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This Harvard Professor’s Mind-Obliterating Drug Trip Ruined His Life (But Saved a Generation)
The wild, true story of two drug-addled professors and a countercultural revolution
Ram Dass’s real name was…Richard Alpert (I know, close, right?), and the story of his spiritual transformation is definitely one of the wilder ones I’ve read about.
Maybe not as wild as that of Timothy Leary (a story for another day), his colleague at Harvard in the early 1960s, but still pretty wild.
Not surprisingly, they were both kicked out of academia for their involvement in various drug studies, including some involving LSD and other substances, but afterwards their lives took almost completely different turns.
Timothy Leary basically cracked, eventually escaped (and was broken out of) two prisons and got involved in a bunch of other shenanigans. Richard Alpert, meanwhile, traveled to India, where he underwent a spiritual awakening of sorts and changed his name to Ram Dass, meaning “Servant of God.”
His book, Be Here Now, was published in 1971 and became one of the foundational books of the “mindfulness revolution,” and led to Ram Dass becoming one of the most influential spiritual seekers of the 20th century.
