Ram Dass

Born Richard Alpert in Boston in 1931, he earned a doctorate in psychology at Stanford University and taught at Harvard University in the early 1960s, where his psychedelic research with Timothy Leary led to his dismissal from the faculty in 1963. Frustrated that chemical highs always wore off and returned him to ordinary anxieties, Alpert travelled to India in 1967, studied Hindu devotional (bhakti) and Buddhist meditation practices under Neem Karoli Baba, and returned as Ram Dass. From the publication of Be Here Now in 1971 until his death in Maui in 2019, his lectures and books shaped generations of Western contemplative seekers.

Unlike teachers who promised that spiritual practice would grant worldly wealth or immunity from hardship, Ram Dass centred his teaching on three themes: cultivating quiet witness-awareness in the present moment ("be here now"), devotional remembrance, and karma yoga—turning everyday service to others into the primary arena of spiritual work. Through the Seva Foundation (co-founded in 1978 to support public-health initiatives such as preventing avoidable blindness) and the Dying Project with Stephen Levine, he emphasized accompanying people through illness, aging and grief without false cheerfulness.

His long public life also made the pitfalls of countercultural spirituality visible, often through his own candid self-criticism. Ram Dass spoke openly about how easily spiritual seekers use lofty non-dual vocabulary to dodge ordinary emotional maturity, and after suffering a severe stroke in 1997 that left him with expressive aphasia and partial paralysis, he spent his final two decades reflecting on physical dependence and aging rather than pretending that meditation places a person above bodily vulnerability.

For a reader today, that coupling of inward presence with outward service is what keeps his work grounded. Pausing to return your attention to the room you are actually standing in—and asking how you can be useful to the people in front of you—turns presence from an abstract mood into an ethical practice.