Peter Clothier

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. Impressed by my friend's enthusiasm, 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 Ph. D. in literature!

Regrettably, it took twenty years and another life's 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, was doubly critical: not only did it threaten his life, it 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 recreate it in imagination. Nature, God, or the Universe (or as Ram Dass sees it, his long dead, still omnipresent, often mischievous guru, Maharajji) conspired at that very moment to endow him with the missing piece: incapacity, near-total dependency, and bodily decrepitude.

What a gift! Yet 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 previous works, mostly compilations taken from the innumerable talk sessions for which Ram Dass is justly renowned, addressed to audiences who came eager to learn about altered states of consciousness and eastern mysticism, awareness, and being-in-the-moment, and of course the meditation practice that teaches a training of the mind. With an impish humor and an irrepressible gift of the gab, he has always enchanted as he instructs, with a little conspirational 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-his own learning has been to accept a new predicament, one in which he moves and speaks only with effort, and with many silences. He speaks of grief, and 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 and compassion born of his own experience.

More importantly, 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."

While this intimate teaching is the core of Still Here, Ram Dass situates his reflections firmly in a cultural context which 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." And 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.

--Peter Clothier has written numerous  articles, art reviews, art catalogues, book reviews, and essays.

Peter also offers creativity coaching and mentoring for writers, artists, and men as well as various workshopsand lecture appearances.