Ram Dass

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Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert, 1931) is an American spiritual coach, a former academic and clinical psychologist, and the author of several books, including the seminal 1971 book Be Here Now.

Timothy Leary, a scholar at Harvard University, is known for his travels to India and his friendship with Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, as well as the founding of the Seva Foundation and Hanuman Foundation.

He continues to teach via his website; produces a podcast with support from 1440 Multiversity; and, through the Be Here Now network and the Love, Serve, Remember Foundation, he continues to teach.

Early life

Ram Dass was born Richard Alpert in 1931. Gertrude (Levin) and George Alpert, a Boston lawyer, were his parents. During his youth, he regarded himself as an atheist. "My Jewish journey was mainly political Judaism, I mean I was never Bar Mitzvahed," he said at the Berkeley Community Theater in 1973. He was quoted by Sara Davidson in a Tufts Magazine interview in 2006, describing himself as "inured to faith." Before taking psychedelics, I didn't have a whiff of God." Arthur J. Magida of the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, who published the interview in 2008, quoted Ram Dass as saying "What I mostly remember about my bar mitzvah was that it was an empty ritual." It was flat. Absolutely flat. At the time, there was a palpable hollowness. "It's nothing, nothing, nothing in it for my heart."

Alpert attended the Williston Northampton School, graduating in 1948 with a laud. In 1952, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from Tufts University. His father wanted him to medical school, but instead of studying psychology at Tufts, he chose psychology. Alpert was recommended to Stanford University after receiving his master's degree in Psychology from Wesleyan University in 1954. After receiving his PhD in Psychology from Stanford in 1957, Alpert wrote his doctoral thesis on "achievement anxiety." Alpert stayed at Stanford for one year before beginning with psychoanalysis.

McClelland came to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to teach at Harvard University, and Alpert accepted a tenure-track position as an assistant clinical psychologist. Alpert worked with the Social Relations Department, the Psychology Department, the Graduate School of Education, and the Health Service, where he worked as a consultant. He specialized in human motivation and personality enhancement and wrote his first book Identifier and Child Rearing.

McClelland studied with Timothy Leary, a professor of clinical psychology at the university, as a close friend and associate. Alpert and Leary met through McClelland, who worked with the Center for Human Resource in Personality, where Alpert and Leary did study. In the lab, Alpert was McClelland's deputy.

Alpert, a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961, devoted himself to Leary's experimentation and deep study into the potentially curative effects of hallucinogenic drugs, such as psilocybin, LSD-25, and other psychedelic chemicals, including the Harvard Psilocybin Project. In 1962, Alpert and Leary co-founded the non-profit International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in order to conduct research into the use of psychedelic drugs in the religious sense. They were both on the board of directors.

Walter Pahnke, a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, was mentored by Alpert in his 1962 "Good Friday Experiment" with theology students, the first controlled, double-blind study of drugs and the mystical experience.

In 1963, Leary and Alpert were officially dropped from Harvard. Leary was dismissed for leaving Cambridge and his classes without permission or warning, and Alpert for reportedly giving psilocybin to an undergraduate, according to Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey.

After IFIF's New York City branch director and Mellon fortune heiress Peggy Hitchcock ordered for her brother Billy to rent the house to IFIF, Alpert, Leary, and his followers flocked to the Hitchcock Estate in Millbrook, New York, in 1963. At the estate (commonly known as "Millbrook"), Alpert and Leary immediately formed a joint group of former Harvard Psilocybin Project members, and the IFIF was later disbanded and renamed the Castalia Foundation (after the intellectual colony in Hermann Hesse's novel The Glass Bead Game). The Psychedelic Review, Millbrook's core group, sought to cultivate the divinity within each individual. They experimented with psychedelics at Millbrook and were often involved in group LSD sessions, hoping for a permanent route to higher consciousness. On the estate where people paid to experience the psychedelic experience without drugs, meditation, yoga, and group therapy sessions, the Castalia Foundation held weekend retreats.

Alpert and Leary continued to co-author a book entitled The Psychedelic Experience with Ralph Metzner, based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and it was released in 1964. Alpert co-authored LSD with Sidney Cohen and Lawrence Schiller in 1966.

Alpert's center in Greenwich Village, 1967, held talks at the League for Spiritual Discovery's headquarters.

Later life

Ram Dass began seriously investigating Judaism for the first time at 60 years old. "I don't get up to Judaism by accident," he says, and so I had to find ways to honor it." "You are born as what you need to deal with, and if you try and push it away, it's got you."

Leary and Ram Dass, who had split apart after Ram Dass denounced Leary in a 1974 news conference, reunited in 1983 at Harvard (at a reunion for the 20th anniversary of their contentious dismissal from Harvard's faculty), and the Harvard faculty's tense dismissal of Leary in May 1996.

Ram Dass suffered with expressive aphasia in February 1997, which he interpreted as an act of grace. "The stroke was teaching me lessons, and I realized that was grace, not charity... We'll all be enduring, so we must practice change." He lived on Maui and did not leave the Hawaiian Islands from 2004 to his death in 2019, after he almost died from an infection on a trip to India. He continued to make public appearances and address small groups; held retreats in Maui; and continued to teach via live webcasts. "I help people as a way to work on themselves," he replied, and "I work on myself to help people," the new game is all about." In August 1991, Ram Dass was given the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award.

Following the stroke, Wayne Dyer released a plea for Ram Dass' help in 2003.

Ram Dass released a memoir and a recap of his teaching in 2013, Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart. In an interview about the book, he said that his earlier experiences of old age and death now seem naive. "Now, I'm in my 80s." He says in part: "Now, I'm in my 80s; now, I'm aging. I am getting close to death. I'm getting closer to the end. "I'm so excited to face the music all around me."

He died on December 22, 2019, at the age of 88.

Personal life

Ram Dass addressed his bisexuality in the 1990s. "I've started to worry about being bisexual, being involved with men and women," he said, adding that gay people are "isn't gay, and it isn't illegal, and it isn't something wrong; it's just knowledge."

Ram Dass learned that he fathered a son as a 24-year-old Stanford undergraduate during a brief association with history major Karen Saum, and that he was now a grandfather. After finding out about his mother's concerns regarding his parentage, Peter Reichard, a 53-year-old banker in North Carolina, did a DNA test.

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