From psychology to the porch in Kainchi
Richard Alpert arrived in India in 1967 carrying a supply of psilocybin pills, convinced that he had something chemically interesting to offer any wise person he met. He reached the small temple in the Kumaon hills where Neem Karoli Baba sat, offered a large dose to the old man, and watched nothing happen. Then Maharaji, without being told, described aloud the thought Alpert had been holding in silence — about his recently deceased mother. That was the end of Alpert's materialist framework. He stayed, was renamed Ram Dass — servant of God — and returned to America carrying a different kind of supply.
Be Here Now
The book was self-published in 1971 by the Lama Foundation in New Mexico and distributed through yoga studios, head shops, and word of mouth. Its first section is memoir; its second is a typographic immersion (hand-lettered brown pages, full-bleed layouts) into the bhakti practice Maharaji had pointed toward; its third is a 'cookbook of consciousness' cataloguing practices from across the Hindu and Buddhist worlds. It has sold over two million copies and has never been out of print. Its influence on the counterculture-to-spirituality pipeline of the 1970s is difficult to overstate.
Service as practice
Ram Dass's later career turned explicitly toward the relationship between contemplation and action. He co-founded the Seva Foundation with Larry Brilliant to address blindness in the developing world — work he framed as karma yoga, service as sadhana. His work with the dying — Being with Dying, Still Here — brought the practical application of non-attachment into one of the most charged corners of human experience. The 1997 stroke became the final public teaching: a man who had spent thirty years telling others to be present with what is, forced into an almost total present tense.
In the index
Ram Dass is the index's primary voice for the bhakti current — the devotional path of love directed at a figure, a guru, God. The Maharaji story — short, impossible, funny — is the most efficient single entry point into what the devotional encounter with a true teacher felt like in that era. Both items cross into the Hinduism and non-duality entries, where the conceptual context is mapped out.
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