Ram Dass

Biographical Information
"Ram Dass first went to India in 1967. He was still Dr. Richard Alpert, an already eminent Harvard psychologist and psychedelic pioneer with Dr.Timothy Leary. He had continued his psychedelic research until that fateful Eastern trip in 1967, when he traveled to India. In India, he met his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, affectionately known as Maharajji, who gave Ram Dass his name, which means "servant of God." ...

"In 1961, while at Harvard, explorations of human consciousness led him, in collaboration with Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Aldous Huxley, and Allen Ginsberg, to pursue intensive research with psilocybin, LSD-25, and other psychedelic chemicals. Out of this research came two books: The Psychedelic Experience (co-authored with Leary and Metzner, and based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, published by University Books); and LSD (with Sidney Cohen and Lawrence Schiller, published by New American Library). Because of the highly controversial nature of their research, Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary became personae non grata and were dismissed from Harvard in 1963. Tim Leary and Alpert then went to Mexico, ate mushrooms, and went from being academics to counter culture icons, legends in their own time, and young at that...

"In 1974, Ram Dass created the Hanuman Foundation, a non-profit meant to embody what he had absorbed from his Guru. Hanuman Foundation developed the Prison Ashram Project, designed to help prison inmates grow spiritually during their incarceration, and the Dying Project helped many cope and transcend, taking the unnecessary sting out of the tail of life and giving people a way to deal with suffering and death.

"The prison Ashram project continues under Bo and Sita Lozoff in North Carolina and the Living/Dying Project, conceived with Stephen Levine and now a separate non-profit headed by Dale Borglum in the Bay Area, provides evolved support for conscious dying...

"Be Here Now, Ram Dass’s monumentally influential and seminal work, still stands as the highly readable centerpiece of Western articulation of Eastern philosophy, and how to live joyously a hundred per cent of the time in the present, luminous or mundane. Be Here Now continues to be the instruction manual of choice for generations of spiritual seekers. Forty years later, it’s still part of the timeless present. Being here now is still being here now.

"Other books include The Only Dance There Is (Anchor/ Doubleday); Grist For The Mill (with Stephen Levine, Celestial Arts); Miracle of Love: Stories of Neem Karoli Baba (Hanuman Foundation); How Can I Help? (with Paul Gorman, Knopf); Compassion in Action: Setting Out on the Path of Service (with Mirabai Bush, Bell Tower Press), Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying (Riverhead Books); One-Liners: A Mini-Manual for a Spiritual Life (Bell Tower Press); Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita (Harmony Books).

"Ram Dass is a co-founder and advisory board member of the Seva Foundation (“seva” means “spiritual service” in Sanskrit), an international service organization..."


 * Honorary Direcotr, Drug Policy Alliance
 * Patron, Wyse International
 * Council of Sages, California Institute of Integral Studies
 * Advisory Council, Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
 * Advisory Board, Albert Hoffman Foundation
 * Advisory Board (emeriti), Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics

Related Sourcewatch

 * Jessica Brackman
 * Windstar Foundation
 * David Padwa of the J.M. Kaplan Fund - invited RD on a road trip
 * Baba Hari Dass - his guru