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Richard
Alpert (Ram Dass) was born in 1931. His father, George, a lawyer, helped to
found Brandeis University and was President of the New York, New Haven &
Hartford Railroad. Ram Dass studied psychology, specializing in human motivation
and personality development. He received an M.A. from Wesleyan and a Ph.D. from
Stanford. He then served on the psychology faculties at Stanford and the
University of California, and from 1958 to 1963 taught and researched in the
Department of Social Relations and the Graduate School of Education at Harvard
University. During this period he co-authored (with Sears and Rau) the book
Identification and Child Rearing, published by Stanford University Press. In 1961, while at Harvard, Ram
Dass' explorations of human consciousness led him, in collaboration with Timothy
Leary, Ralph Metzner, Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, and others, to pursue
intensive research with psilocybin, LSD-25, and other psychedelic chemicals. Out
of this research came two books:The Psychedelic Experience (co-authored by
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 controversial nature of this
research, Ram Dass was dismissed from Harvard in 1963.
Ram Dass continued his research
under the auspices of a private foundation until 1967. In that year he traveled to India, where he met his Guru (spiritual teacher), Neem Karoli Baba. Ram Dass
studied yoga and meditation, and received the name Ram Dass, which means
"servant of God." Since 1968, he has pursued a variety of spiritual
practices, including guru kripa; devotional yoga focused on the Hindu spiritual
figure Hanuman; meditation in the Theravadin, Mahayana Tibetan, and Zen Buddhist
schools; karma yoga; and Sufi and Jewish studies. |
