Psychology Today, March 1992

Sex & crocheting in Burma
Presents an interview with Ram Dass, the 'Servant of God,' by Owen Lipstein. Psychological background; Why he left Harvard; On the larger picture; Decline of materialism and the rise of volunteer work; How he deals with all of the suffering; What he says to these people; Whether he considers himself a religious leader; More.

By: PT Staff


Is he a servant of God or just a nice psychologist from Harvard who took onetoo many doses of LSD? "I'm really an upwardly mobile, exploitative guy on a power trip, and somebody from PSYCHOLOGY TODAY is interviewing me in my house in Marin County with my Mercedes out back. [Those images of me] are all true and they're all false."

It's none other than Ram Dass, who received his name ("Servant of God") from a spiritual guru he found in the Himalayas in the late 1960s. Born Richard Alpert, he was fired by Harvard in 1963, along with Timothy Leary, for conducting experiments with psychedelic chemicals. His 1971 book, Be Here Now, chronicling the use of mind-expanding drugs, Hinduism, and meditation, was a best-seller.

Now, at 60, Ram Dass is not simply an older--and balder--symbol of the Sixties: He works as a counselor for the dying, has established a volunteer organization to aid refugees in Guatemala and the blind in India, and is a popular figure on the lecture circuit. From college campuses to retreats for Fortune 500 executives, he talks about death, compassionate social action, our ties to the environment, and what it means to be conscious.

Owen Lipstein for PT: You have the most formal and academic background in psychology. You served as a professor of psychology at Harvard in the 1960s. But you resigned--why?

RD: The field was defined very narrowly then. The psychology I studied at Stanford saw humans as ambulatory variables. Psychology was what was measurable in publicly reproducible ways. That ruled out introspection. It ruled out naturalistic experience,. At Harvard I started to bring those back in. But that wasn't considered science any longer. Now it is again.

PT: What's changed?

RD: Before, inner experience was considered irrelevant, an artifact. Western psychology had very little to say about the mind. It had a lot to say about the brain, about response behavior. What I did from 9 to 5 at Harvard had nothing to do with what happened to me after five o'clock; my depressions, my fantasies were irrelevant to what I was able to measure.

Psychology then was almost totally built on pathology. You were either sick or not sick. You were never healthy. You could go from negative to zero; you could never go positive. People like [Abraham] Maslow and [Carl] Jung and [Carl) Rogers saw the positive side. But the minute you get to the positive side, you're at the edge of mysticism, the edge of what Maslow called the "self-actualized person." These are the realms in which you don't have hard empirical data to support your theory. You are dignifying humanity with more potential than just pathology or lack of pathology, but you are losing the science of it.

PT: When did this start for you?

RD: When I took psilocybin in 1961, that changed the meaning of psychology to me. There was a major ground reversal. After that, psychology just seemed like a relative reality, rather than absolutely real. The minute you see this kind of monolithic value system is just another one, it loses its power over you. It lost its position as the first way of knowing. I'm still a psychologist in that I can think in terms of personal dynamics and defense mechanisms and psychosexual stages of development, but that's not the uppermost matrix against which I see the world. It's interesting the same way Newtonian physics is interesting in relation to Einsteinian physics.

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