Richard Alpert (1931–2019) was a Harvard psychology professor who lost that job in
1963 over the psilocybin research he was running with Timothy Leary. In 1967 he went to
India, met a small blanket-wrapped man named Neem Karoli Baba in the Kumaon hills, and
came back as Ram Dass. Be Here Now, published in 1971 in its distinctive
square brown format, sold in the millions and put a specific vocabulary — presence,
witness, the guru — into American English.
A massive stroke in 1997 left him aphasic and using a wheelchair. He kept teaching
for twenty-two more years from Maui, and the later talks are noticeably different in
tone: slower, less certain, funnier about his own suffering.
“We are all just walking each other home.”
— Ram Dass
“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.”
— Ram Dass
“Be here now.”
— Ram Dass
“The next message you need is always right where you are.”
— Ram Dass
“Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.”
— Ram Dass
“It’s all real and it’s all illusory: that’s Awareness.”
— Ram Dass
“I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion — and where it isn’t, that’s where my work lies.”
— Ram Dass
“Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom.”
— Ram Dass
“You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing.”
— Ram Dass
“The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving: it’s in the being.”
— Ram Dass
“Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings.”
— Ram Dass
“The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organised or regulated.”
— Ram Dass
“Your problem is you’re afraid to acknowledge your own beauty.”
— Ram Dass
“In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.”
— Ram Dass
“If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.”
— Ram Dass
Ram Dass was a trained academic who deliberately stopped speaking like one. Almost
everything quoted from him is spoken, not written — retreat talks, radio interviews,
question-and-answer sessions — and it shows in the rhythm. The sentences are short
because they were said out loud to people sitting on a floor, and the humour is doing
real work: he used self-deprecation to keep the material from becoming reverent.
The most-shared line, “we’re all just walking each other home,” is genuinely his and
genuinely typical: eight words, no jargon, and it does not require you to believe
anything to be useful.
The stroke is the dividing line in his work and the reason the late material is worth
more than the early. Before it, he taught detachment from the body from a healthy body.
After it, he described being “stroked” as fierce grace and admitted plainly that he had
not been prepared, that he had gone through a period with no faith at all, and that
suffering had not been ennobling in the way he had implied to audiences for decades.
That admission is rare among teachers of his generation, and it is the reason his
quotes hold up better than most of the era’s.
Be Here Now is a period piece and its middle section — the hand-lettered
brown pages — is more artefact than argument. Still Here (2000) and
Polishing the Mirror (2013) are the clearer books. The full archive of talks is
free at the Love Serve Remember Foundation, and hearing him is different from reading
him: the pauses carry as much as the sentences.
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Practices for self-reflection only — not medical advice.