By the time Amherst-native Caleb Seppala met Richard Alpert — also known as Baba Ram Dass, who was famous for popularizing psychedelic drugs in the 1960s and later as a spiritual leader — in Hawaii during the summer of 2015, Dass was in his 80s and living in the aftermath of a debilitating stroke.
“I do not wish you a stroke but the grace the stroke has given me,” Dass said in the 2018 documentary film “Ram Dass: Going Home,” shot by cinematographer Seppala. Over the course of four days with Dass, and another four days of shooting footage for the film, Seppala and director Derek Peck filmed the spiritual guru at his home in Maui, which Dass called his “sacred ground.”
In 1997, Dass suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that left him partly paralyzed, unable to speak at first, and permanently in a wheelchair. In the film, Seppala captures Dass in the course of his daily life, spending time in the study of his home and wading through his pool with some assistance. Interviews with Dass are woven throughout.
Dass was born in Boston in 1931 and died on Dec. 22, 2019, at the age of 88.
“Utmost grace is the best way to summarize him,” said Seppala, 35, now of Brooklyn, in an interview last week. “On a level that is truly unbelievable; so gentle, so kind, and so devoted. Devotion was a big part of his practice.”
Seppala has filmed documentaries, music videos and worked on fashion and commercial projects since moving to New York City in 2010. He’s worked with Peck on a documentary about Peter Beard, a photographer who worked in Tsavo National Park in Kenya and documented huge populations of elephants and rhinos that died of starvation, stress and diseases in the 1960s and 1970s.
In one scene, Dass talks about how the stroke prevented him from enjoying many of the activities he once did, such as playing the cello and golf. He said, “it pulled me inside even more, and it’s so wonderful,” followed by a big, hearty laugh and brilliant smile.
For a man that spent his adult life delivering lectures on the importance of mindfulness and prioritizing mental awareness over attachments to the physical world, Seppala said Dass admitted to the film crew that the stroke forced him to re-evaluate his level of attachment to everyday activities.
“When he first suffered the stroke, it surprised him how attached he was to the physical world, attached to golfing, driving in the car, getting up from his chair and walking,” Seppala recalled Dass saying. “It took him a number of years … of hard work and deep meditation, to be at a place to sit there and feel a great deal of content. It brought him a lot closer to his guru.”
“He joked that his guru had stroked him,” Seppala added.
In the early ‘60s, while teaching psychology and education at Harvard, fellow professor Timothy Leary introduced Dass to psilocybin — the psychoactive ingredient found in certain species of mushrooms — an experience that led Dass to explore paths toward enlightenment using LSD and other mind-altering drugs.
Their experiments led to articles appearing in newspapers and magazines, but not everybody was thrilled with their methods.
Dass and Leary were fired in May 1963 for using students as subjects for their psychedelic experiments — which were still considered legal at the time. A few years later, Dass traveled to India in 1967 seeking spiritual inspiration. There, he met Neem Karoli Baba, also called Maharajji, who became Dass’s lifelong guru. Maharajji gave Albert the name Ram Dass, or servant of God, and added the prefix Baba, a term of respect meaning father.
Dass returned from India appearing physically different — he was bearded, barefoot and wore a robe — but his views on psychedelics had begun to change as well. He promoted meditation and other spiritual practices while de-emphasizing the use of psychedelics as a means for accessing higher levels consciousness. In 1971, he published “Be Here Now,” a book on meditation and yoga techniques. He then spent much of his life delivering lectures, recording audio recordings, starting foundations to promote charities.
Several years later, Dass lived a much different lifestyle in his home in Maui.
Dass’s physical condition prevented him from traveling, yet he still managed to speak with friends from far away and followers through Skype calls from his study, according to Seppala.
“He was willing to use as much energy as possible to meet and talk with people,” Seppala said. “He would have daily Skype calls from his study, and there was a network of people, old friends and — there was a way for people to sign up for Skype calls — strangers during the day. During his free time during the day, he was having these calls whenever he wasn’t resting, eating or swimming.”
Throughout two interviews, each two hours long, Seppala said Dass was very willing to open up, and the experience overall was very emotional for the film crew.
“We cried, we laughed, and we felt a deep connection to him,” Seppala said. Dass spoke about the journey of his life and a lot of the conversations were around the topic of death and dying.
“He was coming to terms with the inevitability of death,” he said. “It was a central component of his beliefs and lectures.” The challenge for Seppala became how to reflect back the ideas in the interviews with the film’s images and cinematography.
Initially overwhelmed with Maui’s beauty, Seppala said he began to see the forests on the island as a perfect metaphor for what Dass had spoken about.
“You can perceive the jungle not only as abundant with life, but also as a realm of constant death,” Seppala said. “For every tree, there is an equal or greater amount of leaves and trees rotting away.”
Seppala said he found a lot of hope in Dass’s messages in which he believes that although our lives are finite, our souls are infinite and will continue on after death. It’s a message that is “incredibly powerful,” Seppala said, so many of the images in the movie are intended to capture that positivity and beauty.
“At the root, it’s asking people to do something extremely uncomfortable and go to a place in our minds that we don’t want to go to,” Seppala said. “To deeply contemplate and question what death really is, which is beautiful and darkly scary.”
Luis Fieldman can be reached at lfieldman@gazettenet.com