Merrily, Merrily, Merrily (What I Learned from Ram Dass)

I watched a brief, pretty good documentary about Ram Dass on Netflix last week. Essentially, it was a sketched portrait of a rather remarkable figure late in life. You'll recall that when he was Richard Alpert, he was Timothy Leary's sidekick in their early experiments with LSD at Harvard. Simply put, it transformed him. He went from being a psychologist in white shirt, black tie, and horn-rimmed glasses (picture those 1950s engineers with pens in their shirt pockets) to becoming a beads-wearing, long-haired spiritual guru famous for the bestseller, Be Here Now. I think it's fair to say that his transformation was true and deep, whereas Leary just remained as he was, a countercultural huckster. I saw him speak during university in the late 70s and he was on a kick about how medical science will enable everyone to live forever, and evangelizing about how great that will be. Fine, whatever, yay.

My gripe with the Ram Dass film was that he was presented as entirely too blissed-out for my taste. Always smiling and giggling beatifically while his way-too-blue eyes were shining way too brightly. I think that may have been the filmmaker's choice to emphasize that, just so us punters would get that He Is Enlightened. They did show him receiving acupuncture for his stroke and he was normal then. And he was normal seeming when his companions helped him with his wheelchair. 

So anyway, at one point Ram Dass keeps murmuring "merrily, merrily, merrily." That was pretty cool. And it got me thinking about how weird and wonderful it is that this nursery rhyme is sung by something like all schoolchildren in America. It's kind of crazy, really, because the message is one of pure mysticism and esoteric ancient wisdom. Think Aboriginal Dreamtime. And it's quite fitting that it is sung as a round: "Row, row, row your boat / gently down the stream / merrily, merrily, merrily / life is but a dream." For what is a round but a simple, songful manifestation of the ouroboros, the snake continually, endlessly eating its own tail, simultaneously inside and outside of itself, never beginning or ending. 

All in all it's actually pretty surreal that this is a staple for youth, since its message does not comport with either of our two major paradigms: that of Christianity and other traditional religions on the one hand and scientific materialism on the other. Not just surreal, really, but subversive -- that is, if people took the time to truly internalize what they are singing, which virtually no one does. It's something that's just there. To me, it clearly gets closer to the truth than typical religion and science. As I considered this, it struck me that it's really like a scene from a Matrix-type film or from a spiritual-allegorical-fantasy show. In it, we see from the cosmic perspective of the higher entities. They have decided to insert the truth into the lives of the sleepwalking humans in the form of this innocent song. And as we watch a grade school teacher lead her kids in a cheerful rendition of it, we see that reality is being presented to them, and that if these kids and all the kids who ever sang the song would grasp that this silly thing and not that other serious stuff is the heart of existence then, well, then everything would change.