Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) is the ex-Harvard professor who along with Timothy Leary started the 1960’s psychedelic experimentation movement. Alpert changed his name to Ram Dass (meaning servant of God) after meeting Neem Karoli Baba, known then as the Maharaji, on a trip to India in 1967. He is the author of many books, including “Be Here Now,” which elucidates his dharmic life and beliefs and is the founder of the Seva and Hanuman charitable foundations.
Early Years
Richard Alpert was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1931. His father was lawyer George Alpert, a dignified Republican financier-philanthropist who was president of the New Haven Railroad and helped found Brandeis University. The was raised Jewish but did not share in his family’s enthusiasm for the religion and after a disappointing bar mitzvah, considered himself an atheist and a religiously injured soul. “I didn’t have one whiff of God until I took psychedelics,” Alpert said.[1]
Career
After graduating from Stanford, Alpert served as a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkley, after which time he was offered a full professorship at Harvard in 1958. While at Harvard he worked in the Social Relations Department, the Psychology Department, the Graduate School of Education, and as a therapist in the school’s Health Services Department.
One year later, Alpert became fast friends with fellow professor Timothy Leary and then graduate student Ralph Metzner. The trio began experimenting with LSD and psilocybin along with popular writer Aldous Huxley and beat poet Allen Ginsberg. During that time researching psychedelic drugs, Alpert co-published two books: The Psychedelic Experience, co-authored by Leary and Metzner, and LSD with Sidney Cohen and Lawrence Schiller. Alpert and Leary were both active members of the Harvard Psilocybin Project from which the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), a non-profit organization and research group, was founded.
As members of the IFIF they were equally interested in taking their research in a religious and mystical direction. Alpert, Leary and Metzner were all dismissed from Harvard in 1963 after school authorities declared that Leary had left Cambridge and his classes without permission or notice, and Alpert had allegedly given psilocybin to an undergraduate.[2]
Upon leaving Harvard, Alpert traveled to Zihuatanejo, Mexico with the remaining members of the IFIF (including Leary) in efforts to establish a psychedelic retreat. Finding no success in Mexico, the group made a further attempt in the Caribbean, and again failed, finally settling in the 64-room Hitchcock estate in Millbrook, New York, where Alpert took up residency till 1967, when he traveled to India in search of answers to spiritual fulfillment.
In India he studied yoga and meditation under the guidance of his spiritual teacher Neem Karoli Baba. The following year he incorporated the beliefs of Hinduism, karma, and meditation in the Theravadin, Mahayana, Tibetan and Zen Buddhist schools as well as yoga and Sufism (Jewish studies) which are all aspects of his first and most popular book, Be Here Now. He returned to the United States the following year and took up his work as a spiritual teacher.
In 1974, Ram Dass (as he has been known from since) created the Hanuman Foundation, from which one of their most distinguished projects, the Prison-Ashram Project,” came about. The Prison-Ashram Project helps inmates with spiritual growth and support during incarceration. He also co-founded the Seva Foundation, which supports programs designed to help curable blindness in India and Nepal, restore agriculture in villages in Guatemala, assist American Indians with primary health care and bring attention to the homeless in the United States. Seva is considered an international organization dedicated to relieving suffering in the world.[3]
In 1996, he began to development on a talk radio program called “Here and Now with Ram Dass" and completed seven pilot episodes that aired in the San Francisco bay area before his stroke in 1997, which left him with permanant damage to the right side of his body along with a speech impediment, neither of which have slowed down the teaching, studying or writing in what he holds dear.Education
- The Williston Northhampton Preparatory School, graduating in 1948 as a part of the Cum Laude Association
- Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree from Tufts University, Medford Massachusetts
- Masters Degree from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut.
- Ph.D. in psychology, Stanford Universtity, San Francisco, California
Recent Times
Since his 1997 stroke, Ram Dass has strove to continue his pursuit of interest in psychedelic research, international development, environmental awareness and political action and physical suffering of the aging. After suffering a severe infection in 2010, Ram Dass's life has slowed down considerably, though it did not curtail his efforts to publish his latest book "Be Love Now," dedicated to his life-long guru and spiritual teacher, Neem Karoli Baba.
Collected Works
Books
- Be Here Now Anchor/Doubleday (over 1 million copies sold) 1971
- Grist for the Mill (with Steven Levine, Celestial Arts)
- Compassion in Action: Setting Out on the Path of Service (with Mirabai Bush, Bell Towers Press)
- The Only Dance There Is (Anchor/Doubleday)
- Journey of Awakening (Bantam Books)
- Miracle of Love: Stories of Neem Karoli Baba (Hunuman foundation)
- How Can I Help? (with Paul Gorman, Knopf)
- Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying (Riverhead Books)
- One-Liners: A Mini-Manual for a Spiritual Life (Bell Towers, 2002)
- Paths to God: Living in Bhagavad Gita (Harmony, 2004).
Articles
Research Papers
Music
Filmography
