3/16/2024 0 Comments Keep calm and carry on clapping![]() “And I cried and cried and cried,” he wrote. He bent down, put his head in Neem Karoli’s lap, and started to weep. Now Alpert felt a wrenching in his chest. When his mother had died the year before, Alpert hadn’t even cried, believing that, as a result of his experience with psychedelics, he’d come to terms with death. Then Neem Karoli leaned back, closed his eyes, and said that she had died of an illness of the spleen, something Alpert had discussed with no one in India.Īlpert’s mind raced, searching for an explanation, but he couldn’t come up with one. He whispered that Alpert had been thinking of his mother, who had died a year earlier. He then described what Alpert had been doing the previous evening. He traveled for several months before encountering Neem Karoli, an old man said to possess extraordinary powers, though he struck Alpert at first as a hustler.Īfter some initial banter between them, Neem Karoli asked Alpert to come closer. and then you got cast out again.”Īfter six years, and more than three hundred psychedelic trips, Alpert went on a pilgrimage to India, hoping to find someone who could give him more enduring answers. It was, he wrote, “as if you came into the kingdom of heaven. There was also a big difference: no matter how high Alpert went, no matter how ecstatic and transforming his visions, he eventually came down. There were parallels, he believed, between his LSD trips and the enlightenment experiences described in certain Hindu and Buddhist texts. beyond life and death.” It was the most exhilarating, deeply religious experience of his life.Įventually fired from Harvard because of his experiments with drugs, Alpert spent several years exploring inner realms of consciousness with psychedelics. For the first time, he wrote, he sensed his inner self - the universal essence within each person that is “independent of social and physical identity. He panicked, feeling more and more distraught then, all at once, he was engulfed by a sense of calm. Images of his different identities - professor, lover, son - appeared and faded before his eyes. On his first trip with psilocybin, Alpert underwent a profound shift in awareness. In 1961, Alpert was introduced to consciousness-expanding drugs by a new colleague at Harvard, Timothy Leary. After five years of psychoanalysis, his own therapist had told him, “You are too sick to leave analysis.” He ate too much, drank too much, and got terrible diarrhea every time he had to lecture. Though he was a professor of psychology at Harvard and a highly regarded therapist, he felt that something was missing from his life, and that psychology didn’t really have a grasp on the human condition. Here was the story of Richard Alpert, a bright Jewish intellectual who, by the age of thirty, had climbed to the top of the academic ladder. Though more than a quarter-century has passed since then, in some ways I’ve never put it down. As soon as I could, I bought a copy of my own. It wasn’t great literature, but, from the first page, the book drew me as powerfully as anything I’d ever read. Next to a shiny white commode.īeing an inveterate bathroom reader, I picked it up and started reading. I remember walking down a long dirt road to get there. I no longer recall the name of the commune, or what town it was near. One summer day, I visited a commune somewhere in California. Instead of deriding the spiritual life, I was struggling to make sense of it, trying to separate the real from the bogus, the flower from the thorn. I’d just switched my religious affiliation from devout agnostic to confused seeker. In 1971, I was hitchhiking around the United States, searching for answers. Then I reconsidered: maybe it would be better to leave the sign the way it was - the cracked glass now as much a reminder as the words themselves. As it hit the floor, the glass inside the frame cracked.īerating myself for being so clumsy, I promised I’d replace the glass. I tried to straighten it, and it slipped from my hand. Each of us should strive to awaken, awaken. Time swiftly passes by, and opportunity is lost. “Let me respectfully remind you,” it reads, “life and death are of supreme importance. On the wall near my desk at home, there’s a sign: thirty-five words inside a simple metal frame.
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