Ram Dass

Ram Dass (1931–2019) was one of America's most beloved spiritual teachers — the Harvard professor who became a servant of God, and whose 1971 classic Be Here Now handed an entire culture its compass phrase. Born Richard Alpert into a prominent Boston family, he rose swiftly through the academic world to a professorship in psychology at Harvard, where in the early 1960s he and Timothy Leary conducted their era-defining — and explosively controversial — research into psilocybin and the further reaches of consciousness. Their dismissal from Harvard in 1963 made headlines; but for Alpert, the deeper crisis was that the chemical doorway always closed. "I got high and came down," he said, and he wanted what didn't come down. In 1967 he travelled to India, and in the foothills of the Himalayas met the man who would change everything: the guru Neem Karoli Baba — Maharajji — who saw through him completely, loved him unconditionally, and gave him the name Ram Dass, "servant of God."

He returned to America transformed, and Be Here Now — part memoir, part illustrated scripture, part manual — became a counterculture bible that has never gone out of print, introducing millions of Westerners to yoga, meditation, and the path of the heart. But Ram Dass insisted the point of it all was service: he co-founded the Seva Foundation, which has helped restore sight to millions in the developing world, launched the Prison-Ashram Project bringing spiritual practice behind bars, and helped pioneer the conscious-dying movement, sitting at bedsides and teaching a generation that death could be met with open eyes. Then, in 1997, his teachings were put to their fiercest test: a massive stroke left him with aphasia and partial paralysis. He came to call it "fierce grace" — the guru's heaviest blessing — and taught from his wheelchair for another twenty-two years with deepened silence, humour, and radiance, chronicled in books like Still Here and the film Becoming Nobody.

From his home in Maui, where the ocean became his final teacher, Ram Dass spent his last years webcasting to the world and distilling his message to its essence: love everyone, serve everyone, remember God — and his most quoted line of all, "we're all just walking each other home." He died peacefully on December 22, 2019, at eighty-eight. The Love Serve Remember Foundation, which he founded with his community, now tends one of spirituality's great archives — more than forty-five years of talks digitized and offered largely free — alongside retreats, courses, films, and the Be Here Now Network of podcasts, ensuring that the laughing professor-turned-servant keeps walking new generations home.