A short life of the author
Ram Dass (6 April 1931 – 22 December 2019), born Richard Alpert, was an American spiritual teacher, psychologist, and author whose life traced one of the great arcs of the American twentieth century: from privileged Jewish upbringing to Harvard professorship to psychedelic pioneer to Hindu devotee to guru to stroke survivor to, finally, something like wisdom. His book Be Here Now (1971) has sold over two million copies and is one of the defining texts of the Western spiritual counterculture — a book that introduced millions of Americans to meditation, yoga, Eastern philosophy, and the possibility that consciousness itself might be the most important subject a person could study.
Early Life and Harvard
Richard Alpert was born in Newton, Massachusetts, to a wealthy Jewish family. His father, George Alpert, was a prominent attorney, a co-founder of Brandeis University, and president of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. Alpert was educated at Williston Academy, Tufts University, and Stanford, and earned his PhD in psychology from Stanford. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1958, where he was by all accounts a successful, ambitious young professor — tenure-track, well-connected, and deeply unhappy.
In 1960, he met Timothy Leary, a fellow Harvard psychologist who had begun experimenting with psilocybin mushrooms. The two launched the Harvard Psilocybin Project, which rapidly escalated from controlled experiments to something more like a religious movement. They gave psilocybin and LSD to graduate students, prisoners, divinity students, and themselves, and reported that the drugs produced experiences of ego dissolution and transcendence that conventional psychology could not explain.
In 1963, both Alpert and Leary were dismissed from Harvard — the most famous academic firing of the 1960s. Leary went on to become the pied piper of the psychedelic movement (“Turn on, tune in, drop out”). Alpert took a different path.
India and Transformation
In 1967, Alpert travelled to India, where he met Neem Karoli Baba (also known as Maharaj-ji), a Hindu guru who became his teacher. The encounter was transformative. According to Alpert’s account, Maharaj-ji demonstrated knowledge of Alpert’s innermost thoughts and of events — including his mother’s death — that he could not have known through ordinary means. Alpert became a devotee, received the name Ram Dass (“Servant of God”), and spent months in India studying yoga, meditation, and Hindu philosophy.
He returned to America transformed — no longer a Harvard psychologist but a spiritual teacher, wearing white robes and speaking the language of devotion rather than pharmacology.
Be Here Now (1971)
Be Here Now was published by the Lama Foundation in New Mexico in a distinctive square format with hand-lettered text and psychedelic illustrations. The book is in three parts: “Journey,” an autobiographical account of Alpert’s transformation from professor to Ram Dass; “From Bindu to Ojas,” a manual of spiritual practices presented in the hand-lettered, illustrated format that became the book’s visual signature; and a bibliography and resource guide.
The book’s message is deceptively simple: the only reality is the present moment, and the purpose of spiritual practice is to learn to inhabit it fully — to “be here now.” This synthesis of Hindu philosophy, Buddhist mindfulness, and Western psychology, delivered in a warm, self-deprecating, and often very funny voice, found an enormous audience among young Americans who were seeking spiritual depth beyond both conventional religion and the excesses of the drug culture.
Be Here Now has never gone out of print. It influenced Steve Jobs, George Harrison, Wayne Dyer, and countless others. It is the bridge text between the psychedelic 1960s and the meditation/yoga culture that followed.
Later Life and Work
Ram Dass spent the next three decades teaching, lecturing, and publishing books on spiritual practice, aging, death, and service. The Only Dance There Is (1974), Grist for the Mill (1977, with Stephen Levine), How Can I Help? (1985, with Paul Gorman), and Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying (2000) extended and deepened his teachings.
In 1997, he suffered a massive stroke that left him partially paralysed and with severe expressive aphasia. He treated the stroke as a spiritual teaching — “fierce grace,” he called it — and continued teaching from a wheelchair in Maui, Hawaii, where he lived until his death in 2019. His post-stroke work, including Still Here and Being Ram Dass (2021, posthumous), addressed aging and disability with characteristic honesty.
Critical Standing
Ram Dass is not a figure of conventional literary criticism — he is a spiritual teacher whose books are instruments of practice rather than objects of aesthetic contemplation. But Be Here Now is a genuinely important American book: it changed how millions of people think about consciousness, presence, and the inner life, and its influence on American spiritual culture is incalculable.
Collecting Ram Dass
Be Here Now (1971, Lama Foundation) in the original square-format first edition brings $100–$300 depending on condition — the book was printed on cheap paper and many copies are fragile. Later printings by Crown are common and inexpensive. Signed copies are available and bring $150–$400. Ram Dass signed books generously at his many talks and retreats. His other books are modestly priced in first edition.