Ram Dass and Timothy Leary; A Friendship Beyond Space and Time
Friendships can be slippery things, often dependent on a particular time and place. But in the case of cultural icons Timothy Leary and Ram Dass, their friendship, while grounded very much in the times, also reached beyond them and influenced an entire generation of seekers.
“Dying to Know” explores Leary and Ram Dass’s long and complicated relationship, from their shared passion for pushing against societal norms to their ground-breaking work in understanding consciousness, and even how we approach our own death. Their friendship was one of the most influential and important, of our times.
From Very Different Beginnings
While both men were born in Massachusetts, their childhoods were very different. Leary, an only child, stemmed from a mix of Irish backgrounds with his mother being extremely conservative and his father, a wilder, drinking, roving type. As a child, Leary loved reading, drawn to stories of adventure and heroism.
Leary’s paternal grandfather advised him to follow his own path and to be “one of a kind.” This advice led him to challenge authority. In his college years, he would leave West Point after a dismissed court-martial charge for supplying alcohol to other cadets, then taking on the persona of the provocateur.
Ram Dass, aka Richard Alpert, was the son of a railroad president and founder of Brandeis University, growing up in a stable, middle-class Jewish family. Alpert graduated from Wesleyan University, then Stanford, where he served as faculty, as well as at the University of California, Berkeley. At 27 years old, he was appointed as an assistant professor to Harvard’s psychology department in 1958; Alpert was a rising success. But he was living a lie as a closeted homosexual. The cost of this secret, according to Alpert, “set the stage for feeling like an outcast.”
Leary also experienced early success in the academic world. His first book, The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, was named “book of the year” in 1957 by the American Psychological Association and he was on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley where he’d received his doctorate in psychology. Despite this academic success, his personal life was troubled. His first marriage ended tragically with his wife’s suicide, leaving Leary to raise their two children on his own.
Haunted by her death, Leary and his children moved to Florence, Italy, where he met David McClellan, the director of Harvard’s Center for Personality Research, who was so impressed by Leary’s original ideas on psychology, he offered him a three-year research project where Leary and Alpert’s paths would cosmically converge.
That same summer was also the first time Leary tried psychedelic mushrooms while traveling in Mexico, an experience in which Leary said he “learned more about his mind in four hours than he had in his 15 years as a psychologist.”
Kindred Consciousness
Leary focused his research efforts on the effects of psilocybin, at that time a legal substance obtained through Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. Trained staff members took the drug and acted as guides for the volunteers in an approach that became known as “set and setting.” When Leary arrived at Harvard, Alpert was drawn to Leary’s sense of personal and academic freedom, as well as his outlandish sense of humor.
Alpert saw his new friend as a visionary and believed Leary’s ability to “see outside the system” would allow Alpert to finally break free. With Leary’s guidance, Alpert tried synthetic psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic” mushrooms. It was a profound experience that stripped him of his false identities.
In 1962, Leary’s research headed in a new direction with the introduction of LSD. At first, Leary was reluctant to expand his research, but after he explored the drug on his own, he changed his mind and the course of the project. Leary, and his research team, felt that the controlled use of LSD could free people to release themselves from the strict confines of society’s norms into a fuller existence. At a time when outer space was being aggressively explored, Leary and Alpert thought of themselves as inner cosmic adventurers or psychonauts.
At the height of the project, Alpert broke the rule regarding only graduate students being used as subjects leading to him being fired from Harvard while bringing national attention to psychedelics. Leary’s contract with Harvard was not renewed, as he and Alpert found a new way to continue their work.
The two resettled in Millbrook, New York on the expansive property of one of their subjects where they set up a new research site and a communal living environment known as Millbrook, and a second home to many of that era’s artists, thinkers, beat poets, and activists.
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out
At Millbrook, Alpert became “the support system for Timothy’s (revolutionary) vision,” efforts that ranged from raising money to housekeeping to substitute parenting — whatever was needed to keep the enterprise afloat. This came at a huge financial and psychological cost, as well as straining their friendship. Alpert found himself in the position of having to break free from Leary, leaving Millbrook in 1965 to embark on his own spiritual quest.
During this time, Leary married a second time and divorced, then got married for a third time to Rosemary Woodruff. Leary headed to Mexico with his children, and upon their return, Woodruff was found in possession of a small amount of cannabis. Taking responsibility, Leary was sentenced to more than 30 years in prison, which was later reduced to a charge of interstate transportation.
For a generation of youth yearning to break free from the strict social confines of the 1950s, LSD represented the keys to that freedom. Leary had been an early proponent of legalizing drugs for adults with stringent license requirements, even being called before Congress to testify on the subject. He believed the criminalization of these substances was directly in correlation to the availability of them. He was right — LSD became the drug of choice for the younger generation and Leary’s words, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” its rallying cry.
Named by President Nixon as America’s “most dangerous man,” Leary was arrested again in 1970 and sentenced to a minimum-security facility for 10 years. He escaped jail and embarked on a fugitive’s life with his fourth wife, culminating in his capture in Afghanistan where he was then returned to prison for four years, including two in solitary confinement.
Desperate to get out of jail, Leary turned to state and federal evidence; he and his wife were put into the witness protection program under the names James and Nora Joyce and relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico. The relationship soon ended, already under intense strain due to drug abuse, alcoholism, and estrangement.
During this tumultuous period in Leary’s life, Alpert was on a very different journey. Traveling in India, he encountered Neem Karoli Baba, also known as Maharaj-ji by his followers. He became Alpert’s guru and gave him the spiritual name, Ram Dass.
After an intensive period of studying yoga and meditation, Ram Dass returned to the United States a very changed man. He wrote about his experience in Be Here Now, one of the best-selling spiritual books of all time and considered many a spiritual seeker’s manual. Ram Dass emerged as a bridge between East and West, opening a new world of spiritual awakening to a generation hungry for ways to train and calm the mind.
A New Stage of Life and Friendship
The two men’s lives took very different paths, but it was through their personal encounter with their own mortality that a new connection was formed. For both, the illness became another opportunity to engage in the greatest mythical experience of all: death.
When Leary was diagnosed with advanced and inoperable prostate cancer in 1995, he turned to his old friend Ram Dass for support, wisdom, and guidance. Two decades before, Ram Dass established the Dying Project (with Stephen and Andrea Levine, and Dale Borglum) and was considered a pioneer in the field of conscious dying and hospice care. As with his life, Leary applied the same bravado to his cancer, which Ram Dass describes as a “theater piece, a poem, a dance…(it) was a celebratory moment.”
Leary died May 31, 1996. In speaking about Leary’s death, Ram Dass said, “Timothy and I are explorers, we’re beloveds, we’re deeply connected and I can’t imagine that will ever change.”
In 1997, Ram Dass experienced a stroke that left him with expressive aphasia and a massive cerebral hemorrhage, leaving him with what doctors predicted as a 10% chance of survival. He viewed this health challenge as an act of grace and spiritual practice, continuing to write, teach, and live with what Joan Halifax called a “delightful determination that is a model to us all.” Ram Dass died 23 years after his friend, also surrounded by loving friends and family.
From the spark that lit their friendship at Harvard, Dying to Know lovingly relates the story of a friendship that transcended time, space, culture, and for Leary and Ram Dass, their own physical realms. Their friendship did change the world, but it was also centered on the most important thing – love; a wild and crazy love that lasted a lifetime.
About the Author
Shamanic Soul Retrieval: How to Recover Parts of Our Soul?
Shamanic Soul Retrieval: Sandra Ingerman on Recovering Parts of Our Soul
“Every book…has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.” ~ Carlos Ruis Zafon
It has been said, “The best things in life are free.” We can all agree it’s nice to be surprised with a gift, but not just any gift. The gift that arrives in your life precisely when you are ready to receive it. The gift is clearly a message to you and for you.
In this case, the gift is Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self by Sandra Ingerman.
With graceful delivery of rarely discussed phenomena, Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self combines shamanism and psychology to explain the effects of trauma that cause parts of the soul to leave the body and the process by which the part(s) can be retrieved.
Follow along as renowned psychotherapist, shamanic teacher, and author Sandra Ingerman delves into soul loss and retrieval.
What is Soul Loss?
Sandra Ingerman’s Abstract on Shamanism states that “there are many common symptoms of soul loss. Some of the more common ones would be dissociation, where a person does not feel fully in his or her body and alive and fully engaged in life. Other symptoms include chronic depression, suicidal tendencies, post-traumatic stress syndrome, immune deficiency problems, and grief that just does not heal. Addictions are also a sign of soul loss.”
For those who have lost parts of themselves, knowingly or unknowingly, “tremendous amounts of psychic energy” are unconsciously spent looking for the lost parts.
What Causes Soul Loss?
According to Ingerman, “The basic premise is whenever we experience trauma, a part of our vital essence separates from us in order to survive the experience by escaping the full impact of the pain.” This quiet occurrence, known as soul loss, takes the form of a perpetual feeling and experience of incompleteness and disconnection.
Ingerman says, “Anytime someone says, ‘I have never been the same’ since a certain traumatic event, and they don’t mean this in a good way, soul loss has probably occurred.”
Sandra Ingerman on Lost Soul Parts
Sandra Ingerman holds a master’s degree in counseling psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is a licensed marriage and family therapist, professional mental health counselor, the author of more than ten books, and a board-certified expert on traumatic stress who was awarded the 2007 Peace Award from the Global Foundation for Integrative Medicine.
As a leading authority on soul loss and retrieval, Ingerman’s highly regarded career spans 35 years of conducting workshops and soul retrievals around the world.
For Ingerman, the leading practitioner of soul retrieval whose own spiritual journey to recapture her soul led her on various spiritual paths. The answer she found was in the ancient tradition of shamanism, which views soul loss as an important cause of illness and death.
The word shaman, originating from the Tungus Tribe of Siberia, means “one who sees in the dark.”
Soul Loss in Society
According to Ingerman, “A reflection of how much soul loss people are dealing with” is evident when “so many governments and businesses are valuing money over life.”
However, Western medicine has no framework for this kind of diagnosis because it only deals with imbalance when it appears on a physical and mental level.
Western medicine “treats chronic pain with pain medication, insomnia with sleeping pills, weight issues with diet and exercise, and most damagingly, may label soul loss as mental illness and cover up the symptoms with psychiatric medications that may make things worse by slapping a Band-Aid on a wound that’s not healing underneath the bandage.”
This “covering up” can lead to the deep unhappiness that many have come to consider as “simply ordinary.” Eventually, this prolonged dissociation produces a nameless void that shows itself through “a loss of meaning, direction, vitality, mission, purpose, identity, and genuine connection.”
This spiritual void, which is always present and always trying to get your attention, operates as the incessant yearning of your soul wanting to incorporate all of its highest qualities, all of God’s essence, all of you.
Simply put, the soul is always trying to reconnect with that from which it came.
Ingerman imparts, “If you are truly in your body (your whole soul present), you cannot place money over life. Planetary soul loss causes so much of the behavior we are currently seeing, behavior that no longer honors the beauty and importance of life.”
Signs of Soul Loss
The following checklist can help identify symptoms of soul loss:
- You have a difficult time staying “present” in your body
- You feel numb, apathetic, or deadened
- You suffer from chronic depression
- You have problems with your immune system and have trouble resisting illness
- You were chronically ill as a child
- Memory gaps of your life after age five where you sense that you may have blacked out significant traumatic experiences
- Struggle with addictions, for example, to alcohol, drugs, food, sex or gambling
- Find yourself looking to external things to fill up an internal void or emptiness
- Have difficulty moving on with your life after a divorce or the death of a loved one
- You suffer from multiple personality syndrome
Having read this book without prior knowledge of soul loss or retrieval, I found the concepts quite sobering.
Within situations of physical and emotional abuse, negation, and trauma, many experiences in life can be too difficult to bear. Soul loss is an understandable response to spiritual woundedness and deep fragmentation of one’s soul essence that would lead to an internal dissociation from natural balance.
What is Soul Retrieval?
During the soul retrieval process, the shaman moves into an altered state of consciousness to travel to realities outside of normal perception (non-ordinary reality), also known as hidden spirit worlds, to retrieve the lost part of the soul.
In some cases, there is reluctance of the soul fragments to return, or the soul may not even know a separation has occurred. While in most cases, the soul does want to return and become whole. It is, however, important to note that when the “soul returns, it comes back with all the pain it experienced when leaving.”
Once the lost soul pieces are located, the shaman will “acknowledge the former pain and gently negotiate the soul’s return to the body.” The shaman then brings the soul back to normal reality and (literally) blows the missing soul part(s) back into the body through the head or heart.
If a person is trained in shamanic journeying, they can ask their spirit guides or power animals to perform a soul retrieval on their behalf. Or anyone can ask for a healing dream where one sets the intention to request a soul retrieval to be performed during the dream state.
If these two processes do not create change or healing, then working with a trained shamanic practitioner is recommended.
Although Ingerman is clear that you should not try to practice soul retrieval based solely on the reading of this book, in an exclusive interview, Ingerman and I discuss what can be done when someone suspects soul loss has occurred.
Shamanic Healing Practice Interview
BJB: What can someone do if they suspect soul loss has occurred but do not have immediate access for soul retrieval with a Shaman?
SI: If a person has soul loss, they can work with a shamanic practitioner long distance. Most shamanic practitioners perform long-distance healings these days.
I have been training Soul Retrieval practitioners since the late 1980’s. I have a website where I have an international list of shamanic practitioners who have sent me case studies. Of course, no shamanic practitioner can ever promise a cure, but I know their work, and I trust them.
BJB: Is there a healing exercise the person can do to begin to address and/or heal the root cause of the soul loss?
SI: Nature is our greatest healer. A person who feels they have lost their soul can walk or lie down on the ground and reflect on what is the root cause of their soul loss.
You can also do automatic writing. This includes listening to spiritual music while writing the following question on a piece of paper: “What is the root cause of my soul loss?”
You then close your eyes and allow your hand to write. This is a powerful way to let your soul and intuition give you the truth of the cause of your soul loss and other information that is important for you to know.
BJB: What has been the most surprising or unexpected part of your work as a Shaman?
SI: All of my Shamanic work is a surprise.
The helping spirits never give expected responses to the questions I ask them. This is true also when I perform the healing journey for a client. I am always given information I did not expect or would rationally think of on my own.
Also, in my 35 years of working with clients, I continue to be surprised by the miraculous effects of the work.
Power of Ancient Shamanic Practices
The shaman’s toolbox is a personal and intimate gathering of powers. Some shamans learned through direct experience, others gleaned knowledge from master teachers like Sandra, and some are gifted in journeying to the depths of spirit realms.
A few tools are so foundational that nearly every shaman utilizes them. Soul retrieval is one such tool. Not only is it universally effective, but it’s also the pervasive root cause of illness overlooked by many in the medical field.
Soul retrieval is not a modern New Age therapy but a profound healing tradition practiced for thousands of years. It involves the reintegration of lost soul parts, that’s akin to the surgical reattachment of a body part but for our spiritual essence instead. By recovering these lost soul parts, individuals can restore wholeness and harmony within themselves.
The Most Important Factor in Personal Healing
Soul retrieval is not a quick fix. Sandra Ingerman states, “If the person has done a lot of personal work, the soul retrieval might be the end of the work. If not, the soul retrieval would be the beginning of the work.”
No matter where you may find yourself, at the beginning or near the end of working through an issue, the most important factor in all healing work is you.
You have to be willing to do the work that is necessary to participate in your personal transformation. You will have to be willing to look at yourself with new eyes, from a new shamanic perspective, and as an embodiment of completion and wholeness while knowing that willingness is the impetus for great change, which always begins with the heart.
For more information on Sandra Ingerman’s work, log onto SandraIngerman.com.
You can also learn more by watching this interview on Gaia.com with Jill Kuykendall on soul retrieval.
