Be Here Now, obviously
Published in 1971, and still the one. Richard Alpert was a Harvard psychology professor who got fired alongside Timothy Leary for the psilocybin experiments, went to India looking for something drugs kept showing him but couldn't hold, and met Neem Karoli Baba. He came back as Ram Dass.
The book is physically odd: a brown square, hand-lettered middle section, printed on rough paper. That design is doing work. It's a document of a specific 1971 moment, and reading it now means reading a period piece with a genuinely useful argument inside it.
If the psychedelic packaging puts you off, skip to the back third, which is a plain reading list and practice manual.
| Book | Year | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Be Here Now | 1971 | The origin. Start here even if the format is strange. |
| Grist for the Mill | 1977 | The follow-up, with Stephen Levine. Practice-focused and much plainer. |
| How Can I Help? | 1985 | Service and burnout, with Paul Gorman. The best thing he wrote on helping other people without wrecking yourself. |
| Still Here | 2000 | Ageing, illness and death, written after his 1997 stroke. The most useful one for most adult readers. |
| Polishing the Mirror | 2013 | A retrospective summary of his own practice. Good second book. |
| Walking Each Other Home | 2018 | On dying, with Mirabai Bush. Written near the end of his life and unsentimental about it. |
The stroke changed the writing
In 1997 he had a cerebral haemorrhage that left him with aphasia and partial paralysis. He called it "fierce grace" and kept teaching from a wheelchair for another 22 years, dying in 2019.
The post-stroke books are different from the early ones. Less cosmic, more specific, and considerably more use if what you're dealing with is a body that stopped cooperating. Still Here is the one to hand somebody facing illness or old age, and it doesn't require any interest in Hinduism to work.
Where he sits on the shelf
Ram Dass is the bridge between the 1960s counterculture and the Western contemplative writing that followed. If he lands for you, the natural neighbours are Alan Watts, who was doing the same translation work a decade earlier and better prose, Pema Chödrön for the Buddhist version of the same warmth, and Eckhart Tolle for the version that sold more copies.
For a daily-paced route through the wider tradition, 365 Days of Meditation works through 80+ teachers a page at a time.
Common questions
Which Ram Dass book should I read first?
Be Here Now (1971). If the hand-lettered psychedelic format puts you off, the back third is a plain practice manual and reading list.
What is Ram Dass's best book?
Be Here Now is the famous one, but Still Here (2000) is more useful to most adult readers, and How Can I Help? is the best thing anyone has written about helping people without burning out.
Was Ram Dass a real teacher or a psychedelic guru?
Both, in sequence. He was Richard Alpert, a Harvard psychologist fired over the psilocybin research with Timothy Leary, before studying with Neem Karoli Baba in India and teaching for another fifty years.
What happened to Ram Dass?
A cerebral haemorrhage in 1997 left him with aphasia and partial paralysis. He called it 'fierce grace', kept teaching from a wheelchair, and died in 2019.
Do I need to be Hindu to read Ram Dass?
No. The later books in particular, especially Still Here, work as plain writing on ageing and illness with no doctrinal requirement.