The Prince Estate, in partnership with Warner Records, presents Prince's timeless album '1999' - remastered for the very first time.

The American spiritual leader, yogi, counterculture icon, and Be Here Now author has died. He was 88.

By Joan Duncan Oliver Dec 22, 2019


If there is an enduring figure emblematic of the consciousness revolution of the 1960s and 70s, it is arguably the Harvard professor and LSD researcher-turned-spiritual leader born Richard Alpert but known the world over as Ram Dass. With Timothy Leary, his colleague in the Harvard psychology department, he forever changed a generation of Americans through his explorations with psilocybin, LSD-75, and other psychedelics before reinventing himself as a spiritual teacher and humanitarian—a bhakti yogi with love as his path. When Ram Dass died on Sunday evening, one of the most beloved voices of the counterculture fell silent. He was 88 years old.

It was Leary who famously exhorted American youth to “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” but it was Alpert who became a model of awakening that wasn’t dependent on drugs. Fired from Harvard in 1963 for giving LSD to an undergraduate, Alpert moved to Millbrook, New York, with Leary, who had been fired ostensibly for not showing up for his classes. In Millbrook, the two continued their psychedelic experimentation with an ever-changing cast of psychonauts and acidheads. But in 1967, Alpert, still searching, left for India. There he found his guru, the Hindu sadhu Neem Karoli Baba, known as Maharaj-ji, characteristically wrapped in a blanket and seated on a wooden tucket, a low Indian bed. Curious to see how a spiritual adept would react to LSD, Alpert gave Maharaj-ji a whopping dose. It had zero effect on the holy man. Over the next few years until Maharaj-ji’s death in 1973, Alpert—by then renamed Ram Dass, or Servant of God, by Maharaj-ji—periodically returned to be with his guru. Resettling in America in 1974, he started a new life based on a different kind of turn-on—meditation—and his own synthesis of Buddhist, Hindu, Advaita, and Sufi teachings, and later, Jewish mysticism.

In Be Here Now, Ram Dass‘s first book for the masses, which has sold over 2 million copies since publication in 1971, he offered seekers an engaging, unconventional, slightly zany roadmap for finding a spiritual path and a more enduring connection to higher consciousness than a tab of acid could bring. From then on, in close to a dozen books and countless teachings, retreats, and podcasts, Ram Dass continued to share the wisdom of a journey that had long gone beyond personal transformation to embrace a cosmic worldview and social agenda.

https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/ram-dass-dies/

Another Lonely Christmas as B-side of I Would Die 4 U
℗ 1984 NPG Records, Inc.

Writer: Brown Mark
Writer: Lisa Coleman
Writer: Matt Fink
Writer: Prince
Writer: Robert Rivkin
Writer: Wendy Melvoin

Parental warning: Explicit lyrics

Prince and The Revolution working on Another Lonely Christmas

Prince - Another Lonely Christmas - Live - St. Paul Civic Center (12-26-1984)

December 21, 2019

Trump’s formal order blocking the Pentagon’s portion of the aid was nonetheless communicated to OMB by one of his aides on July 12. The first footnote depicting a temporary funding holdup was signed by Sandy on the evening of July 25, the same day as Trump’s controversial phone call with Ukraine’s president, Vlodymyr Zelensky.

During that call, Zelensky said he wanted to continue military cooperation with America and that “we are almost ready to buy” more anti-tank missiles. Trump responded that “I would like you to do us a favor though,” and listed two investigations he wanted Zelensky to order: One was about Ukraine’s alleged support for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the other was about lucrative business ties that former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, established with a company in Ukraine.

There was, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland has testified, what amounted to a “quid pro quo” being offered, in which Zelensky could get a White House meeting with Trump and a release of the aid in return for promising the investigations. This was, according to the testimony of Fiona Hill, Trump’s top former White House adviser on Russia, the real reason the aid was withheld.

The deferral order signed by Sandy – using language worked out with the advice of legal counsel at the Pentagon and OMB — stated that the rationale for the holdup was to “to allow for an interagency process to determine the best use of such funds.” But no such reexamination of the Ukraine spending plan was actually under way, according to key officials, other than frantic meetings aimed at getting the flow of funds started.

https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/trump-administration-officials-worried-ukraine-aid-halt-violated-spending-law/

A hidden world beneath the prairie

Bison, elk, and other wildlife roam the rolling prairie grasslands and forested hillsides of one of America's oldest national parks. Below the remnant island of intact prairie sits Wind Cave, one of the longest and most complex caves in the world. Named for barometric winds at its entrance, this maze of passages is home to boxwork, a unique formation rarely found elsewhere.


Continue: https://www.nps.gov/wica/index.htm

By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website

An ancient relative of modern humans survived into comparatively recent times in South East Asia, a new study has revealed.

Homo erectus evolved around two million years ago, and was the first known human species to walk fully upright.

New dating evidence shows that it survived until just over 100,000 years ago on the Indonesian island of Java - long after it had vanished elsewhere.

This means it was still around when our own species was walking the Earth.