Ram Dass was born in 1933 as Richard Alpert. He was the son of a wealthy lawyer, who was the president of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad and founder of Brandeis University. After studying psychology and earning an M.A. from Wesleyan and a Ph.D. from Stanford, he taught and conducted research at the Department of Social Relations and the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University from 1958 to 1963.

Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), while a professor at Harvard, explored the human consciousness and conducted intensive research with LSD and other psychedelic elements, in collaboration with notables, such as Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, and Allen Ginsberg. Because of the controversial nature of this research, both he and Timothy Leary were dismissed from Harvard in 1963.

He is the co-founder and board member of the Seva Foundation ("service," in Sanskrit), an international organization dedicated to relieving suffering in the world. Seva supports programs designed to help wipe out curable blindness in India and Nepal, restore the agricultural life of impoverished villagers in Guatemala, assist in primary health care for American Indians, and to bring attention to the issues of homelessness and environmental degradation in the United States, among others.

Ram Dass continued this research with a private foundation through 1967, when he traveled to India. There he met his spiritual teacher, Neem Karoli Baba. Under his guru's guidance, he studied yoga and meditation and received his Indian name, translated as "servant of God." Since 1968, he has pursued a variety of spiritual practices, including Hinduism, Kharma yoga and Sufism.

In 1974, he created the Hanuman Foundation, which has developed many projects, including the "Prison-Ashram Project," designed to help inmates grow spiritually during incarceration, and the "Living Dying Project," which provides support for the conscious dying. The foundation is also the organizing vehicle for his lectures and workshops, which constantly keep him traveling the world.

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