Life & Legacy
Ram Dass was born Richard Alpert in Boston in 1931. A Harvard psychology professor in the early 1960s, he was dismissed in 1963 alongside Timothy Leary over their controversial psychedelic research — and by 1967 the search that psychedelics had opened led him to India. There, guided by the young American sadhu Bhagavan Das, he was brought to the blanket-wrapped saint Neem Karoli Baba, who saw through him completely and undid him with unconditional love. Given the name Ram Dass — servant of Ram — he returned to America transformed.
The book he brought back, Be Here Now (1971), became one of the most influential spiritual books of the century, introducing millions of Westerners to yoga, mantra, guru, and the possibility of a devotional life. Just as consequentially, his satsang became the seedbed of Western kirtan: Krishna Das and Jai Uttal both found their way to Neem Karoli Baba through Ram Dass's circle, and the community around him — the Hanuman Foundation, the Taos temple, decades of retreats — kept the practice of chanting alive in the West through the years before kirtan had audiences.
He co-founded the Seva Foundation for the blind in Asia, wrote and taught on conscious aging and dying, and after a severe stroke in 1997 taught on — slower, softer, more radiant — from Maui until his death in December 2019. His teachings continue through the Love Serve Remember Foundation.
