Ram Dass

• 1. Introduction

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  "I didn't have one whiff of God until I took psychedelics." That is how Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert, described his early self to a writer for Tufts Magazine in 2006. He said he had been inured to religion. This is a striking thing to hear from a man who lived from the 6th of April 1931 to the 22nd of December 2019, and who became one of America's best-known spiritual teachers. He was also a psychologist, a writer, and a figure many credit with bringing yoga and Eastern spirituality to Western readers. How does a skeptical academic with a doctorate from Stanford end up with that reputation? What did Harvard make of its young professor's experiments, and what did he find when he went looking for answers in India? And what happens to a famous speaker when his own speech fails him? The answers run through a rented estate in New York, a guru in the Himalayan foothills, a commune in New Mexico, and a long final chapter in Hawaii.

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• 2. Skeptic to Professor

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  George Alpert, a Boston lawyer, wanted his son Richard to become a doctor. The boy's mother was Gertrude, whose maiden name was Levin. Richard grew up considering himself an atheist. Speaking at Berkeley Community Theater in 1973, he called his Jewish background "primarily political Judaism." Recalling his bar mitzvah to the interviewer Arthur J. Magida at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, he said the moment had a "disappointing hollowness" and that there was "nothing, nothing, nothing in it for my heart." Magida published the interview in 2008.

  His schooling followed an academic path rather than a medical one. He graduated cum laude from the Williston Northampton School in 1948. At Tufts University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1952, he decided against his father's wishes to study the mind instead of the body. A master's degree from Wesleyan University came in 1954. There, a mentor named David McClelland recommended him to Stanford University.

  At Stanford, Alpert wrote his doctoral thesis on "achievement anxiety" and received his Ph.D. in psychology in 1957. He taught there for a year and began psychoanalysis himself. Then McClelland moved to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and helped Alpert win a tenure-track post there in 1958 as an assistant clinical psychology professor.

  At Harvard, Alpert worked across the Social Relations Department, the Psychology Department, the Graduate School of Education and the Health Service, where he saw patients as a therapist. His specialty was human motivation and personality development. His first book, Identification and Child Rearing, came out of this period. McClelland ran the Center for Research in Personality, and Alpert served as his deputy in the lab. That center was also where Alpert met McClelland's close friend Timothy Leary, a lecturer in clinical psychology.

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• 3. Research and Dismissal

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  In 1961, Alpert returned to Harvard from a visiting professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, and threw himself into work with Leary. Together they ran the Harvard Psilocybin Project, studying whether psilocybin, LSD-25 and similar chemicals could have therapeutic effects. In 1962 they co-founded a non-profit in Cambridge called the International Federation for Internal Freedom, or IFIF. Its purpose was to study the religious use of psychedelic drugs, and both men sat on its board.

  That same year, Alpert helped Walter Pahnke, a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, with the "Good Friday Experiment." The study gave theology students a drug and examined their mystical experiences. It was the first controlled, double-blind study of its kind. The drugs were not illegal at the time, but the work was controversial anyway.

  Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey gave different reasons for dismissing the two men in 1963. Leary, he said, had left Cambridge and his classes without permission or notice. Alpert was accused of giving psilocybin to an undergraduate.

  Peggy Hitchcock, a Mellon fortune heiress who directed IFIF's New York City branch, then found them a new base. She arranged for her brother Billy to rent the Hitchcock Estate in Millbrook, New York, to the group. Alpert, Leary and their followers moved in and set up a communal household with former members of the Psilocybin Project. IFIF was disbanded and renamed the Castalia Foundation, after the intellectual colony in Hermann Hesse's novel The Glass Bead Game.

  The core group at Millbrook published a journal called the Psychedelic Review. They held group LSD sessions in search of a permanent route to higher consciousness. On weekends, paying guests came for retreats that aimed to reproduce the psychedelic experience without drugs, using meditation, yoga and group therapy. Alpert and Leary wrote The Psychedelic Experience with Ralph Metzner in 1964, drawing on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Alpert also co-authored LSD in 1966 with Sidney Cohen and Lawrence Schiller. By 1967 he was giving talks at the League for Spiritual Discovery's center in Greenwich Village.

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• 4. Maharaj-ji

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  Bhagavan Das, an American spiritual seeker, met Alpert in India in 1967 and guided him around the country. Eventually he introduced Alpert to Neem Karoli Baba, whom Alpert came to call "Maharaj-ji." The guru's base was the Kainchi ashram.

  Alpert arrived curious about what this teacher would make of LSD. The day after they first met, Neem Karoli Baba asked Alpert to hand over the "medicine." Alpert gave him one dose of "white lightning." The guru then asked for two more tablets, a quantity put at 915 micrograms, or nine times the average dose. By Alpert's account, it seemed to have no psychotropic effect at all. The guru instead told him that the same state could be reached through meditation, and that he could live in it.

  After that exchange, Neem Karoli Baba became Richard Alpert's guru. He also gave Alpert a new name, Ram Dass. It means "Servant of Ram," a reference to the incarnation of God as Lord Rama, and is usually rendered "Servant of God" for Western audiences. Ram Dass studied with Maharaj-ji for the next four years. The guru died on the 11th of September 1973.

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• 5. Be Here Now

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  The Lama Foundation in Taos, New Mexico, took in Ram Dass as a guest after he returned to America. He had helped Steve Durkee and Barbara Durkee start the countercultural, spiritual community in 1967, and it included an ashram dedicated to his guru. During his stay he presented a manuscript he had written, titled From Bindu to Ojas.

  The community's residents edited the text, illustrated it and laid out its pages. It was published in 1971 as Be Here Now, a 416-page manual for conscious being. The Lama Foundation released it as Ram Dass's gift to the community. The book held his account of his spiritual journey, along with recommended techniques and quotations. It sold two million copies, and the proceeds helped sustain the Lama Foundation for several years. Afterward, Ram Dass donated the book's copyright and half its proceeds to the Hanuman Foundation in Taos.

  For the hippie movement and the spiritual movements that followed, the book became a "countercultural bible" and was called "seminal." It is regarded as one of the first guides for people not born Hindu who wanted to become yogis. Its title phrase passed into everyday use. Among those it influenced were Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, the self-help writer Wayne Dyer and the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

  George Harrison also drew on it. The book's first section inspired the lyrics of his song "Be Here Now," written in 1971 and released in 1973 on the album Living in the Material World.

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• 6. Service and Dying

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  In 1974, Ram Dass founded the Hanuman Foundation, a nonprofit educational and service organization. Its first project was the Prison-Ashram Project, now known as the Human Kindness Foundation. Four years later, in 1978, he co-founded the Seva Foundation with public health leader Larry Brilliant and humanitarian activist Wavy Gravy. The foundation worked with health-care workers to treat blindness in India, Nepal and developing countries, and it grew into an international health organization.

  Across the early 1970s, Ram Dass also taught workshops around the United States on conscious aging and dying. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was among his students. In India he met Dale Borglum, who became executive director of the Dying Project that Ram Dass helped create, while also directing the Hanuman Foundation. The project began as the Dying Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was the first residential facility in the United States where people came to die "consciously." From 1986 it operated as the Living/Dying Project, based in Marin, California.

  In 1981, an Australian radio documentary on death and near-death experiences aired on the ABC. Its title was And When I Die, Will I Be Dead? and Ram Dass appeared in it. A book adaptation followed in 1987. He later joined the faculty of the Metta Institute to train people in mindful and compassionate care of the dying.

  His service work also reached print. How Can I Help?, written with Paul Gorman, appeared in 1985, and Compassion in Action, with Mirabai Bush, followed in 1991. A 1994 one-hour documentary, A Change of Heart, hosted by Ram Dass and shown on many PBS stations, treated social action as a meditative act.

  The money followed the mission. Ever since the Hanuman Foundation began, he donated his book royalties and teaching profits to it and to other charitable causes. Estimates of what he gave each year run from $100,000 to $800,000. The Love Serve Remember Foundation was organized to preserve the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba and Ram Dass.

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• 7. Old Friends and Private Truths

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  At a news conference in 1974, Ram Dass denounced Timothy Leary, and the two men grew apart. They reconciled in 1983 at Harvard, at a reunion marking twenty years since their firing from the faculty. They stayed in touch until Leary died in May 1996.

  At age 60, Ram Dass took Judaism seriously for the first time. He wrote, "My belief is that I wasn't born into Judaism by accident, and so I needed to find ways to honor that." He added a Hindu view of it: "you are born as what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it's got you."

  In the 1990s he began speaking openly about his bisexuality. "I've started to talk more about being bisexual, being involved with men as well as women," he said. His own label for it was plain: it "isn't gay, and it's not not-gay, and it's not anything." He called it "just awareness."

  At age 78, a surprise reached him from his Stanford years. At 24, he had had a brief relationship with Karen Saum, a history major. Her son, Peter Reichard, a 53-year-old banker in North Carolina, took a DNA test after learning of his mother's doubt about his parentage. The result showed that Ram Dass was his father. It also made Ram Dass a grandfather.

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• 8. Fierce Grace

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  In February 1997, Ram Dass had a stroke that left him paralyzed and robbed him of fluent speech. Doctors described his aphasia as word-finding trouble and hesitation in conversation, though his comprehension of complex, abstract information stayed largely intact. For a man whose career rested on talking, it was a brutal turn. He came to see it differently, calling the stroke an act of grace. "The stroke was giving me lessons, and I realized that was grace-fierce grace," he said. He added, "Death is the biggest change we'll face, so we need to practice change." He learned to speak again, and he kept teaching and writing.

  A trip to India in 2004 brought him close to death once more, after a second stroke. He gave up traveling and moved to Maui, Hawaii. There he hosted annual retreats with other spiritual teachers.

  In 2013, at age 82, he released Polishing the Mirror, a memoir and summary of his teaching. Talking about the book, he said his earlier reflections on old age and death now seemed naive. "Now, I'm in my 80s," he said. "Now, I am aging. I am approaching death. I'm getting closer to the end.... Now, I really am ready to face the music all around me."

  He left the Hawaiian Islands only once in those years. On the 13th of July 2019, he attended the consecration of a new Hanuman Mandir in Taos, New Mexico. Afterward he returned to Hawaii, gave talks at small venues, led retreats on Maui and taught through live webcasts. He died on Maui on the 22nd of December 2019, at the age of 88.

  A collaborative album with the musician East Forest, titled Ram Dass and released in 2019, holds his final recorded teachings. The 2019 documentary Becoming Nobody, directed by Jamie Catto, carries a slogan that suits the man who traded Richard Alpert for a new name: "You have to be somebody to become nobody."

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