Ram Dass: Be Here Now and the Path of the Heart

Who Was Ram Dass and How Did He Go from Harvard Professor to Spiritual Teacher?

Imagine you have had a hard year. Maybe someone you love died, or your life looks fine on paper but feels hollow. A friend leaves an old copy of Be Here Now on your table, the one with brown pages and hand-drawn art, and you open it at 2 a.m. because you cannot sleep.

The short answer: Ram Dass was a Harvard psychologist named Richard Alpert who left academia, found a guru in India, and spent fifty years teaching that love is the deepest reality and the present moment is the door to it. Simple enough for a sticky note, deep enough to carry you through grief.

He was born Richard Alpert on April 6, 1931, in Boston, Massachusetts, into a wealthy Jewish family. His father, George Alpert, was a prominent lawyer, president of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, and a co-founder of Brandeis University. Richard later said love in his family felt conditional on achievement. Maybe you know that feeling.

He earned degrees from Tufts, Wesleyan and Stanford, and by his late twenties taught in Harvard's Department of Social Relations alongside Timothy Leary. Together they ran the Harvard Psilocybin Project, giving the compound in magic mushrooms to graduate students, prisoners and divinity students. Both were dismissed in 1963, the first faculty dismissals in the university's history, and the story made national news.

Alpert kept using LSD but grew frustrated that the insights faded when the drugs wore off. It was like visiting a beautiful house and always being sent home at midnight. In 1967 he went to India. A young American, Bhagavan Das, led him to Neem Karoli Baba, a Hindu saint in the Himalayan foothills. According to Ram Dass's account, the guru knew his private thoughts and his mother's recent death, things he could not have known by ordinary means. His materialist worldview shattered.

He stayed to study meditation, yoga and the Bhagavad Gita, and his guru named him Ram Dass, "servant of God." He came home in 1968 and wrote Be Here Now (1971), which sold over two million copies and became a foundational text of the Western spiritual movement.

If success has ever failed to fill the gap for you, his path will feel familiar. His is one of the most documented public spiritual conversions in modern Western history, and many later followed a version of it: faith in scientific materialism, disappointment with its limits, psychedelic exploration, then the contemplative traditions of Asia.

He shared his doubts and setbacks openly, and because a Harvard professor had walked away from prestige, educated audiences listened. Historian Don Lattin, in The Harvard Psychedelic Club, documents how the Alpert-Leary experiments helped shift American attitudes toward consciousness, religion and authority. The parallel route for that same audience is covered in Alan Watts: Eastern Philosophy for the Western Mind.

What Is the Path of the Heart and How Does Bhakti Yoga Work?

If you have ever loved someone so much that your own worries went quiet, you already know the engine of Ram Dass's path.

His main practice was bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion and love. Where many Western teachers stress meditation, mindfulness or self-inquiry, he taught that love is the most direct route. Bhakti turns the emotional energy you pour into things, people and outcomes toward the divine, however you picture it. Slowly this clears ego-driven wants and opens the heart.

The bond with the divine can take several forms: parent and child, friend and friend, beloved and lover. Ram Dass's bond with Neem Karoli Baba was child and parent. He taught that the guru is a mirror showing you your own divine nature, not an authority demanding obedience.

The practical side was service, what Hindus call karma yoga or seva. He founded the Seva Foundation, which has restored sight to millions through cataract surgeries in developing countries. Real service, he said, is not about the helper feeling good but seeing the divine in the person served. When you feed a hungry person, you are feeding God wearing a hungry disguise.

That was radical for Westerners who saw spirituality as a private inner project. He insisted awakening without compassionate action is incomplete. His famous line: "Treat everyone you meet as if they are God in drag."

The tradition is old. It goes back to the Bhagavad Gita's teaching that devotion is a path equal to knowledge and action. The medieval bhakti movement, led by saints like Kabir, Mirabai and Tulsidas, taught that love of God was open to everyone regardless of caste, education or gender.

In the West, devotion was tied to conventional religion and distrusted by seekers. Ram Dass's gift was presenting it to the psychology-educated, authority-questioning audience of the 1960s-70s, blending it with Abraham Maslow's work on self-actualization and peak experiences. That made heart-centered spirituality intellectually respectable in the counterculture.

What Is Loving Awareness and How Do You Practice It?

This is the practice you can start tonight, even if nothing else here sticks.

Loving awareness became Ram Dass's distilled teaching, especially after his 1997 stroke. Instead of identifying with your thinking mind, your emotions, your body or your roles, you identify as awareness itself, and notice that this awareness is loving by nature.

You silently repeat "I am loving awareness" through the day, especially when things are hard. Stuck in traffic. Criticized. Afraid. Each time you step back from the reactive ego into the spacious awareness that holds every experience without being shaken by it.

Ram Dass taught that you do not create loving awareness. You recognize it. It is the background in which every thought and feeling appears, but you are usually so absorbed in the content that you miss it, like being so caught up in a movie you forget you are the screen.

Your personality and feelings stay. You still think, feel and act. But there is space around it all. Anger rises, and you are the loving awareness in which it appears and fades. Fear rises, and you are the awareness that holds it with compassion.

The practice joins Advaita Vedanta's teaching that awareness is the true self with bhakti's insistence that reality's deepest nature is love. It was at once the simplest and most profound instruction he ever gave.

You do not need the philosophy to use the practice, but it shows why it feels so complete. Advaita Vedanta (non-dualism) emphasizes jnana (knowledge) and teaches that the self is pure awareness (sat-chit-ananda: being-consciousness-bliss). Bhakti teaches that the divine is personal, loving and relational. Classical Indian philosophy debates which is ultimate.

Ram Dass, following Neem Karoli Baba, collapsed the distinction: awareness IS love. This echoes Ramana Maharshi, who noted that self-inquiry and devotion meet at the deepest level, and Meister Eckhart, who taught that the ground of the soul and the ground of God are one and the same. The Advaita half of that merger is covered in Rupert Spira: The Nature of Consciousness and Non-Duality.

How Did Ram Dass Teach About Aging, Death, and Conscious Dying?

If you are grieving, caring for someone at the end of life, or quietly afraid of your own death, this may be the part of Ram Dass you need most.

Ram Dass taught that death is a change of costume rather than an ending, and that making peace with dying now is what frees you to live fully today. He compared leaving the body to taking off a shoe that has grown too tight.

Three instructions recur:

Identify as the soul rather than the ego long before the body fails. Whatever you habitually identify with is what you carry into dying.

Be with a dying person in awareness, not problem-solving. Most people at the end want presence more than advice.

Grieve completely instead of spiritually bypassing loss. Awakening exempts nobody from tears.

He called his own post-stroke disability fierce grace: suffering as sandpaper wearing away identification with the body.

His teaching on dying drew on Tibetan Buddhist bardo literature, the Hindu understanding of a soul passing between bodies, and decades of sitting with the dying alongside Stephen Levine. He promised no particular afterlife. What he offered was rehearsal: if you can rest as loving awareness in traffic or in pain, you have some chance of resting there when the body stops. If grief is weighing on you heavily, a grief counsellor or therapist can walk beside any spiritual practice.

What Are Ram Dass's Most Important Books and Talks?

Which book you reach for depends on where you are right now. His work spans five decades, from psychedelic explorer to devotee to elder.

Be Here Now (1971) is one of the most influential spiritual books of the twentieth century. Its three parts, the story of his road from Harvard to India, an illustrated manual on brown paper with psychedelic-influenced art, and a practical guide, made a format as revolutionary as its content. It introduced millions of Westerners to meditation, yoga, mantra, karma and the guru-disciple relationship. Start here if you want the spark.

The Only Dance There Is (1974) collects lectures at the Menninger Foundation and a yoga ashram, Ram Dass at the height of his verbal powers.

Grist for the Mill, with Stephen Levine, explores suffering, death and practice. How Can I Help?, with Paul Gorman, treats service as spiritual practice; reach for it if you are a caregiver running on empty.

Still Here (2000) is a raw, honest look at aging, illness and the stroke that reshaped his later life.

Walking Each Other Home, with Mirabai Bush, speaks about death and dying with warmth and practical wisdom.

Being Ram Dass (2021), published after his death in 2019, is his final memoir.

His recorded talks from the 1970s-90s, available through the Ram Dass Organization and the Be Here Now Network podcast, go wider and deeper than the books. He spoke like a friend across a kitchen table.

Be Here Now was one of the first Western spiritual books to break from dry academic or pious formats. Published by the Lama Foundation in New Mexico, it spread first through alternative channels before reaching the mainstream, and its mix of Eastern philosophy, personal story and practical instruction became the blueprint for popular spiritual writing. Ram Dass was also open about his struggles with sexuality, relationships and the gap between his ideals and his behavior, setting a standard of honesty most teachers of his era did not.

What Practical Exercises Come from Ram Dass's Tradition?

Here is how you turn all this into something you actually do on a Tuesday. Ram Dass drew from Hindu devotion, Buddhist meditation and Western psychology, always with warmth and humor.

Loving awareness meditation. Sit, close your eyes and gently repeat "I am loving awareness." When thoughts come, return to it until it feels less like a mantra and more like recognition. Ten to twenty minutes a day, then carry it into walking, working and talking. This is the one for you if your mind is loud.

The soul perspective. Before you talk with anyone, remind yourself that behind their personality, opinions and behavior is a soul on its own path. You stop judging the costume and see the wearer. Try it with difficult people, especially difficult people, since they offer the biggest chance for your heart to open. You will notice it working the first time a rude cashier suddenly looks tired instead of hostile.

Kirtan. Chanting names of the divine, such as "Hare Krishna," "Om Namah Shivaya" or "Ram," uses sound and repetition to slip past the thinking mind. His close friend Krishna Das became the best-known Western kirtan leader. Ram Dass suggested treating it as an experiment, saying it works on the heart whatever you believe.

Gratitude. Each morning or evening, name what you are grateful for, not as positive thinking but as noticing that grace is always flowing. He called gratitude the antidote to the ego's endless sense of not enough.

Service. Choose one regular act, such as feeding people, visiting sick or elderly people, or volunteering, and do it intending to see the divine in those you serve.

These practices were shaped for busy Westerners, not people with years of ashram training, much as Swami Satchidananda adapted yoga and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi adapted Transcendental Meditation. Ram Dass was more eclectic and psychologically informed than most, using therapeutic ideas like "witnessing" emotions and the "inner child" alongside mantra, visualization and devotion. This anticipated transpersonal psychology and the contemplative psychotherapy of Jack Kornfield and Mark Epstein. Releasing the energy that snags around thought is the subject of Michael Singer: The Untethered Soul and Inner Freedom.

What Are the Criticisms of Ram Dass and Who Is He Best Suited For?

Before you give your heart to any teacher, you deserve the honest picture.

The guru relationship. Western critics argue that surrendering to a guru is psychologically regressive, culturally out of place and open to exploitation. Neem Karoli Baba was widely respected, but India's wider guru culture has produced many abuse scandals. Ram Dass acknowledged this, held that his own bond with Maharaj-ji was transformative rather than exploitative, and insisted on discernment with any teacher.

Psychedelics. Traditional practitioners called drug-induced experiences artificial and possibly harmful; psychedelic advocates felt he dropped them too fast. His middle view: they can open the door but cannot keep you there, and the real work takes steady practice. His famous line was "When you get the message, hang up the phone," though he later accepted that plant medicines still help some people.

Romanticizing India. Critics within Indian culture note that he, like many Westerners, romanticized India and filtered Hindu ideas through Western psychology in ways traditional scholars sometimes found reductive.

Who he suits. Ram Dass is for you if you lead with your heart, respond to love more than analysis, value emotional honesty and feel drawn to service. He is especially valuable through grief, aging, illness or death. He may suit you less if you want systematic practices with measurable results, feel uneasy with devotional language, or need a living teacher. For presence without devotion, try Eckhart Tolle: The Power of Now & Living in Presence.

Religion scholar Lola Williamson, in Transcendent in America, examines how Hindu practices changed in America, often losing communal, ritual and ethical sides while gaining individual and therapeutic ones. Ram Dass felt this tension and tried to keep devotion and community alive through his service organizations and his view of guru devotion as relational. His public openness about his homosexuality in the 1990s challenged both Western spiritual communities and traditional Hindu attitudes, choosing honesty over fitting in.

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