My copy of Ram Dass, Fierce Grace arrived today. Watched it tonight with my wife. I've been a big fan of Ram Dass since I was a young teenager interested in consciousness and meditation. I've read just about everything Ram Dass has written, although I'm grateful there are still a few things I haven't finished. My favorites from my teen and early twenties are: Be Here Now, Grist for the Mill, The Only Dance There Is and Journey of Awakening. Some of these I've read two or three times over the years.
The movie was great. It covered Ram Dass/Richard Alpert's life from childhood to the present (the movie was released in 2001). It had some great footage of Ram Dass and bunches of hippies hanging out on his father's golf course on the 300 acre Alpert estate in Franklin, NH. It had interviews (past and present, where possible) with Ram Dass cronies such as Timothy Leary, Krishna Dass, Bhagavan Das, Huston Smith, Ralph Metzner, and so on. There were lots of photos and film footage of legendary people and places in Ram Dass' life, notably (for me) the Milbrook estate and Neem Karoli Baba.
The only scene I didn't like much was the last one. And it wasn't the scene itself so much as its placement in the movie. I thought the final scene should have been a stonger conclusion. A young woman is visiting Ram Dass and talking about her murdered boyfriend, looking for some closure. How did the film maker find this woman? What is she doing at Ram Dass' place? There's no explanation. She was obviously upset about her boyfriend, but I didn't get the sense that they'd been together a real long time -- it sounded like the boyfriend was killed doing some environmental/anthropological activism in South America, and she wasn't with him at the time (lucky for her, I guess). Anyway, Ram Dass had this incredible emotional reaction to a dream she recounted about talking to her dead lover. He was totally for real, compassionate, totally "getting" her dream on a higher level, and it affected her too. Suddenly she was weeping too, for the first time really crying in the whole scene. I was hoping for a more dramatic or poignant ending, and this just seemed a little weak. It didn't summarize, it didn't point to the future, it wasn't the strongest emotional moment in the film. I don't blame Ram Dass or the woman. The criticism has to rest with the director. There was a much stronger, deeper emotional scene much earlier in the movie where two parents read a letter from Ram Dass consoling them on the loss of their murdered pre-teen daughter. I feel that scene would have made a stronger ending and should have been swapped (in order) with the less powerful one.
Some questions I had after the movie (and some I had before the movie!):
Is/was Ram Dass gay/bisexual? I vaguely remember him saying something about experimenting with homosexuality way back in the day. I know he tried celibacy for a while. Sexuality was almost conspicuously absent from his story. No ex-girlfriends or boyfriends interviewed, never married. Not a word one way or the other. Not that it should matter, but it if it really doesn't matter, why leave it out? Isn't sexuality a big part of being human?
The first time they meet, the little old Indian Neem Karoli Baba tells a skeptical Richard Alpert exactly what he'd been thinking about the night before (his recently deceased mother) as he looked up at the stars (and a pretty specific detail about how his mother died). This story is recounted in Be Here Now too. It blows my mind. I always wondered about this event. Ram Dass is utterly convinced that this guy just knew everything about him. He still does. I guess I believe him too. I've not had that sort of detailed specific psychic experience, but I have certainly had some bizarre psychic coincidences in my own life -- enough to make me think maybe it is possible that Neem Karoli Baba was the real deal and Ram Dass wasn't tricked somehow. Keep an open mind. Keep a questioning mind. The world is a strange place and we shouldn't get too settled on anything we think we know.
Previous Topic
