Ram Dass: Who He Was, What He Taught, Which Book First

By the Awaken Library Editorial TeamEditorial Team · Updated October 23, 2026Oct 23, 2026 · How we write

Ram Dass (1931–2019), born Richard Alpert, was a Harvard psychologist, fired in 1963 for giving psilocybin to a student, who became a spiritual teacher after meeting Neem Karoli Baba in India. His book Be Here Now (1971) taught presence, love and service. Most readers start there.

The witness practice, step by step

Our timer is built on the breath meditation Ram Dass guided in his talks, which ramdass.org publishes as transcripts. His instruction is to keep your attention “in the most gentle possible way” on one object, usually the breath, and to treat wandering thoughts without violence: “Be vigilant but gentle.” The last minute adds what he called the witness, the part of you that notices what is happening without judging it.

He wrote about the witness most fully in Polishing the Mirror (2013), where he calls it “your centering device”. He also warned that it is not the end of the road: in his guided meditations he says “the Witness is only a stage”. If sitting with your thoughts brings up something hard to bear, stop, open your eyes and make a cup of tea or step outside. During the day you can try a few seconds of it: noticing “I am getting angry” while it happens, rather than only afterwards.

What Ram Dass taught: five ideas

1. Be here now. The phrase came from Bhagavan Das, the young American who guided him in India in 1967 and told him, whenever he worried about the future, to just be here now. It became the title of his 1971 book and his shortest summary of the teaching: attention to this moment, not to the plans and fears about the next one.
2. The witness. A part of awareness that watches thoughts and feelings without taking sides. In Be Here Now he writes that the witness “is not evaluative. It does not judge your actions. It merely notes them.” He credited the idea partly to the teacher G. I. Gurdjieff.
3. Loving awareness. After his 1997 stroke he taught a short practice: placing attention in the middle of the chest and repeating silently, “I am loving awareness.” On ramdass.org he says plainly: “Loving awareness is the soul.” It appears in Be Love Now (2010) and Polishing the Mirror (2013).
4. Service. His guru’s instruction, as Ram Dass repeated it, was “Love everyone, serve everyone, remember God.” He put it into practice through the Hanuman Foundation (1974), its Prison-Ashram and Dying projects, and Seva Foundation (1978), which works on preventable blindness. How Can I Help? (1985) is the book on this. Our page on karma covers karma yoga, the idea of action without attachment to results that he drew on.
5. Aging and dying consciously. Still Here (2000), which he was writing when the stroke hit, treats old age as a time for inner work. He called the stroke “fierce grace”, the title of the 2001 documentary about him.

Ram Dass books in order, and which to read first

His foundation lists more than a dozen books, several written with co-authors from his talks. These are the main ones, by first publication.

Some dates differ between sources by a year (for example 1976 or 1977 for Grist for the Mill, 1991 or 1992 for Compassion in Action); we give the year on his foundation’s timeline.

Be Here Now: what is in it

Be Here Now began in 1970 as a box of loose pages from the Lama Foundation in New Mexico and came out as a 416-page book in 1971. It has sold more than two million copies (The New York Times and his foundation). Its four parts are:

1. Journey: The Transformation: Dr. Richard Alpert, Ph.D. into Baba Ram Dass, a short autobiography from Harvard to India.
2. From Bindu to Ojas: The Core Book, the largest part: hand-lettered, illustrated pages printed sideways, one thought to a page.
3. Cookbook for a Sacred Life, practical chapters on diet, breath, mantra, meditation and daily life.
4. Painted Cakes (Do Not Satisfy Hunger), his reading list.

If you only want the story, part one takes under an hour. The practical chapters show their age: they assume a 1970s reader with time for an ashram.

Ram Dass quotes: which are sourced

His sayings circulate on cards and posters, often without a source.

Harvard, Timothy Leary and psilocybin

This section is history only; it is not advice about psychedelics. Richard Alpert joined Harvard’s psychology faculty in 1958. From the early 1960s he and Timothy Leary ran the Harvard Psilocybin Project, giving psilocybin to volunteers and to themselves. On May 27, 1963, Harvard president Nathan Pusey announced, in the words of the Harvard Crimson, that the university had “terminated the appointment of Richard Alpert… for giving hallucinogenic drugs to an undergraduate in violation of an agreement with the University”. Leary was relieved of his duties for absenting himself without permission.

The Crimson’s editors were blunt at the time: the two had been “as much propagandists for the drug experience as investigators of it”. A 2010 paper in the International Journal of Drug Policy describes them as “moral entrepreneurs” whose public campaign helped shape how psilocybin came to be seen and, eventually, banned in 1968. Alpert himself said later that after hundreds of trips he still could not make the experience last, which is why he went to India in 1967 (Publishers Weekly, 2000).

If you are struggling. Some people come to Ram Dass after a frightening experience with drugs or a spiritual crisis. If you feel unsafe, confused or unable to sleep for days, please reach out to someone today; the numbers on our help page are free, and our page on spiritual awakening symptoms covers when to see a doctor.

What research says

A PubMed search on October 23, 2026 turned up no trial of any practice he taught. Two papers are about him: the 2010 history of Leary, Alpert and psilocybin, and a 2000 interview with him on being a patient after his stroke. The witness has a cousin in psychology called “decentering”, stepping back from thoughts and seeing them as events in the mind; a 2015 review links it to lower reactivity. For meditation programs in general, the best-known review (Goyal and colleagues, 2014) rated the evidence for less anxiety, depression and pain as moderate, with no edge over other active treatments.

Criticism and controversy

• Psychedelic advocacy. See the Harvard section above: his early public role was promoting drug experiences, and the Crimson’s editors wrote in 1963 that he and Leary were as much propagandists as researchers.
• Joya. From 1974 he spent about 15 months as a student of Joya Santanya (later Ma Jaya), whom he called an enlightened being in talks. In 1976 he retracted it in Yoga Journal, in an article titled “Egg on My Beard”: “I reported in interviews and lectures that Joya was, as she professed to be, an enlightened being… Finally, I had to admit I had conned myself.” He added: “In our greed for spiritual materialism we wanted to believe it.” The Los Angeles Times summed it up in 1991: “he confessed that he’d been duped.”
• The guru stories. Miracle of Love (first published in 1978, Dutton edition 1979), his collection of stories about Neem Karoli Baba, includes a student’s account of the guru touching her breasts and genitals, presented as divine play. The religion scholar Amanda Lucia wrote in 2020 that “it is striking that Ram Dass chose to include this passage in his celebratory book about the guru”, and that secular readers would see sexual abuse where devotees saw lila. There were no legal cases; the criticism concerns the book.
• Searches that go nowhere. People search for “Ram Dass Epstein” and “Ram Dass cult”. We found no documented link to Jeffrey Epstein; his friend and student, the psychiatrist Mark Epstein, may explain the search. And none of the obituaries and profiles we read describes him as a cult leader.

His defenders point to the same Yoga Journal article as evidence of honesty, and to decades of work on dying, prisons and blindness.

His life after India

Richard Alpert was born on April 6, 1931, in Boston, the youngest of three sons of George Alpert, a lawyer and president of the New Haven Railroad. He studied at Tufts, Wesleyan and Stanford (PhD 1957). After Harvard and the psychedelic years, he went to India in 1967, met Neem Karoli Baba, known to his students as Maharaj-ji, and received the name Ram Dass, “servant of God”. Back in the United States, he spent the next decades lecturing, writing and founding service organizations.

On February 19, 1997, at 65, he had a hemorrhagic stroke that paralyzed his right side and left him with aphasia. In 2009 a DNA test confirmed that he had a son, Peter Reichard, a banker in North Carolina, whom he had not known about for half a century. After a serious illness in 2004 he stopped traveling and settled on Maui, where he taught retreats until his death at home in Haiku on December 22, 2019, at 88. Two documentaries cover the late years: Fierce Grace (2001, Mickey Lemle) and Ram Dass, Going Home (2017), which was shortlisted for an Academy Award but not nominated. A third, Becoming Nobody, came out in 2019.

Where his ideas come from

The teachers he named himself: first Neem Karoli Baba, whose instruction he repeated for the rest of his life, and before him Bhagavan Das, who gave him the phrase “be here now”. His foundation describes his main path as bhakti, devotional yoga centred on the Hindu deity Hanuman, with Theravada and Tibetan Buddhist meditation, Zen, and Sufi and Jewish mystical study alongside it. The Bhagavad Gita was the text he kept returning to; his talks on it became Paths to God (2004). For the witness he gave the credit away: in a guided meditation published on ramdass.org he says, “It’s called ‘the Witness’ by Gurdjieff.” He also named the drugs as the start, not the path: by 1967, he told Publishers Weekly, hundreds of trips had not made the experience stay.

Religion, Jesus, and the other Ram Das

He was born into a Jewish family and taught within a Hindu devotional lineage of Hanuman and Ram, while drawing freely on Buddhist meditation, Sufism and Christian mysticism. He called himself, half joking, a “HinJew”. In a 1977 discussion with the Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast he said his guru had told him to “meditate like Christ meditated”, and that through Hinduism he had come back to Christianity and Judaism.

He is often confused with Guru Ram Das (1534–1581), the fourth Guru of the Sikhs, who founded Amritsar. They are different people; the names both mean “servant of Ram”. For other 20th-century Western teachers of Eastern ideas, see Alan Watts, who wrote about Zen and Taoism from the 1930s, and Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk who taught mindfulness in the West. Our page on mantra covers repeating a phrase like “I am loving awareness” as a practice.

What this page does not promise. The timer retells one meditation he guided and is no substitute for a teacher or for medical care. We take no position on Neem Karoli Baba. We are not connected to the Love Serve Remember Foundation or to his publishers, and the page carries no ads or paid links.

Related: Alan Watts · Thich Nhat Hanh · Eckhart Tolle · meditation for spiritual awakening · self-inquiry · karma