Author: rahnepistor

Harvard-professors-turned-psychedelic-explorers Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary often interjected the virtues of human evolution and technological advancement into their lectures and writings on consciousness alteration. Now it is exactly that technology — Internet technology — that allows Alpert (now known as Ram Dass) to continue his teachings of heightened consciousness and spiritual enlightenment years after a stroke left him partially paralyzed and unable to endure the rigors of travel. Ram Dass will headline Omfest, an event in Santa Monica, via live Internet feed from his home in Maui. Omfest, a mini-retreat and workshop based on the teachings of influential 20th century Indian guru Neem Karoli Baba is scheduled from 3 to 10 p.m. Sunday, October 28th, at the Church in Ocean Park, 235 Hill St., Santa Monica. Tickets are $54, and proceeds benefit the Neem Karoli Baba Ashram and Hanuman Temple in Taos, New Mexico, a facility dedicated to the guru whose message was, “love everyone — serve everyone — remember God.” Ram Dass, along with Leary, is credited with introducing LSD and psilocybin into the consciousness of a generation of young Americans in the 1960s. After being dismissed from his post at Harvard once the research became too controversial and involved student participation, Alpert went on a quest for personal discovery, wound up in India, and was led to a reclusive guru whose teachings were to have a profound...

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…. — Jack Kerouac A three-day 50th anniversary celebration of Beat generation luminary Jack Kerouac’s On the Road has been planned for Friday through Sunday, October 19th to 21st, at Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd., Venice. General admission is $7 and students and seniors are $5. Breaking literary boundaries in a three-week frenzy of writing in 1951, Kerouac typed what was to become one of the most innovative and revered novels of the 20th century on 119 feet of taped-together graph paper. On the Road was to become the defining literary work of the Beat Generation. “I read it in 1968 as a senior in high school and it changed my life,” says Richard Modiano, a member of the Beyond Baroque board of trustees and organizer of the event. “Since then, every half generation it seems, I meet seniors in high school, in the 1970s and 1980s through the present, who tell me that the book changed their life.” After many rewrites, edits and resistance from agents and publishers, Kerouac’s masterpiece was published in 1957 by Viking...