Ram Dass

Ram Dass was born Richard Alpert on April 6, 1931, in Boston, the son of Gertrude (Levin) and George Alpert, a lawyer. He grew up with little sense of religious belief and later described his early relation to Judaism as political rather than devotional. He attended the Williston Northampton School, graduated cum laude in 1948, and studied psychology at Tufts University, earning his B.A. in 1952. His father wanted him to go to medical school, but Alpert chose psychology, then earned a master’s degree at Wesleyan University in 1954 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1957 with a thesis on “achievement anxiety.”

By the late 1950s, Alpert was teaching at Harvard University as an assistant clinical psychology professor. He worked across the Social Relations Department, the Psychology Department, the Graduate School of Education, and the Health Service, where he served as a therapist. His academic work centered on human motivation and personality development, and he published his first book, Identification and Child Rearing. At Harvard he became closely associated with Timothy Leary, and in the early 1960s they conducted research on the therapeutic effects of psychedelic drugs.

That research placed Alpert at the center of one of the most controversial parts of the 1960s. With Leary, he worked through the Harvard Psilocybin Project and helped form the International Federation for Internal Freedom in 1962 to study the religious use of psychedelic drugs. He also assisted Walter Pahnke in the 1962 “Good Friday Experiment” with theology students, the first controlled, double-blind study of drugs and the mystical experience. The work was not illegal at the time, but it drew strong criticism, and Harvard dismissed Leary and Alpert in 1963. Alpert, Leary, and others later gathered at the Millbrook estate in New York, where they experimented with psychedelics, meditation, yoga, and group therapy.

In 1967, Alpert traveled to India and became a disciple of the Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba. Neem Karoli Baba gave him the name Ram Dass, meaning “Servant of Ram,” often rendered for Western audiences as “Servant of God.” This turn shaped the rest of his public life. In 1971, Ram Dass published Be Here Now, a best-selling book that helped popularize Eastern spirituality and yoga in the West. Over the next four decades he authored or co-authored twelve more books on spirituality, including Grist for the Mill in 1977, How Can I Help? in 1985, and Polishing the Mirror in 2013.

Ram Dass also co-founded the Seva Foundation and the Hanuman Foundation. From the 1970s through the 1990s, he traveled widely, giving talks and retreats and raising funds for charitable causes. In 1997, he had a stroke that left him with paralysis and expressive aphasia, with hesitations and difficulty finding words while his auditory comprehension remained largely intact. He later came to interpret the stroke as an act of grace, learned to speak again, and continued teaching and writing. After becoming seriously ill during a trip to India in 2004, he stopped traveling and moved to Maui, Hawaii, where he hosted annual retreats with other spiritual teachers until his death on December 22, 2019.

His words still resonate because they came from a life that moved through psychology, experiment, discipline, illness, service, and spiritual practice without losing its directness. Ram Dass wrote and spoke in a way that made inward life feel usable in ordinary life. One of his briefest lines, “The quieter you become, the more you can hear,” carries much of that appeal: simple, patient, and grounded in attention.