Spiritual guru, LSD proponent dies at 88
Baba Ram Dass was a 1960s counterculture leader who traveled to India in search of enlightenment.
HONOLULU (AP) >> Baba Ram Dass, the 1960s counterculture spiritual leader who experimented with LSD and traveled to India to find enlightenment, returning to share it with Americans, has died. He was 88.
Dass’ foundation, Love Serve Remember, announced late Sunday that the author and spiritual leader died peacefully at his home earlier in the day. No cause of death was given.
He had suffered a severe stroke in 1997 that left him paralyzed on the right side and, for a time, unable to speak. More recently, he underwent hip surgery after he was injured in a fall in November 2008, according to his website.
“I had really thought about checking out, but your love and your prayers convinced me not to do it. ... It’s just beautiful,” he told followers in a videotaped message at the time from his hospital bed in Hawaii.
Over the years, Ram Dass — born Richard Alpert — associated with the likes of Timothy Leary and Allen
Ginsberg. He wrote about his experiences with drugs, set up projects to help prisoners and those facing terminal illness and sought to enlighten others about the universal struggle with aging.
But he was best known for the 1971 book “Be Here Now,” written after his trip to India. The spiritual primer found its way into thousands of backpacks around the world.
“I want to share with you the parts of the internal journey that never get written up in the mass media,” he wrote. “I’m not interested in what you read in the Saturday Evening Post about LSD. This is the story of what goes on inside a human being who is undergoing all these experiences.”
Among his other books were “How Can I Help?” and “Compassion in Action” and “Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying.”
“In the ‘60s, I was an uncle for a movement,” he told The Associated Press in 1998. “I was always showing people where they could go. I went east, and then there was a big movement east.”
Now, he said, “the baby boomers are getting old — and I’m learning how to get old for them. That’s my role.”
The Boston-born son of a prominent attorney, Ram Dass entered the public sphere in the early 1960s as a young Harvard psychology professor. Alpert, as he was then known, earned a doctorate at Stanford University.
He and Leary, a Harvard colleague, began a series of experiments with hallucinogenic mushrooms and LSD, giving the drugs to prisoners, philosophers and students to study their effects.
Ram Dass later wrote that he tried psilocybin, the compound found in hallucinogenic mushrooms, in Leary’s living room.
“I peered into the semidarkness and recognized none other than myself in cap and gown and hood,” he wrote. “It was as if that part of me, which was a Harvard professor, had separated or dissociated itself from me.”
The experiments got him and Leary kicked out of Harvard in 1963.
“It was a little too sensational,” Ram Dass said in 1998. “We were the starters of it.”