University Daily Kansan
Thursday, May 4. 1978
5
Philosopher challenges audience
Staff Writer
By SUSAN MORGENSTERN
A mystic philosopher expounding upon life's mysteries one moment, Ram Dass becomes a comedian in the manner of an actor who but always holding his audience enthralled.
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And never taking himself—or anything—seriously.
Dass, a gray-bearded, baldish, "middle-class American consumer," as he described himself, treated about 600 people last night at his apartment on life, death, religion and "breathing."
About one-half of the audience sat on cushions and mats around the stage on the hard, wooden floor of Hoch, while the other half sat more conventionally in Hoch's hard drum bars. Two musicians, who accompanied Daria on his lecture, four, played softly on guitars.
"HEY, YOU GOING to take your shoes a young man said to his friend. "you might have a knife."
The crowd grew hushed as Dass took his seat, a small platform topped by several chairs.
"Hare Krishna!" cried a member of the audience. Dass did not seem to notice and the silence grew as he and the other two men on stage seemed to meditate.
But, the silence and serious mood filling
the auditorium were dispelled as Dass began to speak, and for more than three hours the audience responded to his swiftly lively moods as if they were his old friends.
Dass, formerly Richard Alpert, taught psychology at Stanford University, the University of California and Harvard University.
In 1961, with Timothy Leary, a former Harvard professor, he experimented with LSD and other psychedelic chemicals. He also taught a spiritual teacher and adopted a spiritual life.
HE FOUNDED the Hanuman Foundation in 1973, which sponsored his visit to the University of Kansas and sponsors projects involving prisoners and the terminal ill.
"Why are we here?" Dass asked the audience at one point. "It just that we
He spoke of the words, hymns and rituals of organized religion and said they were just waiting to have life breathed back into them.
"It's very hard to institutionalize the mindset. An institution can kill the spirit or empower it."
He considered various self-identities that people adopt and the way that they relate to them.
"I have no idea who I am and I don't care.
I be whelwe you want me to be. What else
must I do to get to the door? There nowhere to go,"
Daise says.
HE CHALLENDED the audience to imagine that a Russian bomb, "earmarked for Lawrence, Kansas," would hit in one minute and thirty seconds.
"What do you want to do?" he asked. "Because it is literally that moment. It’s all about the result."
Dass used humor to gently ridicule the roles people play as they strive to be.
People identify themselves with various groups and organizations to lable themselves as somebodies, he said, but he advised the audience to try to be "nobodies."
"I'm just here to reassure you that you don't have to be anybody else," he said, smiling.
Several times Dass invited the audience to stretch, relax and listen to his musicians
"What I'm going to say to you is all a bunch of stuff, and the stuff goes through you like Chinese food," he said. "What this is, ultimately, is a gathering of the heart."
HE LED the audience in a 20-minute mediation, urging them to concentrate on
The auditorium was still, except for the
Cerf's memoirs picked at random
By MARY A. MITCHELL
Staff Reviewer
At Random: Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf
Edited by Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Albert
Random House, 320 pp.
Bennett Cerf was a master of the pun and had a quick witness about him that caught the attention of the American public. Nowhere was he more prominent than as a panelist on the Sunday night quiz show, "What's My Line?"
His sudden death in August 1971 prevented him from publishing his memoirs, but his widow, Phyllis Cerf Wagner, and Albert Erskine, one of Random House's top-60 editors, have seen to it that Cerf's cap remains intact in this delightful book.
What Wagner and Erskine have done is compile tapes and diaries that Cyrfer began at an early age. They have come up with a word for "understanding" that it can be read at one siting.
CERF' REMINISCENCS are simultaneously anecdotal, terse and informative. He not only recounts his life and experiences in House from a small publishing house into a conglomerate, but he also gives an inside view of such writers as Sinclair Lewis, Paulilla Carpenter, Eugene O'Neill, Ariadne Riordan, Richard J. Joyce, Truman Capote and John O'Hara.
KANSAN Review
Committee approves Turkish military aid
WASHINGTON (AP)—In a victory for President Jimmy Carter, the House International Relations Committee voted to impose an embargo of U.S. military aid to Turkey.
The committee approved Carter's request to lift the ban by an 18-17 vote.
Even though Cerf is highly complimentary of the most of the writers he knew, he expresses a dislike for two people: Theodore Dreiser and Carlo O'Neill, O-Neill's a grumpy old man, "always thinking that everybody was cheating him." He merely a grumpy O-Neill was so insanely jealous of O-Neill's attention that O'Neill's tuneral was attended only by Carlo, a nurse and a doctor.
respect for me. And now that I've got the Nobel Prize, you tell the governor of Mississippi that he can ..." Cerd had to relay the message to the governor, but admitted that he didn't quote Faulkner exactly.
CERF ALSO RECounts the time, after the Nobel Prize was given to Faulkner, that the governor of Mississippi had to go through Cerf to communicate with Faulkner, only to have Faulkner say, "When I needed Mississippi, they had no
Rep. Lee H. Hamilton, D-Ind., a leader of the effort to end the embargo, said that the vote would also be close in the full House and could not predict whether it would pass.
Other little-known facts that are revealed in this entertaining book are the time that Franklin Roosevelt was taken on nationwide television, why he was taken off Franklin Roosevelt's Christmas card list and how General Douglas MacArthur kept from being a guest on "What's My Line?"
Cerf was much more than just a successful publisher, he was a reacutee, a humorist, an author, a lecturer and a warmly human person. All these admirable qualities come through in this book, which is written to help you understand certainly a must on the reading list of anyone interested in the publishing business or the lives of literary personalities.
occasional crying of a baby, as Dass ada-
sent himself to tend the breath
gong in and the breath going out.
Then the musicians, Jai Gopal and Hanuman Das Grayson, and Dass playing the cello launched into a spirted 'rock' n'roll. "I was going to wanta finda God stop, trying so hard, just."
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That line brought prolonged applause from the audience, but there was still at least one skepetic as Dass opened the floor to questions from the audience.
PARSONS SCHOOL OF DESIGN
"How do I know? I don't know!" Dass said, "I told you at the beginning. No promises. This lecture is entitled 'Nothing New by Noby Special.'"
A Division of The New School
"How do you know?" a woman in the back of the audience called, challenging Dase's belief.
Six hundred laughing and applauding people obviously disagreed with that. "You should be afraid of me."
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New Faithful.
Good Old Faithful. Always got you where you were going. Always did it economically. And now, after 27 years and 33 million cars, it's still a symbol of dependability and economy.
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The Rabbit has a new fuel injection system, so it starts up as quick as a bunny. Springs like one, too. 0 to 10 in just 8.6 seconds. The Rabbit also has advanced engineering flat tires and pinion steering, and an independent stabilizer rear axle.
New Faithful lives up to Old Faithful's reputation for economy, too. Because it has fuel injection, you can use the
most economical grade of gas 't But you won't have to use it very often. Rabbit gets 40 mg on the highway, 26 in the city (that's EPA's estimate for manual transmission. Actual mileage may vary depending on driving habits, car's
Dependability and economy. That's what Old Faithful gave a whole generation of Americans. And that's what New York gave to a whole generation of Americans.
Rabbit
Volkswagen Does It Again
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†California excluded.
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