The American spiritual leader, yogi, counterculture icon, and Be Here
Now author has died. He was 88.
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.
Much of the compassionate service for which Ram Dass became
known was in collaboration with others. He launched the Hanuman
Foundation to further practical application of the principles and
teachings of Neem Karoli Baba—work that continues today through
Ram Dass’s Love Serve Remember Foundation. Through Hanuman
he also set up the Prison Ashram Project, offering counseling and
spiritual practice to the incarcerated, many of whom had contacted
Ram Dass after reading Be Here Now.
Related: Already Free: A Swim with Ram Dass
Inspired by the humane approach to death and dying he had seen in
India, Ram Dass was instrumental in co-creating the Living-Dying
Project to support caregivers, healthcare professionals, and
individuals dealing with terminal illness, and in establishing a hospice
and training center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1979, with
epidemiologist and Hanuman board member Larry Brilliant and
others, Ram Dass founded the Seva Foundation, which works to
combat blindness in the Himalayas and provides healthcare there
and in other underserved areas of Asia and the Americas. He also
helped set up the Social Venture Network to explore ways to bring
spiritual awareness to business and served on the board of Creating
Our Future, an organization for teens who wanted to lead more
spiritual lives. On Maui, where he has lived since 2004, Ram Dass
co-founded Doorway Into Light, which helps people prepare for
dying. “Sitting by the bed of the dying is sadhana [spiritual practice],”
he said. For his unwavering commitment to helping others, Ram
Dass has been called “a model of selfless service.”
“My life has been a dance between power and love,” he observed
after the massive cerebral hemorrhage in 1997 that left the
charismatic, preternaturally articulate teacher groping for words.
“First part, till Harvard: power, power, power, power. Up until drugs, I
thought power was the end all and be all, because I was a little
individual. Then drugs: love, love, love, love. My first mushroom trip
was so profound that I saw radiance was inside, and I said, ‘I’m
home, I’m home, I’m home.'”
Born Richard Alpert on April 6, 1930 in Boston, Ram Dass was the
youngest of three brothers. His father, George Alpert, a prominent
lawyer, was president of the New York, New Haven & Hartford
Railroad and the first board president of Brandeis University. The
family was Jewish and Richard was bar mitzvahed, but he later
called the ritual “hollow” and claimed to have had no interest in
religion until he took psychedelics. After graduating cum laude from
Williston Northampton, a prep school in Massachusetts, he earned a
bachelor’s degree from Tufts, a master’s from Wesleyan, and a PhD
from Stanford–all in psychology. In California he met psychologist
David McClelland, who became his mentor and brought Alpert with
him to Harvard. At Harvard, Alpert was a star, with appointments in
the Psychology and Social Relations Departments, the Graduate
School of Education, and the Health Service, where he served as a
therapist. He also had research grants from Yale and Stanford, and
was publishing academic books. “In 1961, at the beginning of March,
I was at the high point of my academic career,” he wrote in Be Here
Now. “I was making a great income, and I was a collector of
possessions,” among them an antiques-filled Cambridge apartment,
a Mercedes-Benz, an MG sports car, a Triumph 500cc motorcycle,
and a Cessna 172 airplane. “But what it all boils down to is that I was
really a very good game player.”
All that changed on March 6, 1961, the day he took psilocybin for the
first time. Psychedelics led to his second great awakening: his
encounter with Maharaj-ji and spiritual transformation. Then in 1997,
as Ram Dass was finishing Still Here, the second volume of his
spiritual memoirs, he had his third great awakening, the stroke that
began the final phase of his life. He was given only a 10 percent
chance to survive.
Long an outspoken advocate and support for the sick and dying,
shortly before his stroke, Ram Dass told an audience: “Something
has happened to me as a result of my meanderings through
consciousness over the past 30 years that has changed my attitude
towards death. A lot of the fear that denial of death generated has
gone from me. Death does not have to be treated as an enemy for
you to delight in life. Keeping death in your consciousness as one of
the greatest mysteries and as the moment of incredible
transformation imbues this moment with added richness and energy
that otherwise is used up in denial.”
After the stroke, those observations seemed hopelessly naive, he
said. The stroke had given him a far deeper understanding of what
the suffering of aging, infirmity, and dying really means.
Characteristically, he viewed it in spiritual terms: “I don’t wish you the
stroke, but I wish you the grace from the stroke,” he said in Ram
Dass, Going Home, a 2017 documentary by Derek Peck. “The stroke
pushed me inside even more. That’s so wonderful.”
It also meant that the man who had spent much of his life helping
others had to let others help him. Noting that before the stroke, he
had co-authored a book about service called How Can I Help?, “after
the stroke I would have titled it How Can You Help Me?” he said. “In
this culture dependency is a no-no. The stroke showed me
dependency, and I have people who are dependable.”
Following a near-fatal infection in 2004, Ram Das was largely
confined to his home on Maui. A sprawling, light-filled aerie with lush
vegetation and a panoramic ocean view, it was a gift from devoted
friends. One of his pleasures was his weekly swim in the ocean,
accompanied by a clutch of neighbors. After being wheeled to the
shore in a dune buggy with enormous yellow balloon wheels and
orange floats as armrests, he would launch himself into the sea.
There, buoyed by a large black life jacket, he would paddle gently
with yellow webbed mitts, a look of delight on his face.
Rum Dum to his father, RD to his friends, Ram Dass was a true
original. He lived out loud, with a rollicking laugh and seemingly
irrepressible esprit de corps. Even when his stroke rendered him
virtually immobile with halting speech, he could summon his far-
ranging mind to be totally present for his weekly podcasts and the
friends and followers who gathered around him, some coming to
Maui for his thrice-yearly retreats. His door was open to a steady
stream of visitors, many of them strangers, seeking comfort,
inspiration, or advice.
Ram Dass’s spunk and determination were the energetic benefits of
years of spiritual practice and a bodhisattva-like commitment to
sharing it with others. Mirabai Bush, a “guru sister” from their days
with Maharaj-ji in India and his collaborator on his last book, Walking
Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying, summed up
his life’s work in her introduction. “Ram Dass’s journey has been a
search for love and for finding a way to stay in the space of love once
he experienced it,” she wrote, adding, “Ram Dass was always loving,
but now he is love.”
Unsinkable, Ram Dass survived great challenges to remain one of
the most colorful and memorable spiritual leaders of his age. When
he finally surrendered to death, it was with what filmmaker Mickey
Lemle, in his 2001 documentary about RD, called “fierce grace.”
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