Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary

What starts off as a bit of a light trip, adorned in the most superficial of psychedelic and new- age imagery, ends up being a beautiful deep dig into the philosophy and psychology of death, as well as a fantastic history lesson that reminds us of just how simenal the work, minds and hearts of Timothy Leary and Ram Dass, both together and after they diverged, really were (or IS in the case of Ram Dass, who is still with us).

I discovered Ram Dass' "Be Here Now" on my mom's bookshelf when I was, I don't know, twelve or thirteen years old. I was a latchkey single-chid, a product of Reaganomics, I had a single parent who had to work her ass off to support us, so I was home alone a lot. That's when Ram Dass first came in to my life. "Be Here Now" was pictographic and I was already a huge fan of comic books. It was easy to understand but far from simple. It blew the top of my head open.

Eventually that started me down the path of discovering other "like-minded" minds. Alan Watts, Terrence McKinnon, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan (whose "The Medium is the Message" was another pictographic work that rocked my brain) Anton Wilson, of course Timothy Leary, and on and on and on. All bricks in a road leading me to where I am today. A forty-five year old man who writes comic books for a living.

And in my life, ever since those early days of discovery, I've realized that I have been most happy in the moments when I remembered to embrace the mind of Leary, but the heart of Ram Dass. This movie did that for me. Reminded me. And so it seems impossible to review this film without getting personal, which is a victory of any work of art.

Right now I am so busy with my life. It's a good life, filled with authenticity, but I hate being this busy. When I'm too busy I forget all the things that make me who I am. I forget to meditate, stop exploring with psychotropics, do more "work" but feel less creative, etc. But then this morning this movie came along randomly. I saw it on a whim at a 10 am showing in Santa Monic, and was surprised to find Tim Leary's son, Zac, in attendance and willing to speak for a bit after. Finding it was a wonderful gift and a reminder of the kind of personalities I gravitated toward when I was just starting to try and figure things out.

I am a huge fan of the film "Fierce Grace". I feel it to be a masterpiece. Every time I watch it, it emotionally destroys me and rebuilds me. "Dying to Know" isn't that, but this movie is a genuine delivery mechanism for true emotion and deep contemplation, and it brought me to tears more than once (I cry easily). There's not really more that you can expect a movie to do.

So thanks to all who brought this project to my nieghborhood on a Sunday morning. I didn't even know how much I needed it.

Love.

Timothy Leary was an unforgettable explorer of "inner space" who influenced the hippie generation as much as any other person or group of those times. Richard Alpert, after seeking spiritual advice from Neeb Karori Baba (also known by other names) who renamed Alpert "Ram Dass" ("servant of god") was for many years Leary's research partner and co-explorer of psychedelic consciousness. The two men are tied inexorably together in the history of psychedelic exploration and spiritual awakening.

Background notes:

I was in the audience at one of Leary and Ram Dass's presentations at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium during the '60's. I didn't know how to evaluate their message then. Later, I briefly met and exchanged a few words with the man I knew as Maharaji, Ram Dass's spiritual guru. Again I didn't know how to fit his message into my life's experiences

I explored the psychedelic experience a handful of times during that era using street procured LSD. The experiences were both visual and surreal and at different times generated both paranoia and euphoria. (I suspect there was an amphetamine like stimulant present in addition to the acid.)

I found (approximately) the first half of Dying to Know worthwhile viewing because I had personal knowledge of the times which corresponded with what was being presented. (One significant event that was conspicuous by its absence was any mention of the date LSD became illegal in California (Wiki article states October 6, 1966 but w/o a reference. That date rings at least approximately true according to what I remember.)

For me the middle of the film became increasingly episodic and unfocused, at best loosely tying together incidents being related by different people being interviewed. Most of the audience was middle aged or older but there was one couple who appeared to be in their 20's.

When the last portion of the film began to painstakingly delve into Leary's approaching death and the revelations he experienced as death approached, they, who were sitting toward the front and had a clear shot at the exit, walked out

At the time, I thought if I could have walked out without causing others in the audience to become unduly distracted by my having to pass in front of them, I'd have left too. I had nothing more to learn, as confirmed by staying and watching the last 20+ minutes of the film.

Yes, a great taboo in our culture is discussing experiencing death but one enlightened experience isn't a universal solution. Leary's views, while somewhat different from mine, were at least creditable. Ram Dass, OTOH, went completely off the deep end and spouted what for me was pure nonsense.

In closing:

I'm a materialist. Spiritualism isn't something I focus on. I believe after death a person's essence returns to the state it occupied before conception.

Further I believe a place like this world is an extremely rare occurrence in reality; but reality is limitless and places like our "real" world, while extremely rare, probably exist (on and off) throughout eternity. Places like our world are so far apart they rarely have evidence of other such places.

Of course, YMMV!

Dying to Know is a complex film that explores a constellation of the issues centering on consciousness, life and death. At first, since the film falls into the classification of documentary, I assumed that it would chronicle the lives of these two seminal leaders of alternative, exploratory culture.

Because of the subjects, their particular voices and consistency in their individual philosophy and approach to life and to death, the film mirrors the overt intellectual ideas they each embody while seducing the viewer to feel and intuit the substance of each man and the freedom and openness in their capacity to embrace life and death simultaneously. The thread running through the film is truly about having an open-hearted love for each other and for life. It is a film that does a balancing act of simultaneous objectivity or theoretical exploration while concurrently conveying and honoring the intuitive. So one moment the viewer is asked to contemplate existence through a particular theoretical lens while sensing the profundity of being. The "Be Here Now" mantra we associate with Ram Dass dances with the mind's desire to know and make sense of the world.

There are myths surrounding both of these men and those myths function to hold their personalities in check in a particular moment in history. The sixties have been appropriated to serve fashion, art, popular culture in all forms and so to be able to create a film with such substance serves to undermine these myths and show the progression and transformation that each experienced over time. We tend to hold our perceptions and constructions of icons like these two in a static place. This film makes them the flawed, remarkable, transformative individuals that they are together and explores that over time.

The aesthetics of Dying to Know initially prompt one to think, oh no, I am going to be asked to go on a pretend acid trip. Then, paying attention to the vocabulary that is used to express complicated psychological states of mind or representations of drug induced consciousness and dreams, one finds the range from hand drawn images to highly sophisticated animation serves to make the journey delightfully varied and unexpected. And, when you think about the complexity of the subject, the varied approaches to expressing these states of mind using differing visual strategies lends a supporting framework to the overall conceptual complexity of the film's questions and ideas. It is a collage of ideas and a collage of images and so whatever assumption one might bring to what they will see evaporates into a joy ride. The historic footage is interspersed with colorful images, balancing black and while, old grainy surfaces and high def detail all serving the collage. It is wild and serves the joyous sense of freedom of the period.

I laughed in places where few others in the audience did and I heard others laugh in places that I did not. On occasion humor reaches everyone. I also cried and I think that emotional response was to the genuine way in which the film re-stimulates each of us to think about our own losses and our own mortality. Death is embraced with the embrace and curiosity that life has been and with humor and grace. In that regard, the film offers a gift to others that might be suffering from terminal illness as it opens the journey with openhearted inquiry and curiosity rather than reinforcing our culture's notion of "the End".

In this way, the film covers a lot of ground. The gradual debunking of stereotype, the truth of human change through aging and transformation that comes from being at peace and disciplined in thought on the matter of dying. The seriousness taken with the subject and activity of drugs for the purpose of exploration, in contrast to the purpose of getting wasted is one of the crucial myth busters. That dichotomy has been in place for a very long time and this film honors the depth of seriousness that at least part of the sixties culture understood and were inspired by. Once out in the world on college campuses, there were those who wanted to explore drugs for experimental, mind and reality exploring purposes but popular culture has long re-framed that time as one of debauchery for the sake of debauchery. The film places the subject rightfully on the platform it belongs on and does so respectfully.

Jan Brooks

10/29/17. I thought this doc would be interesting to watch since I am a baby boomer. Sadly, I just found their conversations to be a bit out in left field, a couple of old hippies nostalgic about better days. Well, maybe their younger days rather than better days. The goals of the 60s were good ones - self-awareness, achieving a higher level of consciousness, love for fellow man, regardless of race or religion. Unfortunately, these lofty goals were mired by drugs and unprotected sex. Today, midway through the '10s, we are no closer to the goals of the '60s. People still use drugs to escape to only die from overdoses, and unprotected sex has resulted in a growing list of untreatable STDs. Maybe the better times are only those that exist in our minds.