is, I was not ready for the experience at the time. I wasn’t quite ripe for it. Here was this transformational experience happening to me, but I was unable to receive its teaching. It’s the same with the Guru. The Guru could be my dog for all I know. Right in front of me, everyday. I am not going to know until I am ready.

Treating everyone as if they could be your Guru. A beautiful way to go about life. I had a conversation with a man at the Farmer’s Market yesterday, while in the back of my mind thinking “he could be my Guru”. It made the conversation so much fun! And I am pretty sure all we talked about was the fact that he had a son in medical school, and how fast kids grow up.

The bottom line is, you just never know. You never know when you are going to die, you never know when you are ready to receive a particular teaching, and you never know when you are going to meet your Guru. That is, until you Know. When you Know, then you will know.

The year was 1969. Three weeks after my first acid trip—a “cosmic consciousness” experience of our essential Oneness—I found myself at Ram Dass’s father’s “farm.” Ram Dass was standing by the front door, wearing a white robe, barefoot, with a strand of wooden beads rotating slowly through his hand. I hadn’t smoked or dropped anything, but I actually saw light coming from him. I was speechless. The next day, I moved into a pup tent in the backyard near his father’s 3-hole golf course.

Even though I didn’t have a clue what namaste meant, I had found my tribe in the dozen or so people who were gathered there. At an early morning Mu tea gathering, Ram Dass asked if anyone knew how to type, and so I became his private secretary, using an old typewriter in the barn to type up his taped replies to the letters he was getting from young seekers across the country who had heard his talks.

Woodstock happened just down the road a piece; I was content where I was. Summer ended. I went to work for a New York advertising firm so that someday I, too, could go to India and find the source of the light that I had seen in Ram Dass. During this time, he was writing what would become the His-story part of Be Here Now. He sent me his handwritten pages and I typed them up, editing gently along the way. Then he was off to Lama Foundation in New Mexico, where the rest of the book came together.

Two years later, I was indeed in India at Maharaj-ji’s feet, as was Ram Dass. We were now gurubhai—devotees of the same guru. Maharaj-ji told me I was no longer Ram Dass’s “private secretary”; I was his.

When the email came asking for bloggers to spend 108 days celebrating the 40^th anniversary of Be Here Now, I knew at once I had to do it. Be Here Now was the first book I ever “worked” on, no matter how small my role; in the decades since, I’ve edited many books, but none has had quite the same impact on my life.

By his grace, I’ve come full circle. Now I can give back something for all that I received from this book and its author.

Parvati in 1969 at Ram Dass's