Why Ram Dass Matters More than Ever

Having died only a few days before the close of 2019, it’s an open question whether or not Richard Alpert — better known as Ram Dass — will make it onto major publications’ rankings of “This Year’s Notable Deaths.” But while the spiritual teacher and erstwhile Harvard professor may have written his best-known work — Be Here Now — back in 1971, he deserves a place on such a list today, perhaps now more than ever. For while Be Here Now created Ram Dass’ biggest splash — eventually selling over 2 million copies and helping fund several foundations — it’s his work around aging and death that may have made his most lasting impact.

In facing the most universal and inevitable of spiritual transformations with clear-eyed grace, Ram Dass helped bring the notion of the “conscious death” out of the shadows and onto center stage.

Ram Dass wrote (and recorded) a great deal about the question of presence, about how to see through the stories we tell about ourselves into something more meaningful. In translating what he found — both in entheogenic labyrinths and the great wisdom traditions — into a vernacular I could comprehend, Ram Dass helped open me into a far deeper sense of possibility than I had known.