Be Here Now
AT FIRST I thought the Oregon Country Fair would be like a normal state fair, with greased pigs and gigantic tomatoes and bumper cars.
I was wrong. This was the fair's 33rd straight year celebrating countercultural values, a weekend oasis at lush campgrounds near Eugene, peaking with 18,000 attendees. It was the first year that there would be speakers in addition to music, crafts, food and creative tomfoolery. A headline in the Oregonian announced: "Ram Dass, Krassner Will Talk at Country Fair." The article also included the following, about a misunderstanding I would have liked to forget:
"Ram Dass, the former Harvard psychologist who became a psychedelic pioneer and an admired spiritual teacher, will speak...Sunday. Paul Krassner, a writer and comic who says he's taken LSD with [Ken] Kesey, Dass, Timothy Leary and Groucho Marx...also will speak on Sunday and is scheduled to introduce Dass. That could be interesting, especially because a note on Dass' website takes issue with a recent profile of Dass that Krassner wrote for High Times magazine. In it, Krassner wrote that Dass has retracted a story about how Dass once gave Maharajji (Dass' guru) a high dose of LSD and nothing happened.
"'Just to set the record straight,' reads the note on the website, 'it is Krassner's allegation which was fiction. Ram Dass was shocked by the statement in the article, and vehemently denies it. Krassner attributes the statement to some unnamed source, and admits that he did not check it with Ram Dass before publication.' In other words, Dass says he did give Maharajji a high dose of LSD and nothing happened. The amazing thing about this episode is not that these people are arguing about who gave how much LSD to whom, but that they can even remember any of it."
Ram Dass and I have been friends for four decades, and I wrote a personal apology to him and a public retraction in High Times. We hadn't crossed paths since, and now I was slightly nervous, but we greeted each other with genuine smiles and a warm embrace.
"I know you love me," I said, "but do you forgive me?"
Ram Dass laughed and replied, "There's nothing to forgive."
He tells that story again, about giving acid to his guru, in the illuminating 2001 documentary, Ram Dass: Fierce Grace, which airs April 20 on PBS. Producer-director Mickey Lemle writes in the director's statement, "When I first met Ram Dass 25 years ago, one of his messages that touched me was that we are both human and divine and that we must hold both simultaneously. He would explain that if one goes too far in the direction of one's humanity, one suffers. If one goes too far in the direction of one's divinity, one runs the risk of forgetting one's postal zip code.
"So his stories and teachings were funny, self-effacing and with an extraordinary grasp of the metaphysical. In form and content, his stories are about living on those two planes of consciousness, and the tension between them... His explorations took an uninvited turn when he suffered a massive stroke in February 1997. Now, he has been forced to live his teachings in a way he had not expected... He uses his current predicament to help others-one can see why he is considered one of the great spiritual teachers of our time, and how he is able to see his stroke as grace, fierce grace."
In the documentary, Ram Dass comments: "This isn't who I expected to be. Suffering comes when you try to hold onto continuity. It's so captivating to the consciousness, like I wanna see how the stroke capitulates my mind and then I wanna pull my consciousness out and be free in the middle of the stroke-an experiment in consciousness.
"I feel like an advance guard that calls back to the baby boomers, and now I call back about aging and things like stroke that are going to be in their present much sooner than they think....My guru said suffering brings me so close to God. I was galumphing through life before the stroke, and I kind of thought that was it, that was all there was, but the stroke, it's like a whole new incarnation."
At the country fair, on stage in his wheelchair, Ram Dass talked about his current struggle to love George W. Bush, and I had a flashback to 30 years ago, when he talked about his struggle to love Richard Nixon. His advice to the audience was to "take the ambiance of this fair into our lives because the instrument of greatest social action is the individual heart. Heart to heart resuscitation."
"Non-profit groups specializing in social issues and appropriate technology are given special arenas for demonstration and education. This event is definitely into its second and third generation. Children learn that it is okay to have fun with their parents, be passionate about life and live with an open heart. The bliss from the Oregon Country Fair flows into the surrounding communities all year round. Those who participate know that we are not alone in our beliefs and values. We are stronger, louder and more visible because of our unity in celebration."
This particular year, the fair had a theme-to honor the memory of Ken Kesey. "There are those," I told the audience, "who now envision Kesey on that Great Psychedelic Bus in the Sky, with Neal Cassady at the wheel, Jerry Garcia on guitar and Timothy Leary on acid. But Kesey's little grandchild, upon learning of his death, only wondered, 'Now who will teach us how to hypnotize the chickens?'"
The Merry Pranksters had parked their infamous bus, Furthur, outside the entrance, and they were selling posters to help raise money for a statue of Kesey in the town square. There were two factions in Eugene. One wanted the statue to be Kesey reading a book to his three grandchildren. The other wanted the statue to be Kesey sitting on a bench, toking on a joint. The first statue won out.
"I don't care," insists the sculptor of the pot-smoking statue. "I'm gonna do it anyway."