In the early 1960s, a Harvard psychology professor named Richard Alpert was fired, along with Timothy Leary, for experimenting with LSD. His forays into expanded consciousness led him to India where he met his teacher, the late Hindu master Neem Karoli Baba and metamorphosed into Ram Dass, a notoriously playful and empathic guru who guided a generation of Westerners on the quest for enlightenment. At the pinnacle of its popularity, his spiritual manual "Be Here Now" was outsold only by the Bible and Dr. Spock.
In 1997, at the age of 63, a massive, near-fatal stroke left Ram Dass partially paralyzed and suffering from severe verbal aphasia--and brought him to a new realm of religious insight. His life journey thus far--and particularly the aftermath of his stroke--is chronicled with wit and compassion in "Fierce Grace," an extraordinary new film by the award-winning documentarian Mickey Lemle. It opens in select cities this week.
Sitting in his wheelchair during a recent interview in New York City, Ram Dass's conversation is rippled with silence as he waits, as he puts it, for concepts to be clothed with words in the dressing room of the brain. But as "Fierce Grace" demonstrates, Ram Dass is as eloquent as ever--more so, in fact, for the special vantage he now has on illness, aging, and death after being "stroked by my guru."
In one of the film's most poignant scenes, a couple reads a letter Ram Dass sent them after the violent death of their 11-year-old daughter--a missive that should be offered to everyone who loses a loved one. "Something inside you dies when you bear the unbearable. It is only in the dark night of the soul that you are prepared to see as God sees, and love as God loves....Your rational minds will never understand what has happened. But your hearts, if you can keep them open to God, will find their own intuitive way."
Your life has always been very public. But how was it being the sole subject of a movie?
I like the movie as it came out, but it doesn't show me. It shows a certain aspect of me, but not my rascality, not so many parts of me. That ended up on the cutting room floor. But I understand what Mickey [Lemle, the director] was trying to do. I'm satisfied that it focuses on death, sickness, and suffering and that it makes dharmic points about these things. That part is fantastic. Fantastic.
You say in the film that during the stroke, "there I was, Mr. Spiritual, and in my own death, I didn't orient toward the spiritual." What was going on?
I wasn't conscious. When it started happening, I never thought it was a stroke. I thought it was a weak leg. I thought I was having this fantasy of being an old man.
