Strange what you could come up with when all you had to do was clear your mind and concentrate on the tip of your nose. His brother claimed that the proof of his legitimacy could be found in one of his wisdom teeth. The last time Ram Dass saw him he had a new fantasy: He was the King of the Jews, and his vast riches were locked in a Vatican vault. Another time the pain summoned up his brother, who had spent years in one mental hospital or another claiming to be Jesus Christ. Although barely a stick figure in a hospital bed by then, she insisted on holding a small Japanese fan in front of her face to hide the fact that her gums were too sore to support her bridgework. Once he recalled his last visit to his mother just before she died of a spleen condition in 1966. Or he’d see his guru, Maharaji, a nearly toothless old man sitting in a blanket in a temple in the foothills of the Himalayas, and wonder if the missing tooth would make the two of them look more alike. He’d see a picture of himself, grinning, a gaping hole where the sore front tooth had been, and then find himself ruminating on the social implications of a missing tooth, how odd, and in a way appealing, it would be for a rich kid like himself to have one. They were all related to teeth in one way or another.

The trouble was that every time Ram Dass began to sink back into the nose yoga he’d get another high-voltage jolt in the jaw and instantly the same home movies would start up again on the back of his eyelids.

On the instructor’s advice he tried thinking the pain away, mentally swishing it around his jaw and out his mouth like a swill of water, and when that didn’t work he tried ignoring it. And yet the toothache had felt real enough, building until the nerve seemed a snaking electric wire, making it all but impossible for him to fix his attention on the tip of his nose and watch his breath go in and out, in and out, in and out, which was pretty much all he was supposed to do from four in the morning until ten at night during the meditation retreat.

Richard Alpert, Ph.D., would know all about mind games by now.

YOU’D THINK THAT BABA Ram Dass, who had been a Harvard psychology professor and psychedelic drug researcher in his former incarnation as Dr. This story was originally published in the April 22nd, 1976, issue of “Rolling Stone.”

Ram dass remember be here now