The Only Dance There is (1974)

Another author likely unknown to those under forty is Ram Dass, formerly Richard Alpert, a Stanford-educated psychologist who did his PhD on what is now a topical subject in our socially mediated age: "achievement anxiety". Alpert worked with LSD-advocate Timothy Leary before their expulsion from Harvard in 1963 for conducting experiments on the therapeutic effects of psychedelic drugs. In 1967, Alpert found himself in India, where he was mentored by Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, who dubbed him Ram Dass. 

I had a number of older friends while an undergraduate in Victoria in the early-1980s, many of whom had Ram Dass's Be Here Now (1971) in their bookshelves and by their bedsides. Out of admiration I tried to read what they read, but never took to Dass because I felt if I was going to read about Hinduism, I should start at the source, not with its hippie interpreters. It wasn't until a decade later that I found interpretations of "source material" just as relevant, if not necessary, to an understanding of the subject at hand.

It was at the same garage sale where I found Anne Petrie's Vancouver Secrets (1983) that I came away with Dass's The Only Dance There Is (1974), a book not so much written but transcribed from talks Dass gave at the Menninger Foundation at Topeka, Kansas, in 1970 and the Spring Grove Hospital at Baltimore, Maryland, in 1972. Indeed, it is the composition of the book (transcription) more than its "content" that interested me. But of course I was also interested in what I had years before denied myself the pleasure of -- in this instance, someone providing alternative approaches to institutions (psychiatric hospitals) rooted in Western methodologies.