Ram Dass was born, Richard Alpert, on April 6, 1931 in Boston, Mass., the son of a wealthy lawyer (George Alpert) who was the president of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad and founder of Brandeis University. As Richard Alpert he received a B.A. from Tufts College in 1952, an M.A. in motivation psychology from Wesleyan University in 1953, and a Ph.D. in human development from Stanford University in 1957. He was an instructor at Stanford from 1957-58. He taught and conducted research at the Department of Social Relations and the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University from 1958 to 1963.
While at Harvard, his explorations of human consciousness led him to conduct intensive research with LSD and other psychedelic elements, in collaboration with Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, and others. Because of the controversial nature of this research, Ram Dass and Leary were dismissed from Harvard in 1963.
Leary began "naturalistic" research. He gave the drug to 200 people-musicians and metaphysicians, ministers of religion and junkies. The first analysis of the questionaire which they had all to complete pointed to one common factor. Experiences were related to personal orientation-and to expectation.
A common denominator began to emerge.
1. It heightened sensitivity.
2. It shifted the viewpoint. You saw the similarities of others to yourself rather than the differences. Difference appeared more as different varieties of dress upon a basic common human-ness.
3. A pooling of identity. Self mingled with other-self and the separateness of people diminished or disappeared.
An extreme extension of this last phenomenon occurred occasionally where communication seemed to become open ended. One person asked a question and another answered but both had the sensation that each had done both.
A very few people, about 3 per cent, seemed to get outside form altogether and experienced merely a homogeneous field of white light or pure energy.
Alpert had experience of this state on one occasion when he was part of this homogeneous energy field for a continuous four hours. A dark wave of red colour then began to seep across his field "like a mixture of the Wave drawing by Blake and something by Bosch." The intruder, he realised, was all of his identities. He held up his hands in horror, crying out "No, no, I don't want to go back." His identities seemed like an intolerable burden which he did not want to re-assume.
The Trippers' early expectations were not realised. A High, however, high it was, produced nothing permanent. On the drug road to Enlightenment what goes up must come down. It seems however to have taken a tidy while for this lesson to sink in-something like five years
Om du är intresserad av kopplingen mellan psykadeliska droger och andligt utövande lyssna på detta, Ram Dass berättar när han från början jobbade på harvard med socialpsykologi som inrikning och kom in på learys lsd projekt. Det slutade med att han åkte till indien med lsd:t och försökte få tag i munkar som kunde förklara för honom vad den psykadeliska upplevelsen egentligen innebar: (båda banden är 70 miunter långa)
http://www.freewebs.com/gamedesign/Ram_Dass_Tape_3.mp3
http://www.freewebs.com/gamedesign/Ram_Dass_Tape_4.mp3
