A Place of the Spirit

Ram Dass writes about returning from his first trip to India and setting up a place of the spirit on his father’s farm in New Hampshire.

Hi, my name is Noah, and I’m a Ram Dass-aholic. Wait, wrong Substack. Let me try that again…

Hi, my name is Noah, and I’m the archivist for the Love Serve Remember Foundation. One of the very first things I did for the foundation was to take two giant binders full of Ram Dass stories collected by one of his assistants many years ago and digitize them for a book we were putting together. It was like a crash course in Ram Dass and a taste of what was to come when I got into the digital archives.

Here’s one of my favorite stories from that collection. It really speaks to the incredible importance Ram Dass placed on community and bringing people together. It’s my great hope that we can turn this Substack into a place of the spirit; a space that brings people together in a way that would put that beautiful, loving smile on Ram Dass’s face.

– Noah Markus, Archivist and Content Curator, Love Serve Remember Foundation

Ram Dass:

The summer I got back from India, I went to live in a cabin at the back of my father’s farm. I went into town one day in my father’s Cadillac to buy some groceries, with my beard and beads and all. I had a Massachusetts plate on the car, and this was in New Hampshire, in a little village.

Two young guys came up to me and said, “Are you the connection from Boston?” They saw this guy with a beard and a Cadillac from Massachusetts, and they were waiting for a connection, so they assumed I was it.

I said, “No, I’m not that kind of connection.”

There was a hook there, so they said, “Well, what kind of a connection are you?”

I said, “Well, I’ve been to India, and I’ve really learned a lot about consciousness and stuff.” They asked where I lived, and I told them. They came up to visit my cabin, then they brought their friends, then their friends brought their friends, and within about two and a half weeks, 300 people came on a weekend to sit out under the trees and talk about dharma.

Then they all started to live at the place. About a hundred people were living in the woods in tree houses and tents and so on, and a couple hundred more would come all the time, and we’d have these HUGE gatherings in which we’d talk dharma.

My father was great, just very open to the whole thing. He loaned us some money, and we put up a big, screened-in room—we all just got together and put it up—and we used it for hatha yoga, for reading the Bible, for whatever we did. We had a big fire pit in the center of it, and we would gather there. It was like our darshan hall.

So the ministers in town heard that I was starting a church, which was some threat to them, and one of the ministers came to see me and talk about it. I said, “Oh, no, no, I’m not starting a church. There’s no ordained minister here. This is just a place of the spirit.”

He said, “Oh, well, if that’s all it is...” Which is a great line.

Then I said, “Would you like to see it?”

And he said, “Oh, yes.” So we started to walk up the hill.

We had put in an outdoor shower that had an opaque screen around it, but you could see his mind going: orgy, orgy…

And we came into this hall; everybody was doing yoga, or reading the Bible, or reading the Gita. He said, “This is very interesting. Maybe you’d like to come to our bag lunch on Tuesday, where all the ministers and priests from the area meet, and tell us about your work.”

I said, “Well, maybe better still, why don’t they all come up here?”

“Oh, that would be fascinating!”

So we got bridge chairs around the fire, and they all came up. I said, “Can all the people here be present?”

“Oh, yes, that’s fine.”

So all these young hippies were present, and we had a fire they all sat around. And the young hippies started to tell their stories about what they were experiencing.

At that point, one of the ministers, who had tears in his eyes, said, “You know, when I was studying for the ministry, this is the world I hoped I’d come into. But it isn’t the world I came into. Is there any chance that this is going to come back to the churches?”

Imagine that. Imagine what it took him to say that. It was an incredible space.

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Published by the Love Serve Remember Foundation, the nonprofit caretaker of Ram Dass’s teachings since 2010. Learn more at RamDass.org or join our virtual community and archive at Inneracademy.ramdass.org.

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