The American counterculture provided an radical experiments in communal life, gatherings in an interpenetrating network of creative, messy, processes. Or maybe kaleidoscopes. In the essential context for the establishment of Naropa University. Its founder, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, turned to the protean and kinetic energies of the counterculture to assemble Naropa’s initial faculty. Everyone involved in Naropa’s early years was either orchestrating, conspiring with, or at least touched by the counterculture spirit.
Amidst an eclipse of the utopian idealism of the 60s, when much of the naiveté of that era began to face a series of reckonings, Naropa emerged as a wellspring of subversive imagination. One of Naropa’s original visiting faculty members, the historian Theodore Roszak, was a preeminent scholar of these alternative wisdoms, and is even credited with coining the term “counterculture.”
Roszak had tracked the rise of the New Left, the recent bloom of bohemian subcultures, surges of literature and music centered on self-expression, a turn away from rationalizing industrial society towards envisioning new ecologies that would foreshadow global environmentalism, a wholesale reevaluation of sexuality, identity, and the erotic, of “mutual delight” and “satirical humor” in the face of entrenched political corruption, not to mention many of the tacit philosophies floating around in the background. Perceptively, Roszak identified a common thread across all these impulses in consciousness and culture: resistance to the technocracy.
The life-streams of many of Naropa’s earliest teachers, staff, and students were related in some fashion to this act of resistance. But more so to an expansive notion of liberation, and what Roszak described as “experiments in education, which aimed at subverting and seducing by the force of innocence, generosity, and manifest happiness in a world where those qualities were cynically abandoned in favor of bad substitutes.”
Naropa, in many ways, forms a nexus within this history. This can be exemplified by looking to two figures crucial to Naropa’s genesis: Ram Dass and Allen Ginsberg. Both lived in vibrant epicenters of the counterculture. Just touch any of the gossamer-like threads that wove through their lives to see, to remember. You might find yourself weird, dreamy, restless, wistful, and ecstatic scenes. An Indra’s net…on fire.
Ginsberg was part and parcel of many zigzagging currents: psychedelic experimentation and advocacy, an evolving flux of art, poetry, journalism, and cultural criticism, America’s love affair with Buddhism, anti-war activism under the shadow of “the bomb,” a bold stand for taboo sexual orientations and gay rights, a reclamation of romanticism, and a growing empathy for the tragic lives of the dispossessed.
And Ram Dass held court at the intersections of innovative psychedelic research and experimentation, synergies between psychology and spirituality, an embrace of Hindu devotion and community blended with perennial mysticism and Western esotericism, and new methods of care related to death and dying.
This is not simply an inventory of their personal interests. Ram Dass and Ginsberg can be appreciated as prisms of far-reaching cultural right light, if you peer into their spinning lives, Naropa’s countercultural roots colorfully flash into view. The friendship they shared was also prismatic.
Ram Dass would come and teach about love and surrender, and we would sing to his guru and chant kirtan and get high on bhakti, opening the heart. It was great. That was Monday night. Then Tuesday night...Trungpa would give a simple talk about how practice really meant being where you are, coming down to earth, not getting lost in all the hoopla of Eastern mysticism.
The first summer at Naropa, by many reports, was surreal. As the festivities began, there was a “joyous incredulity” that the summer institute was even happening, and one student remembers events being “so electric” she could hardly sleep more than a couple hours each night.
Ram Dass’s course, Yogas of the Bhagavad Gītā, enrolled over 1,000 students. In addition to the course itself, Trungpa Rinpoche and Ram Dass staged many evening dialogues that summer. Their encounters were playful, yet sharp. Some of the creative tensions between them spilled over into “dharma wars” between Trungpa’s community and Ram Dass’s following. Students from both “camps” volleyed between Trungpa’s course, The Tibetan Buddhist Path and Ram Dass’s Yogas of the Gītā. The differences between their teaching style were stark, yet strangely complimentary. Jack Kornfield remembers:
“Ram Dass would come and teach about love and surrender, and we would sing to his guru and chant kirtan and get high on bhakti, opening the heart. It was great. That was Monday night. Then Tuesday night…Trungpa would give a simple talk about how practice really meant being where you are, coming down to earth, not getting lost in all the hoopla of Eastern mysticism. And then on Wednesday night, Ram Dass—we would all sing together and get high and dance with devotion and so forth. And then Thursday night Trungpa would come back again and say, ‘Impermanence. The fact of death. Remember that there’s also suffering in life.’ This went on week after week. It was driving a lot of people crazy.”
Ram Dass initially had trepidations about his own qualification to teach the Bhagavad Gītā. He sought Swami Muktananda’s blessing—an Indian master with whom he recently toured America. Muktananda told Ram Dass a story about the mystery of thetext’sdivinenature, concluding: “you don’t have to worry about teaching the Gītā that is none of your business. The Gītā will teach itself. Krishna will do it in spite of you.”
Ram Dass took course preparations quite seriously. Outfitting a school bus as a camper, he spent two months before Naropa’s first summer session in the desert, studying multiple translations and commentaries on the Gītā and organizing its major themes as a blueprint for his riffs. While at Joshua Tree National Park, he recalls practicing his first lecture to a rapt audience of “jackrabbits that were hanging around the bus.”
In Boulder, the course was held in a large warehouse, later a local natural grocery store on the corner of Broadway and Arapahoe, to accommodate the massive class. Ram Dass enlisted ten teaching assistants, including the Vipassana teacher Joseph Goldstein, the Kirtan- wala Krishna Das, and Mirabai Bush who went on to found the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. Outside the warehouse, a “Pūjā Bazaar” popped up, with books, mālās, photos of gurus, shawls, and other spiritual wares.
Many of Ram Dass’s talks on the Gītā really served as a launch pad to relive the sagas of his own relationship with his guru, Neem Karoli Baba. As a lecturer, Ram Dass was spell-binding. He once divulged an unexpected source of his rhetorical brilliance: witnessing, as a child, his wheeling-and- dealing, cigar-chomping father—a railroad tycoon and master of verbal persuasion—in action. Throughout the course, he adeptly translated the core themes of the Gītā into anecdotes resonant with his audience; a skill not unrelated, perhaps, to his training as a psychologist. And his secret weapon was story-telling, always delivered with a scintillating sense of humor.
During that initial summer, Naropa’s first executive director Marty Janowitz remembers:
“Ram Dass and his particular energy and style was a fundamental part of what made Naropa what it was. It’s hard to even imagine how we could have pulled it off without him, because we needed a strong voice that was not Rinpoche, that could magnetize this notion of ‘the sparks can fly.’ There were many other marvelous teachers, but they didn’t have the galvanizing quality of Ram Dass. He spoke to the whole community.”
Today’s colleges are turning out money speculators, yuppies trained to build Star Wars. It’s really a good thing to create a school where the basis of the studies is wisdom.
Allen Ginsberg had a much more comprehensive and longstanding impact on Naropa. He not only co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, but fundraised, administrated, and convened at Naropa for over twenty years. Naropa also impacted Allen, and marked a major shift in his life; it was at Naropa that he first took up the mantle of a teacher. Whereas Ginsberg had been promoting the Beat Generation and its literature in the two decades before Naropa was founded, within the Naropa academy he was given the opportunity to teach, to contextualize and formalize the field of Beat Studies from which he himself emerged the intellectual, spiritual and activist figurehead. Speaking to the meaning of his endeavors at Naropa, he commented:
“Today’s colleges are turning out money speculators, yuppies trained to build Star Wars. It’s really a good thing to create a school where the basis of the studies is wisdom. I feel proud of that. I feel like I’ve done something in my life. I feel better than if I was just a poet.”
Beyond his singular career as a wordsmith, trickster, cultural hero, activist, documenter of corruption, iconoclast, and world traveler, Allen ranks as one of the best networkers in American history. He was a true champion of his friends, as well as his students. In this vein, Amy McClure recalls her husband, the poet and playwright Michael McClure, referring to Allen as a Mahātmā, a ‘great soul’. He also described the endless proliferation of projects, engagements, interviews, events, muses, concerts, archives, publications, and lectures swirling around him and his stretched-thin assistants as “Ginscorp.”
Allen was a co-architect of creative social protest; he engaged in an art of generational spectacle with imagination and theatrics. In this capacity, he moved through some of the last century’s most consequential counterculture spaces. While studying at Columbia in the 40s, he was exposed to many avant-garde artists, such as the painters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. John Cage was in the mix, a composer whose focus on transcending personal aesthetics in favor of opening the mind to the beauty of processes greater than human intelligence inspired a generation of artists. New York at that time was also home to an efflorescence of bebop and modern jazz. Frequenting late-night clubs, Ginsberg not only got to see Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, and Thelonious Monk do their thing, but also befriended them. The musical language, energy, rhythms, and commitment to improvisation of American jazz artists, together with the stream-of-consciousness repartee of Neal Cassidy, would be critical to Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac’s formulation of novel forms of poetry and prose.
The mid 50s found Ginsberg smack in the middle of the so-called “San Francisco Renaissance.” He organized the famous Six Gallery reading, where he tested out an initial draft of “Howl” alongside performances by Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen. This led to his first publication with City Lights, Howl and Other Poems (1956), which became the focus of a protracted obscenity hearing that serendipitously catapulted it, the Beat Generation, and Ginsberg as its primary spokesperson, to national fame.
The morning after a revelatory evening with psilocybin supervised by Timothy Leary at his Newton, MA, residence in 1960, Ginsberg and Leary spawned a vision for a psychedelic revolution. In many ways, Ginsberg’s circle of artists became the portal by which Leary would initially take his psychedelic research beyond the cloistered halls of Harvard University. Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie were the first to participate, and it ‘mushroomed’ from there. Once Leary got plugged into Ginsberg’s vibrant network of cultural possibilities, the scholarly and scientific ‘game’ suddenly seemed lackluster. There was no turning back.
Ginsberg himself would pen many poems under the influences of a wide range of substances, such as “Wales Visitation” written on a psychedelic excursion in the Vale of Ewyas. He was present at the very first Acid Test (and many subsequent ones) organized by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. He testified before the U.S. senate on LSD in 1966. He headlined the San Francisco Human Be-In. He rallied against propaganda campaigns and the criminalization of mind-altering substances throughout his life. While his attitude towards psychedelics would swing in many directions, much of the recent shifts in legal frameworks and the explosion of research on psychedelic-assisted therapy may not have occurred in the absence of Allen’s tireless diplomacy and good humor.
He was the kind of person who could (to his own surprise) put the Oakland Hell’s Angels at ease by chanting the Prajñāpāramitā mantra, and then successfully mediate a resolution between this infamous chapter of the motorcycle gang and the Vietnam Day Committee regarding a contentious anti-war march. His mantric incantations were also on display during one of the most occult, or at least satirical, anti-war protests in American history: an ‘exorcism’ of the U.S. Department of Defense through an attempt to “levitate the Pentagon” 300 feet into the air, via telekinesis. The five-day standoff between police and a huge encampment of protestors at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago took this practice to a new level. Allen, in the face of a storm of riot police in Lincoln Park, began chanting OM on a small grassy hill, which caught on. Soon he was in deep sonic chorus, and the protestors that gathered around him chanted OM for seven hours straight. The chant shifted the entire atmosphere of the rally. Ginsberg remembered:
“If there’d been panic and police clubs, I don’t think I would have minded the damage. Clubbing would have seemed a curiously impertinent intrusion from skeleton phantoms—unreal compared with the natural omnipresent electric universe I was in. The fear of death was gone. I was in a revolutionary mass of electricity. I was in a dimension of feeling other than the normal one of save-your-own-skin.”
Steven Taylor, Allen’s musical collaborator, describes the beat poets as “the last romantics,” and “none of them more so than Allen.” This romantic impulse, he notes, was about actually trying “to save the world through art.” This was not an abstract proposition, or simply taking a leaf from the book of Percy Shelley on the prophetic potency of the poet’s speech. In a very real way poetry had “saved Ginsberg’s life. Saved his sanity.” And for Allen, the goal was never simply personal salvation. He continually directed his art, his voice, his unbridled emotion, his sympathy, and his courage outwards, to ever-expanding horizons of beings.
And this brings us back to his friendship with Ram Dass. The crisscrossing of their paths, Naropa’s initial summer being but one, deserves a much more detailed accounting, but one episode of their friendship stands out.
Ginsberg’s passion for activism initially unnerved Ram Dass:
“When Allen turned to his voluminous yellowing folders to ‘inform’ me about the perfidy, greed, misuse of power, violence, injustice, inhumanity, and irrationality of our fellow humans, he would once again seem to be enshrouded in a dark cloak of conscience and that sense of impotence reflected in the urgency to ‘do something’. And I would pull back. It was obvious to me that this perception of Allen as caught, which put me off so, was in part due to my own misunderstanding of renunciation and my own fear of drowning in social involvement. So Allen sat on the tracks in Rocky Flats and got arrested. I waited and watched.”
This all changed when Ram Dass, while passing through Boulder to give a talk, accepted Allen’s invitation to join another protest against nuclear stock-piling at Rocky Flats. Allen’s own growth and maturation in his spiritual practice (a “new lightness,” which Ram Dass credited to the influence of Trungpa), combined with the energy and good will he experienced at that peaceful protest, helped shift Ram Dass’s perspective:
“On that day I finally felt the schism between social action and spirit was healed within me. After that it seemed second nature to speak at anti-nuclear demonstrations and to do benefits for the hungry, impoverished, and persecuted peoples throughout the world. Finally, I could sit with Allen and his facts of horror and not feel frightened for my heart. He was showing me that one did not need to avert one’s gaze from the human condition in order to remain in the spirit.”
It would seem that Naropa’s motto of late—transform yourself, transform the world—carries on a noble (and unmistakably countercultural) tradition.
