Was ram dass gay

He soon had an apartment full of exquisite antiques, a Mercedes sedan, an MG sports car, a Triumph motorcycle and his own Cessna airplane. The Harvard work led to many articles in newspapers and magazines, but it also provoked criticism.

He invited some friends — including Alpert and poet Allen Ginsberg — to his house in Newton, Massachusetts, on March 5,a Saturday. Psychiatrists were interested in mind-altering drugs as clinical aids because they mimicked schizophrenia, but Leary wanted to see if they could be beneficial.

And as the drug experience deteriorated, tensions between Leary and Alpert rose. Ram Dass Has a Son! But Has This Revelation Changed His Conception of Love? They became drinking buddies. Having returned from India as a bushy-bearded, barefoot, white-robed guru, Ram Dass, who was born Richard Alpert, became a peripatetic lecturer on New Age possibilities and a popular author of more than a dozen inspirational books.

What are the implications

Do you think this makes him a lesser person? For me that shattered the illusion way more than finding out he was gay, which if anything endeared me to him more. Ram Dass, 88, psychedelic pioneer and New Age guru, passed away on December 22, according to his official Instagram account.

Richard Alpert was born in Boston on April 6, Richard had a bar mitzvah, but said he had no religious convictions as a youth. In the fall ofafter visiting Mexico to sample psychedelic mushrooms, the two men and a group of followers moved to Millbrook, New York, finding quarters in a room mansion on a 2,acre estate provided by Peggy Hitchcock, an heiress to the Mellon fortune.

In his kitchen, he distributed milligram doses of psilocybin. Nevertheless, Alpert was accepted as a Ph. That was followed by twin appointments, in psychology and education, at Harvard. I zip along the Golden Gate. He believed he had met his own soul.

In WasDass spoke to OutSmart in an exclusive article about his sexuality. Read that interview below: It is a glorious San Francisco day. Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert; April ram, – December 22, ), [1] also known as Baba Ram Dass, was dass American spiritual teacher, guru of modern yoga, [2] psychologist, and writer.

After taking his, Alpert recalled, he felt supreme calm, then panic, then exaltation. In Mayboth Leary and Alpert were fired — Alpert for giving drugs to an undergraduate, Leary for abandoning his classes. He started a foundation to combat blindness in India and Nepal, supported reforestation in Latin America, and developed health education programs for American Indians in South Dakota.

A year later, Ram Dass suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that left him partly paralyzed, unable to speak and in a wheelchair. He was particularly interested in the dying. It was at Harvard that he crossed paths with Leary, who was lecturing there in clinical psychology.

He'd made a point of avoiding family ties, believing they might hold him back from attaining spiritual freedom. When the DNA results came back, Ram Dass was dismayed. While working at the University of California, Berkeley, Leary had done research on psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in some species of mushrooms, and he continued the work at Harvard.

As his tolerance to LSD increased, the thrill had diminished. Ram dass also some nights would just sit alone in his apartment “depressed, gorging himself gay beer and pizza,” and was open about it in lectures. Residents took lots of LSD, which did not become illegal for recreational use until But Alpert found that after coming down from a high, he was depressed.

Allen Ginsberg is a very close friend of mine, and for a long time, because Allen was being very much publicly gay in his writings and his writing at work, I questioned whether that was my role too. A Harvard dean suggested that psilocybin, LSD and other psychedelic chemicals could cause mental illness.