in 1963, richard alpert had everything his boston family could have wanted for him: a harvard post as assistant professor of psychology, degrees from tufts, wesleyan, and stanford, a father who ran a railroad and helped found a university. then harvard fired him — for giving psilocybin to an undergraduate in violation of a formal agreement, and, the university's president made clear, for denying it afterward. the lie mattered as much as the drug. students protested; the career was over anyway.
most people's story would end there. his was just clearing its throat.
the door and the room
psychedelics had shown alpert something real — and left him with a problem he described honestly for the rest of his life: the chemical opens the door, then closes it. as he put it later, the drug "could chemically override the thought patterns in your brain so that you are open to the moment, but once the chemical loses its power the old habit patterns take over again." the visit ends. in 1967 he went to india looking for someone who lived in the room the drug had only let him visit.
in the himalayan foothills he met a blanket-wrapped old man named neem karoli baba — maharaj-ji to his people — and, as ram dass tells it, the encounter dismantled him. the famous story, told only by him and unverifiable by design: he gave the old man an enormous dose of lsd, enough for several people. nothing happened. maharaj-ji's verdict, as ram dass recounted it: these medicines let you visit christ, but you can only stay two hours — better to become him. the guru renamed him ram dass — "servant of god" — and sent him home.
the book he brought back, be here now, was hand-assembled by a new mexico commune in 1970 and has sold over two million copies since — its royalties still support that commune today. its teaching is its title. not "be calm." not "be better." be here, now — because, as he put it, "when you are fully in the moment, this moment is all there is."
the whole path in four words, and the hardest instruction ever printed: be here now.
the second loss
in february 1997, a massive hemorrhagic stroke nearly killed him. it left him partly paralyzed, in a wheelchair, with aphasia — the great talker now hunting for words through long silences. and here is where his story earns the right to be taught: he did not perform serenity about it. "the stroke wiped out my faith," he admitted. the man who had spent thirty years teaching people to trust the universe felt his own cord cut.
what came back was something sturdier than the old faith. "the stroke was giving me lessons, advanced lessons," he said. "it brought me into my soul, and that's grace... fierce grace." the man who had always been the helper learned to be helped — bathed, dressed, wheeled — and found a teaching in the receiving. "i don't see myself as a stroke victim," he wrote in still here. "i see myself as a soul who's watching 'him' experience the aftermath." at his first public talk after the stroke, he opened from the wheelchair, in the new halting voice, with three words: "i'm still here."
loving awareness
his last teaching was almost nothing at all. a single practice, said inwardly, attention resting in the chest: "i am loving awareness." not the roles, not the biography, not the body that had betrayed him — the awareness underneath, and the love it's made of. he taught it from maui, mostly in silence, until he died at home three days before christmas, 2019, at 88. the last book he published in his lifetime, written with a friend, carried the line his foundation chose to define him: we're all just walking each other home.
he never claimed to be a guru — he reserved that word for his own, and insisted he was just a fellow student a few steps ahead. which is exactly why he belongs here: twice life took everything he'd built his identity on, and twice he found that what remained was enough. that's the teaching. not that loss won't come — that you are not the thing it takes.