Ram Dass (1931-2019) was born Richard Alpert. He was an American spiritual teacher, a guru of modern yoga, psychologist and writer. His seminal, best-selling 1971 book Be Here Now, helped popularize Eastern spirituality and yoga in the West.

1948 Graduated cum laude from Williston Northampton School
1952 Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from Tufts University
1954 Master’s degree in psychology from Wesleyan University
1957 Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University
1958 Taught at Stanford for one year. Tenure track position at Harvard University
1960 Visiting professorship at the University of California
1961 Began his research on psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary
1963 Dismissed from Harvard University for allegedly giving psilocybin to a student
1963-1967 1963-1967 He and colleagues investigated the spiritual effects of psychedelic drugs.
1967 Traveled to India where he met Neem Karoli Baba, his guru at Kainchi ashram. Neem Karoli Baba gave him the name Baba Ram Dass, which means “Servant of God.”
1974 Co-founded the Seva Foundation that treats blind people in India and other countries. He founded the Hanuman Foundation, an educational and service organization that initiated the Prison-Ashram Project, now known as the Human Kindness Foundation.

Traveling through the ’70s and ’80s Ram Dass gave talks, lectured and held retreats, raising funds for charitable organizations. In 1986 he opened The Dying Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the first residential facility in the United States where people came to die consciously. In 1997 he had a stroke that left him paralyzed with expressive aphasia. Interpreting this as an act of grace, he learned to speak again and continued to teach and write. He made a final visit to India in 2004, then moved to Maui, Hawaii where he continued to speak and write until his death in 2019.

His most popular books: