– An excerpt from an Interview with Ramananda John E. Welshons

NILS MONTAN: When and how did you first encounter Ram Dass?

RAMANANDA JOHN WELSHONS: I had known about Ram Dass’s work at Harvard with Tim Leary back in the early Sixties when he was known as Dr. Richard Alpert. Then, in 1970, while I was living in Boston, I saw a poster stapled to a telephone pole in Cambridge that had Ram Dass’s picture on it. It was advertising a lecture he was giving at Boston University. I didn’t go because I didn’t know who “Baba Ram Dass” was. Then in August of 1971, I was visiting another high school friend in Washington, DC. He had a recording of a three and a half hour lecture Ram Dass had given in 1968. It was on an old reel-to-reel tape deck. When I heard that lecture, I was just blown away! I would have to say – unequivocally – that from that moment on, Ram Dass has been the biggest single influence in my life.

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Nils Montan is a writer and social commentator who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Southern Brazil