Ram Dass
1931 CE–2019 CE · Modern · Boston, Massachusetts
1931–2019 CE (born 6 April 1931, Boston; died 22 December 2019, Maui)
Richard Alpert was born in Boston to a prominent Jewish family and became a psychology professor at Harvard, where in the early 1960s he and Timothy Leary conducted controversial research with psychedelics that led to their dismissal. Seeking something the drugs had only pointed toward, he traveled to India in 1967, where he met Neem Karoli Baba, who gave him the name Ram Dass ('servant of God'). Returning to the United States, he distilled his transformation into 'Be Here Now' (1971), a book that became a touchstone of the American spiritual counterculture and introduced many Westerners to bhakti devotion, karma, and guru-discipleship. He taught and wrote for decades, founded service organizations (the Hanuman and Seva foundations), and after a severe stroke in 1997 continued to teach on aging and dying. He spent his last years on Maui, Hawai'i, where he died in 2019. His life is thoroughly documented.
Did you know?
The Harvard psychologist who became a household spiritual name
Before he was Ram Dass, he was Dr. Richard Alpert, a Harvard psychology professor who had grown up in a well-to-do, largely secular Jewish family outside Boston — his father a lawyer who helped found Brandeis University. After his 1963 dismissal (over psychedelics research with Timothy Leary), he traveled to India in 1967, where the guru Neem Karoli Baba gave him the name Ram Dass, and in 1971 he published Be Here Now, one of the best-selling American books to introduce Indian spiritual practice to Western readers. That a man from a secular Jewish Boston family — New England vowels and all — became one of America's most recognized teachers of Hindu devotion is one of the era's more improbable turns.
How we know
Richard Alpert / Ram Dass: b. Apr 6 1931 (Boston area), into a prominent but largely secular Jewish family (he described the home as culturally/politically Jewish, not observant — never bar mitzvahed); father George Alpert (1898–1988), Boston lawyer, last president of the New Haven Railroad, and a founder + first board chairman (1946–54) of Brandeis University. Dismissed from Harvard 1963; to India 1967 (named by Neem Karoli Baba); Be Here Now 1971; d. Dec 22, 2019 (age 88). Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Dass; Brandeis Univ. archives (George Alpert); UPI 1988 Alpert obituary; ramdass.org/about-ram-dass.
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Boston, Massachusetts
What they did here
Birthplace; born Richard Alpert on 6 April 1931 into a prominent Jewish family.
About Boston, Massachusetts
Boston is the capital of Massachusetts, on the north-east coast of the United States. It was a U.S. port of arrival and lecturing for Indian teachers: Paramahansa Yogananda arrived there in 1920 and addressed the International Congress of Religious Liberals, and A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda landed at Boston's Commonwealth Pier in September 1965 before continuing to New York.
In Boston, Massachusetts at the same time
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The world in their lifetime
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Works
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