Richard Alpert was a partner of Tim Leary at Harvard and Millbrook in the early 1960’s founding the Harvard Psilocybin Project, then turning to LSD (which Dr. Hofmann had synthesized in 1938), in a quest to explore the topography of human consciousness. Harvard lost patience with these two rogues and with the flood of undergraduates tripping with their profs, and they fired them both, and the rest is history. Alpert felt he had exhausted the possibilities of entheogenic exploration and realized “you always come back down”. While Tim became a counter-culture faux-political clown, Richard went to India and became Baba Ram Dass.
In the sixties, there were many people and conditions influencing us to turn toward a life of contemplation. This had begun in the prior century actually but really grew after WWII. Those influencers included Philip Kapleau, Alan Watts, Walt Whitman, Madame Blavatsky, Ruth Fuller, Gary Snyder, and so many more. But Ram Dass’s influence on millions of young people around the world was singular and undeniable.
His book, Be Here Now, was published in the spring of 1971 and has been consistently in print since, selling over two million copies worldwide. I still have my first edition copy I bought then, on the right, though it’s somewhat dog-eared. I also have the book From Bindu to Ojas which is an unbound tome that preceded Be Here Now. These are valuable these days, fetching into the thousands on the collectible market. Who knew a hippie kid with a paper route high on blotter paper would scrape together a few bucks and end up with a collectible or two.
Though I am a decade younger than Alpert, his influence on me was profound and life-altering, as I know it was with many of my contemporaries. Everyone I knew had this book. My path was similar to Alpert’s, with me having walked the rainbow road hundreds of times. It ran its course for me too, but it took a while.
Ram Dass’s influence was not necessarily that we should all do yogic practices, though I and millions of young folks did for a while. Rather, he opened the door and demystified ancient practices from an array of traditions that were distinctly different from the Abrahamic milieu we lived in. He and others showed us we did not need dogma, fealty, compliance, paternalism, or frankly, anything we did not already have in order to wake up to the moment, realize our nature, and relieve suffering. It was okay to be happy and guilt-free and here’s how.
I went to see Ram Dass speak on a cold, grey, rainy day in Mount Vernon, Washington in late 1972. We were a bit late, and the parking lot was full. As we walked toward the venue, a tall, skinny, grey-haired man in white clothing and no jacket came bounding past us. My memory, and the impression I had at the time, was that he was not contacting the ground. He turned and smiled, right at me, and time stopped.
I don’t think I’ll sell these two books They’ll go to my kids one day.
December 9, 2025
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