Ram Dass
1931 – 2019
“I would walk through the door of the temple with my mind full of questions, and Maharaj-ji would answer them before I asked.”
Richard Alpert was a Harvard psychology professor — colleague of Timothy Leary — when, searching for something the mind alone could not reach, he travelled to India in 1967. There, guided by the wandering yogi Bhagavan Das, he was brought to a small temple in the Kumaon hills and into the presence of Neem Karoli Baba.
In their first meetings Maharaj-ji told Alpert things no one could have known — the death of his mother, the thoughts he had kept secret. Alpert wept. He had found his guru. Maharaj-ji gave him the name Ram Dass — “servant of God.”
Be Here Now
Returning to America, Ram Dass distilled what he had received into Be Here Now (1971) — part teaching, part hand-drawn mandala of a book. It became one of the most influential spiritual texts of the 20th century, introducing millions of Westerners to bhakti, karma yoga, meditation, and the simple, radical instruction of its title.
Through it, and through decades of teaching, Ram Dass made Maharaj-ji’s central message plain: “Love everyone. Serve everyone. Remember God.”
Service as the path
With his fellow devotee Larry Brilliant, Ram Dass helped found the Seva Foundation, applying Maharaj-ji’s teaching of seva to the work of curing preventable blindness around the world. Until his death in 2019, he kept turning seekers gently back toward the heart — and toward his guru.