Ram Dass

Ram Dass was born Richard Alpert in Boston, the son of a lawyer. He studied psychology at Tufts, Wesleyan and Stanford and in 1958 became a professor at Harvard. There, with Timothy Leary, he researched the effects of psilocybin and LSD; in 1963 he was dismissed from Harvard. In the following years he was a figure of the psychedelic counterculture.

In 1967 he travelled to India and found his teacher, Neem Karoli Baba, who gave him the name Ram Dass, “servant of God”. His book “Be Here Now” (1971) sold millions of copies and helped popularise meditation, yoga and Eastern spirituality in the West. He co-founded the Seva Foundation, which fights blindness in poor countries, and the Hanuman Foundation, which brought meditation to prisons and supported the dying.

Ram Dass was bisexual. For decades he kept his relationships with men largely private. Later in life he spoke openly about it and described how his spiritual practice had helped him to accept himself.

In 1997 a stroke left him partly paralysed and with severe difficulty speaking. He learned to speak again, saw the stroke as an act of grace and continued to teach. From 2004 he lived on Maui, Hawaii, where he died in 2019, aged 88.