The Teacher Has Changed, but Wisdom Remains

In the early 1970s, in the midst of one of life’s crises, at a time when I knew--or thought it necessary to know--much more than I do now, I was urged by a friend to read “Be Here Now” by Ram Dass. I picked up a copy--and was at once repelled by what I judged to be the flip pretentiousness of this Western intellectual, this drug-promoting, renegade Harvard professor who had absurdly renamed himself and now presumed to an understanding of the wisdom of the East; and, worse, to foist it upon me, a newly anointed PhD in literature!

Regrettably, it took 20 years and another life crisis to open me to the wisdom of Ram Dass, in a later, sparkling work called “The Only Dance There Is.” Had I been wiser at that first encounter, I might have realized that my outrage was a clue that even then this messenger had something I was desperately seeking, at some inner level of being, and that my threatened ego was simply thrown into revolt. Now, years later, along comes Ram Dass again, in the wake of a devastating stroke, with “Still Here”--a title whose gentle irony is a reminder of the essential sweetness of his soul.

If I get personal about this book, it is because that’s what Ram Dass is all about. “I’ve always gone through experiences,” he writes, “and then shared my wisdom about them. That’s been my role.” His stroke, in February 1997, hit precisely when he was casting about for the experiential base for his book on “Aging, Changing, and Dying” and, lacking the actual experience, was forced instead to attempt to re-create it in imagination. Nature, God or the universe conspired at that very moment to endow him with the missing piece: incapacity, near-total dependency and bodily decrepitude. Or perhaps, as Ram Dass sees it, this was just one more challenge thrown down by his personal guru, Maharajji, who, though long dead, remains an active force in his life.

What a gift! The result, “Still Here,” is a wonderful book, especially for those of us who have begun to think about our age. Its tone is subtly different from that of previous works, mostly compilations taken from the innumerable talk sessions for which Ram Dass is justly renowned, addressed to audiences eager to learn about altered states of consciousness and Eastern mysticism, and of course the meditation practice that teaches a training of the mind. With an impish humor and an irrepressible gift of gab, he has always enchanted as he instructs, with a little conspiratorial wink to the audience implied in everything he has done.

In “Still Here,” the often self-deprecating humor is still present--Ram Dass will have you laughing out loud at moments--but the wink is gone. Perhaps this teacher senses a different audience, one that is less hip and closer to death--in short, the now-aging boomers. But the teacher himself has changed: Deprived by the stroke of his stock in trade--the easy flow of speech--he has needed to learn to accept his own new physical impairment, which leaves him moving and speaking only with great effort and with many silences. He speaks of grief, pain and sickness--of that list of “usual suspects” that shadow our approach to age: loneliness, embarrassment, powerlessness, depression, a loss of role and meaning, the fear of change--and disempowers them with the rich understanding born of his own experience.

More important, he speaks of the positive values in aging consciously, the possibility of embodying wisdom in our lives by shifting our attention from the impermanence of Ego to the lasting qualities of Soul, and offers guidance in a thoughtful preparation for death “through contemplation, quiet time and deepening knowledge of ourselves.” Out of the long experience of sitting bedside with the dying, he lovingly describes the process of death itself, easing the reader with his faith: “If we have expanded our consciousness to include the Soul and Awareness levels,” he writes, “we understand that the physical organism is merely the shell, the rented apartment. Knowing myself to be a Soul, I realize that something will indeed survive death, though this body and personality will be gone.”

Although this intimate teaching is the core of “Still Here,” Ram Dass situates his reflections firmly in a cultural context that values youth, power and action at the expense of patience, quietude and wisdom. Older people, he writes, “find themselves with no mythology to support their presence, no place--figurative or otherwise--for themselves in the culture.” He adds later, “Aging consciously, we will naturally begin to manifest those qualities that our society needs in order to survive--qualities like sustainability, justice, patience and reflection.” This is “elder wisdom” that our society badly needs to hear, and we can be glad that Ram Dass, no matter how incapacitated, is still here to engage us in the joyous dance of the Soul.

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Peter Clothier is the author of “While I Am Not Afraid: Secrets of a Man’s Heart.”