The Professor Who Couldn't Stop Searching

In the early 1960s, Richard Alpert had everything an ambitious academic could want. A psychology professorship at Harvard. A Mercedes, a Cessna airplane, a sailboat, and a wardrobe full of tweeds. He was the kind of man who should have been happy, and the fact that he was profoundly unhappy told him something important about the nature of the equation.

Then Timothy Leary introduced him to psilocybin, and everything cracked open.

The psychedelic experiences showed Alpert something his psychology training had never hinted at — that consciousness was far more vast and strange than the clinical models allowed. But the problem with psychedelics, as he would later say, was that you always came down. You got a glimpse of the infinite, and then you were back in your kitchen, anxious about tenure reviews.

Harvard fired both Alpert and Leary in 1963. It was the most famous academic dismissal in American history, and it freed Alpert to do something reckless: he went to India.

A Barefoot Man Under a Blanket Changed Everything

In 1967, in the foothills of the Himalayas, Alpert met a barefoot man wrapped in a plaid blanket who was sitting on a wooden table. This was Neem Karoli Baba — known to his followers as Maharaj-ji. The guru looked at Alpert, told him details about his recently deceased mother that no one in India could possibly have known, and then laughed.

What happened next is difficult to explain in rational terms, which is partly the point. Alpert gave Maharaj-ji a massive dose of LSD. The guru took it, sat calmly for hours, and nothing happened. No visible effect whatsoever. Alpert, who had built his entire post-Harvard identity around the power of psychedelics, realized he was looking at someone who already lived in the state that chemicals could only briefly simulate.

He stayed in India. He studied yoga, meditation, and the Bhagavad Gita. When he came back to America, he was no longer Richard Alpert. He was Ram Dass — "servant of God" — and he carried with him a manuscript that would become one of the most influential spiritual books of the twentieth century.

Be Here Now Was Not a Slogan

Published in 1971, Be Here Now sold over two million copies and became the entry point for an entire generation's exploration of Eastern spirituality. The book's central message — that we suffer because we live in our thoughts about the past and future rather than in the present moment — was not original. The Buddha said it. The Zen masters said it. But Ram Dass said it in American English, with humor, vulnerability, and the credibility of someone who had tried every other route first (Ram Dass, Be Here Now, 1971).

What made Ram Dass different from many spiritual teachers was his refusal to pretend he had it figured out. He talked openly about his struggles with desire, his complicated relationship with his father, and his ongoing battle with what he called "somebody training" — the lifelong habit of performing a self rather than simply being.

In 1997, a massive stroke paralyzed the right side of his body and took much of his speech. Many expected this would end his teaching career. Instead, he called the stroke "fierce grace" and continued teaching from a wheelchair, slower and more present than ever, until his death in 2019 (Ram Dass, Still Here, 2000).

The professor who flew his own airplane learned, eventually, that the only destination worth reaching was the one that required no travel at all.