"He buckled his seatbelt and rested his left hand on his knee, exposing between his knuckles and wrist a tattoo of the words 'want nothing' over the outline of a desert island."

I quoted that because it's my favorite sentence in "Will Welch Leads GQ to ‘the New Masculinity’/When he got the job as top editor, a friend told him, 'Yikes.' Now, with an assist from Brad Pitt, he has remade the men’s magazine for the post-#MeToo age" (NYT). 

What more do you want? Well, he has to want you to want his magazine. And he seems to want you to buy into masculinity, but doubts you'll buy that (or doubts you need him to inform you on the subject), so he came up with "new masculinity," so he must want you to believe that GQ is in the know about what is new.

"Ram Dass was the master of the one-liner, the two-liner, the ocean-liner."

Said Wavy Gravy, quoted in "Baba Ram Dass, Proponent of LSD and New Age Enlightenment, Dies at 88/Born Richard Alpert, he returned from a trip to India as a bushy-bearded, barefoot, white-robed guru and wrote more than a dozen inspirational books" (NYT).

Baba Ram Dass, who epitomized the 1960s of legend by popularizing psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary, a fellow Harvard academic, before finding spiritual inspiration in India, died on Sunday at his home on Maui. He was 88....

He was particularly interested in the dying. He started a foundation to help people use death as a journey of spiritual awakening and spoke of establishing a self-help line, “Dial-a-Death,” for this purpose.

When Mr. Leary was dying in 1996 — and wishing to do it “actively and creatively,” as he put it — he called for Ram Dass. Over the years, Ram Dass had alternately been Mr. Leary’s disciple, enemy and, at the end, friend. In a film clip of the two men preparing for Mr. Leary’s death, Ram Dass turns to Leary, hugs him and says, “It’s been a hell of a dance, hasn’t it?”...

"Is modern Western life anathema to the effort needed for the kind of spiritual development you espouse?"/"Yes. Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts —"

"Those are the daily attention-grabbers that make it so that you can’t come from your mind to your heart to your soul. The soul contains love, compassion, wisdom, peace and joy, but most people identify with the mind. You’re not an ego. You’re a soul. You’re not psychologically full of anxiety and fear.... If you identify with the ego plane, you’ll find you’re in time, you’re in space, you’re a little body. But go to the spiritual heart, and there will be a doorway to the next plane of consciousness: soul land. My guru once called me over after I threw a plate of food at a Westerner at the ashram. Maharaji said: 'Ram Dass! Is something the matter?' I told him my complaints about the Westerners who were hanging around, and he got a glass of milk and fed it to me, and he said, 'Now, you do it for them.' So I fed the milk to every one of the Westerners. It made me feel good in my heart. Feed them. Love everybody."

From "Ram Dass Is Ready to Die" (NYT), where I learned that old lectures by Ram Dass — most famous for a 1971 book called "Be Here Now" — will be available in a podcast called "Here and Now." Ram Dass, a contemporary of Timothy Leary's, is quite old now, 89, and he is speech impaired (after a stroke).

The interviewer asks him if he worries "that all these individuals turning inward rather than outward are doing it as a way of avoiding political engagement?" He says:

Social action and spiritual work are not mutually exclusive. The witness witnesses the politics or the many games we play. In the long run, this is beneficial to individuals and the culture.

Yes, that feels like an explanation of what I've been doing here these last 15  years.

The interviewer pushes him about Trump. What would he say to Trump? Answer: "Identify with your soul." The interviewer snarks: "That would take some work." Answer: "No." The interviewer continues: "No? Am I being unfairly judgmental?" Answer:

On my puja table [altar] is Donald Trump. When I look at his picture, I say to him, “I know you from your karma, and I don’t know you for your soul.” And I am compassionate about that soul because he has heavy karma.

And let me give you the part that explains the title of the article. The interviewer says, "You’ve said that you’re ready to die. When did you know?" Answer:

When I arrived at my soul. Soul doesn’t have fear of dying. Ego has very pronounced fear of dying. The ego, this incarnation, is life and dying. The soul is infinite.... The soul witnesses the ego and witnesses thoughts. “Be here now” gives people an opportunity to reidentify outside of their thinking-mind ego and into that thing that’s called the soul. It is the perspective from which we could live a life without being caught so much in fear. To reidentify there is to change your whole life.

But what about political engagement?!

50 years ago today: The Human Be-In.

Ah! Watch it in its 1967 glory — San Francisco takes off toward the Summer of Love:



In the early 60s, we'd had "sit-ins," when civil rights advocates quite logically made a protest out of sitting at lunch-counters where black people had been excluded. The "-in" suffix got attached to "teach" when the Students for a Democratic Society held a teach-in at the University of Michigan in March 1965. The "Be-In" of January 14, 1967 preceded the "love-in" and the TV show "Laugh-In."

In the hippie era, the idea that we could simple "be" felt — often with the prompting of LSD — so right. To hold an event that was patterned on a protest with that "-in" but at which you would just be... well, it was very 1967, as was the delight at the cosmic pun on "human being." Remember, this was before hippies seemed dumb. Imagine a time when hippies felt like the cutting edge of enlightenment:

The Human Be-In focused the key ideas of the 1960s counterculture: personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological awareness, higher consciousness (with the aid of psychedelic drugs), acceptance of illicit drug use, and radical liberal political consciousness....

California had, only a few months earlier, banned LSD, shutting the door to cosmic perception. Timothy Leary was there to say "Turn on, tune in, drop out." Among the other gurus: Richard Alpert ("Ram Dass"), Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Dick Gregory, Lenore Kandel, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jerry Rubin. Yes, there were also women in those days, but it was before prideful enlightened men noticed a need to perform gender-diversity theater. Male human was human enough for the Human Be-In. There is, however, a snakily sexy lady dancing in the audience in that video.

Hells Angels provided security. Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service played music. There was "White Lightning" LSD from Owsley Stanley and free turkey provided by the Diggers.

The serious adults who ran the mainstream news and covered the Human Be-In didn't think they were running free ads for LSD and the counterculture but they were. And those ads were vastly more effective than ads for conventional trips to tourist destinations. We teenagers watched and dreamed of making it out to San Francisco where life was beautiful and love was everywhere.

ADDED: "There was an awakening going on, and we knew it was happening across the country, and we knew there were pockets of people out there who felt isolated and alone and scared. We wanted to send a signal out to them: 'Hey, it’s OK to come out and spread your wings. Be your fully glorified self in all your beauty and joy. … You are not alone.'"