Letter to me from Ram Dass in 1974
Ram Dass sent me this letter in 1974. It is the only one we received that had a tiny picture of his guru on it. I love that! My mother, Marge, had kept him informed about the very difficult year I had in 1973. For most of that year a lot of my thinking was not reality based (not due to any drug use). She had asked him to ‘check in on’ me psychically once or twice, as I was lost to anyone during that very dark period in my late teens. He did. I can still vividly recall how his presence come into my mind very powerful and very clearly. I was hitchhiking into Nevada, on the run from reality. When I came out of it a year later Marge told me that Ram Dass had called her to report that “Storm is safe, but he will not be home for some time.” Fortunately I never experienced any symptoms of a thought disorder after that one year.
One comment on this letter when it was posted to social media was: “This beautiful letter captures the essence of all his teachings and those of most sages, saints and gurus. Thousands of books have been written to convey what our beloved Ram Dass captured in so few lines.”
He wrote: Storm – Wherever your mind takes you or your body wanders, we are together. To truly be instruments of Divine Will – every vestige of our thoughts about “our trip” must float by. Let go. I am here. Shanti Shanti Shanti Ram Dass
Letter to me from Ram Dass in 1993
Out of all of the spiritual guidance that has come my way because of Ram Dass, there is one that has helped me more than any other. What he shared about cultivating the witness. He wrote, in the book Polishing the Mirror: “One way to get free of attachment is to cultivate the witness consciousness, to become a neutral observer of your own life. The witness place inside you is simple awareness, the part of you that is aware of everything — just noticing, watching, not judging, just being present, being here now.”
Whenever I get wrapped up in my head, whenever I become anxious or fearful, whenever I sense the approach of feelings of dread or despair, I try to remember to use this very effective tool. I try to get some intellectual and emotional distance from myself. Like Ram Dass suggests, I separate out the me that is doing stuff from the me that is observing that me. To make this exercises as real as possible, I will hold my cupped hand out in front of me and visualize it holding my whole world. All of me with all of the busy things I have going on. Then I tell myself ‘Isn’t this interesting. Here is this Storm dude, and he has all these plans and all these worries and all these emotions about the present and the future. Wow. This is really interesting.’ And just like that the sky is no longer falling. The gloom and doom are vanquished, at least for a time.
I do not recall anything about the letter I sent Ram Dass in 1993. From his reply here I can deduce that I asked him what is was like to be so famous, like I remember doing during our visit at Esalen in 1969. He said: Fame is all relative, and I am really just a big fish in a very little pond. Close to thirty years after he wrote that he is still a big fish in a much bigger and growing fast pond. I attempted to milk it for significance, but it turned out to be kind of irrelevant, Ram Dass always displayed a genuine humility and a charming ability to acknowledge and then laugh at his own ego desires. because it still boils down to the depth of the truth you share with beings from moment to moment. Ram Dass shared his truth with us, and that sharing continues to elevate and guide tons of people. When I hug someone in line after a lecture, in that hug all the “Ram Dass-ness” disappears, and there there is only “hug-ness” that remains. I could spend a lifetime contemplating and trying to enact what Ram Dass communicats in this one paragraph.
In the fall of 1996 I was attending graduate school in Palo Alto California. A friend and I heard that Ram Dass was going to give a lecture in San Francisco. We were in a very large lecture hall at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. About 20 minutes after he was scheduled to appear someone came onto the stage to tell us that Ram Dass would not be speaking to us that day. He had suffered a serious stroke the night before.
The last time I saw Ram Dass was in the early 2000s. I had moved to western Massachusetts in the late 90s. Ram Dass was once again giving lectures, after his stroke. I found out that he was going to give a lecture in the town of Northampton, Massachusetts. I arrived early at the theater where he was to speak. A small handful of people were gathered by the stage entrance door on the side street to greet his car as it pulled up.
When he arrived, someone got out and was standing on the sidewalk to block the handful of people from coming up to the passenger side of the car were Ram Dass was. I just kind of stepped quickly around that person and went to the open door where Ram Dass was. He was very happy to see me. We had a short, brief conversation while they got his wheelchair out from the trunk. We talked about my mother’s passing the year before. Then I told him that I had gone back to graduate school in mid life to get my PhD in Clinical Psychology. He laughed and said “Why did you do that?” I told him that I had wanted to live off of the student loans. He laughed again. I had to lean into the car for it but I did get one last Ram Dass hug that day.
The last of my personal ‘encounters’ with Ram Dass is an odd one. A few years ago I was watching the amazing, profound documentary called Going Home. It is about Ram Dass and his life on Maui as he was preparing to make his transition. I was watching it for the third time when I realized we had something in common. In that documentary Ram Dass talks about sitting in his recliner a lot, just looking out the window at the beautiful scenery on Maui. In 2010 I fell off a ladder in a manner that caused me to have my right leg amputated below the knee in 2016. So I spend a lot of time in my recliner also. We have the exact same electric recliner!
