I'm Oprah Winfrey.
Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast.
I believe that one of the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time, taking time to be more fully present.
Your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right now.
At 27, Richard Alpert was an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University and had all trappings of big success a corner office, golf outings, extravagant vacations.
In 1959, a young professor named Timothy Leary moved into the office next door.
He was brilliant, charismatic and believed mind-expanding, psychedelic drugs could be used in psychological treatment, a theory that also intrigued Richard Alpert.
The professors tested this theory on students and were famously fired from Harvard for their research in 1963.
That's when Richard realized he needed to follow an entirely different path to enlightenment, and it led him to India.
It was there he met Maharaji, who became his guru, or spiritual guide, and taught him the power of unconditional love.
Richard returned to Boston, renamed Ram Dass, which means servant of God, with a new sense of purpose to teach a generation a lesson he learned in the East to live in the moment.
And he wrote his classic best-selling book, Be Here Now.
In 1997, at 65, Ram Dass suffered a massive stroke.
Doctors gave him a 10% chance of survival.
But Ram Dass is still here, and his message as strong as ever.
So, on a magnificent Maui day with the Pacific Ocean as our backdrop, I met Ram Dass for the first time in his own backyard.
So it's an honor to be here.
It's an honor to have you here.
So I wanted to do this interview because it is my goal, with my new network, to use it as a platform for opening people up to the best of themselves.
I want to elevate consciousness wherever I can.
Wow.
And the very idea of having you to sit with me is really a gift, not just for me but, I think, for anybody who has the opportunity, as you are one of the great leaders of the tribe of the personal growth and spirituality movement.
From where you sit right now, looking at where we've come from as a Western nation in terms of our acceptance of opening up to it, compared to where we were when you first started, what do you see?
The 50s were all so different than the 60s.
Everything was so in the boxes.
And the 60s are just ecstatic.
And feeling that you had a voice of your own.
Let's talk about the 50s and the kind of boxed life, your words, you were leading at the time.
You were, you know, renowned.
You were doing what everybody wants their son to do.
This is the life.
Were you not?
Did you not think that was it at the time?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I had the antiques and the Mercedes and everything.
You had that.
My cello and I really... You were the Harvard professor.
You know, I sat and looked at the fellow faculty members and I didn't see such a spark.
They knew up here, but they didn't know down here.
And it never got to this.
It never got to this.
It stayed up here.
This meaning coming from your soul, from your heart space.
Yes, yes, yes.
The path of the heart.
The path of the heart.
Then I got involved with psychedelics.
And that opened me up to what I hadn't been opened to.
And you got involved, not just involved with psychedelics, you got involved with psychedelics, with the king of psychedelics.
Timothy Leary moved into an office right next to yours at Harvard.
Yes.
The professor who moved in next door, Timothy Leary, would later be described by the media as the most dangerous man in America, called an acid evangelist and a renegade who advocated for psychedelics with that famous phrase turn on, tune in, drop out.
For decades, he was the public face of the era's drug culture.
Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary's paths diverged after Alpert's spiritual transformation to Ram Dass.
But they maintained a friendship and a deep connection.
Were you ever, you know, in all the stories I've read about it, you know, had your father...
You know, that generation was the drug culture generation.
Had you been warned against the drugs?
Had you been told not to use drugs?
Had there been this stigma against the drug?
My father said, my God, you could be a doctor.
What are you doing with this crowd?
My family didn't quite understand what I was doing, what psychology was.
It wasn't like it is now.
Yes.
It was considered crazy at the time, right?
Crazy.
Yeah.
So they were one sign, and Timothy was another sign.
Very different.
And I looked at academia as I was proud of Harvard, but the mushrooms showed me Harvard was a box.
The psychedelic mushrooms.
Yeah.
I have read that psychedelics gave you the first whiff of God, that you hadn't even had a whiff of God prior to that.
Yes.
Was that the first whiff?
First whiff.
First whiff.
Yes, absolutely the first whiff.
Yeah.
I mean...
I had bar mitzvahs and all that.
Because you were raised Jewish.
Yeah.
Yes.
None of that gave me... A whiff.
A whiff.
Do you ever regret taking the drugs, with all of the fear and the fact that they're illegal, and all of the people who've lost their lives and their way to drugs?
Did you ever regret doing it?
I have regretted making drugs positive for people.
Were you disappointed to be thrown out of Harvard?
No.
I bet your dad was.
Yes.
Yes.
But I was so I knew there was drugs in my system because when I went into the president of Harvard he says I'm sorry, we'll have to let you go, and all that.
And I looked at him and he just looked like a small man and he was frightened because frightened by mysticism.
We were mystics, and they were intellectuals.
In 1967, a few years after leaving Harvard, Richard traveled to India, marking the beginning of a life-changing spiritual journey.
Goodbye Harvard, hello India.
I just came from there.
God only knows what it was like in the 60s, because my experience just a month ago was you look out one side of the window and there are ox and camels pulling people in the street.
And then there are people zooming through on motorcycles with their saris sitting to the side.
It's like nothing I'd ever seen.
Isn't it wonderful?
It is wonderful.
I felt like I was in the middle of a video game.
I didn't know which way to look or where to turn.
And your senses?
You're overwhelmed.
And people are burning things on the side of the road and they're cooking and the smoke.
The smells.
The smells.
Oh, God.
You're taken over by the smell.
So you arrived in the 60s.
Yeah.
But why had you gone?
Why had you gone?
Can you tell me why you wanted to go?
I was going to find out... who had a map for my planes of consciousness.
So I said, I'm going to these.
Richard knew he had come to India, as he said, to find something.
When he met a Californian known as Bhagwan Das in Nepal, he had a feeling he was getting closer.
They drove in a borrowed Land Rover towards the foothills of the Himalayas, with Mozart playing on the eight track, and stopped at a roadside temple.
And there is a scene, a man with a blanket He's on a table and about 20 people around him.
Sitting at his feet?
Sitting at his feet.
And they all look like white gowns.
It all looks like cultish things.
So I stood back because I didn't want to get involved.
In any of that cultish distance, yes.
He pointed at me.
He's speaking Hindu.
And he said, you were out under the stars last night, and you were thinking about your mother.
Your mother died.
And I said, yes.
Now, how did he know that?
But he said, Spleen, which is just the name of the organ that killed my mother.
That's when you went, whoa.
Yeah.
Who is this guy?
Yeah, who is that?
Who is this guy?
How did he know?
I didn't tell anybody.
That was a miracle in a way.
He was reading my mind.
He was reading your mind.
And I said...
If that, if he knows that, oh, he'll know.
He's gonna know, if he knows that, then he knows me.
He knows all my secrets.
And I looked up at him and he was looking at me with unconditional love, unconditional love.
He was loving me totally.
It never happened before.
People love you because, because you're a good boy, you're a good friend, and he was loving me all of me, because he was all the stuff of me that I never wanted anybody to know.
Right.
That's what everybody fears, if you really knew me.
Exactly.
If you really knew me, you wouldn't really love me.
He knew me, and he loved me.
Yeah.
I found myself saying, home again.
Home again.
Home again.
And how do you explain that when you sit in front or sat in front of the Maharaji, you not only felt love, but became love and loved people too?
Is it because his, He mirrored my soul and made me identify with my soul, not my ego.
This was who i thought i was and who i was really.
And he, he said i want you to love everybody.
So you came back to spread the love, the message of love.
Yes yes, you've got to tell the story of coming back to new york, Getting off the plane.
Your father has come to meet you.
And there you are, getting off the plane, wrapped in what?
Beads and long hair and Indian clothes.
The white garb.
White stuff.
Beard.
Yeah.
And my father meets me and he says, get in the car quick, somebody sees you.
And I was just off the graph.
And my father, Father, his grayness, his gray Cadillac, his gray cigar.
Your father had been a pretty traditional yet successful person.
You all had 300 acres, I think.
Yeah, 300.
He seems like he openly accepted you and your transformation and allowed all these hippies to come to his house and dance on the lawn.
But that was for the camera.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
So you came back and all of these people are coming to your father's house.
You came back.
Did you feel filled by the message that you had received when you were in India and therefore then wanted to express it?
What I felt was that Maharaji was a jewel and the West didn't understand people like Maharaji.
Right.
And I wanted to share the jewel.
The guru THE WAY YOU WRITE ABOUT HIM TAKES ON A QUALITY THAT IS NOT HUMAN.
USUALLY WHEN WE THINK OF GURUS, WE THINK OF HUMAN.
IS THE GURU THE SAME AS A TEACHER?
NO.
SO THE GURU IS ABOVE THE TEACHER?
OH, YES.
OH, YES.
IS THE GURU LIKE AN ENLIGHTENED BEING IN A PHYSICAL BODY HERE ON EARTH?
YES.
THEY ARE A HIGHER BEING.
Not necessarily the highest.
Not the highest.
He sees your future, your past.
People call you a guru.
Do you think you are one?
No.
I say to them, Find a real one.
This isn't a real one.
Let's talk about what you say on page 158 about faith.
I loved this.
You said faith is not a belief.
Now that just struck me because so many people do believe that their... Belief is up here.
Belief is up here.
And faith is down here.
Wow, faith is what is left when your beliefs have all been blown to hell.
Yeah, and then the stroke.
You got stroked, what you call that stroke.
I looked around the hospital and that was around me.
They were all saying too bad, you've got a stroke.
Oh, there's two.
Oh, too bad, you stroke and i.
It would be negative thoughts and there was very negative feelings in me because I realized I was missing my faith.
The stroke has taken my faith in Maharaji.
And everybody says, are you depressed about your stroke?
No, I don't care about my stroke.
I care about my faith.
So it wasn't the stroke, but the loss of your faith.
Yeah.
Did you go through your why me period?
Why me?
No.
Don't feel sorry for me.
Because that's just wasting your time to feel sorry.
Did you ever, in this period of being stroked, feel sorry for yourself?
No.
No.
You never felt sorry?
No.
No.
It just was a new stage of life.
Did you think you came to understand what being spiritual meant in a different way with the stroke?
Yeah.
How so?
Suffering is grace.
Not the stroke itself, but spiritual life is in the moment.
In the moment is where you see God.
Not in the past, not in the future.
Past and future are thoughts.
Just thoughts.
This is the moment.
This is the moment where God lives.
Right there in the stillness.
Right there in the still.
The moment is God lives.
Beautiful.
So that's what I wanted to ask you too, for people who are.
You know, the majority of the people in our country are Christian people.
Where is God in all of this?
Is God in the Maharaji?
Do you see the Maharaji as a manifestation of God, yourself, all of us?
Lots of questions, but where is God?
God is all over.
They're all over.
Maharaji has God in him.
We all have God in us.
He identifies with God in him.
In a way that we don't.
We don't.
Got it.
So there is a sense of in the West is a god outside of you.
In the east, god is inside of you.
Yes, are there moments now where you wish that you were not in this wheelchair, that you could get up and dance or do whatever you would be doing where you're not in the chair?
Are there still moments?
No, and i used to dance, But see that I used to is a thought form of the past.
It's like, I used to walk.
Oh, if I could walk, but that's the past.
And a waste of time.
Yeah.
And a waste of energy.
That's right.
Going into what I wished I could have been or wished I could have done.
Yeah.
Even though the stroke surprised you, Because I know you were in the midst of writing a book on aging at the time right.
That's right.
To try to help people through it.
Yeah.
To help people accept it.
And interesting the way our culture perceives aging, isn't it?
Boy, oh boy.
Now I'm 80.
And it's just amazing that they don't know. the joy that comes in aging.
So how do we practice being love now?
The mind should say, I am loving awareness.
And then you've got, that's a direction.
Because the moment you get tucked off means you've been taken out of the right space, right?
I get that.
Once you can get yourself back to that space, you don't have to worry about what to do.
The doing comes naturally.
That's right.
Because you're doing and operating from the love space.
That's right.
And this is being, and this is doing.
Doing, yes.
Are you happy?
I'm joyous.
Not happy.
That's even better.
I know it.
Yeah.
It's just, in the moment, I'm joyous.
In the moment.
Do you have any regrets?
Do you look back at your life with any regrets?
I wish I could have.
No, I wish I'd be more love.
And that's what Maharaji gave me.
And I'm wishing I could do it forever.
You just did.
You just did.
You just did.
Thank you.
Thank you.
That was great.
Thank you.
That was great.
Ah, good.
That's good.
I'm Oprah Winfrey and you've been listening to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast.
You can follow Super Soul on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
If you haven't yet, go to Apple Podcasts and subscribe, rate and review this podcast.
Join me next week for another Super Soul Conversation.
Thank you for listening.
