THE DAILY FILES: 'GO OUT, GET HIGH,' SAYS DRUG GURU

A look backward in time through the yellowing pages of newsprint
archives shows what The Daily and the UW looked like 25 years ago this
month.

Although Ram Dass, spiritual guru of the '60s, is now well into middle
age, he hasn't lost any of the verve that cost him his Harvard
professorship and cast him into the spotlight 20 years ago.

In the mid-'60s Dasss, along with Timothy Leary and others, took the
drug culture beyond endless parties, free love and dropping out.

For Dass and Leary, hallucinogenic drugs were the key to unlocking the
doors of perception. They believed LSD and mushrooms allowed users a
new and unique glimpse of their inner selves.

Dass, whose real neame is Richard Alpert, earned a doctorate in
psychology from Stanford in 1957 and spent the next four years
teaching at Stanford, Berkeley and Harvard.

It was at Harvard that Dass and Timothy Leary began experimenting with
hallucinogenic drugs. In 1961 Dass left Harvard to experiment with
LSD. Between 1961 and 1967 he took acid at least 300 times.

Sitting in his room at Seattle's Edgewater Inn, Dass, who speaks at 8
p.m. in Kane 130 tonight, was animated in discussing his past.

Clad in white dungarees and bare feet, Dass talked about the turning
points in his life. "Often, the moments which seem to be critical in
life, like the first time I took psilocybin, or when I got thrown out
of Harvard, or when I went to India, are very dramatic looking from
the outside, but inside there is a certain kind of preparation that
goes on in one that makes you ready for certain changes that happen,"
he explained. "I can see continuity in it all."

Dass' first adventure into the world of psychedelics came on March 6,
1961, when he ingested psilocybin mushrooms at the home of Harvard
colleague Timothy Leary.

Dass said it was snowing heavily as he sat in Leary's living room and
"watched himself from several feet away." The image he saw was that of
an academic stereotype, he explained, and slowly his image of himself
began to disappear and the couch his sitting on appeared to him to be
empty.

"Nothing had prepared me to think I could exist without my body," Dass
recalled.

"I was suddenly connected with a part of me I hadn't known existed.
It's still very vivid."