BetterListen!’s series of excerpts continues with the following excerpt from the wonderful recording of “An Evening with Ram Dass”.
I have a friend -- his name is Larry Brilliant and Larry is a doctor. He used to be known as Dr. America as part of the Hog Farm, which was a hippie commune in Berkeley. It was run by a fellow named Wavy Gravy, who was a clown. Wavy works with children in leukemia wards as a clown, and among other things he also emcees. Those of you that saw the movie “Woodstock” remember Wavy offering everybody breakfast in bed, 500,000 people. Because he gives away food. They would bring the Hog Farm bus and feed people. Very beautiful man. Well, Larry was part of that, and he was a hippie doctor, and his wife went to India and met my guru, named Karoli Baba. She brought Larry to him, and when Larry met my guru, my guru said to Larry, very shortly after meeting him, “U N O doctor”. What Larry heard him saying was “you are no doctor”, which is what his mother had been saying to him for years because he wasn’t earning a living. But the guru kept repeating “U N O doctor, U N O doctor” ‘till finally it sunk into Larry’s mind that what he was saying was United Nations Organization Doctor.
UNO doctor. And there was the UN World Health Organization project to eradicate small pox that was going on in India. So Larry went down the bus trip from the mountains down to Delhi, and he went in with his long hair and his beard, and they said, “We don’t want hippie doctors, thank you very much” and he was shown the door. He came back to the guru, and the guru said, “U N O doctor. Go”. He went back. They said, “We don’t want you”. He came back – and this is a long bus trip -- and he kept just doing it. It was like seven, eight, nine times. Finally he went into the United Nations and he said, “Look have you got any job at all? I mean I gotta get this guy off my back. I’ll take any job you’ve got”. They said, “Well, we don’t have a job as a doctor, but you could be an administration assistant”. He said, “Fine”. So he joined the club of a group of people who were getting rid of small pox.
