Dancing with Mother at a family wedding
With brothers Leonard and Bill, and our father George Alpert
As a child at Willenrica, Franklin, NH
Worms for sale! With brother Leonard at Willenrica
Dad with Albert Einstein
Mary McClelland
"If you want to see how you are doing on your spiritual path, go spend a week with your parents."
Teaching a seminar at Stanford
On a cruise ship to Hawaii
Richard Alpert, PhD
"Ego and soul are a balance, as are power and love."
The Doctor is in. Timothy Leary at Harvard.
Richard Alpert as a young man.
Captain of the Intranauts
"Taking birth in a family, entering with the innocence of infancy into an existential situation of parents and siblings, is a marvelous recipe for karmic stew, for cooking a soul. All the subtle permutations of relationship and personality, prosperity and poverty, ease and difficulty, joy and sorrow, success and failure, are karmic stew ingredients."
Monitoring Ralph Metzner with the Experiential Typewriter.
From an interview in a German magazine
Timothy Leary
With Leary at the Bucket of Blood in Antigua
Richard Alpert Ph.D. Business Card
"For the whole first part of my life, I never saw myself as a soul. I thought of myself as a body, an intellect, an emotional being, with my roles as son, brother, student, psychologist, pilot, cello player, lover, psychedelic adventurer, on and on…. My Richard Alpert persona—with my material trappings, my desire to both achieve and rebel—was the optimum experiential setting for all my karma to play out."
From the Lowell, Massachussetts Sun, May 29th, 1963
Richard Alpert, tripping
Breakfast at the Newton Commune
"Psilocybin turned my world completely upside down. For the first time in my life, I saw myself from outside myself. Who I thought I was—a son, a professor, a psychologist—was not who I actually was.... As I see it, the real change that came from psychedelics was opening people to their inner nature, to their soul."
Timothy Leary and Professor Richard Alpert
With Susan Homer, Timothy Leary, and Peggy Hitchcock in the kitchen at Newton
With Peggy in Mexico, 1962
"The religion you are born with frequently becomes more important as you see the universality of truth. Once you learn to go beyond the negative experiences you had as a child, you return to your roots with new eyes."
Tim and Nena on their honeymoon in India
Smoking in bed
Mother at her birthday party
Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary at the Human Be-In
Human Be-In poster
Climbing Khyber Pass
Passport photo
With David Padwa in the Himalayas
"See God in everyone."
Bhagavan Das
Maharaj-ji in Nainital
About to become Ram Dass
With Maharaj-ji, 1971
Maharaj-ji's gaze
Visiting K.K. Sah, circa 1967
"Surrender is a tough one to accept for Westerners. Our reality is based on a conceptual thought of how we think it is. If we give up that thought, give up our power and free will, we may succumb to someone else’s control and lose ourselves forever. That’s the fear. It turns out that giving up conceptual thought is not so scary after all—in fact it’s a relief. So-called objective reality is only relatively real compared to the deeper reality of the Self."
Kainchi Ashram
My room at Kainchi
Learning from Hari Dass Baba, Kainchi Ashram, 1967
Meditating in the snow, Kainchi, 1967
Bhagavan Das, 1967
A page from Maharaj-ji's "RamRamRam" diary
My co-author and compatriot, Rameshwar Das, in India, 1970
At Hanuman Garh temple, Nainital, 1967
"Hold onto nothing."
My Kainchi yoga diary
Meditating in the family cabin at Willenrica, 1969
Meditating at Willenrica, circa 1968
Sculpture Studio Talks, NYC, 1966
With David McClelland, Cambridge, Massachussetts, circa 1973
"The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. If our attachment is to the thinking mind, it dies with the brain and the body. I am interested in what is beyond the thinking mind, leaving behind the thoughts of the ego, allowing the essence of our deeper being to shine forth. The soul is infinite, eternal, beyond space and time."
Tellis Goodmorning, a Native American mentor for the Lama Foundation
Meditating in the dome at Lama
The Dome at Lama Foundation
"Love everyone, serve everyone, and remember God."
Lama Foundation, 1974
With Steve Durkee, Lama Foundation, circa 1974
Little Joe Gomez, an elder in the Native American church, Lama Foundation
The Blue Bus, still used as a residence at the Lama Foundation
Speaking to a weekend group at Willenrica 1969
"It was the summer of 1967, and the Six Day War between Israel and its neighbors had just taken place—not the most auspicious time for two Jewish guys to drive through the Middle East. But I was buoyant. I was ready. 'Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band' had just been released. From across America, some 150,000 young people were about to descend on San Francisco for the Summer of Love. This would be the summer of love for me too—just in an entirely different way."
Bhagwan Nityananda, Muktananda's guru
With Papa Trivedi at Ganeshpuri, 1971
Maharaj-ji with Dada Mukerjee, Kainchi, 1971
"There are billions of tiny acts that create suffering in the world—acts of ignorance, greed, violence. But in the same way, each act of caring—all the billion tiny ways that we offer compassion, wisdom, and joy to one another—serves as a preservative and healing agent."
Meditating with Maharaj-ji after his instruction to "Love everyone and tell the truth."
The venerable VW van, en route from Nainital to Kainchi
Coming down from PCP, Kausani, 1971
"Nainital High," class of 1971
Anandamayi Ma at her ashram near Haridwar
"Contentment is not a feeling of accomplishment from doing something. Contentment is a practice."
Bhagavan Das and Hari Dass, Haridwar, 1970
Along the Yamuna River in Brindaban
Maharaj-ji with the first printing of Be Here Now
With teaching assistants outside the "lecture hall," Boulder, CO, 1974
Hanuman, the embodiment of service and devotion for whom Ram Dass is named, at Kainchi
"Everything we do to work on ourselves—going on retreat, meditating, opening our hearts, quieting our minds—transforms our being. Whatever we have to offer, as a physiotherapist, or a bus driver, or a parent, is all part of that work. It’s not the forms of the game—those are the vehicles."
Jack Kornfield, Naropa Institute, 1974
Teaching on the Bhagavad Gita at Naropa
With Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche at the inaugural summer of Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado, 1974
"Once, when I was in Jerusalem, I passed two Hasidic Jews coming across a square. They were wearing the usual black hats and black coats, and I heard one of them say, 'That’s Ram Dass! That’s who got me into this.' They had taken drugs and read Be Here Now. In Burma, I met two Westerners who were studying to be Buddhist monks. 'You’re the one who got us into this,' they told me."
With Joya and Hilda Charlton, circa 1975
Martha's Vineyard, 1976
Barbara Durkee with her children at Lama Foundation, circa 1974
A rare image of young Maharaj-ji with an ancient Hanuman
"Old age and childhood offer a kind of spacious time other seasons do not, because they are not filled with busyness and rushing around. This quiet openness allows the soul to enter, just like quieting the mind in meditation."
At Neem Karoli Baba Ashram, Taos, New Mexico. Hanuman is adorned for the Guru Purnima festival
Martha's Vineyard, 1976
"Every dying person with whom I shared time helped me probably more than I helped them. Dying is a collaborative dance, an opportunity to do the work within, whether you are the one facing death or the one at the bedside."
Martha's Vineyard, 1976
Lama Foundation, view from the kitchen
Govindappa Venkataswamy, AKA "Dr. V."
Laurie Anderson performing at the Home-Aid benefit, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, NYC, 1988
Larry Brilliant plotting the rates of blindness in Nepal on an Apple II donated to Seva Foundation by Steve Jobs, Katmandu, 1980
"Have you ever noticed how many angry people there are at peace rallies? Social action arouses righteousness. Righteousness ultimately starves your heart. If you want to be free more than you want to be right, you let go of righteousness. For social action to be done with love, the spiritual work comes first. If you oppose something or someone in anger, all you proliferate in the world is more anger."
Joseph Goldstein in the late 1970s
Seva Foundation board meeting in Ann Arbor, 1987
With Dad and Phyllis, Gay Head, Martha's Vineyard
"Our minds go, our bodies go. Our souls remain."
George Alpert, circa 1985
"The evolution of the soul is about decreasing separateness, shedding attachments that distract us from Oneness."
"The karmic sandpaper of existence, time and experience, grinds down separations, grinds down resistance to love, until we see through personalities to what is beneath, to the soul."
Together with Tim, California, circa 1996
"The poet Rainer Maria Rilke describes a quality he calls 'in-seeing,' which is changing one’s point of view to inside another being…. That’s when your awareness merges into Awareness, then you are 'inside’ everything, as well as outside, because there’s only one of it in the universe. This is the mystical root of awareness."
With Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner at the Harvard Project reunion, 1996
"The soul’s game is not about getting a new job, friends, lifestyle, making more money or getting a new car, finding a new partner or a new therapist. This life is about finding a way to be in the world that connects you to your soul."
"Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing."
Viewing the new temple site at Taos ashram with Gopal Singer, Taos, 2005
"Aging gives you a new curriculum. It gives you some creative space, because to the culture, you’re becoming irrelevant—and as soon as you become irrelevant, you’re free. You’re free to be eccentric, to express yourself in ways you wouldn’t before. Aging gives you a chance to rethink your identity."
"I’ve never been into being a guru. As a teacher, I always use my life experiences as a lesson plan—often as an example of what not to do. We’re on a journey together, and I’m as honest as I can be about my trip."
Maharaj-ji's empty chair, Kainchi, 2004
Maui Retreat, 2018
"The spiritual journey is less from birth to death than from separation to Oneness."
Maharaj-ji's empty chair, Kainchi, 2004
With Dassima Murphy
With K.K. Sah and Rameshwar Das, Kainchi, 2004
"Maharaj-ji said no man can die a moment before his time or live for a moment past it.... Souls are not afraid of dying, because souls have many, many incarnations. Each time we die, we find our home. Much of my life has been about trying to make contact with this home in my heart. I’ve seen it up close at times, through psychedelics, through meditation, through being with Maharaj-ji, but it has always been temporary. Now I will soon be home. A new beginning awaits around the corner."
With Joan Baez
Maui Retreat, 2018
"When you lose your fear of death, you gain a love of life."
With Peggy Hitchcock
With Dr. Raj Rajan
With David Padwa
With Bernie Glassman Roshi
"Scientists go to the brain to get to the mind. But neuroscience has never been able to adequately define consciousness. It’s like the guy who loses his keys and is looking for them under a streetlight. Someone comes along and asks him where he lost them, and he says, 'back in the alley.' The passer-by asks, 'So why are you looking here?' and he says, 'The light's better here.'"
Meeting my son, Peter Reichard
In the beach buggy at Kihei
At home on Maui, 2017
"Enlightened beings say that when we take birth, a veil of unknowing covers our soul, lest the knowledge of our previous incarnations distract us from our work in this life. The veil is part of māya, the illusion of separateness that accompanies incarnation, and comes with having a body and an individual consciousness. Each of us has to go through the lila, the dance, of forgetting and remembering."
In the ocean at Kihei
At home on Maui, 2017
"Almost everyone in the West who reports a near-death experience tells of a loving, light-filled return to the Source, the home of the soul. They report an experience of wholeness outside time and space…. I imagine that death is like finally coming home, home to an old friend who has always known me and loved me completely."
My two families: The Alperts, circa 1961, and Maharaj-ji's Western devotees at Kainchi, just after his death
"I love nature, and that love is a method, an entrance into the vastness…. I am the trees, I am the ocean, we are together in the One, in Ram."
Inauguration of new temple at Neem Karoli Baba Ashram in Taos, New Mexico, July 2019
"Love holds the universe together. Love is the emotion of connection and merging. Viewed from the soul, this world is a manifestation of love. Love is the glue, the transfer of energy between form and formless, matter and spirit."
Inauguration of new temple at Neem Karoli Baba Ashram in Taos, New Mexico, July 2019
Inauguration of new temple at Neem Karoli Baba Ashram in Taos, New Mexico, July 2019
