Baba Ram Dass died on December 22, 2019

Baba Ram Dass's book BE HERE NOW, had and still has a powerful influence on my daily life.  I have bought that book more times than any other book in my lifetime.  I bought it two or three times in the 70's and at least four times since 2000.  Sometimes I bought it because I couldn't find it, but mostly I bought it to give to my friends because it was so helpful to me.  The title says it all.
Baba Ram Dass not only gives you permission to be in the present moment, he gives you and injunction to.

My Protestant conscience taught me throughout my life to be my brother's keeper, to feel responsible for all the harm and misery in the world.  It weighed me down.  From my earliest days, I have been painfully aware of the suffering of other beings both near and far.  I can remember so many instances of real trauma and long lasting mental misery caused by things that were hardly noticed by others.  "How could they not care?" I wondered.

For two small examples:  One Easter my family was all dressed and ready to go to our local and family church, Gloria Dei, 'Old Swedes' Church, on Front Street in Philadelphia.  Outside on the street, ready to get into the car, I saw a cat in the gutter and picked it up.  "Put down that filthy thing?" MY mother cried out in horror.  "It's dead!"  

In explanation, my father said, "They climb onto the wheels to be near the warmth of the engine, then they fall asleep and the car cools down and they freeze."

It may have been my first experience of death.  And, I must add, my closest soul mates at that time (and possibly to this day) were cats and dogs, particularly cats with whom I have always had a deep and special bond.  That this memory remains after seven decades, speaks to the power of the moment.

The second incident was much later, when I was in my teens. I had just read the story of Pompei and the imagery was vivid and fresh in my mind.  I came out the front door of our house in the suburbs and my mother was pouring a pot of boiling water over the ants, a colony that had developed between white concrete sidewalk blocks.    I was horrified, connecting the ants, washed away by the boiling water with the people carried off by the pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius.  I could almost hear them screaming.  

To me these creatures are as real as people and incidents of their powerless suffering and death haunt me.  They rise up in my mind and I suffer - sorrow, heartache, and it drags me down into worldwide despair for everything, children separated from parents at the border to Mexico, animals in labs, homeless cats in winter, creatures poisoned by pollution, whales caught in nets, and on and on.  I could be weighed down to depression and death by it all.

BUT Baba Ram Dass, supported, in my case, by many many other texts on Zen Buddhism, gives me permission to be here, in my present moment, right now, and gets me released from the jail of images from the Holocaust, and mail solicitation for animal rescue groups.  I am not there, I am not able to intervene, I am here and this is now, not the past, not the future.  It is such a remarkable relief for someone with an overburdened sense of responsibility and  empathy.  

It doesn't release me from a responsibility for right action, it simply relieves me from fruitless suffering over what I cannot affect, the past, or things beyond my realm.  

I have read many other Buddhist philosophers such as Jack Kornfeld, and Pema Chodrin ( second only to Baba Ram Dass in influence in my life) and subscribed over the years to Shambala Press, but Baba Ram Dass was the first to show me the way.
It is true that he was also supported by my experiments with LSD, and his guidance no doubt, directed the effect of the LSD.

I am glad Baba Ram Dass had the chance to live such a good long life, to age 88, and I am eternally grateful to him for helping me to live a better life.  May he rest in peace.