Ram Dass

Who was Ram Dass?

Ram Dass (1931–2019) was an American spiritual teacher, born Richard Alpert, whose 1971 book Be Here Now brought devotional Hinduism§ and the figure of Neem Karoli Baba§ into Western counterculture. He spent the second half of his life teaching bhakti yoga, the path of devotion, alongside karma yoga, the path of service.

Ram Dass vs adjacent figures

Ram Dass is often paired with Timothy Leary, his Harvard collaborator on early psilocybin research. The two diverged sharply after India. Leary stayed with the chemicals. Ram Dass left them behind for a guru and a devotional path. He is sometimes confused with Krishna Das§, the kirtan singer who travelled with him in India. Krishna Das was a disciple, not a peer, and built his own musical lineage. Compared to Paramahansa Yogananda§, the earlier Indian missionary to America, Ram Dass was a returning Westerner rather than an emissary. His teaching style was confessional and informal rather than institutional.

From psychology to the porch in Kainchi

Richard Alpert arrived in India in 1967 carrying a supply of psilocybin pills. He was convinced he had something chemically interesting to offer any wise person he met. He reached the small temple in the Kumaon hills where Neem Karoli Baba§ sat, offered a large dose to the old man, and watched nothing happen. Then Maharaji, without being told, described aloud the thought Alpert had been holding in silence. It was about his recently deceased mother. That ended Alpert's materialist framework. He stayed, was renamed Ram Dass, meaning servant of God, and returned to America carrying a different kind of supply.

Be Here Now

The book was self-published in 1971 by the Lama Foundation in New Mexico. It moved through yoga studios, head shops, and word of mouth. Its first section is memoir. Its second is a typographic immersion into the bhakti practice Maharaji had pointed toward, with hand-lettered brown pages and full-bleed layouts. Its third is a 'cookbook of consciousness' cataloguing practices from across the Hindu and Buddhist worlds. It has sold over two million copies and has never been out of print. Its influence on the counterculture-to-spirituality pipeline of the 1970s is difficult to overstate.

Service as practice

Ram Dass's later career turned explicitly toward the relationship between contemplation and action. He co-founded the Seva Foundation with Larry Brilliant to address preventable blindness in the developing world. He framed the work as karma yoga§, service as sadhana. His writing on dying, in Being with Dying and Still Here, brought the practical application of non-attachment into one of the most charged corners of human experience. The 1997 stroke became his final public teaching. A man who had spent thirty years telling others to be present with what is was forced into an almost total present tense. He named that condition fierce grace§.

In the index

Ram Dass↗ is the index's primary voice for the bhakti current, the devotional path of love directed at a figure, a guru, or God. The Maharaji story↗ is short, improbable, and funny. It is the most efficient single entry point into what the devotional encounter with a true teacher felt like in that era. Both items cross into the Hinduism§ and non-duality§ entries, where the conceptual context is mapped out.